The Unofficial Kiwi Poorfag Resource Thread - share recipes and resources for your area (both government and personal) here

[Frog-Chomping Bat]

These might be pretty damn US-centric but that’s what I offer.

Favorite snacky recipe when I was a broke student - buy pita bread, slice in half width-wise (so you end up with two giant flat circles), place on baking sheet with original insides facing up. Rub with olive oil and sprinkle with the Parmesan flakes that come in a cylinder. Bake in oven at 350 to desired crispness and cut each piece into quarters.

Learn to sew and lose weight (get to straight sizes if female). You can get decent sewing machines on the cheap, and your options for wearing second-hand clothing improve dramatically if you can buy larger sizes and tailor them down. Research what tailoring can and can’t fix as well.
Buy RIT black dye and dye all the cotton stuff if you want to be more sophisticated and/or goth.
Cobblers still exist - take boots and shoes in to get new heels and soles.
Even if you are poor, for the love of god, don’t cheap out on shoes. Buy the nicest-quality leather you can afford that support your feet the best - especially if you’re going to be walking everywhere.
Buying shoes second-hand is fine, since most people own too many pairs and will resell them with relatively little wear.

Download a Freecycle app (I use TrashNothing). I’m now lucky enough to be able to give away stuff - I list it on the app, and usually someone swings by my front porch within 24 hours to pick it up. You can list on there if you’re looking for something in particular.

 

[Quantum Diabetes]

You can be really, really addicted to nicotine. I’ve done studies for Iqos (it’s like vaping tobacco), countless white nicotine pouches and once in awhile actual dip, we tested cope wintergreen smooth, it was utter shit but I got a giant box of them, just play rocket league and dip away and get paid.

 

[shank]

Bulk buying, shopping generic, and dollar stores are all great, but it can cost you more in the long run if you're not careful. Dollar stores in particular are horrible for selling smaller containers that end up being less cost effective than buying the full-size version. Learn how to calculate unit prices to figure out the best deals, even on sale items cause sometimes the generic is still cheaper.

Whenever you can, buy reusable and double up. I spent about $20 total at during the initial pandemic panic on reusable freezer/sandwich bags and those fancy bamboo paper towels because I couldn't find the regular stuff. They paid for themselves about 2-3 months in, and I haven't needed to replace them yet.

In addition to the learn to sew advice, hang onto a few pieces of clothing that you don't have the skills to repair. It makes good donor fabric for patches. You can also pick up rolls of iron-on backing to fuse two pieces of fabric together if your sewing skills aren't great. You'll still need to sew the edges, but the extra security can be worth it. Also, head down to the thrift store and grab some old sheets or drapes for a couple bucks if you want fabric. Won't always find what you want/need, but it's usually cheaper than fabric stores and you'd be surprised what you can find.

 

[sheepworldvizor]

Nah, I'm with you. Brain is nasty. I don't even eat it in fish.

My experience was lamb brains but it has completely scarred me.
This was kinda interesting to read https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ains-protected-this-tribe-from-brain-disease/

 

[NoReturn]

Whenever you can, buy reusable and double up. I spent about $20 total at during the initial pandemic panic on reusable freezer/sandwich bags and those fancy bamboo paper towels because I couldn't find the regular stuff. They paid for themselves about 2-3 months in, and I haven't needed to replace them yet.

In addition to the learn to sew advice, hang onto a few pieces of clothing that you don't have the skills to repair. It makes good donor fabric for patches. You can also pick up rolls of iron-on backing to fuse two pieces of fabric together if your sewing skills aren't great. You'll still need to sew the edges, but the extra security can be worth it. Also, head down to the thrift store and grab some old sheets or drapes for a couple bucks if you want fabric. Won't always find what you want/need, but it's usually cheaper than fabric stores and you'd be surprised what you can find.

That reminds me! Washcloths and rags are a great replacement for paper towels
I stocked up on a bunch of washcloths for cheap a while back, and I've been using them ever since. I can't actually remember the last time I even bought paper towels at this point.
For gross messes, I use rags made from old towels and old clothing that have been cut into squares.

 

[Hongourable Madisha]

Chinese people eat most stuff North American people would just threw away, pig feet, intestines, chicken skeleton, duck Intestines, lamb liver, kidney, testicle, you name it. Thought most of them look (and taste) like food straight from Cthulhu mythology, some of them actually make great recipes.

