Stop eating fast food thinking it’s the cheapest food source around. You CAN eat very healthy AND cheap. I have many examples and do this daily without trying too hard. The trick is to eat more veggies and minimal but enough meat. Fish in particular is relatively cheap compared to beef. Here, I use a low cost Mackerel Pike and show you how to eat it easily.
How’s it going everybody this is beat the bush today i’m gonna show you how to make a $1 meal using the mackerel pike fish now these $1 meals are actually really good for those on a fixed income or limited budget but did you know that even though it cost so little is actually still really healthy for you observe this is the mackerel pike i bought from the fish market
Now normally when you go to an american supermarket they normally sell you fish that’s in fillets already where all the bones is removed naturally because there’s labour put into it in order to fillet it for you it would cost more so it goes to say if you want to save money you should buy whole fish instead with the head with the bone and everything generally what
I notice from a large variety of fish is that the more bland it tastes the cheaper it usually gets the more bones that the fish has the cheaper it also gets but not necessarily the flavor so it can have a lot of bones and yet a lot of flavor and it would still be really cheap because people just don’t want to buy fish with a lot of bones in it so it is true that
This mackerel pike has a lot of bones but if you know how to eat it it’s really really easy to pick out all the bones and i’ll show you how to do this later so right now let’s just get to cooking it first and let me show you how this is done the mackerel pike made in taiwan the cool thing about this is wild-caught and because you’re buying really small fish there’s
Gonna be less mercury content in it over here you see it’s a dollar ninety-nine a pound six fishes in here for three dollars and sixty cents which is about sixty cents per fish every time i buy fish i bring it home and i rinse it a bit first over here you see a lot of little bones and you could chew through it if you want to but i prefer to remove these little
Bones and i’ll show you how to do it later when you look at the fish you want to look at the eyeballs to make sure that it’s pretty clear and then you can also look at the gills but it’s removed here but you want to make sure the gills are really bright red rather than a dull red over here i’m just making sure that all the guts are removed before i steam it this
Is what i use the steam with is just a pan now i want to put the fish over here but i don’t want to put it directly on the plate so i need some vegetables to pad them rather than buying a specific type of vegetables just to put on the plate i just pick whatever vegetable i have you see even with green beans i can do the same just try to cut it into something very
Very thin like this and then you just try to line the plate with a vegetable let me cut all of them up okay now when i put the fish on top of this it’s not going to stick to the plate because the fish skin if you place it directly on the plate it would stick in by the time you take it off the plate you want to turn it to eat the other side it’ll get stuck so this
Is to prevent the skin from sticking on to the plate here are the fish again each fish over here is about 4 to 5 ounces so each one would do just as well for one meal so right here you already have 6 meals over here i’m just heating some water ready to steam the fish so if it’s boiling so i’m gonna put the fish in i knew the fish was too long so i asked them to cut
Off the tail i’m gonna try to wedge them in here somehow yep they fit barely so now we’re gonna steam this for about 14 minutes and they’ll be done hey now it’s done i normally just take this little grabber thing and take it off because it’s really hot i dumped out the water gave it a quick rinse i put it back on the stove to use the residual heat to evaporate
All the water on the pan still you want to pour out the juice from the head or tail end because if you pour it down the side here the juice will actually collect here and drip onto the edges so you want it to drip in the middle so you would need to pour it from the tail end or you can pour it from the head end but i need to position this grabber at the tip here in
Order to do that okay and then i just put it on another plate of the same size so it won’t be too hot and we can take this and eat so let’s do some plating let’s say we want one fish on here and i started eating barley and they sell these for about 80 cents a pound so it’s really pretty cheap barley tends to be a bit more chewy than rice and they’ll take a little
Bit getting used to but after a while i feel like barley is even better because there’s like a little bit of chewiness to it and it depends you just gotta get used to it and really like the chewiness so here it is the whole meal you got about 60 cents worth of fish 10 cents worth of barley and another 30 cents worth of green beans i want to mention that this macro
Pike is actually wild and it is of the smaller fish type so therefore you’re gonna get less mercury content generally having smaller fish is good for you so now i’m gonna zoom in on this fish so you can see what i do when i’m eating it in order to easily remove the bones but first let me have some of this fish broth i know this is kind of fishy tasting for some
People and usually there are people that really don’t like the taste of fish some people can stand it i personally can stand it i don’t even need to add ginger or anything and i can you know just have it just fine every fish is a little bit different in the bone structure sometimes they have bones in the back over here but this one in particular only has bones along
The belly over here so what you can basically do is only eat the top half of it like this now all of this part over here will not have any bones in it so you can just grab that and eat all of this this belly part is likely the difficult part because if i flip it over you can see all these bones right here and this might prove very difficult for most people to eat
If you just take this and take a bite out of it in your mouth you’re gonna get all kinds of bones in there towards a non belly part over here in the back there’s not much bones either so you can run your chopstick over it and you can see okay i found a few bones so i can just put that aside so it will make things a lot easier if you’re willing to use two of your
Fingers to pick out the bones this part is the difficult part so this is part of the middle of the fish as well and over here i can just start removing all the bones see it comes off pretty easily if you know where they are and then you can just run your chopsticks over it to see oh there you see i just ran my chopstick over and i can see a bone move right there so
I can remove that there’s another one there and now this is basically boneless and it’s the sole reason why this fish is so cheap at two dollars a pound versus you know other comparable fish will be like four dollars a pound now after you’re done with that you can basically eat the head for the head if you’re okay with eating the head you can just basically suck
Out all the juices skin and whatever and anything hard you just spit out put that aside over there all of these are boneless so far and in order to take out the middle bone well it just comes right off like that now we have the same thing as the other side except it’s upside down so we can just go and open it up in the middle like that this whole piece is boneless
This is boneless as well over here now we can just pick out some other bones of course you want to have wash your hands first again you can run your chopsticks across you try to find any leftover bones or some right here and that’s it this is all pretty much boneless but you might find one or two bones in there somewhere i think this fish actually tastes really
Good after you’ve taken out all the bones and stuff it sort of tastes like sardine kind of like tuna kind of like sardine so you might argue that hey why is it so cheap maybe it tastes like disgusting or something the truth is this actually tastes really good and today before making it i was actually craving it i’m like oh yeah you know i’m gonna taste some of
This you know mackerel fish thing it’s gonna have this good mackerel taste to it so thanks for watching this i know this video is kind of similar to the other $1 dinner meals i had but the point of this video is to try other things that’s less popular generally the less popular food items are not as expensive take for example chilean sea bass i used to buy that at
$9.99 these days it runs for about 21 dollars a pound so you know it’s just gotten too popular maybe the people like how it’s very buttery tasting maybe more people are aware of that fish so the more people that are aware of it does not necessarily mean the nutritional content has gone up twice as much the pricing of the fish is only due to the demand due to the
Popularity take a look at lobsters for one they normally these days go for ten dollars a pound when a long time ago lobsters used to be considered a peasant food in fact the lobster bosses of those days kept on feeding the workers fishing the lobsters lobster and they actually had a strike saying we don’t want any more lobsters so you see how the cultural views
Skews the pricing of various types of foods people favor lobsters crab steak that’s why those are so expensive these days to me if you’re able to discover really cheap good tasting fish it would actually reduce your grocery budget but a lot so thanks for watching everybody don’t forget to give me a like on this video comment down below let me know what kind of
Food that you’ve discovered is really really cheap as well if you’re interested in supporting this channel check out my audible link down in the video description below i have a patreon over here and don’t forget to subscribe thanks for watching
Transcribed from video
Healthy One Dollar Meal: Mackerel Pike By BeatTheBush
