Kaylee's not-a-blog » Food » Meals » canned Beef Stew (from DollarTree) with instant rice, dash heated

Last summer, after my experiment with van dash heating cheap canned Beef Barley soup with instant rice, I decided to try the same technique & rice pairing with cheap canned Beef Stew ("Southgate" brand from DollarTree, which I've had before but never with rice).
It worked well, and was much heartier and filling than the beef barley soup (albeit more expensive at $1.25 for the stew).

Steps:

• place both stew can and water bottle on vehicle dash, in full sunlight, leave for 2 to 4 hours, until hot
• add some instant rice to a bowl, add hot water, let sit for about 10 minutes to rehydrate
• add stew
• enjoy :)

Pictures:

The can of stew:

Entire label, flattened:

Instant white Rice, in a bowl, fully rehydrated:

Stew and rice in a bowl, ready to eat:

Review:

It had been a while since I'd had this particular brand of beef stew, and it was much better than I remembered.

The beef chunks were bigger than I expected, and the beef gravy had a very hearty flavor.
There was far less vegetable variety (mostly potatoes and some carrots) than in the beef barley soup.

Around the same time, I used the same technique with a can of Dinty Moore beef stew (bought with a coupon at Dollar General), and was surprised that it was not significantly better than this much cheaper brand.
Numbers:
Southgate has 594 calories (per 15oz(425g) can) and costs $1.25, which is 475.2 calories/$1.
Dinty Moore has 481 calories (per 20oz(567g) can) and currently costs $3.38 at Walmart, which is 142.3 calories/$1 (i.e. 3.3 times the calorie cost of Southgate).

Bottom line:

This is trivially easy to make, with near zero cognitive load, and zero danger of damaging the food.
I plan to buy more of this budget beef stew, mainly during summer.