Fish heads and shrimp heads are pretty great, there's lots of flavour in them. Even if you just use them for stocks and broths, but the meat is really good too.
Whenever you find some ingredients cheap (or free), it's worth looking them up online and seeing what other people do with them, then decide if you want them. There's a lot of foods that are ignored in the west that other cultures can make tasty, and vice versa. In my mushroom guidebook it says wood ear mushrooms were known in Britain for centuries but weren't eaten, described as "like eating an india rubber with bones", but there's lots of Sichuanese recipes using them. They're good in hot and sour soup or cold with with chilli oil as a spicy salad.

There was a British gameshow in the '90s called Ready Steady Cook (hosted by Ainsley Harriott, him of the memes) that involved contestants bringing £5 worth of ingredients and a chef would help them make a fancy meal with it in 20 minutes. Sometimes people would bring all sorts of random shit (I suspect the producers had a hand in that, to make it more challenging and to make the show funnier) and they'd always make something at least edible and usually pretty good.
During the credit crunch, my now boyfriend and I had just started dating and we had a date where we basically did that, we set a budget, went round a bunch of shops, bought some things and made a fancy dinner together. It's a fun time if you like cooking.

Other cheap/free days out:

• Walks in the park/beach/woods/local green space. Bring a flask of tea or coffee and make some sandwiches and you can have a picnic.
• If you have kitchen scraps or stale bread (sometimes shops will give this away) you can feed wild birds, fish, or whatever other animals show up. Don't use it to dump garbage or anything, but a few crumbs thrown to them won't do any harm. It's good for entertaining kids too.
• Also, as long as kids are supervised carefully and made aware of the risks, foraging is a good hobby to get them into. Make sure they show you their finds before anyone eats them, and stick to only a few easily recognisable plants that you're certain you can identify too, like blackberries. First thing I learnt to forage and I had a great time collecting them when I was a kid. Even in urban areas - there was a trend for leylandii conifers and so they used to grow through gaps in garden fences where the owners couldn't get past the trees to weed them out, so we'd just harvest the berries we could reach from the street. And you get free food!
• Birdwatching and wildlife watching are popular hobbies so there may even be a group near you.
• Open mic nights at pubs/cafes. You sometimes get pretty good acts trying out new material, and there's sometimes free food.
• Student/amateur theatre or from poor foreign places. Usually cheap and not terrible, or if it is then it's so bad it's good. I used to see operas pretty cheap when it was student productions or companies from places like Moldova touring.

 

[Angel Dust]

Many many audiobooks can be found for free on YouTube. Horror is especially plentiful on there. Lots of old school Clive Barker and Stephen King.

(If you don't have a library for whatever reason or don't want to download an app)

 

[L. Ron Hubbard's Cat]

We all know that if you bitch to companies, they sometimes give free shit. That's the route most "I'm poor, look at me" people go.

What works even better...is if you compliment the company.

Email used to be best but I haven't done this jn years so maybe twitter/fb works now, but send an email about a product you like or want to try.

Just a quick little "oh I loved this product so much, I've made friends and family buy it and my whole family worships it nightly" or "I've seen commercials and think x is a great idea. I can't seem to find it locally, can you direct me towards where you sell?"

9/10 times they'll send you either some coupons, a free item or a gift card. Major companies have a whole underused department that deals with this and they love getting a compliment rather than some illiterate screeching about how someone didn't like something and now the world's ending.

Related: If you've ever worked customer service, you know there are policies in place that allow even low-level grunts to give you a deal if you meet certain criteria (one of which is not being an asshole to low-level grunts, just saying). Even if it's not discretionary, they'll make sure not to "forget" to offer you everything you qualify for as long as you're genuinely nice. It's just how it is.

For example, I'm at the end of a 2 year "introductory price" contract with my ISP, so I just cancelled it and went back to my previous ISP. Now, not only am I on another 2 year "introductory price" contract with this other company, but because I'm technically a returning customer they waived a bunch of fees and gave me a $150 credit towards my first bill.

Took 20 minutes and it will save me several hundred dollars over the next 24 months.

Many many audiobooks can be found for free on YouTube. Horror is especially plentiful on there. Lots of old school Clive Barker and Stephen King.

(If you don't have a library for whatever reason or don't want to download an app)

Project Gutenberg, yo. It's public domain stuff (so nothing really new or copyrighted) but if you're looking for the classics, they're all there.

Edit:

On that note, don't bother buying rags.

In my past life on the ships of my youth, we would get rag bundles that were nothing more than burlap sacks filled with the remains of t-shirts.

When you wear a t-shirt out to the point that it's no longer socially acceptable to wear it, recycle it into rags. Cotton and cotton-poly mixes work very well for basic cleanup. Straight cotton works well as wash rags. Silk doesn't work well for much, but I have a silk shirt I lost to unfortunate circumstances that has become a shop rag and is used when I wipe down headunit threads on bicycles and do work on my restoration cars in my garage.

