On Christmas Eve of 2023 my wife Eve was diagnosed with cancer. The same day, we were evicted from our family home and just a week later the eviction cost me my job. The next few years were a series of emergencies, long days, sleepless nights, and relentless dread without even a moment to breathe.

Money became a luxury. I was hopping from gig to gig, interview to interview, application to application. The post-COVID job market was not kind. During this period I had to learn how to cook on a budget. I'd already been flirting with learning how to cook before this but this accelerated the timeline drastically and I began to research recipes that could stretch my meager funds as far as possible. Luckily there was no shortage of struggle meal recipes online, so I bought a $10 pan and got to work.

Very quickly I realized that there was going to be another major challenge. Neither Eve nor I was prepared for what chemo does to your taste buds, appetite, and ability to eat... basically anything. She had trouble eating. She had trouble keeping things down. Her favorite flavors became inedible to her and her sensitivity to texture was amplified so much that regular water had become completely undrinkable. Learning how to cook around these limitations was a challenge in and of itself. It wasn't just about learning the fundamentals of cooking, it was about Eve and me working together to discover foods that were cheap and that would fit her particular set of restrictions.

Cooking became a love language for me (and remains so to this day). Finding something she enjoyed and could keep down wasn't just about giving her good food, it was a moment of triumph that meant we could get more nutrients into her. One of the biggest victories in all of this involves the first recipe below: I had made small variations of it a dozen times over and while it was edible to her, she said that she could barely taste it. The flavors were there, but they just didn't land. One day I decided "Hey what's the worst that could happen?" and loaded the rice up with as much garlic, black pepper, and onion as I dared. To me it was so powerful I could barely eat it but when I handed her the plate and she took a bite, her eyes lit up. "Oh my god that's so good. I can actually taste it!?" She was so excited and I literally started crying. I'd found something that not only could she eat, she was excited to eat!

These dishes are equal parts struggle meal, medicine, and love letter, and one of the anchors that helped us survive our darkest days.

1. Fried Rice

Fried Rice became a staple in our household that we'd cook 3-5 times a week. We ate this a lot, to the point that we were terribly sick of rice in anything for a good while after. This isn't the kind of takeout egg fried rice you may be thinking of—instead it was the idea of "fried rice" as a base which we could build variations upon. Rather than listing exact measurements here, I'll list the basic building blocks for you to make your own.

The List:

• 1-2 cups white rice
• 1lb Ground turkey or beef
• 1-2 whole fresh onions, diced fine
• 1-2 cups frozen peas and carrots
• 1-2 cups frozen vegetables (broccoli, green beans, corn, etc)
• Lots of salt, black pepper, and garlic powder
• Optionally 1-2 large bell peppers diced fine
• Optionally some soy sauce, worcestershire sauce, teriyaki sauce, brown sugar, and honey.
• Optionally a couple tablespoons of MSG

The Base

This was always rice, some sort of ground meat, spices, and vegetables. We used frozen veggies because they were cheap, quick, and available and the ground meat was turkey probably 90% of the time. Ground beef was more flavorful but also much more expensive. Fresh onions were dirt cheap and packed with flavor, so we threw those in fairly often.

We typically used 1lb of ground turkey at a time and just eyeballed the rice and vegetables. I would pour in 1-2 cups of rice into the rice cooker, cover it in water (use the finger test to determine how much water you need; cover the rice approximately knuckle-deep over the surface) and then take as much rice as I needed from that at the end.

The Seasoning

For the spices we rotated between several combinations. What was always present was lots of salt and ground black pepper. We'd frequently use an enormous amount of garlic powder as well to amp up the taste since she struggled with this and on a few occasions we tried out MSG. It was very successful but also was an extra expense that felt hard to justify at times.

Fresh herbs, while delicious, were never worth the price for us in this dish. They didn't change the profile nearly enough, so we didn't include them.

