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They sell it in powder form too, if you prefer to mix it yourself. I like the smoother consistency of the bottled version better, personally. You can add flavors in a variety of ways (Mio, Hershey's syrup, Torani syrup, etc.), and you can amp up the nutrition with supplemental additions like PB2 (powdered peanut butter), Kencko (whole fruit & veggie powder), various protein powders (egg, soy, pea, whey, casein, hemp, etc.). There are also a variety of other competing vendors, some with variations for things like being keto-friendly & so on:

https://www.reddit.com/r/soylent/wiki/distributors

There's also a huge DIY community, if you want to source the ingredients yourself: (Soylent was originally an open-source recipe, which you could either purchase or make yourself from scratch)

https://www.completefoods.co/

Other people have gone the solid-food route, while keeping the meal-replacement. If you're a geek, then you'll know what Lembas bread is from LOTR; Meal Squares has kind of gone that route with a solid Soylent-style bready bar:

https://mealsquares.com/

Vite-Ramen just started shipping to their Kickstarter backers, which is a nutritionally-complete instant ramen, but it isn't deep-fried & then packaged first

https://viteramen.com/

There's a lot of cool ideas coming out in food. Like for DIY cooking, I love sweets & am a big fan of ProteinPOW's recipes, which are basically treats infused with protein powder:

http://www.proteinpow.com/

I also like a lot of the new milks, especially the ultra-filtered kind & the kind with MPC (milk protein concentrate). Fairlife's chocolate milk is super amazing, and both Shamrock (Rockin' Protein) & Nestle (Protein Plus) have high-protein milks out now (in vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate). I actually really like Nestle's strawberry protein drink, it's pretty decent!

Should all of this replace real food? I mean, I have mixed feelings about it. There are some people who live 100% on Soylent, which I don't think is like super healthy, but I also know people who have to live off feeding tubes because their stomachs don't work right, so it does keep you alive.

I like Soylent, especially the bottled variety, from a convenience standpoint. I work like 60 to 70 hours a week on average & sometimes it's just easier to grab a few bottles of Soylent when I'm super busy & then not have to worry about breakfast or lunch, but also not skip a meal & miss that nutritional intake for the day. As a bonus, real food (Soylent'ers call that "muggle food", haha) tastes like 10x better at the end of the day...if you have Soylent for breakfast & lunch, and then have pizza for dinner, it's going to taste pretty dang good haha.

Also, if you do get into mixing stuff like meal-replacement powders, protein powders, etc., shaker bottles were all the rage for a long time (a bottle with a cap on it & a metal whisk ball inside to help blend the powder into the water or milk or whatever liquid you were using). However, the latest tech is battery-operated blender bottles, which is basically a rechargeable blender. This is the one I have:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07HCM92SV/

Plugs into a USB port to charge (sounds silly for a bottle, but hey) & actually does a really good job mixing. It's kind of like a high-powered milk frother, or portable Nutri-bullet mini blender. It won't chop up chunks of food or anything, but you can add a little bit of yogurt & whatever powders & liquids & it blends them up pretty nicely.

Hey, glad to help. I had the same epiphany a few months ago. The food really is designed for it. If you live somewhere with any sort of international market, go there and grab some Indian spices in bulk. I drive half an hour to closest one for black peppercorns, coriander seeds, cumin seeds, mustard seeds, turmeric, green cardamom pods, and garam masala. It's so so cheap and totally worth it. Also brown rice and whatever special lentils they have like unsplit black lentils. Oh man are those foods cheaper and better than I imagined.

I also have this great book about instant pots by Roger Ebert. I'm also a U of I alum, and just found it fascinating. It's a great read and it's really interesting to read a short book by someone that is so incredibly passionate and funny about a subject like this.

These look icky. Recipe looks unreliable, too. If you want a good bagel recipe, I suggest you buy this book:

http://www.amazon.ca/Artisan-Bread-Five-Minutes-Revolutionizes/dp/0312362919/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1348260951&sr=8-1

...and follow the bagel recipe in here, because it's delicious and much better. Actually, all of their bread recipes are awesome, and super fast to make, and because it's homemade it's definitely budget-friendly. I have this book and their Artisan Pizza and Flatbreads book as well, and I love 'em.

I know it sounds simple compared to all these other great ideas, but you might check out the [Student's Vegetarian Cookbook, Revised: Quick, Easy, Cheap, and Tasty Vegetarian Recipes] (http://amzn.com/0761511709) As the title suggests it has a lot of simple, easy to make recipes that might inspire you. I wish you luck and btw 1st post.

