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Serious question, who decided lentils are the cheap meal? Took me 3 weeks to admit they cost more than chicken thighs
Everyone in this community pushes lentils and beans as the cheapest protein, so I built a whole month of dinners around them thinking I was saving money. Three weeks in I added up my receipts and a bag of dry lentils from my Kroger in Columbus came out to about 19 cents per serving, but the onions, garlic, cumin, and broth I had to buy to make them edible pushed it to almost 80 cents. Meanwhile chicken thighs were on sale for 99 cents a pound that same month and needed nothing but salt. I stuck with it way too long because I figured I was doing something wrong, not that the advice was off. Anyone else track the real cost of their bean dinners, or am I the only one who blew my budget chasing the cheap lentil thing?
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wells.karen20d ago
My sister did the same thing last winter with a big bag of pinto beans from Costco and she swears the bay leaves and ham hock cost more than the beans did. She started keeping a little notebook of every single thing she bought for each pot and stopped after a month when she saw she was spending more on the extras than on the beans. The part that got me was when she tried the beans plain with just salt and said they tasted like wet dirt, so she had to keep buying stuff to fix them. Meanwhile I can grab a rotisserie chicken for 5 bucks and eat off it for three days without buying one single spice. It really does feel like the cheap bean thing only works if your pantry is already stocked with all that stuff. Nobody ever counts the pantry when they tell you beans are cheap.
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