Cooking #

Eating out in San Francisco is how most people quietly lose a thousand dollars a month. Cooking is the fix, and it does not have to be complicated. Everything here is cheap, classic, home-style food, most of it Chinese, all of it doable on a weeknight.

These are not fussy recipes. Most are one pot or one pan, several are under five ingredients, and one is literally two ingredients. Every recipe says what the dish is, what it is good for, and what you can swap so you can adapt it to whatever is in your fridge.

Start here #

• The Chinese Pantry: Twelve Bottles for About $30, which is the ingredient list every other recipe on this page assumes you already own
• How to Cook Rice Properly, the ratio, the rinse, and the ten minute rest

The pantry article is the one that unblocks everything else. The reason people bounce off Chinese home cooking is almost never the technique, it is the shopping list.

Rice and noodles #

• Egg Fried Rice, the best use for leftover rice there is
• Scallion Oil Noodles, a Shanghai classic from almost nothing
• Chinese Stir Fry Over Rice

Eggs and everyday classics #

• Tomato and Egg Stir Fry, the most-cooked home dish in China
• Silky Steamed Egg
• Chinese Tea Eggs, marbled, cheap, and good for a week
• Mapo Tofu, restaurant flavor, home-cooking price

Meat and fish #

• Red Braised Pork Belly (Hong Shao Rou), eight minutes of work and ninety minutes of waiting
• Steamed Whole Fish, twelve minutes and about nine dollars for the dish a Chinatown restaurant charges thirty five for

Vegetables #

• Garlic Bok Choy in Four Minutes, the green thing that goes with everything else on this page

Dumplings and wontons #

• Chinese Dumplings the Easy Way
• Wonton Soup From Scratch (The Freezer Method)

About $15 of ingredients from Chinatown, and dumplings feed six people. The wontons are the better deal still: one afternoon of folding buys you a month of six-minute dinners.

Soups and porridge #

• Hot and Sour Soup at Home, and why most home versions taste flat
• Chinese Congee (Rice Porridge), the cheapest comfort food there is
• The Easiest Chinese Soup: Pork and Seaweed, Two Ingredients
• Chicken Noodle Soup the Easy Way
• Minestrone Soup the Easy Way

Where to buy the ingredients #

Almost everything on this page comes from a Chinese grocery at a third to a half of supermarket prices, which is a bigger saving than any individual recipe. That comparison is in grocery shopping in SF Chinatown.

Cooking is one piece of a bigger picture. The rest of living here cheaply is in Frugal SF.