I’m new to crock pots as well, assuming it is the same as slow cookers. So I’d like to jump in and try to add some things I’ve recently found out about them.
What is Crockpot:
It’s a powered hotpot that doesn’t use on the stove, just sits on the counter like a rice cooker. It heats food slowly for 4-8 hours.
Buy from where?:
I kept an eye on Gumtree (neighbourhood re-sale site, like ebay but usually cheaper. Like Craigslist?). It took ~3 weeks of checking online but I got one for $5, from an apartment block on my street. I don’t have a car so I set the search parameters to nearer than 5km, under $20.
Many people have them stashed on a kitchen shelf and never use them. so you can get a bargain, like new.
Ingredients:
Dried beans usually under $3/kilo from dry good shop. They keep forever in glass jars, or just seal the bags with a peg/rubber band. Cook with chopped vegetables like carrots, potatoes, silverbeet, onions, which don’t even need storing in the fridge. Add fresh greens and maybe tomato slices to serve.
If you have any chicken, even just the bones, cook it in water in the crock pot to make chicken stock and soup. Lots of recipes online under “slow cooker chicken stock”, things like that.
Basic spices help a lot.
I never buy meat because of cost but I look forward to making a brisket or stew with some other basic cut.
Another sad thing about poverty is that you don’t always have a choice on what critters live with you.
It seems like a great idea to buy in bulk but if you have bugs or mice that money gets wasted if you don’t keep the food locked up like fort knox.
Even if you keep the place practically sterile, if your neighbour doesn’t then you are likely to end up with pests and no way to keep them out. Pest control costs $$ and if your place is old, your landlord is a jerk, or you neighbour plague carriers, you can’t keep food around because of the pests.
I read the discussion with interest and I should say that I am not sure I understand all of it. What I find particularly surprising is the concept of “food desert”. I don’t live in the USA (I live in Europe) and in any large city there are a selection of groceries stores within walking distance (within biking distance in remote suburbs).
I find it also a bit strange that people would not have cooking pots and pans.
Where we have a similar problem is with the availability of fresh produce, which may be similarity lacking. Also: fresh produce grows in season, so you have to buy it in season for it to be cheaper and it can be tricky. But one can use tinned or frozen produce (I use tinned tomatoes and frozen peas and spinach for example). Easy to find fresh are carrots, potatoes, onions, garlic, etc… plant parts which keep well.
Meat is expensive (and rightly so), but many soup recipes use little of it and mostly as a flavoring. Eggs are cheap. Sausages are quite expensive when one realizes they may contain less than 20% meat.
What I regret not seeing in the video is the cost of energy. It can be a sizeable part of the cost for some dishes. Heating up an oven is particularly expensive.
What the video also omits is that cooking for one person is tricky. Most recipes are made for 4-6 portions and one may not want to eat the same dish the whole week. I found it difficult to organize, although a selection of recipes which freeze well and a freezer was a great help.
Cooking on a budget, especially for a single person, takes organisation and planing. It is possible and definitely worth it in the end, but it is not easy.
I pretty much stopped buying meat years ago because of cost. The only meat i will buy is canned tuna and even then it’s something i don’t make for myself often. I still do eat meat when out and about but if i’m cooking for myself at home i’m usually eating vegetarian.
Unfortunately, yes. Back when my daughter was a teen, we were poor. Really poor. We moved into an apartment with no appliances and I couldn’t afford a stove, only a second-hand refrigerator. I cooked with a microwave, crockpot, and electric griddle for 2 years. Letting the neighborhood kids raid the refrigerator meant that my kid & I went hungry.
I was always happy to cook for them, and we usually had a pan of filled oatmeal cookies or blondies available for the kids to snack on, as well as foraged berries in season. But let some strange kid walk in and help him/herself to the contents of my fridge? Sorry, no. That wasn’t happening.
Ingredients for chicken soup: bones and scraps from chicken, carrot, celery. Pinch of parsley & black pepper if available.
Beef soup: beef bones, any veggies on hand, tomatoes if possible.
Preparation: throw stuff in crockpot, cover with water, cook. Remove bones before serving.
Refrigeration is necessary for storing meat and some produce, but rice and beans and flour can be kept anywhere, and if you double wrap them in the plastic bags that the grocery gives you, the bugs don’t get in.
Food deserts can only exist in countries as large as as Canada or the United states.
Switzerland is 41,000+ square kilometres.
The greater Toronto area is 7,000+ square kilometres.
The province of Ontario is 1,000,000+ square kilometres.
We are big, and we are spread out.
[quote=“marence, post:106, topic:103103”]
Refrigeration is necessary for storing meat and some produce, but rice and beans and flour can be kept anywhere, and if you double wrap them in the plastic bags that the grocery gives you, the bugs don’t get in.
[/quote]My mom got into the habit of putting all of her flours, grains, beans, etc in the 2nd fridge we owned because bugs kept getting in them, pretty sure she could have just as easily put them in containers but she never did. My advice for this is save all of the glass bottles from pasta sauce, peanut butter, jam, etc and reuse those. Storage containers are nice and all but not when you’re trying to save. In fact, my mom saves and reuses plastic containers from food delivery or takeout. Some of them are sturdy enough to hold up to extended use.