Old bath/hand towels work FANTASTICALLY as cleaning rags for most household use. If your towels aren't ready to be cut up into dishrags/dustrags/floor rags just yet, hit a thrift store and pick up some old ones for a few bucks.

 

[Diet Coke 4 Life]

That reminds me! Washcloths and rags are a great replacement for paper towels

On that note, don't bother buying rags.

In my past life on the ships of my youth, we would get rag bundles that were nothing more than burlap sacks filled with the remains of t-shirts.

When you wear a t-shirt out to the point that it's no longer socially acceptable to wear it, recycle it into rags. Cotton and cotton-poly mixes work very well for basic cleanup. Straight cotton works well as wash rags. Silk doesn't work well for much, but I have a silk shirt I lost to unfortunate circumstances that has become a shop rag and is used when I wipe down headunit threads on bicycles and do work on my restoration cars in my garage.

 

[Aunt Carol]

On that note, don't bother buying rags.

In my past life on the ships of my youth, we would get rag bundles that were nothing more than burlap sacks filled with the remains of t-shirts.

One way to streamline the rag process/storage: I cut the shirts into rags pre-need, so I'm not frantically wiping up a hairball with an entire old shirt that was on top of the rag pile.

I'm storing them in one of those grandma-type grocery bag holders, which works really well. When the bag holder gets low enough, I cut more rags to fill it. This way I do have a couple of old shirts if I need a bigger piece, but I have small rags I can quickly and easily grab.

 

[NoReturn]

Another thing I just thought about.

Psychological Hack: See something you want on Etsy or Amazon? Put it on your wishlist instead of in your cart and tell yourself you can only get it when you buy something practical at the same time. I've found that I usually just get sick of seeing the stupid thing by the time I have to buy dish soap or whatever so I end up not buying it. This seems to work because the novelty of whatever it is dies off before you even get it. As an added bonus, it's ensured I only buy new non-practical things that I really really like, so even something like this stupid backscratcher I have on my desk makes me happy, because I really did want it and I still enjoy having it.

Fish heads and shrimp heads are pretty great, there's lots of flavour in them. Even if you just use them for stocks and broths, but the meat is really good too.
Whenever you find some ingredients cheap (or free), it's worth looking them up online and seeing what other people do with them, then decide if you want them. There's a lot of foods that are ignored in the west that other cultures can make tasty, and vice versa. In my mushroom guidebook it says wood ear mushrooms were known in Britain for centuries but weren't eaten, described as "like eating an india rubber with bones", but there's lots of Sichuanese recipes using them. They're good in hot and sour soup or cold with with chilli oil as a spicy salad.

Love me some wood ears, but they do definitely taste better with an acid and/or chili to taste good. Maybe that was the problem with the British, they didn't have the right things to go with it.

There was a British gameshow in the '90s called Ready Steady Cook (hosted by Ainsley Harriott, him of the memes) that involved contestants bringing £5 worth of ingredients and a chef would help them make a fancy meal with it in 20 minutes. Sometimes people would bring all sorts of random shit (I suspect the producers had a hand in that, to make it more challenging and to make the show funnier) and they'd always make something at least edible and usually pretty good.

Check it out, I found a playlist:

Many many audiobooks can be found for free on YouTube. Horror is especially plentiful on there. Lots of old school Clive Barker and Stephen King.

(If you don't have a library for whatever reason or don't want to download an app)

There are also fan productions/fan-dubs for some stuff as well. The HP Podcraft Literary Society, for example, has some great Lovecraft ones: HP Podcraft - Readings

One way to streamline the rag process/storage: I cut the shirts into rags pre-need, so I'm not frantically wiping up a hairball with an entire old shirt that was on top of the rag pile.

I'm storing them in one of those grandma-type grocery bag holders, which works really well. When the bag holder gets low enough, I cut more rags to fill it. This way I do have a couple of old shirts if I need a bigger piece, but I have small rags I can quickly and easily grab.
View attachment 3662395

I got two trash cans under my kitchen sink, one for clean rags and one for dirty, so as I use them I throw them in the dirty and then wash them as a single load of "laundry".

 

[Fareal]

Jam makes many shitty, past their best parties and bread products quite edible.

You don’t need pectin if you use frozen cranberries and keep the jar in the fridge. So, cheap frozen cranberries and a box or two of reduced-to-clear soft fruits. Whack em in a pan with a bunch of sugar and a bit of water. Boil. Then fast simmer. It’s cooked when you drop a bit on a cool plate and it sets up like, well, jam. You’re going to keep it refrigerated, so don’t get super hung up on thickness/set.