If hot meals are important to you, then do yourself a huge favor and get a lunchbox oven. They're only $30, and are powered by your cigarette lighter. Works great for heating up/cooking just about anything. (there are a few different brands out there, suggest reading the reviews on each yourself)

Walmart or your grocery store sells disposable aluminum trays that fit perfectly inside, for a lot less money than they cost on the internet/Amazon. To lower the per-use cost even more, just take regular aluminum foil, and use that to line the disposable tray, and throw out the foil liner when you're done, instead of throwing out the tray. Ends up costing you almost nothing this way.

Using a lunchbox oven, you can prepare just about any meal ahead of time, put it into a tupperware type container, and keep that in a cooler with some ice packs until lunch. Put the food into the lunchbox oven, heat it up, and voila - hot meal of any kind. Can also use it to heat up your cold cans of Beefaroni or whatever!

Of course, you could always just eat cold sandwiches (roast beef/ham/turkey/etc), its a lot easier. As others have said, having a cooler is the main trick here. I also work via truck in the heat of summer, so I usually just freeze a bunch of water bottles and pack those around my lunch. They're super cheap, and when they melt, you're left with bottles of cold water to drink ;)

I bought this Aroma 8-cup Rice Cooker back in July as an impulse buy and I use it probably 3-4 times a week. I've never steamed vegetables in it (even thought it has the option) or use the "Brown Rice" button haha but the little thing has worked like a champ and it wasn't even $30 off amazon. :)

My parents use this to slice cheese and it works well:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00KFO3BMK/ref=s9_zwish_hm_b1DNY_g79_i1

IIRC, it's not big enough to make "normal" sized cheese slices, but it's perfectly fine if you don't mind making the slices a little smaller.

Edit:

Otherwise there's this, which might work better for you but I've never used one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B000HMB0IM/ref=s9_top_hm_b1DNY_g79_i1

I bought my mom a Toddy cold brew machine for Christmas last year. She can make her own super delicious cold-brew coffee concentrate, and it makes a great iced coffee when combined with water, almond milk, or what have you.

Have you considered getting an actual rice cooker? I don't know if it is in your budget but I have used an inexpensive one for many years and they work very well and are versatile. I cook most of my meals in the rice cooker and toaster oven for a variety of reasons. One of my go-to meals is rice in the bowl of the cooker and a handful of frozen veggies and frozen salmon in the steamer tray on the top. Everything comes out perfectly every time, uses very little electricity, only a few dishes to wash, and it doesn't heat up my home as much as the stove/oven does.

This is the one I've been using for the last 5-6yrs:

http://www.amazon.com/Aroma-6-Cup-Cooked-Cooker-Steamer/dp/B0057XGM5W/ref=sr_1_3?s=kitchen&ie=UTF8&qid=1425857837&sr=1-3

Maybe it is an option for you?

Don't underestimate your freezer so you can buy the ingredients you want. It took me years to embrace this while cooking for 2. Need heavy cream for a recipe but feel like it's wasteful? Go ahead and buy it, you can freeze the leftover as ice cubes and put them in a bag when frozen. Flash freezing items like that (or cut up bell pepper for example) is helpful. Also, try to vacuum seal your bags using a straw or [something like this] (http://www.amazon.com/Ziploc-Vacuum-Starter-3-Quart-1-Pump/dp/B003UEMFUG) to get the most freezer life out of items.

Peanut butter (or any nut butter) is literally just putting nuts in a food processor or blender and pulverizing it.

Butter is easy if you happen to have a Kitchenaid mixer. You just throw heavy cream in the bowl, turn it on with the paddle attachment and wait. Then just knead out all the watery stuff (keep it! It's buttermilk, which is awesome for pancakes and such) and boom, you've got butter.

[Check out this book] (http://www.amazon.ca/The-Homemade-Pantry-Buying-Making/dp/030788726X). It has mayonnaise, sour cream, ketchup, cheese, and a bunch of other awesome stuff.

I have about a dozen different thermos bottles of various brands and sizes. Personally, I find that the glass vacuum lined thermos bottles are the best for holding heat (especially if you follow the directions and "charge" them by filling it with boiling water for 5 minutes, first.) I frequently find them at thrift stores for under $5. For food use, I prefer the wide-mouth bottles, which can be found in both pint and quart sizes. Some of the bottles even have plastic inserts in case the glass breaks, so your food is protected, and it also makes the cleaning a bit easier.

