A Cheapskate Capricorn's Remake of a "Power Bowl" Meal

As I’m sure many of you can relate, I want to eat healthfully, but I also have to work full-time and take care of a family. I don’t always have time or energy to cook “properly.” So I’m always looking for ways to make my life easier and more convenient, while trying not to compromise too much on health.

I considered subscribing to one of those meal services, where they deliver partially-prepped meals to your door every week. I tried one for a couple months, and I’ll admit, it was nice… BUT it was really expensive, compared to grocery shopping myself! It averaged around $10 per meal. Eek. I can’t afford that, long term. Also, I am a Capricorn, and I hate spending money I don’t have to.

To add to the “cons” list for these meal delivery services— most meals still took at least 30 minutes to prepare, not to mention the cleanup. $10+ per meal, plus prep time, plus clean time? I may as well go out to restaurants every day, for that kind of money!

My next thought was remembering what we used to call, back in the day, “microwave meals” or “TV Dinners.” Now I think some people are calling them “Power bowls.” (Marketing. Sigh. 🙄) Basically, these are prepackaged meals sold at the grocery store, that you can just heat and eat. Surely, I thought… surely… somebody out there makes some easy meals that aren’t too full of bad ingredients, and that would be cheaper than the delivery kits?

I remember seeing microwave meals for just $1 each, a mere 20 years ago.1

Well, bless my naive little heart.

My, my, my, how inflation has inflated. If only median salary had gone up >300%, the way microwave meal prices have!2

So, these convenience meals are a bit cheaper than the delivery services, but really not by much, considering how tiny the portion sizes are.

<insert swear words in goat-bleats here> 

I didn’t want to get one of those Hormel meals, since I’m pretty sure that meat isn’t real meat, and everything was just loaded with chemicals. So I sprang for the slightly healthier, but more expensive option. It looked yummy on the package!

$5.29 seemed a little steep for what seemed to be a pretty small serving, but I thought, what the heck, I’ll give it a try.  

OMG, people.

It was almost nothing. Just some rice noodles, a small sauce packet, and a TINY bit of dried… are those supposed to be vegetables?

The result was tasty, sure, but the portion was VERY small. It’s hard to capture size in the photos, but trust me. It was small. I was still hungry after eating it.

Five whole dollars for this nonsense!!?? The profit margin on these “power bowls” must be HUGE. I bet manufacturing costs are just a few pennies.

I thought, I can definitely do better.

So I went to ALDI and got ingredients.

Total cost for these ingredients? $13.15, including tax. And I only ended up using half the bag of rice noodles and half the bag of spinach. So the net cost of the groceries was $9.22 for the whole recipe. (I added a sprinkle of grated ginger and some peanuts that I already had on hand. This would only add maybe a few pennies to the cost.) The result made about 8 large meals. Eight.

Bottom line? About $1.15 per meal!

And my “power bowl” was actually filling and satisfying— twice as large as the grocery store packaged one, and it had a much better ratio of veggies to noodles.

To make this even better, the recipe was very simple and only took about 10 minutes to prepare. Here’s what I did:

The recipe

Ingredients

• 4 ounces (dried) rice noodles

• 2 cups fresh spinach

• 2-3 cans of whatever vegetables you want. I used carrots, corn, and mushrooms. You could use frozen veg here instead, if you wanted.

• 14-ounce bottle of sauce. (I used General Tso’s Stir Fry Sauce this time, but ALDI has several options that you could try, which would probably all be yummy! I bet curry would be amazing as well.)

Instructions

• Bring some water in a large saucepan to a boil. Crunch up the rice noodles and add them to the water. Turn off the heat, and put the lid on. Let the noodles sit for about 5 minutes until they are soft. The beauty of rice noodles is that they soften very quickly!

• Meanwhile, open all the cans of veggies and drain them.

• Drain the noodles and add them back into the saucepan.

• Stir the spinach into the hot noodles until it wilts, one handful at a time.

• Pour in the cans of veggies and the bottle of sauce.

• Stir everything together (I also added grated ginger). Store in the fridge.

• Before eating, you could top with peanuts, cilantro, green onions, boiled eggs, or whatever you like.

Oh! I also tested it in the freezer + reheating, and it turned out fairly well. The noodles get a bit soggier when they are reheated, but they weren’t too bad, really.

How healthful is it?

Using canned vegetables adds quite a bit of sodium. You could use frozen veg instead, if you wanted to avoid that. (Frozen taste better than canned, too, in my opinion.)

However, the biggest source of bad ingredients would be the sauce. It has a lot of sugar and preservatives. Most of the sauce options also have food colorings, which are pretty bad for you. (Did you know that many food colorings are made out of petroleum? Yuck!)

So if you wanted to make this recipe much better for your body, you should make your own sauce from scratch. But that takes quite a bit more time, unfortunately. In my case, I traded convenience for a bit of stress on my liver. That said, as far as healthfulness, the recipe could be a lot worse!

The result:

• Masterpiece of culinary perfection ❌

• Edible ✅

• At least it’s more healthful than McDonald’s ✅

• Convenient ✅

• Easy to prepare ✅

• Quick to prepare ✅

• Saves a lot of money ✅

There ya’ go. Healthy, cheap, and easy!3 

Try it out and let me know what you think.