Hungry? Maybe this can help.

As a poor disabled foodie, I'm here to share my advice and weekly meal plans with fellow poor disabled foodies (and anyone else who finds this).

The information here will assume you:

• are in the USA (for economic/ingredient availability reasons)
• have $50 per week per person available for food expenses*
• have much more time than energy, but can cut veggies and/or man a stove (with sitting breaks) at least 2 days out of the week
• don't have any serious food restrictions**

If you don't meet these criteria, uhhhh, hopefully some of these are adaptable to your needs. :')

For myself, it takes around 2 cups volume and ~600 calories of food to satiate me in 1 meal, and portion sizes will reflect this; your needs may vary.

*If you have less than this, I highly recommend Dollar Tree Dinners and/or Julia Pacheco on youtube.

**I myself have low tolerance for heat (capsaicin, gingerol, et al) and lactose, and a lot of food additives allowed in the USA make me ill. My meal plans will reflect this, but I'm not e.g. fatally allergic to anything or vegan or FODMAP or celliac. If you are any of these things, I wish you the best of luck, but things probably won't go too well if you follow these plans exactly.

General Advice:

1. Plan around needing a fuckton of breaks. Any point at which you are chopping, forming, or waiting for things to simmer, you can be sitting down. Keep a snack and bottle of water on hand at all times.
2. Start cooking right after eating, if at all possible. Don't wait until you're hungry.
3. Make sure you get all three macros (fat, carbs, protein) over the course of the day. I will not ever recommend a restrictive diet unless you need it for medical reasons. The prevalence of diet culture in the home cooking sphere is deeply fucked up, and I'm making this site to help people, especially those with chronic conditions and depression, eat better, which means more calories and more nutrition.
   • If you're worried about weight, know that eating regularly with adequate nutrition is actually the best way to lose excess weight. Eating regular full meals takes your body out of starvation mode, which means that it will use the nutrition it gets, instead of storing it all and leaving none for your daily functioning. Eating regular full meals means that you'll have the energy to exercise, which is vital not only for keeping your body fully functional, but also for keeping your weight from fluctuating.
   • I'm serious. Unnecessary diet restriction is the single biggest way people shoot themselves in the foot with regards to weight loss.
4. ALWAYS always always keep a sanity food on hand. It needs to be: filling, eaten as-is or microwavable, a good source of at least two macros (protein, fat, carbs), frozen or shelf-stable, and bought pre-made. This is so that when you're laid out flat for a week straight and all your homemade food is gone, you won't die. This is food that you can have in front of you within 10 minutes of realizing you're fucking starving and need to eat right this second or you'll pass out.
5. Freeze or refrigerate single portions of everything. Try to make sure that most things are microwavable for reheating. Make this as easy on future-you as fucking possible. -1% assembly needed food.
6. We will be freezing most of everything, because extending the shelf life of freshly made food is paramount to actually eating it. This is a site for disabled people. Getting to what's in the fridge before it goes bad is a skill not all of us have.
7. Don't bother with "splurging" on any particular ingredient unless the cheapest kind genuinely won't work and/or would ruin the dish for you. For the first, an example would be garlic salt; the spice mix specifically is more expensive, but the kind that's only granulated garlic and salt doesn't behave the same. For the second, store brand baking powder often makes things taste "tinny" and the two dollars it saves is not worth having to toss out a cake because nobody liked it. But dollar bottles of spices from Walmart are perfectly serviceable and will flavor your food just fine, and I've never had a problem when substituting vegetable oil for olive oil, or using food pantry canned beans.

Kitchen basics:

1. Appliances
• Stove or hotplate. I've done this before with ONLY a single $40 electric hotplate in a tiny studio and meal prep is pretty hard, but not totally impossible. Focus on one-pot meals—soups, stews, chili, curry. You can do stuff like stovetop pizza and fried rice with a big skillet. Oyakodon, shakshuka, pancakes, eggs, chicken orzo, etc are all good for this.
• Oven. It does not need to be big. If it will fit a sheet pan of some size, it can do sheet pan meals. Pizza will get easier. You might even be able to make a cake!
• Microwave. If you at all have the option of a higher powered one, I highly recommend it. It makes a huge difference in how palatable (and safe) the food is afterwards. Regardless, you do at least need one.
• Toaster. Because we're going to be freezing bread, we need a way to un-freeze it gracefully.
• (needed for plans from this site) Blender. Yes, we will be doing smoothies. No, I would not try to get a smoothie-like consistency by hand without a blender. A shitty one for $20 on sale or a well-loved one from Goodwill will work fine.
• (needed for plans from this site) Rice cooker. Dead useful litle bugger. Rice can be made on stovetop, steamer, or instant pot if you have the equipment, but it's MUCH easier to have a little rice cooker on hand. It can do the work while you do other things (or take a nap). Get the cheapest one available—I got mine for $20.
• (needed for some plans from this site) Bread maker. Seriously. This is the key to bread products. A model from the 90s sold on FB Marketplace or Craigslist for $20 will save your life, water your plants, and walk your dog. All it needs is a 'dough' setting. It does the hard work of kneading your bread for you, and all there is left is to shape it and bake it. It's a game-changers for cheap, easy, and delicious bread products. Once you realize you can make an amazingly delicious loaf for under $2 (sometimes under $1!), you'll be in love. Once you realize you can make anything from cinnamon rolls to breadsticks to naan with it, you'll never go back.
• (needed for some plans from this site) Instant pot. I hate cleaning mine so I never use it, but it is undeniably very good at turning tough cuts of meat into delicious stew or similar. It's also very good for steaming potatoes and eggs and such. Also, many people appreciate the hands-off nature of it—put raw ingredients in, get edible food out. They can be picked up secondhand for not-too-terrible prices.
  • DO NOT GET THE NINJA BRANDED ONES. those had a highly dangerous flaw for years that they're only just now recalling (as of May 2025), and you never know how many are floating around in secondhand circulation.
• (needed for some plans from this site) Electric beater. Vital for a few key tasks, especially with desserts. You could skip the cakes and cookies, or break your wrist trying to cream butter and sugar by hand, but I really recommend getting one of these secondhand or on sale and save yourself the pain.
• (optional) Air Fryer. Or any convection cooker that can go for 20 minutes or more. Unlike oil, you don't have to watch it or flip it or worry about it catching fire if you end up passing out while waiting for dinner. I have a Ninja SP101 (air fryer/toaster/countertop oven combination; especially useful since my real oven is unusable), and I highly recommend it if you can get it secondhand and cheap. I got mine as a birthday gift. I wouldn't bother buying one new yourself, though.
• (optional) Kitchen scale. I haven't had a single baking recipe fail while using one. I got mine for $15 at Walmart, and they come even cheaper than that.
• I also have access to a stand mixer and a food processor. Both of these are a) expensive as shit and b) can be replaced by elbow grease 99% of the time. If you have the space and funds, they're great! They're not exactly necessary, though, and it'll be a long time before either of them pay themselves off in food savings.
2. Prep
   • Measuring cups and spoons. Make sure you have measures for at least: 1 cup, 1/2 cup, 1/3 cup, and 1/4 cup; 1 tablespoon, 1 teaspoon, 1/2 teaspoon, and 1/4 teaspoon. General quality doesn't really matter, but, speaking as someone who went with the absolute cheapest option and promptly washed the numbers off, I will advise you get a set with etched or embossed measures, so you can still tell them apart if that happens to you.
   • Knives. At least one large chef's knife (10" or 12") and one paring knife (3" or 4"), and ideally a bread knife (long and serrated) as well. I've gotten by with only a chef's knife before, but a paring knife will make your life so much easier when it comes time to work with anything small. Bread knives are great for anything that really doesn't want to be cut, especially tomatoes.
   • Cutting board. Wood is antimicrobial, plastic is easier to wrangle. Pick your poison, but you do need at least one.
   • Large bowls. At least two. At least one should be microwavable, i.e. glass or ceramic, NOT plastic and NOT metal. Sometimes you'll come upon recipes that want you to mix wet and dry separately. That's what these are for.
   • Mixing spoons. You can get any kind, but I like wood because they're not as bendy as plastic and aren't as loud as metal. Try to make sure at least one isn't plastic; plastic runs the risk of melting if left too close to a fire.