The Variations

The reason this dish was so successful for us is because it is a blank slate which you can change and flavor how you wish. The core was rice, ground meat, black pepper, salt, garlic powder, and frozen vegetables and you could add anything you wanted to completely reinvent it. Some of our favorites were:

• Change the veggies to peas, carrots, onions, celery, and corn. Add lots of paprika and cumin. Add worcestershire sauce, but not much as it quickly overpowers literally everything else. Optionally add in a can of black beans for a massive protein boost.
• Change the vegetables to peas, carrots, onions. Use a rice mixture (white/brown) for a change in texture and color. Add a little butter for some extra fat content and salt the hell out of everything. This worked better with meat that was crisped up more than usual and with a ton of nearly-caramelized onions.
• Use broccoli, peas, carrots, onions, and bell peppers as your veggies. Use a LOT of garlic. More than you think you need, then add more than that. Create a mixture of two parts soy sauce, one part worcestershire sauce, one part teriyaki sauce, one part brown sugar, and one part honey if its in budget (it often wasn't for us but it really elevates things here if you can swing it). Add a bit of corn starch to that - 1-2 tbsp - and give it a very good whisk. This was the variation we ate constantly and it gave us a really nice sauce to finish everything with.

The Method

Start your rice cooking and pre-chop any fresh vegetables you have. You want your veggies to all be pretty small if possible (it may not be with certain frozen veggies though, more on that later). Heat your pan on high heat and get 1 tbsp of oil just smoking, then drop in your ground turkey. If you're using 85/15 ground beef, you won't need oil here. Cook your meat until it's mostly cooked, then drop in any diced onions you have and let it all cook up. Make sure you salt your meat and onions here. You generally want the meat somewhat crispy as this promotes better flavor. Avoid the dismal gray of meat misery.

Once that's done, you can set it aside in a bowl and then fry up any "big" frozen veggies you have. Broccoli, green beans, etc. Save peas and carrots for later, we don't need to fry those. When your veggies are soft enough to easily cut through, you can toss the meat and onions back in and then start adding the rice, peas, and carrots.

Toss it all together and fry it up. Sometimes, depending on the moisture content of your rice, you'll need to cook it a bit longer and maybe add a little oil if things aren't coming together how you'd like. Add in your spices when it starts to look and smell like it's done and sauce it up. If your sauce has corn starch, add it in at the very end and stir fast.

Kill the heat when it looks and smells delicious. Stir it some more, and take a bite. You'll develop a taste for anything it may be missing over time. I often found adding a little lemon juice at this step helped cut through any of the darker flavors as well.

We cooked this constantly and in absolutely massive batches, as Eve never seemed to have developed an intolerance to it. It was a safe, reliable way to get nutrients in her (once I figured out the spices).

It keeps in the fridge for up to five days. If it's a bit dry when you go reheat, just add a little water and partially cover the dish you're microwaving it in and it comes back to life without an issue.

2. Chili

A half-decent chili is way easier and way cheaper to make than I ever assumed it would be. Bonus points? Eve absolutely loves it. I'm pretty sure she could eat this every day and never get tired of it. It's also packed with protein and fiber, which were arguably Eve's two largest struggles when it came to specific nutrient requirements. As with the rice, we used ground turkey the vast majority of the time because it was very, very cheap compared to beef (often 1/3 the price).

The List

• 1lb ground turkey (or beef)
• 2 large cans Bush's chili beans in mild sauce
• 1 large white or spanish onion, diced
• Salt, black pepper, garlic powder, cumin, paprika, and a little oil
• Optionally a can of rotel (diced tomatoes and chilis)

This one doesn't need a whole breakdown. Get your pan ripping hot, let 1-2tbsp of a neutral oil (we used canola) heat up and throw your meat in. For good flavor you really want to let sections of this brown properly and turkey is finicky when it comes to browning. Spread it out evenly over whatever hotspots you have in your pan and let it start to really get some color before you go about breaking it up properly.

