No, you don’t need to know how to cook from scratch to create loads of your favorite meals every day.
Yes, you need to do some simple cooking (Can you use a can opener and put something in the microwave?), but you don’t have to be a great, or even a good cook to eat really, really well for less than $5 a day.
You’ll need to be able to open canned goods, add water to some prepared foods (like instance mashed potatoes), put a piece of chicken in your oven, use a microwave, and fry some eggs.
That’s about it.
The meal you see below takes about three minutes of preparation time and 30-40 minutes of cooking time — at most.
You just need to open two cans with a can opener and nuke the soup and green beans, add some hot water to the mashed potatoes and put the chicken in a heated oven for 35-40 minutes.
By the way, if you want to get more ambitious, you can find a video showing how to make almost any dishes you’d like to make. Forget about the celebrity chefs – go to YouTube and watch home cooks show you how to make almost any dish or meal you can think of.
You don’t need lots of kitchen appliances and gadgets or drawers full of cooking utensils. As you get the hang of making your meals, you might want to start adding things like a whisk or a spatula or a cake pan or better cutting knives.
Whatever you do, DON’T buy home-delivered meal kits. They will charge you up to $12 for $2 worth of ingredients! And you won’t get fresh ingredients. Why pay an extra $10 for some printed directions when you can find the same information online, and with video instructions?
So no, you don’t have to be a cook to eat well for less than $5 a day, but you need to some simple cooking and heating of your foods.