No Stupid Questions

If you buy local, and go with the seasons, I'd argue it is rather hard to not have all three (cheap, delicious, healthy) at the same time.

You won't have to rely on produce which is optimized for long transports but can tap into fresh, original flavors. Ripe fruits and vegetables from the fields, harvested just this morning. And because they all ripen now, quality maximizes when prize minimizes.

Oatmeal with butter, brown sugar, and salt.

The above 3 primary ingredients will be cheap, healthy, and delicious when prepared properly. Adding milk and/or cinnamon to taste can improve the deliciocity.

But maybe don't eat it for every meal or you'll be shitting after every meal. Very clean colon though.

Carrots. Same as potatoes. Boil em, mash em, stick em in a stew. Someone already mentioned onions, same idea.

I know your edit says you were thinking about dishes, and I think carrots can be their own dish with very little preparation. I like to bake mine on a sheet for half hour or so at 425f, and they are wonderful on their own. Also so low-calorie you can eat a practically infinite amount of them without spoiling a diet!

Another one is curry, which is actually real easy to make. I bought a bag of curry powder for a few bucks years ago and it's still just fine. You can get cans of paste too but honestly I can go either way, both are great, and I love that the curry powder is so absurdly cheap per serving.

I just julienne an onion and red pepper, saute for a bit, add a few teaspoons of curry powder, throw in some garlic and ginger, then add a can of chicken broth, and a few drops of fish sauce. I simmer for a while to let it reduce, then add a can of sweetened coconut milk at the end. Also at the end I add a ton of basil. Maybe some other stuff in there too that I'm forgetting, you really can't go wrong with this either.

For protein you can obviously do chicken or something, but if you want to go ultra cheap and healthy, just throw in a cup of lentils to that curry you got going. Give it 20 minute or so and you're in flavor city. I'm always blown away at how insanely tasty it is, like it's just impossibly good. You can add literally whatever spices and flavorings you want and it just gets better.

There's an asian grocery store near me with all these ingredients for super cheap so I can make that curry sauce for literally like $5-10. It's delicious, cheap, super easy, and healthy, if not a bit calorie dense from the coconut milk.

Well chicken maybe as it is the most cheap meat. And it is subjective, but something like chicken soup (if cooked at home) can be relativly cheap and really delicious.

Also, just thought about it - fruits and berries also easily break this trinity

You should shop at a grocery outlet, that's how you get all three achieved. there's so much cheap overstocked healthy food, because originally was too expensive and people didn't want to pay that much, so I benefit. Best grocery store there's ever been, prove me wrong!

Rice

Eggs

Check out the Healthy Food community!

https://lemmy.world/c/healthyfood

Scrambed eggs.

This will be controversial. I'm going with Costco rotisserie chicken. $5. They taste good fresh but bad reheated. I don't eat the skin

Well, first we need to define what healthy means, because you could die of water intoxication, meaning there is a point where quantity matters.

Are cheese and butter healthy ? Not if it's your only diet, but there are tons of very healthy things in cheese and butter. And of course, the same goes for every thing. So we must have balance in mind when defining an healthy food.

The second is to define what is cheap. In most of European countries, fresh food is relatively cheap, but in other countries they can super expensive. And there's nothing more healthy than fresh food. So you definitely need fresh food as a base for an healthy balanced meal.

The third is highly subjective.

As for my healthy delicious cheap meal:

Breakfast

One scrambled egg by Gordon Ramsay with a melted slice of cheddar on toast and A fruit salad of one orange, one kiwi and one small apple

Lunch

Spaghettis with fresh garlic, olive oil, fresh basil and tomato wedges

Dinner

Pan-fried chicken fillet with frozen peas and carrot rings

Snack

Any fruit really

Oh boy I've got one! Bonus, it ticks a 4th box - convenient!

Not sure where you're located and there are different brands, so you'll have to investigate for yourself. But the Tasty Bite brand microwaveable Indian pouches to me manage to hit each of these dimensions. They're cheap (-ish, I wanna say $4 per meal?), healthy (probably high in sodium, but if you look at the ingredients list it's all just food - not weird processed and/or synthetic crap), microwaveable and totally delicious. Granted, it's delicious for a microwaved meal...can't exactly compete with a properly prepared Indian dish. But it's easily the best microwaved food I've ever eaten.

And they're vegetarian and sometimes vegan so a small win on the critter ethics too! Can't recommend em enough unless you mean REAL cheap or you're used to eating home cooked Indian dishes on the regular.

Homemade Popcorn!

Most things are unhealthy because we eat too much of it. For example (fresh) bread is delicious, cheap, and healthy, provided you eat it in moderation. Now if you ate nothing but bread all day you would gain a lot of weight.

Same goes for salt, fat, and sugar. To be fair, part of the reason we tend to eat so much of it is because normally this stuff is rare in nature and we are evolved to seek it, but we've made it so accessible and cheap, that we easily let our natural instincts take over. So that aspect explains your trinity. But it doesn't have to be that way. You can have all three with a bit of self control.

Chickpeas

The one thing missing from the trinity is "effort". For instance, you could make any Dal, which would fit the trinity, but takes a lot of time. There are books with hundreds of Dal recipes that all taste different and work, too. And this is just one example. Less than a dollar a meal if made in bulk with rice.