Hot Dog Self-Harm Assistant
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2026
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Brilliant
with real cheese
Yeah, I don't believe that an just the fact you have to say it makes me suspicious.
Wait, so it doesn't come with ground beef? Is it just mac n cheese then?
Always has been.
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Happy to say I'm past the piss-broke stage of life, but I'll never forget how much is sucks. One of the really shitty things about it is all the products marketed toward selling us a 'cheap' meal, and we buy it because you don't question it: it's poverty food, right? Must be among the cheapest options in the store, right?
Then you start pricing stuff out by things like cost-per-gram and realize you're getting ripped off. To answer OPs question, I'd call that dish: predatory, bc it's an up-charged box of ingredients that you can buy separately in probably that same aisle for much cheaper.
For anyone reading this who is stuck in that hell, first off: /hug. Second, the real poverty food MVP is rice. I don't recall the price off the top of my head, and even if I did I'm sure it's inflated since I was a frequent buyer, but look for "fortified short grain" which is usually the least expensive and is 'fortified' with some extra nutrients to get something other than carbs. Buy it in bulk - you can get it in 50lb bags at places like Costco (if you don't have a membership, mooch a ride there off someone who does, they can get you through the door/checkout) or Asian/Middle Eastern grocery stores. Price it out to what you're paying for the amount used in a single meal, and it's like a literal nickel.
Rice makes for a boring meal by itself, but it'll fill you up. Your second best friend is the clearance shelf. Pretty much any meat or veggie can go with rice. You'd be surprised how well other shit work with rice too... I recall having a single slice of shitty supreme pizza in the fridge; not enough for a satisfying meal, but, fuck it, whipped up a serving of rice, chopped up the slice of pizza crust and all, and threw it in when the rice was just about soft enough to eat and kinda stir fried it in. The oils from the cheese and sausage all got soaked up by the rice... end result wasn't amazing by any stretch, but it was away more satisfying than a single slice of pizza or bowl of plain rice, tasted decent, costed pennies.
Pro tip: buy some snack-sized ziplock bags, measure out what you need for a serving, portion it into a ton of individual bags, and keep those in a sealed 5-gallon buckets. There's a type of beetle that lays its eggs in rice, and it may not hatch until after you've bought it. Then they propagate, and there are tiny beetles all over the batch... and losing the better part of a 50lb bag to those fuckers is pretty heart breaking. If you portion it out first, and then it hatches, you lose a single-portion ziplock full. No biggie. Also keep the empty ziplocks and reuse them for the next big bag of rice.
Also get a cheap rice cooker as soon as you can afford it - a pot works fine, but a rice cooker will get you much more consistent results for much less effort.
it's an up-charged box of ingredients that you can buy separately in probably that same aisle for much cheaper.
Yeah, this product is an awful choice for the budget conscious.
Pasta is like $1.20/lb. There are many different ways to dress up pasta with other ingredients, whether saucy or cheesy or creamy or oily or even relatively dry seasoning. You can add a cheap protein source. You can add vegetables. In many forms, pasta is still a one-pan dish that can be made in about 20 minutes, where you prep ingredients as the water boils. Or you can put in a lot of effort (all-day sauces, hand-pounded pesto, etc.).
My favorite low effort, cheap and nutritionally complete meal is boiling a package of pasta, dumping in a can of beans, dumping in a can of premade chili, and shredding a bunch of cheddar over it. The macros are good, even for athletes, it's cheap, and it's easy.
As you mention, rice is between $1 to $2 per pound, based on quantity and type. There are a ton of options around that, too.
Add some beans and spices to that rice for an almost nutrient complete meal that can taste pretty damned good.
^ Beans FTW.
Dress it up with hot sauce if you can find it.
Getting slightly off the path of “cheap”…
If you have a grocery nearby that sells cheap goods from south of the border, grab some plantains. Wait until they’re good and dark, peel, cut them in half lengthwise and then in about 2” pieces and fry them. Making me hungry just thinking about it. Sofrito for the rice.
One of my favorite cheap meals.
