Oats, rice, beans, pancake mix, those gross canned peas…to anyone who has been to a food bank, this is a non-exhaustive list of things that tend to be staples in their pantry.
So my question is this, to anyone who has been to a food bank:
What are some meals that you’ve been pleasantly surprised when you made them out of the most common ingredients you got from the food bank?
For me, it’s probably really simple black bean burgers.
Cook up some canned black beans, mash them while warm. When they’re colder throw in some breadcrumbs and an egg, mash them more, add whatever spices you like, and then form them into burgers. Fry them with whatever oil or margarine or butter that you happen to have that week. Ketchup is surprisingly good on these.
I eat them on bread usually, since if I’m going to the food bank that week I probably don’t have the money for buns and food banks here offer buns rarely.
Oat milk oat milk oat milk. OAT MILK. I can’t describe how much I hate powdered milk and as much as I like oatmeal I can only eat so much. Me and my sister have taken the leftover oat mulch and mixed it with a flavor packet from some other dried food to make pancakes but I don’t recommend it.
On the topic of black beans if you like Mexican food/have spices you can low boil the beans (with the juice and some water) with onion powder, garlic powder, cayenne pepper, paprika, chili powder, salt and pepper to make beans that go really good with chicken / rice / eating by themself ngl
If you end up with a lot of dry pastas I low-key like to eat em right out the box (I just dump the flavor packet and shake it) but you can fry the noodles to get like chips
Canned peas aren’t gross imo but it’s soooo easy to make fried rice with leftover rice (the rice has to be cooked and then cooled) peas, garlic, egg and onions and then you just add whatever else you want (+ idk where you live but here I just walk into chains like panda express and grab soy sauce packets). Bonus points if you take the egg yolks and mix them into the cold rice - it’ll coat the grain and give it that Chinese food texture
Also don’t diss pancake mix, almost every pancake mix doubles as a “bake starter” which means you can use it to make cakes, muffins, fry batter, etc etc. I like to make biscuits
Peanut butter is another versatile one but something different you can try is making peanut sauce which is so delicious with instant ramen noodles.
I also used to always end up with canned chicken?? I would basically just use it like ground meat lol
Definitely not dissing pancake mix. That there is the holy baking mix. My mother likes to make them in cupcakes cups in the microwave and eat them later.
(I will however insist that the specific brand of canned peas that pop up where I live are really gross)
Also, won’t lie, it is fascinating to meet another person who eats raw noodles out of the box. I thought that was just me!!!
The black beans sound yummy and so does that fried rice. Thank you for commenting with your recipes!