From there add your onions, cook until translucent, then turn down the heat and add your chili beans. If you want it done quick, drain one of the cans, but a little time investment here goes a long way. Stir everything together and add your spices. Add Rotel here if you like it and let everything sit for a while. You'll wind up with more liquid than you expect, so I'd let it simmer for just a little bit to try and pull some of it off. Once it gets to a consistency where its just a little bit more runny than you like, turn off the heat and then let it sit for 5-10 minutes. It'll thicken up very quickly and you don't want to overdo it (if you do, add a little water).

You're all done! It's very fast and easy. Some upgrades we found we loved were adding some butter at the very end, just a small amount goes a long way, and eating it with crackers was always good. Cheese was a rare treat, but any time we could swing it the whole dish got way better. Eve loved this whenever she was really hungry and needed something heavy, and I can say with confidence this does really stick to your ribs. I can barely finish a full bowl myself.

We still eat this exact recipe at least once a week. It isn't "real" chili that's been simmering for hours but it tastes pretty good for something that costs less than $0.30 a serving.

3. Chicken and Rice

Rice is such a power player in struggle meals. It's great for body, absorbs flavor easily, and acts as a wonderful base for building complex flavor profiles.

This chicken and rice was something I used to eat when my mother and I were homeless. When I was fishing around for recipes I remembered just how often we ate it and decided to try it out and was very pleased at how effective it was. We didn't eat this often, as sometimes Eve couldn't handle the texture, but some days she could and we'd whip it up in a few minutes to have a great dinner.

The List:

• Chicken (Any cuts work here, but breast is best IMO. We buy rotisserie chickens because they're very cheap.)
• 1-2 cups rice
• Any frozen veggies you might like. Peas, carrots, corn, and green beans are the golden standard for us.
• 1-2 cans cream of mushroom soup
• Salt, black pepper, garlic powder, ginger (grated)
• Optionally as much diced white onion as you like. I add a ton as we both love onion, but the dish stands on its own without it.
• Optionally 1-2 tablespoons chicken bouillon powder

The method for this is as easy as the chili and leaves tons of room for variation. Bake your chicken (if using raw instead of rotisserie) and break it down into small chunks, you can dice it, shred it a bit, you just want them big enough to not fade into the rice and small enough to fit on a spoon. If using onion, dice it slightly larger than you might expect.

Cook your rice. A few minutes before it's done, you can start working on the rest. Get a pan hot with a little oil. Fry up any onions you have until they're soft, then add the rest of your veggies and any chicken you're using. We're not cooking these so much as softening them up a bit so once everything is properly thawed you want to go ahead and salt everything, then add your rice. Mix everything first, then add the cream of mushroom. My recommendation is only add a half can at a time, then mix, as you're trying to hit a "loose" consistency and it's easy to go overboard depending on your ratios.

Lower the heat and cook it on medium to medium low for a bit. We want everything to thicken up a little. Add your spices at this step and once you've reached the desired consistency, let it sit for a few minutes before serving. It will thicken a little more, so if you've overdone it just add a little water and stir.

This actually goes great with some cheesy bread if you can swing it. Plate up and serve!

4. Pasta

This is a classic for cheap food. Canned tomato sauce or pre-made pasta sauce is easy to turn into a really flavorful sauce for your pasta of choosing. Pasta itself is very cheap and the supplementary ingredients cost next to nothing in most cases. We ate a good amount of pasta during this time—both Eve and I love it—and these days I've really stepped up my pasta game so I'll also include some Upgrades that we didn't know about back then.

The List (Classic):

• A bag of pasta of your choosing
• Either canned tomato sauce OR premade pasta sauce
• Salt, pepper, garlic powder
• Optionally 1lb ground meat (turkey, beef, italian sausage)
• Optionally lemon juice
• Optionally 1-2 fresh white onions, diced
• Optionally a cheese of your choosing, parmesan is recommended

The basic version here is to boil your pasta, drain it, and then add in your sauce. It's about as simple and foolproof as you can get. However, there's some tricks you can use to build a lot more flavor in any sauce.

