Originally Posted by tandempower

Buying dry grains makes it easy to carry and cook a lot of food affordably and without the water weight. I try to cook brown rice often, because it's higher in protein than other grains, but it requires a pressure cooker, which many people are not responsible enough to use safely. If you can absolutely not forget to leave the stove on, you can bring a pressure cooker up to pressure and turn it off after 5 or 10 minutes and just leave it cooling on the stove all afternoon and have chewy, gooey brown rice for dinner. I usually cook enough that I can get a couple days of stir-fries out of the same batch of rice, but I don't know if that would work with multiple teenager 'bottomless pits,' as you put it.

I also like dried beans for the same reasons, i.e. cost-efficient and light to carry without the water-weight. I have learned to soak beans, keeping them rinsed and drained for a few days to soften them up before cooking. I also use the pressure cooker, which is especially good for black beans that can take hours and hours in a crock pot. Unfortunately, my son can be very picky when it comes to preferring canned beans over soaked-and-boiled dry beans, so I end up buying cans, which are heavy and bulky, but we usually do fine going by the store every few days by bike.