(USD)
Sofrito jar 2.99
25 lb bag of rice 13.50 (~55 cups of rice, 25¢ a cup)
1 lb beans, pinto 1.19, black 1.59 (2 cups/bag, 60¢ cup)
Hot sauce 1.19
Plantains 65¢ each.
Rice and beans, decent serving, 1 cup cooked each makes a good amount, 85¢ total. Assuming some salt is already available to cook the rice with.
So adding a cup of sofrito, a dash of hot sauce, and cooking up a plantain will add a little over $2 to the total, make it $3 for the whole meal.
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Pro tip: buy some snack-sized ziplock bags, measure out what you need for a serving, portion it into a ton of individual bags, and keep those in a sealed 5-gallon buckets. There’s a type of beetle that lays its eggs in rice, and it may not hatch until after you’ve bought it. Then they propagate, and there are tiny beetles all over the batch… and losing the better part of a 50lb bag to those fuckers is pretty heart breaking. If you portion it out first, and then it hatches, you lose a single-portion ziplock full. No biggie. Also keep the empty ziplocks and reuse them for the next big bag of rice.
Do this, but also Freeze 'em.
The beetles you're talking about are common in pretty much every grain. Freezing kills the beetles, the larvae, and the eggs. I'd suggest gallon-sized freezer bags rather than snack sized. If you don't need the space for anything else, just store the bags in the freezer. If you do need the space, freeze the bags for a week, then move them to the buckets.
Same trick works for flour, oats, etc. Any grains you bring home should go straight into the freezer for a week before you move them to the pantry.
An additional benefit: Freezers are most efficient when they are kept completely full. The thermal mass and insulation of 50lbs of rice and/or other grains will keep your perishables frozen for days during a power outage.
I want to chime in and say that while my meal prep won't win any blue ribbons, rice plus TVP is my MVP. It's cheap because it's a diversion of defatted soy flour, which is otherwise used as animal feed (so demand won't drive prices up long term, the price actually goes down if it gets more popular). TVP is 50% protein by weight, and its digestibility is remarkably similar to beef.
I use it in a ~1:2 ratio with rice by dry weight. Actually here's my recipe:
- 2.5c (460g) white rice, dry
- 3c (280g) TVP, dry
- 2 cans of any kind of bean, preferably low sodium
- 2.5 tsp beef base, again preferably low sodium
- 2 packets of taco seasoning (you guessed it, preferably low sodium)
- 1.3L of water total
- Start the rice
- Rehydrate TVP by mixing 1:1 with boiling water, beef base, and taco seasoning in heatproof bowl. Stir thoroughly and let it sit until the rice is done.
- Combine with drained beans
- Portion and freeze for up to 90 days.
- Reheat from frozen in a microwave for 3min or on auto with a little water.
- Mix in 1 tbsp of butter or oil. if you do not do this it will taste like shit, this is the only fat in the entire recipe
Buying in bulk at Winco, the total cost per batch is $6.29 here in the PNW. Divvy it up into 9 portions and that's $0.70/serving.
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Wannabe Macaroni.
The real recession indicator is when they swap Hamburger Helper for Tuna Helper.
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Hamburger helper is bullshit. They give you some dry noodles and a "spice" pack of dubious powder, you have to provide the beef and milk. That's not helping very much.
for real, and it's not even enough noodles. So you end up adding more noodles too... at that point you're paying for a box with some "spice" in it.
But by the time you add enough beef and noodles to it, there's not enough spice and it's all bland. So you gotta add extra spice. May as well just cook.
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I call that "American"
I'll be honest, I'm not sure I can classify it as food
This is cooking with training wheels and I'm not gonna shit on it.
I hear the comments that you need to add noodles, add more spice... you know that because you started here too. I'm glad this exists to open the door to cooking for yourself, but if you know better, do better.
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I call this the dinner I most often had as a kid.
Uh yeah we were poor.
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Pain.
The Hamburger Helper brand sucks. Buy the store brand version. I personally enjoy the "Lasgana Skillet Meal". Has more flavor than HH, and a bit cheaper too.
Give yourself so much hypertension that the inevitable heart attack is so quick you won't need to worry about paying medical bills
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We did this all the time when I was a kid, my dad would make macaroni and cheese and toss in some hot dogs. It was delicious then and its delicious now.
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