The mainstream media, that is, but then if you’re regular reader of this humble little blog, you already know that.
Anyways, PawPaw of PawPaw’s House turns me onto this little laugh:
Spaghetti Meal With Twist And On The Cheap
Add Lamb To The Mix! Chef Amanda Freitag Tries To Prep Family-Friendly Dinner On “Shoestring” Budget Of $35NEW YORK, Jan. 10, 2009
(CBS) Amanda Freitag is all about feeding the family.
She’s executive chef at The Harrison, in Manhattan’s trendy Tribeca neighborhood. Freitag treats guests to an inspired New-American menu that tourists and New Yorkers alike can’t seem to get enough of.
As The Early Show Saturday Edition’s “Chef on a Shoestring,” Freitag sought to take a traditional, three-course spaghetti dinner and give it a little twist any family would love – on our new, lower, recession-busting budget of $35.
The story goes on…
Now let me explain something to you: If you’re throwing down $35 for a “recession-busting” meal, you aren’t receding very far.
I guess I’ve been in the wrong universe, folks. The people I was raised around knew “frugal” to a “T”.
Thirty-five bucks? You can just about feed a family of four for a week on thirty-five bucks. You’ll do rich soups and beans and rice and pasta dishes.
You won’t do expensive out-of-season and exotic vegetables. You won’t do “instant”. You won’t do frozen meals, and meals-in-a-box. You won’t do imported cheeses.
You will learn to COOK things yourself. For the price of a box of cake mix you can bake your own cake three times.
Frugal? I didn’t know I was raised being frugal. I thought Mom’s gumbo or Dad’s navy bean soup was the peak of daily fare, and we generally cooked with the idea of leftovers making the menu the next day. Portion control was eating what you wanted today and freezing the rest for later.
I admit that my food budget gets busted regularly, but that’s because I like to indulge myself in an occasional odd cheese or something, and every now and then a ribeye will grab me, but I know how to do a meal of red beans and rice for three bucks, too, and people, red beans and rice is GOOD. So is a chicken and sausage gumbo, and while I like to use convenient pre-cut chicken pieces, I know that I can also make a chicken gumbo off a bag of necks and backs, an onion, a bit of flour and oil, and some rice, and buddy, the SMELL of that pot simmering will stop traffic on a interstate highway and people will line up at your door with spoons and bowls.
We Cajuns knew how to do this. My great grandmother lived in an era when the stove was kerosene (no wood out on the Louisiana Gulf Coast prairies) and refrigeration was a luxury, and the pantry was full of things that you could buy a as month’s supply at a time. This only works if you know how to COOK.
And frugal? Frugal didn’t work if nobody could eat the stuff.
And Cajuns don’t have a lock on this stuff. If you get your head out of the frou-frou cookbooks and foodie fan shows and into the hinterlands of France and Germany and Italy and anywhere else, you’ll always find cooking like this.
Frugal? I got yer “frugal” right here…
Yep, that’s pretty much true of country folks everywhere. My Grandmother used to “can” cooked meat in stone crocs. A layer of meat & a layer of lard, until the croc was full. Working on the farm you burned up all those calories, so NOBODY was fat.
AHH, the good old days!!!
Merle
I make $35 meals all the time… they end up coming out to about 10 quarts, and feed 10-12.
Hell, my wife and I eat good steak dinners at home that only run us $15.
A “bargain” meal for four costing $35? What planet do these people live on.
I once showed my grocery list to a friend who was having money trouble & ran through & put prices beside it and it was for about 35-40 bucks. I told you can do this too. She looked at it and said “there is nothing prepared on here. I’d have to cook”.
Of course this is CBS news. Oh look how bad the economy you have to scrimp and save and you only have 35 bucks to feed four people. Look at what Bush has done to this economy. Blah Blah Blah. New York liberals totally out of touch with reality.
Heck if you already have some of the basics in your pantry you could stretch the 35 a bit longer than a week. wouldnt be fun but it could be done.
I spend about fifty a week on food…and we not only eat good but too damn much!
Reminds me of Sunday ham, Monday leftovers, Wednesday and Thursday navy beans and ham. Plenty of cornbread if you didn’t get full, although you wanted the cornbread in milk later on.
Come to think of it, when we finally finished with the ham bone, the dog didn’t even want it.
Ha, this reminds me of my grandma. My family is originally from the backhills of West Virginia…she used to have a string of pig tails hanging in the panty (no central heat, stayed right cool in there) that she’d use to grease skillets on her wood-burning cookstove. We also had a smoke house, root cellar, hand dug well that you lowered this cylinder into and it filled and you hauled it up… used to catch rainwater to run the wringer washer…had chickens so we had eggs… raised hogs…I also remember putting hog meat in crocks and covering with melted lard….she never bought that stuff she refered to as ‘bakers bread’ however twice a week we made huge amounts of bread…had 5 milk cows, that were milked by hand, and made butter when the snow was too deep for the milk trucks to pick-up…
I too, know how to live well….
Buy cheap meat, etc., that’s on sale and learn how to cook it, not only fun, but your friends will love you for it!!
The WV comment stimulated me to think back to my childhood days in the WV boonies. I haven’t heard or read the words “root cellar” in years. Of course, we had one. That’s where we kep’ the taters we dug.
But if you want to see some delicious, low cost cooking, check out a copy of the “White Trash Cookbook”. We were poor (but not trashy, you knew who those people were…), and a lot of those recipes were daily fare on our table.
My gran’daddy, who lived to be darn near ninety, had fried fatback rolled in cornmeal for breakfast every day.