Whenever I post a recipe or another food post, I usually hear from a reader or two who tout cooking everything from scratch. They’ll tell me about their very low food bill and encourage me to post recipes that start from even more staple-oriented food.

A great example comes from my recent recipe for lemony fettuccine with asparagus:

Commenters on the recipe offered lots of great suggestions for how to improve the recipe: use broccoli instead of asparagus, use olive oil instead of canola, and so on.

One reader emailed me and offered up a further interesting suggestion:

Your lemon fettuccine recipe was pretty low on protein. I make my own pasta and sometimes add ground flaxseed to the dough to increase the protein count. It creates a great taste and keeps my grocery bill low.

Undoubtedly, making my own pasta (something I do from time to time) is a great way to make mind-blowingly delicious pasta and it’s way cheaper than the boxed stuff. You can make a giant pile of pasta with just a couple cups of flour and a few eggs.

Time
There’s a problem, though: from-scratch pasta is time expensive. Making the dough, pressing it, cutting it, and drying it can eat up a good hour of your time. Considering that I’m trimming about a dollar in cost off of a box of pasta for that effort, I’m only saving $1 for that hour of my time.

For a busy person (and who isn’t), saving $1 for an hour’s worth of work is not a good deal.

This is true for many from-scratch dishes: the closer you get to the raw ingredients, the less it costs, but the more involved time it takes. I don’t mean total time – it’s often comparable between from-scratch recipes and others – but the time you have to spend focused on the meal itself.

Time has a cost. Time spent on one activity is time not spent on something else – even if it’s just idle relaxation. That time could be used to increase your earnings or to save money in other ways.

Health
Most of us are biologically wired to enjoy and to crave fattening foods. Our ancestors found such foods so rarely that they were hard-wired to love them and to pack it away when such an opportunity arose.

Today, with the abundance of food around us, that can be a real danger. Without psychological reinforcement that we shouldn’t, we tend to eat everything served to us. Without being careful, we’ll eat an unbalanced diet. Both of these are detrimental to our long term health.

This problem is made worse by the fact that unhealthier options are generally less expensive. Take a look at the cuts at your local butcher or meat counter – the fatty cuts are the cheap cuts. Wander through the aisles and compare the cheap pasta sauce and the organic pasta sauce on the nutrition label. Compare a loaf of bread made from whole grains and a loaf of generic white bread. Time and time again, the unhealthy option is the cheap option.

I look at such food purchases in a very simple way: you save money now to pay more later on. Pay more later? A consistent diet of unhealthy foods will cost you later in life with medical bills and other health-related choices that are foisted upon you.

Personal Values
For some people, food is merely a fuel to help you plow through the day. For others, it’s an art form that speaks directly to your soul. The rest of us are in the middle, alternating back and forth.

Take me, for example. Most days, I’m perfectly content to eat leftovers for lunch and prepare a really simple dinner with my family.

Yet, every once in a while, I’ll devote three hours to making coq au vin from scratch, as I did last Friday. I’ll splurge and make croque-madames for a surprise lunch on a lazy Saturday. I’ll attempt some soul food dish from my own childhood, slaving for hours to recapture some flavor from my youth.

I don’t make these things because they’re quick. I don’t make them because they’re healthy, either, and they’re certainly not cheap. I make them because cooking is a pastime I get a great deal of personal enjoyment from.

Finding Value
In the end, it’s all about value. What’s truly important in your own life? Do you view an occasional afternoon in the kitchen as drudge work or as a soul-nurturing experience? Do you look at breads in the bread aisle by their price tag, by their nutrition facts label, or by their texture and color – or some combination thereof?

For many people, minimizing your food bill is a worthwhile goal. You live an active and very busy life and minimizing the costs in an area where you don’t have much personal added value is a great way to maximize value in your overall life.

For others, personal health is a key value and thus spending money on healthy ingredients is key. It’s worth your extra dollar to get raw organic vegetables for the meals you create and you pride yourself on putting pure, whole foods in your body.

For still others, food is their art form, a way to get in touch with their spirit. It’s worth their extra money and extra time to create the perfect meal, combining sublime flavors like an artist at the canvas.

Each of those groups sacrifices something along the way, whether it’s time or flavor or money, in order to get in touch with what really matters to them.

The happiest person is the one who has looked inside themselves, figured out what they really valued, and chased it with gusto. No matter which path you follow, if it’s in line with what your true values are, your dollars are being spent in the right place.

In April and May, National Public Radio featured a series on inexpensive gourmet dishes entitled “How Low Can You Go?” Although many of the dishes looked quite tasty, most of the dishes weren’t actually all that inexpensive, often narrowly getting below $10 to feed a family of four, and many involved arduous cooking processes. I decided to try out some of these recipes throughout the summer to see how I could take the recipes and reduce them down to a simple and very inexpensive form.