Okay. I can totally understand being conservative with your foodstuffs in the case of you being poor. That entirely makes sense to me. It also sounds like you’re more than willing to share what you had in general. Thanks for clarifying.
For those of us who routinely buy carrots, celery, meat with bones, parsley, etc this is trivial (although I would have added thyme, oregano, and fresh garlic from my garden.) The point of the objections is that this represents unexamined privilege.
Today I live in a house with gardens in a small city surrounded by farms, less than ten minutes walk from a good grocer. I didn’t always, and forty years ago where I lived was nearly an hour’s walk to the nearest fresh produce. It makes a difference.
I’ve turned my mom onto gardening. She doesn’t quite have a process down so she’s just putting things in the ground and hoping for the best. But it’s been a fun project for both of us, i try to give her a little bit of advice when i visit though i’m not super savvy either, wish i lived closer so we could work on the garden together.
Step one in chicken soup: have enough money to have bought and previous cooked and eaten a chicken.
I love all these recipes that neglect the stuff that comes before doing the thing.
I’ve lived in apartments where it was impossible to cook in the oven. The burners worked but the oven didn’t.
The things you put up with for cheap rent.
There’s some workarounds one can use, depending on how persuasive one can be. One can go to a butcher at a grocery store and ask them for chicken bones and leftover bits for the stock. I suppose it’s possible to do this at a restaurant as well, ask them for chicken or beef bones/leftovers but would imagine it would not be as easy. Maybe not. I’ve never tried.
Also about the things you put up with for cheap rent. If i could show you my current apartment… i hate it. It’s 400sqft, and it’s old. My vent hood over the oven doesn’t work and causes the smoke detectors to go odd just by turning on one of the burners without cooking anything. So i’ve disconnected those for the sake of my sanity. 2 of the burners don’t work very well, one hardly ever works and the other whistles when you turn it on. There’s more wrong with the apartment but i’ll spare you the rant, but i’m moving in about 3 weeks. Thank god.
re:chicken soup - I used to make soup from the neighbor’s fried chicken bones. I also used their oven for baking bread, for the price of a half-dozen rolls. I had no shame when it came to feeding the kid.
I’m not saying its not possible, people are amazing resourceful.
I’m saying it shouldn’t be necessary.
And I’m saying that level of hustle is not sustainable.
We need to fix things!
It is a good read, but it also makes it clear that the problem with food desert has nothing to do with the size of the country and everything to do with corporate greed and large chunks of the population not turning enough profit for the overlords to consider feeding them.
From experience : if you grow your own grains and beans, bugs will be in them and tight containers won’t help. If you buy them, they will be pre-treated and will keep in a tight container, provided that this container is metal or glass. Bugs will drill their way in through layers of plastic just fine. They’ll even manage through wood.
OK, but the recipes are specific tools in the toolbox for this particular problem: we need to keep eating every day and it’s healthier, actually more sustainable to use longer-term thinking. To make the most of your resources, whatever they are.
I get the frustration, and some advice is too specific for every application. Some might be specific enough to actually be helpful.
Maybe you know this, but many people don’t, that if you ever DO eat a carrot or other vegetable, even just one a month, keep the scraps in the freezer. Don’t throw out the top or the skin peelings. You can make stock, it makes your cheap food taste really good. If you ever have KFC, great, keep the bones too. Where I live, a whole roast chook is often marked down to $5 at the supermarket deli. It can stretch to about 5 different meals, so you can get a lot of enjoyment and value out of not much.
You’re preaching to the choir here.
But as i said upthread it takes very little to derail good intentions. Kids, illness, lack of tansportation, debt, lack of time, food deserts, etc. Just one of those will set you back and the working poor are often dealing with many at once.
So yes I agree cooking your own food is better but its just not always feasible and I’m not going to lecture people about how to live thier lives or how to eat because life is more complicated that “make chicken soup instead of eating McDonalds”.
Sorry, I sound like I’m lecturing you and that wasn’t my intent. I mean, for me, working poor aren’t other people, but my family, myself. So I’m trying to be specific. My main point is about problem-solving, the soup is an example.
Videos like this can’t solve the material challenges you describe, which are very real. But discouragement about food is also a big obstacle. Discouragement is a cultural or attitude problem, so all we can do is share info that might be encouraging and constructive.
Fast food puts convenience above every other priority. But every fast food sells for profit. Convenience is a value-add that doesn’t necessarily add up: the premise of the video. Companies profit from cultural stigma about second-hand goods, eating leftovers, cooking, and cleaning up. It’s too hard, too time-consuming, boring, old-fashioned, unhygienic. I disagree, I think advertising constantly lies to us about this, and I want to hear more positive things about how cooking solves problems. I agree that isn’t always 100% possible every day, and I hope we agree that it can be worthwhile, enjoyable, and doable.
