My weeks look like this: open at the coffee shop at 5am, come home to a dog that needs a solid hour of training and enrichment before she'll settle, and then I have approximately zero energy left to cook anything that requires standing at a stove. So the slow cooker has basically become the only reason I eat real food Monday through Friday.
The thing I keep running into is that I'm trying to do this on a pretty tight budget and I can never figure out the right ratio of dried beans to everything else without the whole thing turning into either soup or paste. Last week's white bean and kale situation was not great. The beans were somehow both mushy and underdone at the same time, which I didn't know was possible.
I do chicken stock from scratch pretty regularly and that helps stretch things. I just dump it in as the base for almost everything. But I feel like I'm circling the same four or five meals and I want to branch out without buying a bunch of ingredients that don't make sense on a barista's paycheck.
What are you all making that's genuinely cheap, like dried beans and cheap cuts cheap, and actually holds up through the week without tasting like sadness by day three.
Alt titles: Cheap slow cooker meals that actually last through the week, what are you making | Dried beans in the slow cooker are defeating me, tips | Slow cooker meal prep on a tight budget, what actually works
burningrubber - ET pubs
See you on rng-et-1.
