Buy a bag of rice and cook it up yourself. A 10-lb bag of rice costs, what, six bucks? You can cook it in a covered bowl in the microwave, or get a rice cooker for $15. Ten pounds of rice will last a single guy a full year, even eating rice with every meal. Twenty bucks is four orders of fried rice.

To get the yellow color, add a dash of turmeric. A little garlic, soy sauce, some frozen mixed vegetables and an egg, you've got something that matches up with the Chinese takeaway and costs less than twenty-five cents per serving, probably less. Could be a nickel as I wrote above, depending on what you pay for the mixins. At any rate, a monkey could do it.