you can make good energy/protein bars with protein shake mix, dried oatmeal, dried fruit, peanut butter

a few other things i'm forgetting, there was a video of a guy making them somewhere

make tacos with different mixes, some vegetarian, some with dry fruit like nuts, etc... if you roll them in tin foil they are easy to transport

found it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHBi-wq_c3E

saemfag

>7' tall
>260 lbs
>bicyclist
>Fast metabolism

Jesus christ you must be a terrifying individual.

Also, bicycling rules.

Fuck you, after mortgage and car payments etc I'm lucky to have $74 a month.

>>775266
I believe that is why this man bikes

>>775233
>i'm looking at $74 to last me two weeks. $74 would be PLENTY if i wasn't 7 foot tall and 260 pounds with a metabolism that keeps pantries empty.

4 days ago I spent $93 shopping for food. I had not been to the store for over 2 months and last time I also spent about $100 on food. I'm 6'2" 180lbs.

LRN2FUCKINGSHOP

>>775266
>mortgage

lol inhomerent

>>775274

Try doing that where it's winter 5 months out of the year.

OP here! i know how to shop lol, and i could make it through the two weeks just fine on ramen, but i'm looking for healthy/flavorful on the cash i've got. i know it's a tall order but i gotta figure it out somehow.

i took up cycling to save on gas (when it was $4 at its highest here, we're very lucky in terms of it's pricing vs the rest of the us) i don't have car insurance, and the bike was bought when i sold my car, and paid off some student loans. it's very liberating knowing that i don't have any debts. the thought of a mortgage... hell i've worked in real estate, and a few careers in finance. i'm very happy to live humbly and right at my means.

>>775279
Northern MNfag here, where are you? It's like that here and I rely on buses for those five months, and it still costs me far less than driving.

>>775233
>disposable gladware

I hope you're recycling that shit.

I have a grocery budget of $80 to feed two people for two weeks (I am a small girl who can eat a decent amount, but my husband can eat a pound of ground pork by himself with some noodles for a meal) so you should be able to feed yourself for two weeks if you're careful. Save that gladware and wash it when you get home so you can use it every day.

Breakfast: Protein shakes or get a container of plain oatmeal. Make it and add dried fruit and brown sugar. It'll fill you and be relatively inexpensive.

Lunch: Do you have a microwave where you work? If so, make a shitload of pasta and put it in the gladware with sauce of your choosing. You can get three or four meals out of it.

Snacks: Baby carrots are cheap. As well as apples and a bag of pretzels. Put pretzels in ziplock bag and one bag should last you a week.

Dinner: Again, pasta is not hard or expensive to make. Kraft mac and cheese is very cheap and if you add tuna or hot dogs it can have different flavors, in a way. Hot dogs are a cheap and easy meal, just get a bag of chips or you can make a baked potato to go with it.

Really, it all depends on your ingenuity. Also, I don't think it'll kill you to watch your portions for the next two weeks. This way you don't eat through the pantry and keep yourself fed enough so you'll last.

>>775599
Also, get a Sunday paper and browse through the coupons in that sucker. You can save a few bucks through that alone. Just don't bother with any coupon that requires you to buy more than one to save or its something you don't usually need.

And if you want to plan ahead, go to your grocery store's website and look at their circular to see what their sales are. You can plan your meals around there.

>>775606
I agree about the coupons, but I disagree about the usefulness of "buy 2, get $0.75 off" type of coupon. If these are for something you actually buy, and that won't spoil within a few weeks of buying, they're great.

If you found a coupon for say, buy 2 boxes of Ritz crackers, save $1, you wait until one of the local grocery stores put Ritz on sale for buy-one-get-one-free. Then you use the coupon. That way, you're getting two boxes of crackers for a dollar less than the normal cost of a single box. (Yes this is allowed, since one discount is the store's discount, and the coupon is the manufacturer's discount.)

>>775266
Fuck YOU for getting us all in to this mess in the first place.

Live beneath your means, faggot.

Sell that bass, because it's shit.

I eat on about $20/wk.

Usually grab a slice of toast with some peanut butter for breakfast, ramen for lunch, apples or tangerines or baby carrots for a snack, and a can of soup with some additional canned vegetables (kidney or garbanzo beans) for dinner.

I guess I probably eat a lot of salt, but I don't drink the ramen broth usually, so whatever.

One of these days I'll switch over from canned soup to bullion cubes, meat and vegetables.

Number one rule of grocery shopping: have a meal before you go do it.

>>775688
This. I sick to shit hearing people baww because they have to return their 55inch HDTVs because their mortgage, rent, brand new car payments, or whatever the fuck is too high. Living beyond one's means doesn't just mean spend right up to your last dollar from each paycheck. It means you save at least 25% of your take home forever, incase shit like this happens in the first place and not blowing it all on new Wii games.

>>775706
Or, have some self control, but that's too much to ask of most people.

>>775720
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNmcf4Y3lGM

>>775599

There's some good points in there, but you don't have to eat crap food (Kraft mac and cheese for example) to eat on a budget.

You can eat meat and fish on a budget. Aside from the obvious (look for what's on sale), you just have to shop and cook smart. When buying meat, buy the largest cuts you can. This way you're not paying the supermarket a ton of money to do work you can do yourself very easily. For example, chicken breasts are usually quite expensive. But, you can buy whole chickens very cheap per pound. For the price of 1.5 lbs of breast you can have a 4-5 pound chicken. If you're too lazy to cut it up, roast in the oven, grill, or smoke it and you've got several meals worth of meat right there. Then you can make chicken noodle soup from the carcass--and belive me, it will be MUCH tastier and healthier than that canned crap. Think whole birds, whole fish, and larger cuts of beef/pork.

When you buy veggies you can use peelings, tops, and unused parts to make stock/soups. Bones from beef and pork roasts or steaks can be used in the same way.

Learn to do some basic baking. Baking ingredients (flour, salt, water, yeast, baking powder) are about as cheap as it gets--and again, you'll end up with food that's tastier and healthier than the supermarket.

Making your own pasta is easy, but it's so cheap to buy it's not really worth it. Don't buy prepacked mac-and-cheese: just buy the macaroni (or whatever shape you like) and make your own sauce or dish to go with it.

A pressure cooker or crock pot (or a lot of patience) will let you turn larger, cheaper cuts of meat into great food.

>>775918

...contiuned.

See if you can find a local butcher. Butchers usually sell meat for much less than the supermarket charges, and you can get better stuff too.

What's even better is if your butcher does game processing. Of course, if you hunt then you can get wild game (super tasty!) for next to nothing compared to the market rate. But even if you don't hunt, this will benefit you. Here's why: many hunters bring their deer in for processing, and some of them forget to pick up the meat once it's processed. What happens then is that the butcher will sell it to the public for the cost of the processing labor alone. I have bought a great deal of venison steaks, sausage, etc, like this--for literally pennies per pound! Ask around at butchers that advertise game processing and see what's available. Many of them have waiting lists for this sort of thing.

As 775599 said, it's all about enginuity:

Don't buy baby carrots. Buy whole, large, carrots and cut them up--that's about half the price. Save the scraps for making stock.

Don't buy canned soup. Use your leftover meat scraps and veggies to make your own. Bullion? No sir. Ever wonder why soups at nice restaruants taste so good? They make their own stock from leftover bones. You should too. You'll also avoid the sodium bomb typical of commercial bullion.