   • Hard spatula. Plastic if your pans are nonstick; either plastic or metal if not.
   • Whisk. Endlessly useful contraption. Have one on hand in case of sauces, quick breads, omelettes, and the like. I recommend metal.
   • Metal tongs. Sometimes you need to grab things out of a pan, and a spatula and mixing spoon just won't cut it. Make sure they're metal—the plastic/rubber ones break pretty easily. Just try to keep them from dragging on your nonstick pans.
   • Food thermometer. Foodsafe temperatures are no joke! Especially if you're immunocompromised or cooking for someone immunocompromised. Especially when cooking meat, search the FDA-recommended temperatures for what you're making. Sidestep most foodborne illnesses with this one easy trick.
   • Vegetable peeler. Unless you're very good with a paring knife, you're going to want one of these for vegetable prep.
   • (optional) Bread slicing guide. One of the most inane useful purchases I've made. Great especially if you're baking whole loaves of bread for sandwiches, instead of individual rolls.
   • (optional) Rubber spatula for scraping down the insides of bowls. I've been doing without this one but it's been taking a toll.
   • (optional) Zester. A little sprinkle of lemon zest goes a long way! But also it's just a fun little gadget that brings me joy. Probably not worth making the purchase for for most recipies, but if you come by one naturally, grab it.
   • (optional) Melon baller. Hear me out. It makes coring apples so much easier. To the point where I refuse to process apples without it. You could make melon balls with it also, but it works better with less waste than any other coring gadget I've met yet.
   • (optional) Basting brush. It doesn't come up often, but if you like giving your bread products an egg wash or want to coat meat in a glaze while cooking, this is what you want. Sometimes you can get them from Walmart or Dollar Tree for like a dollar. I wouldn't recommend paying more than that.
3. Pots and pans
   • 6 quart pot. One of the biggest "standard" sized pots out there. Great size for prepping ~10 substantial meals of soup or soup-like substances (chili, stew, curry, etc). Kind of unwieldy to wash, but much less unwieldy than trying to cook that much food in *shudder* batches.
   • 1.5 quart pot. This one is excellent for making one or two meals for dinner, when you're feeling fancy. Also good for heating up soups or soup-like substances (chili, stew, curry, etc), and making things like mac & cheese, instant rice, or single servings of pasta.
   • 14" skillet. 14" skillet is, again, great for meal prep. Unwieldy to wash, but better than doing endless batches in a tiny pan. It's also good for when you need to feed more than just yourself and/or your partner/roommate/etc. Shakshuka in particular benefits from having room to spread out.
   • 6" skillet/egg pan. The egg pan is a great size not only for eggs, but for pancakes, french toast, oyakodon, burgers—anything of that size, and it's much less unwieldy to wash than the big one.
   • A cookie sheet that fits in your oven. You can kind of do without this and just cook things on foil, but then you couldn't do sheet pan meals, which are great ways save spoons, especially if you line the pan with foil before cooking anything in it.
4. Disposables
   • Aluminum foil. Honestly one of the most useful disposables to always keep on hand if you can. You can use it to wrap leftovers, line pans so you don't have to clean them later, protect food from browning too fast in the oven, use it as a makeshift cookie sheet in certain circumstances...
   • Foil cake and loaf pans. Spoon-savers that they are. They're extremely good for not only making baked goods in, but freezing and storing most other goods as well. I really like that they're not plastic, and therefore universally recycleable (I go for the ones with flat paper lids). Very good for making trays of those easy-prep meals that you pop in the oven as-is.
   • Deli and/or meal prep containers. To me, the extra $0.30-0.60 per meal is worth it, because that means no thinking is required to get them from the freezer to my stomach. Out of the freezer, into a paper bowl, into the microwave—done. I get mine from Walmart, Smart and Final, and Amazon. Ziplock bags may work (make sure to let the food cool off before packing it) for cheaper. If you've got more spoons than I do, reusable glass meal prep containers will work fine, they just need to be washed. Just make sure the food is in a single portion container before it gets frozen.
   • (optional) Plastic wrap. For most of plastic wrap uses, foil will work just fine. Times when you need to plastic wrap things specifically are very rare. However, it is much, much cheaper, at the price of being more difficult to use and less environmentally friendly. Pick your poison.
   • (optional) Parchment paper. It makes all the difference in the world in one specific circumstance: baking. It's marginally pricier than foil, and YMMV if it's worth it, but I like to keep it around because I haven't found anything that bread products stick to less. You can use it for roasting veggies and such, too, and it works great.