First, if you're using any ground meat, fry it up in a second pan while your pasta is boiling. Get a good fond going on the bottom because we'll be incorporating that into the sauce. Add in anything else that needs cooked, cook that down a bit, then add in a little bit of pasta water at a time from the still-boiling pasta. I usually do 1-2 ladles. Your goal is to boil off that water and leave a lot of the starch behind. Do this 2-3 times until there is a noticeable thick sauce forming out of the starch and whatever fat you may have in the pan. Drain your pasta, reserve a little more of the water, and dump it in along with whatever sauce you're using (premade or canned). Add in your spices and stir on high heat for about 1-2 minutes to let everything incorporate. Check the consistency of the sauce and either add water to loosen it up if needed or cook it another 1-2 minutes to thicken. You can add a little lemon juice at the end for brightness and I like to top it with some parmesan cheese. Bam! All done!

The List (Sausage):

• A bag of rigatoni
• 1lb italian sausage (a bit pricey in comparison but worth it)
• 1 whole white onion, diced
• a significant amount of parmesan cheese
• fresh basil, finely chopped (with one whole leaf)
• fresh garlic, minced
• Salt, black pepper
• Lemon juice
• Optionally some brie (though this is much more expensive than every other ingredient, so skip this if you're genuinely on a tight budget)

The sausage pasta uses an identical trick but without any tomato sauce. Instead, it relies heavily on building a rich, creamy sauce out of the starchy pasta water, the fat from the sausage, and the parmesan/brie. This one is significantly harder to cook though:

Start off the same. Fry up your meat while the pasta is boiling, add your onions and get them sweating, then start adding pasta water to create that starchy sauce. Once it starts looking kind of thick, turn down the heat to medium and drain your pasta, but reserve a lot of that water (about a cup). Throw the pasta in with your meat, onions, spices, and herbs along with a bit of extra pasta water and get that simmering for a short time, just 1-2 minutes. Turn the heat down to low and begin to add the cheese a little at a time—This is the hard part. If your pan is too hot the cheese will form long, stringy bits that are awful in texture. If it's too cool the cheese won't melt into the sauce. You will absolutely mess this up the first time. Once you get it down, though, it's so good. Add your brie at this step if you're using it, but be warned that brie is temperamental to say the least and you really need to have your heat just right. Incorporate the cheese and pasta water to form a creamy cheesey coating, load it up on as much black pepper as you want/can handle, add more parmesan on top and serve!

5. Potato Stew

Eve loves potatoes. Baked, mashed, stewed, fried. I'm with her, too! This was another dish that we both loved but couldn't eat all the time because some days the texture would trigger her really badly. But when we could, we'd make a big batch of this and go wild on it.

A weird note about this one is that if you can afford a casserole dish or any kind of baking dish to cook this in, that's great. If not, cooking it on the stove in a pot will work but you will need to stir it very frequently.

The List:

• Several large russet potatoes diced into 1in cubes
• Carrots, cut into roughly 1in chunks
• 1-2 fresh white or spanish onions, roughly chopped
• Salt, black pepper, garlic powder, beef bouillon powder
• 2-3 cans cream of mushroom soup
• 1tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• 2-3tbsp butter
• Optionally some thyme and/or rosemary goes well in here
• If you have any MSG from the rice, you can sub out some of the salt for it for a big flavor boost.

This one is as easy as they come. Throw everything into a baking dish of your choosing and add water so it's all just covered. Stir it around a bit and pop it in the oven at 350 for a while. You don't want to cook this super fast, you want to give everything in there time for it to soften. This is why the sizes on the cuts matter—If you don't cut everything roughly even, the potatoes will still be hard while the carrots are basically falling apart and that's not a very fun stew.

Check on this often and test the potatoes with a fork. Once they're very soft, it's ready. Take it out of the oven, let it sit, stir it around a bit, and serve. If you have any garlic bread it's a good pairing, I often had some day-old bread from the bakery down the road to use and it was perfect for mopping everything up at the end.