Make sure you washed the old jars you’re going to use and then sat them full of boiling water for a bit. Lids too.

Pour your jam carefully into your dry jars. Let it cool a bit, then whack on lids. Let cool on countertop and then put in fridge. You ought to get three, four jars of this, which will do a single person or a small family a while. Cranberries will go pretty well with most other berries, and the quantities of sugar used to jam take the sourness off.

Toast and jam is a pretty universally acceptable breakfast, and you can improve stuff like rice pudding or plain yogurt with a good lump of jam.

 

[Hongourable Madisha]

Jam makes many shitty, past their best parties and bread products quite edible.

You don’t need pectin if you use frozen cranberries and keep the jar in the fridge. So, cheap frozen cranberries and a box or two of reduced-to-clear soft fruits. Whack em in a pan with a bunch of sugar and a bit of water. Boil. Then fast simmer. It’s cooked when you drop a bit on a cool plate and it sets up like, well, jam. You’re going to keep it refrigerated, so don’t get super hung up on thickness/set.

Make sure you washed the old jars you’re going to use and then sat them full of boiling water for a bit. Lids too.

Pour your jam carefully into your dry jars. Let it cool a bit, then whack on lids. Let cool on countertop and then put in fridge. You ought to get three, four jars of this, which will do a single person or a small family a while. Cranberries will go pretty well with most other berries, and the quantities of sugar used to jam take the sourness off.

Toast and jam is a pretty universally acceptable breakfast, and you can improve stuff like rice pudding or plain yogurt with a good lump of jam.

It's good on oatmeal too, and if you have some flour and fat you can make jam tarts or put it in the middle of a sponge cake.
Apples and crabapples also have pectin in and are pretty cheap (or free if the shop's throwing some away or if you find some growing feral or wild), you can use them to help bulk out the jam and to set it.

Check it out, I found a playlist:

Aw fuck yes, that's a rave from the grave. Thanks in advance for when my stoner pals and I hang out next, that'll be our viewing!
edit: lol at the first few minutes, "I've brought some goat's cheese, I can't eat dairy so that's a good alternative" what? Wonder if she's in the Munchausen's thread with all these fake allergies.

 

[0000]

A trick i have is that i buy this kind of ham and then
cut the fat part out and set it aside to use it later as a cheaper bacon.
although it really depends on where you live, i guess.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

You can make stale bread soft again by sprinkling it with water and microwaving it for 30 seconds.

It's better in the oven. Run the tap and just shake it in there for a second or two, put it in the cold oven, turn it on to 225c, ten minutes later and it's perfect, soft, warm and crispy.

On that topic, learn how to bake simple bread. It costs nothing. It is practically free.

Look at these suckers, they're the easiest thing in the world to bake.

Ingredients are
1. Water
2. A bit of oil or melted butter
3. some milk if you can afford it but you can also use leftover yogurt or other dairy
4. flour, yeast and some salt/sugar.

Important: If you're not using cookie sheets or whatever they're called put some flour on the oven place(or whatever it is called). Not necessarily because they stick to it, but when they are rising they might pick up a bit of an iron flavor.

Brush with a whisked egg if you want. Egg is not necessary, oil/butter is not really necessary, milk is not really necessary. Good things to add, but in a pinch you can do without them. When they come straight out of the oven it doesn't matter that you skimped on ingredients, with a bit of butter or margarine they are heavenly. Survived a whole summer almost exclusively on those things.

Pro-tip: grate a carrot and mix it into the flour mixture before adding water, doesn't matter if you like carrots or not they don't add any taste or texture in the final bread, they add moisture and it stays moist longer. Add some garlic and you have garlic bread, add some thyme or rosemary and now it's a bit different, fennel is nice etc. Get some tomato sauce and make pizza rolls. Or a pizza.

Pizza can easily be done with a recipe like that. Roll the dough out to the size of whatever oven tray you use, pour on a third of a €0.50 cartoon of crushed tomatoes, grate some cheap cheese and here is the trick that makes it cheap: use bacon instead of ham. Four strips(70grams), cut them into inch long pieces, put them on top. It makes it cheaper than ham because that amount of bacon is fattier, saltier. That salty, smoky fat will render and mix in with the cheese that is getting cooked on the tomato sauce.

For a rectangular oven sized pizza that costs €1.50 it is good.

 

[Adrenochrome Dreams]

You can get a whole new wardrobe from ebay and Vinted if you know how to search properly.

