Quick links to recipes:
Goulash
Mock Clam Chowder
Baked Rice Pudding
White Cornmeal Muffins
Biscuit Mix
For as long as I can remember, the high cost of food has been an issue in my family. My Grandmother Dietrick got excited when Grandfather permitted her to buy a lemon so she could make lemon sauce for the gingerbread.
Grandma Pennington’s best-loved dish for festive occasions was ham loaf, made of ground ham and pork.
My mother made a concoction called Rinktum Ditty for guests. It was a mixture of canned tomatoes, a little onion, an egg and grated cheese, cooked together to make a thick sauce. She served it over saltine crackers. If the occasion was fancy, she served from a chafing dish. That was a good meal, and I still make it sometimes, but I am not passing on the recipe because the stuff looks so awful you’d think I made a mistake when you saw it.
When I was first married and it was my turn to worry, I bought “A Cookbook for Poor Poets and Others.” I thought the recipes were bogus. A dish using two pounds of hamburger, called Cats’ll Eat It, because the author’s had when she left it on her balcony in Greenwich Village, just didn’t sing to my palate. But I liked the spirit of the book. Her main advice was, “Always use real butter. Always serve wine.”
Not that she was advocating getting crocked at breakfast so as not to know what you’re eating. Just the opposite. I think her message was that you should come to your meals in a celebratory mood rather than thinking, “Oh, poor me, I have to eat cheap food.”
The extreme of that attitude came a couple decades ago, when reports of old people on fixed incomes eating dog food made the news and even got worked into a couple of television shows. In the one I recall, the boys in the second-floor apartment didn’t want to eat meatloaf brought by the woman on the third floor because they’d seen her carrying cans of dog food up the steps and she didn’t have a dog.
She assured them the meat loaf didn’t contain dog food — she only ate that “sometimes.”
This is a crock. As anyone with a dog knows, dog food is an expensive commodity. Lots of good stuff comes for less money, although surprisingly few people seem to realize it.
When I first began experimenting with my own economies, I found a book called, “How to Eat Well on Practically Nothing,” in the bookmobile. “That’s really impossible, isn’t it?” a neighbor said.
It wasn’t. It still isn’t.
Don’t get the impression that I do it all the time, because I do like my organic chickens and eggs and milk and vegetables. They cost more to buy. On the other hand, I have lots of favorite recipes that will feed six people for a couple of dollars or less.
Looking in shopping carts at the supermarket check-out, I deduce that the high cost of eating for today’s generation of shoppers comes from four things: luxury items such as balsamic vinegar or marinated artichoke hearts; prepared foods, including frozen entrees, canned biscuits, mixes; out-of-season produce; and nutrition-deficient items such as chips and sugared breakfast cereal.
Say you decide to keep the luxury items. They make meals more interesting. But look at what prepared foods do to a budget. I wrote down some prices a couple weeks ago in one of the supermarkets that pushes its reputation for low prices. A can of refried beans was 89 cents. A 14-ounce bag of tortilla chips was $2.69. But a whole pound of pinto beans, from which you can easily make enough refried beans to feed the whole soccer team, was 50 cents. A pack of a dozen tortillas, which you can fry up into the equivalent of several bags of chips, was less than a dollar.
The argument these days is that no one has time to cook from scratch. It doesn’t have to take a lot of time. It does take planning.
Here are some recipes that have worked in my family for a long time. These are our comfort foods, the ones I prepare when I want to be sure everyone likes what I serve. They’re all inexpensive and good.
Goulash
I’ve been eating some version of this ever since college, where it was served in the dorm dining hall. This particular recipe came from Sue Paterno, the wife of Penn State football coach Joe Paterno. Given how well he’s perking along in his 70s, I wonder if it has some health benefits.
1 pound ground beef
1 medium onion, chopped
1 28-ounce can whole or diced tomatoes (or 1 quart home-canned)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup uncooked elbow macaroni or shells
Grated cheese
Brown the beef in a skillet with the onion. Drain off excess fat. If using whole tomatoes, buzz them briefly in a blender to break them up. Diced tomatoes are OK as is. Pour the tomatoes into the pan with the beef and onion. Add salt. As soon as the mixture starts to bubble, stir in the uncooked macaroni or shells. Set heat at medium to keep the tomatoes bubbling gently and cover the pan. Simmer for about 35 minutes, stirring occasionally to make sure all the pasta is mixed in thoroughly. If the mixture seems too thick, add a bit of water, a tablespoon at a time, but don’t make it too soupy.
