Beans are about the cheapest and best vegetable you can eat. High protein, high fiber, and versatile. Cook up a bunch of beans, mash some of them, mix in a bunch of taco seasoning and stuff in a wrap with some cheese and rice. Super filling and delicious. Add some seasoned taco meat if you want.

It really depends on where you live. Certain commodities are cheaper depending on their availability and ease of access in relation to the world market or national market.

For instance, in Europe, the price of rice tends to vary between 2€ and 4€, while in Brazil, a large producer of rice tends to vary between R$4 (0.72€) to R$10 (1.79€) at most, because we are a massive producer of it.

Potatoes are incredibly nutritious, cheap, and can be cooked in a million different ways! From extreme simple fried slices, to more fancy double scooped baked potatoes, there are plenty of ways to incorporate it into a diet!

Rice, lentils and tomato sauce does the job for me. It’s my go to lunch. Cheap, easy to make and very nutritious. Buy tomato sauce with spices already added or add the spices you like.

I buy these trailmixes at the grocery store that are an assortment of nuts and dried fruit. They are a little over 5 USD a bag and contain about 1800 calories per bag.

https://www.budgetbytes.com/ might tickle your fancy?

for me i’ve always had alot of congee lol which is like a rice soup/porridge, soak/wash rice and then throw it into the freezer into ice cube trays (the freezing of the water absorbed rice will shatter the rice grain) then boil that frozen waterlogged rice cube into your favourite broth. or you can skip the freezing process and use the instant pot porridge setting.

• i’ve found the easiest thing was canned chicken from costco, with some msg/chicken bouillon was the quickest broth that is my favourite. i prefer it thinned down (basically a thicker chicken soup), then you can throw toppings like veggies or bacon/eggs ontop

My suggestions would be:

• vegetarian chili

Can just use beans and no meat. Intensity of flavor is up to your taste I usually go with rather spicy but it can be mild too. Can take a bit of time but if you make one large pot it can last days and just needs to be reheated

• shakshuka

Relatively easy to make and is rather flavorful. Again here spice level is up to you

Both of these go well with bread, rice, or potatoes

Peanut sauce is easy to make and goes with everything. Just add some boiling water a bit of peanut butter, add some heat and soy sauce and its done.

Lots of beans and bean-like foods (chickpeas, lentils, peas, soy beans) can be made into a variety of shapes. If you have a pressure cooker you can even cook them relatively quickly in mass and freeze most of it for later. No idea how much that costs in your country, but it’s supposed to be cheap.

You can just make regular bean “soup”, or you can “fry” them in a pan (specially lentils). You can eat chickpeas like popcorn or you can mix them with flour and something sticky (overcooked rice if vegan, egg whites otherwise) and make burgers. Just remember to put something oily like olive oi or butter for taste.

You can also do some really low-nutrition despair foods by mixing wheat flour, salt, water and butter, and frying that in a pan. It’s not healthy, but it’s filling and easy to make, tastes like bread. But of course, if you add to this you can make other cool stuff like pancakes (less salt, lots of sugar, baking powder).

All of the fried stuff get a very homogeneous consistency so they might be fine for your sensory issues.

On the matter of taste, you just need a lot of seasoning.

Um, if you like bell pepper and onion I can recommend coca de trampó. It’s like pizza a lot more oily and takes longer to bake. My bastardized version of the recipe is:

• Chop 2 medium sized bell peppers (red and green or whatever you like), an onion and a medium tomato. You can chop them to strips or squares. Put everything in a bowl.
• Add a bit of oil (should be olive oil but if it’s too expensive just use seed oil), enough to soak everything. Add sweet paprika. Add crushed tomato (like a cup or cup and a half, I normally add a whole can which is like 400g).
• Mix that evenly.
• While that macerates, make the dough by adding half a cup of oil and a cup of water.
• Add flour while stirring so as to avoid lumps, until the dough doesn’t stick to the bowl.
• Spread the dough in an oven plate (if you have a small oven like me you can make two)
• Put that in the oven for like 10 minutes at 200°C, or until it you see the surface “solidify”.
• Take out the plate and spread the vegetables over the base.
• Put everything back in the oven for like 30-40 minutes depending on how hard you like the dough to be.

Hey, it may be oily as hell but it’s so fucking good

Unrelated to above: you should also have frozen vegetables in the freezer so that you can cook them quickly whenever you need. Also have cans/jars at hand for the same reason. If you cook something that takes long, go all in and make at least a kilo so you can store for later in the freezer. Get glass tupperware.

Bananas are pretty cheap right? Idk but they’re delicious and can be made into bread, cookies, or chips if you have them too long.

Egg fried rice is cheap, easy and vegetarian. If you cook your veggies with garlic, onion and chillies, and you top it off with soya sauce you’re gonna have an intense taste lol. It might be a ‘weird consistency’ though, since it’s quite soft, but you’ll have to be the judge of that.

Look up texturized soy recipes. Ill give you one later.

These are not the absolute simplest recipes, but they are nutritious, flavorful, inexpensive, take a shorter time to cook relative to other Indian recipes due to the prep ahead of time, and will serve you well. https://myheartbeets.com/category/method-cooking-style/onion-masala-recipes/

One of my go to recipes is this one, the easy way:

https://youtu.be/iKMI1xkU_oo

This can be really spiced up to intensify the flavor and it’s very filling and easy