Type in "(your size) (item) never worn" on ebay and you'll find loads of clean, new bargains really cheap. Shoes are especially good, and you can get cheap designer trainers. "Size 5 never worn" has saved me so much money over the years, I never shop new now.

The categories on Vinted are quite intuitive and user friendly. You can filter to new with tags, the size, and specific type of item you want,. Then just sort from lowest price to highest.

 

[Shmuel "Sam" Coinsniffer]

I have lived periods in extreme third world tier poverty, homelessness, etc, so this advice is only for the truly desperate.

Dumpster diving. If you can get over rummaging through the trash, supermarkets throw out stuff that is perfectly edible. From time to time you hit a jackpot, once I found kilos of perfectly good strawberries still in the packages. I used to bunk in the homeless shelter with a dude who had it made: He used to live on streets close to a Deli and Arnold's, so he had access to infinite sandwiches and donuts. But it was winter and he needed a place to stay so he had to abandon his gold mine. But it was pretty luxurious (?) homeless shelter and it provided food. Only bad side was when I had a schizophrenic bunk mate who accused me of stealing his limbs and blood and got into a few fistfights.

Also Christian congregations usually have some programs for homeless and needy, I recommend checking them out for soup kitchens or food donation programs. Pocket a bottle of hot sauce in a pub or Mexican place or free salt and spices and and bags of ketchup at Mickey D's, makes macaroni and ramen much more palatable. A lot of gas stations have a microwave so you can prepare your food.

 

[Adrenochrome Dreams]

I have lived periods in extreme third world tier poverty, homelessness, etc, so this advice is only for the truly desperate.

Dumpster diving. If you can get over rummaging through the trash, supermarkets throw out stuff that is perfectly edible. From time to time you hit a jackpot, once I found kilos of perfectly good strawberries still in the packages. I used to bunk in the homeless shelter with a dude who had it made: He used to live on streets close to a Deli and Arnold's, so he had access to infinite sandwiches and donuts. But it was winter and he needed a place to stay so he had to abandon his gold mine. But it was pretty luxurious (?) homeless shelter and it provided food. Only bad side was when I had a schizophrenic bunk mate who accused me of stealing his limbs and blood and got into a few fistfights.

Also Christian congregations usually have some programs for homeless and needy, I recommend checking them out for soup kitchens or food donation programs. Pocket a bottle of hot sauce in a pub or Mexican place or free salt and spices and and bags of ketchup at Mickey D's, makes macaroni and ramen much more palatable. A lot of gas stations have a microwave so you can prepare your food.

Is it still the same regarding dumpster diving in the USA? Here in the UK there has been a big push regarding food waste, and restaurants and supermarkets advertise their about-to-be-chucked food on apps like Too Good To Go. Supermarkets pour bleach on their dumpsters to stop the homeless from trying to feed themselves.

(Too Good To Go is a really, really good app if you live in or near a city, they give away "magic bags" for like £3 and you can get a whole load of groceries or a massive restaurant mystery meal for the whole family. There's also the Olio app for individuals to give away free food)

 

[eternal dog mongler]

Supermarkets pour bleach on their dumpsters to stop the homeless from trying to feed themselves.

They do this in the US too, and also put locks on it.

Small restaurants are less likely to give a shit.

 

[𝕺𝖑' 𝕯𝖎𝖗𝖙𝖞 𝕱𝖆𝖙𝖘𝖔]

Shop at ethnic grocery stores if possible. The Chinese stores I've been to usually have super fresh produce for much less than mainstream stores, plus you can get large containers of spices for half what the tiny ripoff jars in mainstream stores cost. You get a choice of different kinds of huge cheap bags of rice. Soy sauce is 4 bucks for a liter instead of a tiny 8 oz bottle. And you can try all sorts of interesting ingredients that are hard to find elsewhere.

In addition to the learn to sew advice, hang onto a few pieces of clothing that you don't have the skills to repair. It makes good donor fabric for patches. You can also pick up rolls of iron-on backing to fuse two pieces of fabric together if your sewing skills aren't great. You'll still need to sew the edges, but the extra security can be worth it. Also, head down to the thrift store and grab some old sheets or drapes for a couple bucks if you want fabric. Won't always find what you want/need, but it's usually cheaper than fabric stores and you'd be surprised what you can find.

Any clothing from thrift stores can be used for fabric not just bedsheets, especially for quilting... although quilting gets fucking expensive. It's nice because you can shop based solely on whether you like the fabric in an item rather than whether it fits you, which frees up a lot of things you might have otherwise passed over. Patching can be fun - learn to do applique/broderie perse and make the patches themselves into a design element on your clothes.