Potato and canned bean stews: eating healthy for 54 cents

Four recipes and a pressure cooker to eat healthy all week

Can you eat varied, healthy and cheap for a whole week without spending more than twenty minutes a day in the kitchen? That's the starting question: from someone who declares himself useless at the stove, capable of boiling pasta, rice and eggs and frying potatoes, and who is looking for a routine of meals and dinners that can stand being repeated without the menu turning into a punishment. His breakfast is fixed (orange juice with a bowl of milk) and between meals he relies on fruit and the occasional sandwich. The hole is at lunch and dinner.

The first thing that appears in the answer is not a recipe, it's a method: cook once and eat from it for two or three days. And a piece of domestic hardware that changes the equation, the programmable pressure cooker.

What someone who can't cook cooks

The starting diagnosis is more common than it seems. You boil pasta, rice, eggs, fry potatoes and little else. Any dish that requires a sautéed base and cooking time is off the radar. The answer that gets the most out of it holds that half of home cooking boils down to four recipes that you rotate: a potato stew, a rice with stuff, a pisto (Spanish vegetable stew) and a legume stew. By changing three ingredients, the same skeleton goes from patatas a la riojana (Rioja-style potatoes) to marmitako (Basque tuna stew), to porrusalda (leek and potato soup) or to a soupy rice.

The procedure, in the words of its defender: chop, sauté and simmer. Fifteen or twenty minutes on the heat and then leave the stew off with residual heat for an hour or more. From one day to the next it tastes better. There's no hidden trick, there's passive patience.

The pressure cooker and canned pulses: the shortcut that wins

For pulses there are two routes and both work. The first: soak the pulses the night before, water, oil, salt and whatever accompaniment you fancy, set the program and wait. The second is even shorter: a can of already cooked pulses, drained and rinsed under the tap, a quick sauté of garlic and onion, a little flour with paprika and the dish is ready in minutes.

That's where the first serious objection appears. Some warn that jars of cooked pulses contain preservatives —they cite sulphites and nitrates from curing salts— and recommend avoiding them. The warning has merit and also a cost: the alternative is prior soaking and a pot. Each person chooses which currency they pay, time or additives.

The broth that solves five different dinners

If there's an ingredient that appears again and again, it's homemade broth. A pot with one or two chicken carcasses, three or four carrots, a whole onion with a cut, a leek and salt. One hour boiling. From there come potato purées, stewed beans, noodle soups with vegetables, soupy rice dishes. Whoever proposes it asks for something more: abandoning meat concentrates, because, he argues, they accustom the palate to increasingly intense flavours.

Another faster route: dried vegetables for a julienne soup without noodles, canned green beans with potato for half an hour, or a can of peas mixed with spinach. And for anyone who wants something more substantial, cooked chickpeas sautéed over high heat with curry, salt and pepper until they toast.

How much it costs to eat like this: 54 cents of protein

The numbers are the most eloquent part of the matter. Twelve eggs for 2,20 euros: 18 cents each, 54 cents for a dinner for three. And only one dirty pan, the frying pan, plus the plate. Whoever calculates it has been having scrambled eggs for dinner daily since January for convenience and laziness, with ham or cheese when there is some. The freezer, meanwhile, is described as the most useful appliance in the kitchen: make a big pot and divide into portions.

At the other end of the spectrum are closed menus. One proposes fish soup on Monday to compensate for the weekend, carrot or courgette purée on Tuesday, roast chicken on Wednesday, pisto with eggs on Thursday, macaroni on Friday and pulses on Saturday, with dinners of turkey sandwich, Russian salad, soft-boiled eggs and salmon toast.

The juice breakfast: where consensus broke down

Breakfast was taken as settled in the approach and it didn't take long to explode. Some argue that orange juice on an empty stomach is too acidic, causes an insulin spike and leaves you hungry an hour later, and that starting the day with flours —cookies, toast, pastries— is the basic error. The counterreply is blunt: years eating the same breakfast, correct blood tests and three hours of satiety. Underneath lurks a bigger fight about bread, sugar and carbs, with cross-accusations of diet fads and metabolic problems.

Nobody learned to cook at home

The conversation drifts to domestic transmission and an uncomfortable fact appears: in March 2020, with classes suspended, there were cities where families were left with fridges at minimum because they ate in school canteens, at work and at their grandparents' homes. The habit isn't inherited just by watching; you need to be in front of the pot.

The closing is almost always the same: tuna salad with potato and hard-boiled egg, tortilla, vegetable purée with cheese. Dishes for a tired person, made in the time it takes the oil to heat. Oh, and the 1-2-3 sponge cake to kill the sweet craving without going through the supermarket aisle.

In the end, the daily scrambled eggs dinner —one frying pan, one plate, half a minute of soap— remains unrivaled. Any weekly plan that aspires to dethrone it will have to explain why it's worth dirtying more pots.