Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Low cost nutritious foods?

Not sure if you YANKS eat Barley, but here in Down Under, we make a stew from any cheap meat you like, beef, pork or chicken, sometimes lamb if you can get a cheap shoulder, and put 1-2 cups of Barley in depending on stew size of course. You can freeze individual portions or the whole thing and heat it up in camp while you hunt, the smell upon your return will be delicious.
It makes for a wholesome and delicious meal that keeps your energy up with very little actually eaten.
The other thing I use a lot of is oats, either as porridge or as homemade muesli bars or slice.
I also take small tins of flavoured tuna with crackers to have for lunch. It is cheap and very nutritious.

Cheers.

rice is usually the No.1 in UN relief operations. Cheapest per energy benefit, long shelf life, dense storage. Also lentils, chickpeas, any other of the hard vege pellet types. keep in mind these need fuel . if cooking and heating becomes expensive, cold soaking can speed it up. Other grains and cereals may need less energy to prepare.

For protein, eggs and chicken stay the most affordable in poor countries I have seen. Also offal, a favorite of our ancestors. Beef and sheeps heart are veru nutritious and fry up like normal steak. Kidney and liver if you like them. Pigs feet, pigs head( quite a bit of meat on a pigs head), gel brauns, fish head stews. Also all the less popular fishing options. Catfish, eel, baitfish, squid, ray, shark, whatever you have in your region.

Dandelions.

Canned venison. You can use it a thousand different ways. If this is the “new normal”, I would start canning if I didn’t already.

True, we are no that hungry yet, but it's coming .

Build a nice hen house, get a dozen female chicks, and wait for the eggs to come rolling in.

Cornmeal mush.

Wabby, you will never go hungry . You must own 1,000 cows by now.

Ham is cheap.

Turkey is cheap.

Chicken is cheap.

Local beef and pork is cheap.


Cheapest thing I ever bought was a huge, 60 dollar ham.

We ate all week on that....stretched with bread, potatoes and beans.

Us, an' the bank! More like a hundred.

Informative thread, gents, thank you.

Catfish is very popular fish around here.

Thanks for the ideas. This will be the first thread I bookmark.

A flock of free ranging laying hens is super easy and cheap to keep, and the rewards are great. That's why such was ubiquitous anywhere you found human beings for most of human history.

I've thought about getting some chickens.

Beans and Vegetables

I dont think anyone has mentioned the dented can store yet? usually one in in every town, they have damaged cans or somtimes torn or missing labels,, I know several who frequent these store an come away with good buys at a big savings,, Quality thread !!

Dried beans
Canned tuna

I have an older friend who was raised in rural Georgia during the depression. He says some days they would have cornbread and peas. Other days they would have peas and cornbread.

By peas he meant purple hulls. They grow fast and a gardener can make two crops of them during the growing season. I would prefer to eat them as a steady diet opposed to beans but both are okay.

Somebody tell me the difference between a pea and a lentil?

RJY66;
Good afternoon to you sir, I hope the day's been behaving for you and you're getting the weather you need in your part of Georgia.

Here's a quick link as to the difference between eating and cooking lentils or field peas.

https://www.thekitchn.com/whats-the-difference-between-split-peas-and-lentils-word-of-mouth-214986

Way, way back in the day - about '81 - we were trying to grow field peas, lentils and fava beans in our part of Saskatchewan. We did it for a few reasons, one of which was that they were not governed by a marketing board like all the seed grains were then and still might be, I'm not exactly sure. It gave us a crop we could sell when we needed to free up some cash, or that was the theory.

Back then too there weren't any soybean varieties that'd grow that far north, but if I'm not wrong they're now able to grow soybeans there.

Lentils or at least the kind we grew, would make it to perhaps 10" tall and then fall over as they ripened. That meant to swath them, we installed drag pads on the outside of the header and any stone bigger than a golf ball would break a knife. We did it with a small swather that was half the size of what I'd run on Canola.

Because of the tangling nature of the lentil vines and the stones breaking the knives, when my elder brother had been on that field less than a couple hours, he came onto our VHF band radio and said to my older cousin who farmed with us, "I'm done with this >>>>>, you won't like it either. If Dwayne isn't patient enough to do this <<<<<< then I say we disc it under... Your call Dwayne.."

I want to say it took me two and a half days to swath that quarter section, where I'd usually knock off a half section a day with the regular swather doing Canola.

Field peas grew even taller and then would tangle up when they fell over, but somehow the next year when we did them we'd figured out how to pack the rocks in the field a little better and had a different swather setup.

Honestly I still wince a wee bit when I'm cooking lentils to this day.

All the best to you in the upcoming week.

Dwayne