Thrifty Cooking and The Hunger Challenge
1. If you already know how to cook, and you have time to cook, the job of preparing inexpensive meals gets a lot easier. (I collected some of my favorite tips and recipes over here.)
2. The job gets easier still if you have the added luxury of time to bargain-shop, and reliable transportation to get you to the stores with the best deals.
3. Planning meals in advance makes all the difference.
Food writers are usually already good at #1, and many are lucky enough to have the advantage of #2, so the logic of using us to make a point about hunger didn't entirely resonate with me last year. This year, though, some participants went beyond the basic approach, stripping away some of those advantages. Alice at Savory Sweet Life restricted herself to the single grocery store in walking distance from her house, cutting herself off from the inexpensive vegetables and wide supply of Asian ingredients she normally would have bought on shopping trips. Patricia and John at Cook Local decided to see if they could eat frugally while maintaining their commitment to locally-grown ingredients and shopping at farmers markets, nicely taking on the common claim that such foods are unaffordable splurges. Nurit at Family Friendly Food talked about the luxury of being able to choose to pinch pennies, rather than being forced to do it. I was most wowed by the comments on Gluten-Free Girl's post, with readers giving tips on how they shop on the "challenge" budget as a way of life, not just one week a year, without feeling deprived. I could learn a lesson from them, instead of the other way around.
What are your best tips for cooking on a tight budget? A lot of people over the years have recommended the More-With-Less Cookbook as a worthwhile guide.
-- Rebekah Denn
Rebecca on February 01, 2010 at 01:26 PM
Thanks for the post-I literally just blogged on the issue of cost vs. ingredient quality this morning! I'm especially interested in the project at Cook Local-will be checking out their blog.