Stipend ready meals- oatmeal

Few foods are as quick, cheap, and easy as cup-noodles. In terms of storage and convenience cup-noodles are hard to beat. They’re a bit high in sodium, but pouring the ‘soup’ out instead of drinking it can help reduce that a bit. Oatmeal is one of those foods that can rival cup-noodles in terms of cost, convenience, and storage. On sale, a box of 10 packets of Quaker instant oatmeal will cost about $1.50, or about 15 cents a pack. Of course, if you are concerned about the sugar (and salt) content of prepackaged instant oatmeal, you can always make your own which is cheaper and healthier. All you need to do is get some quick-cook oats from a bulk store like Sprouts (less than a dollar/lb on sale.)

Make your own instant oats courtesy of instructables.com:

Into a container or bag, put:

1/2 cup oats
1 tablespoon milk powder
sugar and salt (if you like)

For flavoring, try adding:

• 1/8 teaspoon cinnamon, with dried apple bits (as much as you like)–Apple-Cinnamon flavor
• 2 tablespoon cocoa powder (or more if you like)–Chocolate flavor

Seal the container and shake it up. You now have one serving of instant oatmeal to take to work, school, etc. Just add hot water to cook it up.

For even more wild/awesome flavors, you can use hot tea (green, black, mint, chamomile, chrysanthemum, any tea) or coffee (with sweetened condensed milk or honey) to make the oatmeal instead of hot water.