The Recipe Every High School and College Athlete Should Know How to Cook
and for the love of god, don't make your mother do it...
So you’re poor. You're an athletic teenager with no money. All you’ve got is a dream and more testosterone than you know what to do with. (And yes, that also applies to female athletes - turns out you also have testosterone.) You train your face off at school in a weight room and sprint harder than anyone else at practice. Or maybe you swim…whatever, you’re a baller, and baller is a baller regardless of the sport. Your high school coaches say you have incredible potential. You know this to be true, and you only hope to maximize this potential.
So you do some digging on the internet and eventually you discover that at some point it doesn’t come down to hard training. It comes down to hard recovery. He who trains hard improves. He who trains hard and sleeps like a log gets to play in college. He who trains hard, sleeps like a log, and eats like a fucking lion becomes a monster. You’ve decided to become the monster. You throw out your cell phone and grab an extra hour of sleep every night. That was the easy part, behavior is free after all.
But that nutrition part is grating on you. Lions need protein, at least a gram of protein per pound of bodyweight every single day. Monsters also need carbohydrates to attack the ludicrous amount of training you know you need to be the best. But you’re poor, and food costs money. What to do?
Make this. This following is the most cost effective recipe for athletic development I have ever discovered. If you’re a family looking to support your child’s athletic development but you can’t afford cuts of meat over $3 a pound, or you’re a college athlete trying to make it work with a budget of $70 a week, then this is the saving grace.
- Buy a 25 pound bag of rice from Costco for $20 (This is an investment, it should last the whole month)
- Buy 80% ground beef from almost anywhere for $2.99 (If you weigh 200 pounds, around 2 ½ pounds of 80% ground beef will cover your protein needs for each day. 2 ½ x 7 (days a week) x $2.99 = $52.33
- Or, if that’s still too crazy, you can find ludicrously cheap chicken thigh/drumsticks on sale often for $1.99 a pound or less.
Recipe for ‘The Bowl of Gainz’
Cook 2 cups of rice - Bring 4 cups of water to a boil, toss in the 2 cups of rice and bring to simmer, cover the pot and cook for 20 min. (For the love of god if that didn’t make sense just watch a youtube video of someone cooking rice.)
Cook 2 ½ pounds of ground beef - Easiest way is to just mash it all into a big frying pan, salt the hell out of it, and flip like a big pancake after half of it is cooked through on a medium high burner.
Once the rice and meat are cooked, your job is to make a gigantic doggy bowl. Put all the rice in a bowl. Then take the meat pancake out and chop it up into tiny bits with a knife over a cutting board. Then throw the chopped up meat into a bowl and mix the rice and beef together. (Beef or chicken, it doesn’t matter)
If you checked your budget and you’re still sticking to 70 bucks a week, you should know you have about 15 bucks per week leftover. This is your opportunity to make that bowl of gainz taste good. Throw in some spices and give it some flavor. Chop up some carrots and throw it in there for fiber. My personal favorite is boiling some chicken broth and pouring it over the bowl to make it moist and tasty…Or, if you just want to chew nails and spit bullets, just have the beef and rice. Food is fuel bebe.
Now I know what you’re thinking. How do I transport this? I can’t just bring a big bowl with me wherever I go. (You actually can, I was famous in my gym for bringing a rice pot with me wherever I went…but this is besides the point.) Get yourself some thermoses. You can buy some cheap ones on amazon for 10-20 bucks. Fill those thermoses with your hot steaming food and enjoy your gainz on the go.
Now imagine I just boxed you around the head. This is a reminder, you high school college aged athletic piece of trash. It’s YOUR job to cook this, don’t you dare make your mother do this. Learn dammit.
Train hard, sleep harder, eat the food, enjoy the gainz. Till next time you goddamn champions.