6. Porkchops and Mashed Potatoes

This recipe is more expensive than the others, but it was one of the ones that gave us even a small sense of normalcy. Pork chops are not amazing but they are relatively cheap and if you cook them right they can be a nice treat alongside some potatoes and whatever other veggies you like. Eve always loved when we got to eat these and the flexibility of potatoes meant I could easily adjust them to meet whatever texture needs she had for the day.

The List:

• 4 boneless pork chops
• Either a packet of instant mashed potatoes or several large russet potatoes
• Salt, pepper, garlic powder
• Soy sauce, worcestershire sauce, lemon juice
• A few tablespoons of butter

Getting pork chops just right is not easy if you do not have a skillet, so I will say up front that this recipe basically requires a skillet to work. If you have a baking dish, you can bake them, but I've consistently found that baked pork chops are just not to my taste.

To start this dish, get a zip-loc bag and add in 3 parts soy sauce to one part worcestershire sauce and one part lemon juice and a good bit of salt, then add your pork chops to that bag. We're going to marinate these as long as you can, up to 24 hours even. The lemon juice and salt are going to help tenderize the meat, and I've found that the soy sauce helps create a more flavorful crust when we go to sear.

When you're ready to cook, start with a ripping hot pan and a little bit of oil. Lay your pork chops in straight from the bag and let them sit for a while. We want to develop a good crust, so no flipping! They'll bind to the pan at first and the trick is to leave them there until they naturally unbind from it. You can tell by gently wiggling them around a bit—if they move easily, they're ready to flip. If they don't, leave them a little longer. Be sure to salt the top side before you flip them but do not add any garlic powder or pepper to the pan yet.

Once flipped, you'll do the same with the other side. I've found most of the thicker pork chops can take a good while to cook through, so once I've got my crust I will drop the heat a bit and cover them with just a small amount of the marinade in the pan along with a little butter. This steams them and helps them finish cooking. After a while, add some garlic powder and black pepper and sear for just a few seconds. Pepper and garlic burn very fast and give the meat a terribly bitter flavor, so you want them out of the pan quickly here. Give them a few flips to make sure they aren't burning and then lay them out to rest once the inside is cooked through (these are not steaks, these are pork, please do not serve undercooked pork ever).

We pretty much always eat this with a potato based side. The most common is mashed potatoes. You can either use instant or make your own, and I'll admit we used instant most of the time. It's faster and requires much less time and energy, and we spruce it up heavily with garlic and pepper. Baked potatoes are also very easy and absolutely delicious, and as a bonus they're one of Eve's all time favorite foods. We top them up with salt, pepper, and butter and sometimes add green onions (and I love sour cream on mine).

Adding an extra veggie can also take this meal up a notch. Our favorite was green beans. We'd often just buy great value's frozen brand, toss them in the skillet after the pork chops were done and cook them in any fat and bits left behind. Add salt and pepper and a bit of oil if they need it and they're an incredible side with this. Other good options might include corn or just a nice fresh salad to add something light to an already heavy meal.

If you can't afford pork chops and you have a Walmart nearby, look for their "ham steaks". They're not incredible but they cook up well enough and they're very cheap.

These meals were essential in getting us through the thickest part of the woods. I didn't know how to cook when I started this and now I cook nearly every day. In fact, we still eat most of these meals really frequently; Eve often specifically requests pork chops, potato stew, and chili as dinners and I'm always all too happy to oblige.

These days, Eve is doing much better. We are both in recovery mode, with whatever rest we can get, good food in our bellies, and brighter days both present and future. I do not look back on the misery behind us with any fondness. That shit seriously sucked. But I do look at where I am now and am thankful for the thousands of creators who publish their struggle meals, their experiences, and their advice online. We are both so thankful for our friends that helped us stand when we couldn't and for the gift of good food and for the fact that we can be here now, in this moment, together.