I’m sad that this is worth mentioning. But if you are dealing with hunger amid threats to SNAP benefits, rice and beans are very cheap per meal and can be bought in bulk. Here’s some tricks I’ve learned:
If you get dried beans, make sure you follow the directions to pre-soak them. Canned beans are easier to prepare, just dump in near the end of cooking to heat them up. Dried lentils don’t need to be pre-soaked, but I prefer to cook them separately and drain the water they boil in.
Brown rice, barley, or other whole grains have much more protein than white rice and I find them more filling. Whole grains take longer to cook than white grains.
Frying diced onions in the pot before adding the grains and water is an easy way to kick the flavor up a notch. Use a generous amount of cooking oil (light olive oil is healthiest) for cost effective calories and help making the meal more filling.
Big carrots or celery in bulk are pretty cheap too. I like to dice carrots by partially cutting length wise into quarters, but leave the small end intact to keep the carrot together to make it easier to dice down the side. Add them to the same pot as the grains after the grains start to soften. Beets are also great; skin and cube then boil separately until soft. Change up your veggie to get a mix of vitamins
Get some bulk garlic powder, hot sauce, paprika, cumin, crushed red pepper, black pepper, etc. Season and salt the pot to taste.
You’ll only need 1-2 pots and a cutting knife/board for veggies.
I recommend Harvard’s Nutrition Source for science-based nutrition information and they have some recipes too
Edit: discussing big changes in diet with a primary care doctor or registered dietician is generally a good idea.
Probiotic supplements may help with gas.
As a bonus this sort of meal has a very small environmental footprint.
Wish I could but I can’t stand neither beans nor rice. Gotta have meat and green veggies in my meal.
That means that I only like chili without beans. At Asian restaurants I always ask for no rice and substitute noodles. The only beans I can tolerate are refried. So at Mexican restaurants I ask for no rice and double beans.
While we’re at it, I don’t like potatoes, either. I’ll eat them, but I won’t go out my way to order them, unless the alternative side dish selection is no better.
Edit: FWIW I’ll eat it all if I’m hungry, but none of these things would be my first choice.
It might taste better if you cook it from scratch yourself and add a ton of spices/flavors or something. I used to think rice/potatoes sucked also, but adding a lot more flavors (like salsa) improved it a lot.
My parents would say you just haven’t been hungry enough. Their parents lived through the great depression. I wouldn’t know, but I hear people are having to make food/medicine trade offs, which seems more dire than flavor/texture preference tradeoffs.
That said, I don’t know a protein source that’s as available and cheap as beans, but you might try insects if cheap is the priority or poultry if availability is your priority.
You can buy a large bag of frozen vegetable blend and steam it fairly simply. You can either steam single serving and keep the rest frozen OR steam the whole bag in bulk, and refrigerate for up to a week, reheating single servings as you need them.
Best of luck.
Is it a textural thing? I wish very much that I liked mushrooms, as they seem like such a good alternative to meat, but I cant stand the texture of them. Makes me gag.
Mostly I just don’t like the taste, but I guess I don’t like the texture of beans and many potato preparations either, now that I think about it.