Welcome!

Welcome to The Penurious Kitchen, a blog of cheap, healthy recipes for austere times.

In spite of the title, I'm not in total penury. I've often been broke, but I've never been truly poor. It drives me nuts to hear other middle-class people say they can't understand why poor people can't eat more healthily, because "I had a $20 food budget and lived on beans and rice when I was at university." Sure they did, but university doesn't last forever, and when you have an education, there's at least some promise that you'll one day have a middle-class lifestyle. I'd be lying if I said I'd ever experienced real poverty; I've never had to choose between paying the electricity bill and buying food. I've thrown both on the credit card more times than I'd care to admit, but I still have the privilege of a bank that will give me credit.

That said, you'll find plenty of beans and rice here because I adore them. One of the reasons for starting this blog was that so many recipes that claim to be frugal are anything but. The top things that drive me bananas about recipes are:

1) They require a vast collection of equipment that I don't have. I don't have a stick blender. No one as clumsy as I should ever, ever be allowed to own a mandoline (unless we're talking about a plucked string instrument). While a lot of my recipes use a slow cooker, that's about the fanciest thing I ever use. All my recipes can be made with just a few pots and pans, a sharp knife, a chopping board, some measuring cups and spoons, and one or two other useful bits such as a grater and a sieve.

2) They require dozens of fancy ingredients I don't have, such as spices I'm not going to use again. The recipes I'm going to post here use ingredients that you can use up in other dishes. If I'm feeling particularly energetic, I'm going to post weekly meal plans as well so you can see how I do this.

3) They don't work. Is there anything more infuriating to a frugal cook than wasting ingredients on something that doesn't turn out the way the recipe promised it would, doesn't taste good, or, in some cases, is inedible?
The recipes I'm going to post here are ones I've made several times over and tweaked to make sure they won't be abysmal failures. I'm not going to claim that they're impossible to mess up, because you can always mess something up, but they don't involve hours of sweaty labor followed by crushing disappointment.

They are also cheap to make, and taste good. Most of them don't take a long time, but the ones that do--roast chicken, slow-cooker recipes, breads--can be done when you're at home doing other things, such as running around after an energetic toddler, because they involve long stretches of doing nothing. (In the case of the slow cooker, you can usually throw everything in it and go out all day, then come home at night to a house that smells heavenly and a ready-to-eat dinner.) I tend to plan a week's worth of recipes at once and buy just the ingredients I need. I don't buy in bulk, nor do I freeze meals, because I don't much like the taste of previously-frozen casseroles and I don't tend to use many of the things you can buy in huge amounts. I'm not a snob about cans and frozen vegetables, but I try where possible to buy fresh, seasonal ingredients. Living as I do in a rural area, it's also possible for me to eat locally produced foods cheaply, though I don't go out of my way to do this unless it's the same price or cheaper than buying things from the budget supermarket.

Being irredeemably middle-class, I really would like to eat only organic foods, but on our austerity budget, that simply isn't going to happen. I do buy organic milk and yogurt for Baby B because she consumes vast amounts of both and I don't trust conventional dairy farmers not to pump their products full of rBST and hormones, but where I live these only cost pennies more than the non-organic versions. I can buy cheap, non-organic but grass-fed meat from a shop run by the local university's agriculture department, and fresh free-range eggs are easy to come by cheaply. I buy organic fruits and vegetables when it's possible to do so without spending more, but I figure the benefits of eating non-organic produce outweigh the downsides of pesticide and GMO exposure.

So how much do I actually spend? Well, these days I set myself a strict budget of $100 a week to feed Mr. B, our toddler Baby B and me for a week. We don't go out to eat, but we're avowed foodies, so eating well matters to us. Before we had a child, my budget was $140 for the two of us, in other words, $10 a day each; the amount seemed reasonable to me. But then came Baby B, and not only were there daycare fees, medical bills, and all the usual baby expenses, but a soy formula habit that cost up to $90 a week. (I intended to breastfeed and I really, really tried. Then catastrophically failed, for reasons I won't go into, hence the soy formula.) So something had to give.

For a while, when we were really poor and hungry (Mr. B doesn't get paid in summer), I got our food budget down to $45 a week, but we found that we were eating so much starch and so little protein that we put on a lot of weight and couldn't fit into our clothes. Since upping the food budget would cost less than two brand-new wardrobes, we did that. How do we keep things cheap, then?

1) We buy vegetables and fruits that are in season. Usually, this coincides with being cheaper.

2) We buy cheap cuts of meat and make them into stews. We eat a lot of chicken. We rather like canned fish.

3) We go to budget supermarkets that have bulk bins. Staples such as rice, oats and pasta are about ten times cheaper than the packaged alternatives.

4) We only buy what we need, sticking to a strict shopping list, so we don't have a pile of vegetable rotting in the refrigerator.

5) One night a week, we eat something really cheap. Homemade soup and bread, a vegetarian dinner, etc.

6) We make things from scratch. Canned beans are cheap, cooking the dried ones yourself in a slow cooker is even cheaper and takes hardly any electricity.

7) This may seem too simple even to mention, but we make packed lunches. I used to despise packed lunches, but I've found ways to make them bearable. All of which I'll share here.

Well, I think that's about all for an introduction! Let the cooking begin......