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Hungry? (09/07/2024)
Rather than focus on how hungry I am, I would rather try to help others not feel it. We've spoken before about achieving abundance through food preservation and economy, as well as how to use plants as food and medicine.
I recently heard of HerbRally's The Art of Frugal Nutrition course that is available on a sliding price scale, anywhere from $0 to $100. It looks awesome and many of the skills remind me of the old favorite, Mary's Nest.
Here are various YouTube channels and playlists with ideas for "struggle meals" / "poor man meals" / "budget meals" / "inflation meals"...
• Frugally Delicious
• The Productive Homemaker
• Great Depression Cooking with Clara
• SouthernFrugalMomma
• The Budget Foodie
• Cookies & Bacon
• Dollar Tree Dinners
• Frugal Fit Mom
• Frankie Celenza - Struggle Meals
• Julia Pacheco - Cheaper Meal Ideas +
• SoutherWife EverydayLife - Easy Realistic Budget Meals
• Inside Out Triangle Kitchen - Struggle Puff Meals
• Homegrown Hillary - Save Money On Groceries
• TheWolfePit - Extreme Budget Meals
• Flourishing Miranda - Extreme Budget Meal Ideas
And here are a few webpages with the same sorts of ideas...
• Prudent Penny Pincher - 50 Best Poor Man's Recipies
• Prudent Penny Pincher - 150 Super Cheap Meals For When You're Flat Broke
• Recipe Lion - 45 Poor Man Meals
• Adapt Your Dollars - 51 Cheap Meals To Survive Tough Times
• Real Food Real Deals - 30 Frugal Dinner Ideas
• The Frugal Mom Guide - 12 Cheap Dinner Ideas That Cost $1 Per Person
• Living on a Dime - $3 Dinners! Cheap Dinner Ideas and Recipes
• Frugal Nutrition - $1 And Under Per Serving
• BudgetByte$ - Popular Recipes Under $1 Per Serving
• The Frugalite - Cheap Eats: Stretch Your Budget With Thrifty $1 Meals
• Cheapskate Cook - Recipes
• TuppenysFIREplace - 80+ Frugal Meals For When You Feel So Broke
• Little House Living - Meals For Under $1
• The (Mostly) Simple Life - 24 Inexpensive Healthy Foods Under $1 Per Serving
• Budgets Are Sexy - How To Make Nutritious Meals for $1-$2/Day Per Person
• Dollar$anity - 20 Dirt-Cheap Meals Under $5
• American Heart Association - Healthy Foods Under $1 Per Serving
• Orison Orchards - 65 Cheap Family Meals For Pennies
• Chris Gates Fitness - How to Eat High Protein on a Budget: 13 Options
• Premeditated Leftovers - 25 Healthy Foods For Under A Dollar A Serving
• From This Kitchen Table - 27+ Family Friendly Frugal Meals Under $5
• Work.Play.Mommy - Feed 20 People For Under $20.00
• ASDA Good Living - 30 Delicious Recipes You Can Cook For Under £1
• SideChef - 38 Cheap Dinner Ideas Under $10 to Feed Your Entire Family
• Mealprepify - 50 Dirt-Cheap Meal Prep Ideas (All Less Than $2 Per Serving!)
• $tack Your Dollar$ - Cheap Family Meals Under $10 Or $2 Per Person
• Aussie Home Cook - 90 Dirt Cheap Meals
• Lightspeed - Food Cost Formula: How to Calculate Food Cost Percentage
• EatingWell - What A Day Of Eating On A SNAP Budget Looks Like
Thanks for reading! May you all be well fed! 💗
Some music:
• 2point0 and Project Pat - My Story
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Addendum (Nov. 1st, 2024)
About a week or two after I had posted this blog, I came across another interesting free resource, Good and Cheap: Eating Well on $4/Day by Leanne Brown. If you sign up to her newsletter, you can download it as a 7MB, full-color PDF. It is essentially a cookbook intended for people on food stamps. She's given several interviews that describe the motivation behind it (at Google Talks and Liz's Healthy Table). While the prices and availability of certain foods can vary dramatically depending upon where one is located, especially if they are in a "food desert", the general ideas behind the recipes are sound (e.g.: get produce while it is in season to save on money, make things stretch by creating stock from food scraps, learn to use flour to make a variety of different foods rather than relying on pre-made mixes, etc.).
Again, such approaches remind me of one of my favorite Mary's Nest videos, Cooking with Economy and Grace - Doing Our Best with What We Have. This was actually the first Mary's Nest video that I had ever seen and I remember tearing up as I watched it. The title of the video is actually taken from the subtitle of a book by Tamar Adler, An Everlasting Meal. Tamar is a brilliant writer. Although, I am bit hesitant to call this work a "cookbook" per se. It feels more like sitting with her in the kitchen while she talks about her life, philosophy on food, and approaches to cooking. I remember reading a good chunk of it at the local library and found the tips that are sprinkled throughout very interesting. To give a few examples:
• One can use the same pot of water to cook multiple things if they move from the least starchy foods to the most (e.g.: boil broccoli, then make pasta from the same water, then boil potatoes, and then finally, cook some beans with the water that is left).
• Even things that have been burned or over spiced can be salvaged, such as by changing the context of the flavor or dilluting it in different ways. Actually, a common method of balancing out a strong vinegar flavor is to add sugar. Sweet can balance sour, and vice versa.
• When there are few ingredients, what is done with them becomes more important. I don't only mean this in the sense of being frugal with the resources that one has, but also in the sense of understanding how food is affected by its preparation. A couple of examples: A vegetable like a bell pepper can be given great flavor simply by roasting it, adding a little bit of salt or specific spices to a dish can noticeably enhance the flavor, etc.
More later.