Goulash is done when the pasta is tender. Serve immediately with a sprinkle of grated cheese or refrigerate to use later. Goulash reheats perfectly, either in the pan or microwave. You can also chill it and freeze in individual serving dishes to thaw and reheat later in the microwave.
Makes six servings.
Mock Clam Chowder
Here’s another one of those make-believe dishes. It’s a New Year’s Eve tradition in my son-in-law’s family. It gets better each time it’s reheated and can be frozen successfully. The original recipe doesn’t call for browning the ground beef, but I think browning it makes the chowder more flavorful. Feel free to vary the quantity of the ingredients according to what’s on hand. I usually don’t use all the flour-egg mixture.
1 pound ground beef
4 cups water
1 onion, chopped
4 medium potatoes, diced
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup flour
1 egg
Ground black pepper
Break the ground beef into a large pot. Brown it if you wish. Add water, onion, potatoes and salt. Bring to a simmer and continue cooking, covered, until the potatoes and onions are tender, about 25 minutes.
Mix the flour and egg together in a small bowl with a fork to make fine rivels, gradually stir into the simmering pot and cover to cook about 10 minutes more. Add more water, if necessary to maintain a soupy texture and stir from time to time so the chowder doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan.
You can serve immediately or refrigerate to use another day, which will allow the flavors to develop more fully. Sprinkle on black pepper at serving times.
Makes 6 to 8 servings.
Baked Rice Pudding
Of all the prepared foods I see in the dairy case these days, I think the puddings are the biggest ripoff — a couple bucks for a small container of pudding that doesn’t have much to recommend it except sweetness.
You can make a whole casserole of this rice pudding for about a dollar. It’s easy. It’s good. It’s nutritionally valuable. Either plain white rice or converted white rice will work in the recipe. I prefer the flavor of whole milk here, but using 2 percent milk produces acceptable results.
1/3 cup raw white rice
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup dried raisins, currants or cranberries
1 quart milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
Cinnamon
Mix the rice, sugar dried fruit and milk in a baking dish. Bake, uncovered, in a 275 degree oven for 2 to 2-1/2 hours, stirring occasionally. When the pudding begins to appear thick, stir in the vanilla. Test a grain of rice. When it is very tender, the pudding is about done. Stop stirring, shake on cinnamon and allow to brown lightly on top.
Remove from the oven. If the pudding looks too thick, make a small hole or two in the top and pour in a bit more milk. The pudding will thicken some as it cools. It tastes best lukewarm from the oven, but it’s also very good cold and will keep several days in the refrigerator.
White Cornmeal Muffins
The cost of cornbread mixes gives me a headache when I know I can buy a whole pound of cornmeal for less than a dollar. In this recipe, you can mix the dry ingredients together ahead of time and do the same with the liquid ingredients in a separate bowl. Refrigerate the liquid ingredients. At baking time just mix the two together and spoon into greased muffin cups.
Baking muffins instead of a pan of cornbread allows you to freeze the leftovers in a plastic bag for reheating another time.
Dry ingredients:
2-1/4 cups fine white cornmeal
3 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
Liquid ingredients:
2 eggs
2 cups buttermilk
1/4 cup melted butter
Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.
Stir together the cornmeal, baking powder, salt, baking soda and sugar.
Beat the eggs and combine with the buttermilk and melted butter.
The muffins may be prepared ahead up to this point. Refrigerate the liquid ingredients.
At baking time, pour the liquids into the dry ingredients and mix with a spoon. Spoon into buttered muffin tins. Bake 10 to 15 minutes, until muffins are done through and lightly browned.
Makes about 12 medium muffins.
Biscuit Mix
I won’t say a word about canned biscuits. You know what I’d say if I were speaking. This mix will keep in the refrigerator for about four weeks and allows you to pop off a batch of biscuits faster than you can cut your thumb and find a bandage opening a can.
3 cups self-rising flour
1-1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
1 cup shortening
Sift the dry ingredients together. Cut in the shortening until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Store tightly covered in the refrigerator.
To bake, preheat oven to 450 degrees F. Stir in enough milk to make a soft dough. Pat it out and cut as with other biscuit recipes. Bake 8 to 10 minutes.
Each cup of mix makes about 6 2-inch biscuits.
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