Since you're based out of a vehicle all day, you really do have a few options. If you do an web search for something like "12v appliances", you'll find a bunch of cooking items that run off a vehicle's cigarette lighter. You can get crock pots, coffee machines, hell, someone even makes a 12v microwave.

One of the things you might want to think about is a 12v heated lunchbox. If you want a hot meal for lunch, you could prepare your lunch at home, pack it in a cooler, and then just throw it in the heated lunchbox to heat up while you're working on a job, and it would be hot and ready when you finish. That basically gives you all the options of having a kitchen to be able to reheat things, and opens up a whole world of possibilities.

Mayonnaise, many different kinds of pickles and jams, bread, rolls, and pizza dough (scroll down for magic dough recipe, it does just about everything!). Use dried beans and buy in bulk. Make your own stock bases using left over chicken, vegetables, pork bones, beef bones. It's not really that difficult to make your own mozzarella or yoghurt. Try blogs like this one for tips and to get you started. There are also books on the subject. I find it much more fun to make things at home, anyway. :)

I highly, highly suggest asking for a copy of "Joy of Cooking" as a send-off present.

I largely learned to cook using just that book. It has easy to follow directions on nearly every type of food (4500 recipes) and sections devoted to everything from carving up a chicken to the fundamentals of cooking eggs. Generations of Americans have learned to cook using it. The index and glossary are comprehensive and speedy to use as a reference as well.

In college, I found a second copy at Goodwill and left it in the bathroom. I probably read that copy 3 times and can now cook nearly anything from memory.

I hope it works for you. I think you can find recipes for this thingwhich is just a pricier way to do it but totally viable. I think the cast iron is critical. Good luck!

I cook a bunch of stuff in my small rice cooker. I make quinoa, rice, couscous, oatmeal, steam veggies, steam meat and make hard boiled eggs.

I think it would be a great use of $16. I bet you could use it to make soup as well, if you wanted to.

My sister bought me a Toddy for a wedding present. It makes a coffee concentrate and its perfect for iced coffee.

It should be linked now. :-D

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0970586892/ref=cm_sw_r_awd_uutTub0H3Y1CX

For ease, and to give big ups to the author, here's the link:

https://www.amazon.com/Good-Cheap-Eat-Well-Day/dp/0761184996

Relevant cool book

Will recommend

After graduating I found out my biggest barrier to eating cheap and healthy was that I didn't want to faff around forever in the kitchen when I'm starving. A recipe is only good if you will make it. I've worked my way through about half of that book now and dropped my 2 person grocery bill by $100 this month. Ingredients are cheap.

I know you’re not vegetarian, but I am so that is where my cookbook experience is. Quick vegetarian pleasures

Non-mobile: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KFO3BMK/ref=s9_zwish_hm_b1DNY_g79_i1

^That's ^why ^I'm ^here, ^I ^don't ^judge ^you. ^PM ^/u/xl0 ^if ^I'm ^causing ^any ^trouble. ^WUT?

Yup.

http://smile.amazon.com/The-Flavor-Bible-Creativity-Imaginative/dp/0316118400

It may or may not also be available by googling it + pdf

Actually, you can.


You can buy a Wonderbag or make one of your own.

http://www.amazon.com/Wonderbag-Non-Electric-Portable-Cooker-Cookbook/dp/B00ESI96SW

https://patternpandemonium.wordpress.com/2013/10/19/fuel-saver-pattern/

I use this combo to make vacuum sealed jars.

https://www.target.com/p/ball-12ct-wide-mouth-pint-jars/-/A-50624128

https://www.amazon.com/FoodSaver-T03-0023-01-Wide-Mouth-Jar-Sealer/dp/B00005TN7H/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&qid=1498677791&sr=8-12&keywords=wide+mouth

https://www.amazon.com/Ziploc-Vacuum-Starter-3-Quart-1-Pump/dp/B003UEMFUG/ref=sr_1_1_a_it?ie=UTF8&qid=1498677774&sr=8-1&keywords=ziploc+pump

https://www.amazon.com/New-Farm-Vegetarian-Cookbook/dp/0913990604

I have that exact one, very unhappy as it spits foamy rice jizz all over no matter what I do. He'd be moving from microwave boilover to countertop boilover.

I upgraded to http://amzn.com/B007WQ9YNO and couldn't be happier. It also has a setting for the brown rice I use, and it comes out perfect! I cook 3 (rice) cups at a time, and store it in the fridge to eat off the next few days.