Eat cheap, healthy, and YUMMY #1: Stir Fry, Noodles and the Miracle of Shiratake

I have three people in my house. One is a toddler.

Cheap, Healthy, and good is a hard balance to find. Most people say to pick two, but I think the balance is more complicated.

In order to enjoy good food, cooked at home on a budget you will need to learn a few techniques.

Techniques are not recipes.Recipes may take you part of the way, but if you learn techniques then you will be creating your own dish easily, every day of the week.

Now, really. I don't spend a lot of time cooking. And I'm no professional chef. But I think that I'm ahead of the curve, since even though I'm in Canada (where food is quite expensive) my meals are pretty cheap. And I know they are healthy because at one point I weighed ingredients and found that my meals had very low calorie counts. Less than 500 for a huge meal!

Stir fry with rice or noodles.

I eat some form of this almost every day. for lunch or dinner.

There are three components:

• Veggies - Just take whatever veggies you have and stir fry them. Put the hard ones in first, then whatever combination of garlic, onions, mushrooms, ginger, and other aromatics, then last goes the peppers, zucchini or other green things. Any veggie that melts or turns color if you cook it too long, put it in last.

• Meat - Adding meat to this is easy too. One chicken breast per two people along with a whole wack of veggies.
  There are multiple ways to do the meant. You can just throw it in there, but it's more tender and better if you do it separate. Either make sure it is really dry (marinaded or not) then flash fry it before your veggies, or cut up into thin slices, coat it with flour and then water poach it and throw it in at the end with the sauce. Use Chinese cooking alcohol between meat and veggies, or when veggies start to stick. (After you add this stuff starts to steam, so make sure you have most of the crust you want.)

• Sauce - a little cornstarch and water is the basis of most of my stir fry sauces. I just put in whatever condiments I feel like (Hoisin sauce, sriracha, rice vinegar, orange juice, lime). Make sure the taste is sweet, salty, and a little sour and it will be perfect.

Ok, I lied. There are 4. You will usually be eating this with a starch, like rice or noodles. If I'm having noodles, I like to toss them with the food, like above. If it's rice, I usually just put the rice in a bowl and then the food goes on top.

The meal in my picture is onion ($.5), Cauliflower ($4.99), Broccoli ($3.99), Carrots (.5), Green onions (free from my garden), Garlic(.89), and pepper (3.99). Of course, I use about 1/4 of each for just one meal, and the sauce is just a few spoonfuls of stuff that I have around. The noodles were Tofu shiitake, which is the most expensive, since I use the whole pack (4.99).

So a meal for 3 was about $7.70. I know that you are probably laughing at my prices, but that's what things cost here (shrug).

Ok, so I should mention more on the sauce. I don't measure my sauce ingredients. I make the sauce in a cup and taste as I go.

To make a sauce, balance salty, sour, and sweet, like I said above. This sauce has about a tablespoon of Sriracha, some dry spices, a little light soy sauce, salt, garlic and ginger, and lots of sesame seeds (and sesame oil) Add a little water and starch, and there you go.