I know of Ming Tsai from his excellent public television cooking show Simply Ming. He tends to make a lot of fairly unusual dishes with Asian themes that are really palatable to Western taste buds. So I was excited to try out the recipe he submitted to “How Low Can You Go,” Chicken-and-Corn Fried Rice with Lemon Spinach. Even more interesting, he claimed his kids love it, which made my foodie thoughts perk up even more. Here’s the recipe:

1 pound ground chicken
2 eggs
1 large yellow onion, minced
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 teaspoon ginger powder
2 ears of corn when in season, or 1 bag frozen (12 ounces)
1/2 (10 ounces) bag spinach (washed, spun dry, de-stemmed, leaves torn)
2 tablespoons naturally brewed soy sauce
Juice of 1 lemon
4 cups cold, cooked long-grain rice, brown and white combination, preferably day-old so it’s nice and dry*
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Canola oil

Heat a wok or large saute pan over medium-high heat. Lightly coat with oil. When oil shimmers add chicken, season with salt and pepper, and brown, breaking up any large chunks with wooden spoon or spatula. Remove chicken to a plate. Add about 1/2-inch oil to wok and allow to heat; add eggs, which will puff up. Cook scrambled eggs and remove to a paper towel-lined plate. If necessary, add more oil to wok to lightly coat, then add onions, garlic, and powdered ginger, and cook until nicely caramelized, about 5 minutes. Add corn, rice, chicken and egg, and toss to combine. Add naturally brewed soy sauce, toss to combine, and check for seasoning. Place mound of raw spinach in center of four dinner plates. Drizzle with lemon juice and season. Top with fried rice to cover. Enjoy!

My wife Sarah took charge of this recipe, so my notes below are largely taken from her comments as she was making it.

First of all, here are the ingredients we used.

We wound up using Dole spinach for this because the spinach we got at the farmers market (our usual source for summer produce) was utterly abysmal – the two purveyors had some of the saddest looking spinach we’d ever seen, so we passed. The rice – a mix of white and brown long grain – was pre-cooked a day in advance. We also chose to substitute some ground turkey for the ground chicken, because that’s what we had on hand.

So, anyway, on with the cooking. She cooked the turkey with quite a bit of seasoning by itself, breaking down the pieces. Here it is, frying away on our stove:

Sarah suggests spicing the meat quite a bit here by putting on plenty of pepper and I agree wholeheartedly – black pepper really complements things well.

After the turkey was finished, she cooked the eggs, essentially making scrambled eggs in a bit of oil. This part smelled really good to me:

After the eggs were finished, she cooked the other ingredients together in the remaining oil. A quick note: she decided that there was an excess of oil after the eggs finished and removed most of the oil. I agree – I think with that much oil, there would have been too much in the pan. Half an inch might be the right amount in a wok, but not in a large pan – use just barely enough to cover the pan (once the eggs are done).

Upon adding the rice, the turkey, the eggs, and the corn to the mixture, there was a huge amount of food, filling up our rather large pan.

It smelled heavenly at this point. I (personally) suggest adding a bit more soy sauce than what the recipe calls for, but it was quite good as-is.

Serve it on top of spinach leaves, as the flavor of the spinach combines well. Here’s our final plate:

Did we like it? Almost universally, yes. Even our son, who is the pickiest eater in the house, seemed to really get into it, gobbling it down like crazy. Both children had seconds, though neither one finished their second helping. I loved it, though I would have included just a bit more soy sauce. Sarah loved it, too, though she’s intrigued as to whether it would be significantly different with chicken.

What about the cost? Our cost for this recipe totaled $9.80. But here’s the kicker – there was more left over than we consumed at the table. We were able to get eight more meals out of the fried rice, for a total of twelve meals. Thus, the cost per meal was $0.81 – not bat at all.

Still, if you’re eating for a small family and don’t want to eat this four times, you should reduce the recipe significantly.

Changes I Would Make to Save Cost and Time
The first thing I would do is halve the recipe. The recipe makes a mountain of food and, unless you want to eat it several times or have an enormous family, it makes too much food and the rest will go to waste. One could freeze it, I suppose, but the dish does not strike me as one that would tolerate freezing well.

The second thing I’d do is reduce the oil. This doesn’t change the time, but it slightly reduces the cost and definitely improves the health of the meal. You don’t need half an inch of oil here unless you’re using a wok – even then, it’s perhaps too much.

Third, de-stemming the spinach seemed flatly unnecessary to us. It would be a time investment that doesn’t gain too much – the small stems on most spinach is just fine. We served ours just as it came, after washing.

Those changes alter the recipe quite a bit. Here’s my alteration:

1/2 pound ground chicken
1 eggs
1 small yellow onion, minced
1/2 tablespoon minced garlic
1/2 teaspoon ginger powder
1 ear of corn when in season, or 1/2 bag frozen (6 ounces)
1/4 bag spinach (washed and dried)
1 tablespoon soy sauce
Juice of 1/2 lemon
2 cups cold, cooked long-grain rice, brown and white combination, preferably day-old so it’s nice and dry (that’s about 3/8 cup of white and 3/8 cup brown when dry)
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Canola oil

Heat a wok or large saute pan over medium-high heat. Lightly coat with oil. When oil shimmers add chicken, season with salt and pepper, and brown, breaking up any large chunks with wooden spoon or spatula. Remove chicken to a plate. Add about 1/4-inch oil to wok (unless using pan, then just coat bottom) and allow to heat; add eggs, which will puff up. Cook scrambled eggs and remove to a paper towel-lined plate. If necessary, add more oil to wok to lightly coat, then add onions, garlic, and powdered ginger, and cook until nicely caramelized, about 5 minutes. Add corn, rice, chicken and egg, and toss to combine. Add naturally brewed soy sauce, toss to combine, and check for seasoning. Place mound of raw spinach in center of four dinner plates. Drizzle with lemon juice and season. Top with fried rice to cover. Enjoy!

In April and May, National Public Radio featured a series on inexpensive gourmet dishes entitled “How Low Can You Go?” Although many of the dishes looked quite tasty, most of the dishes weren’t actually all that inexpensive, often narrowly getting below $10 to feed a family of four, and many involved arduous cooking processes. I decided to try out some of these recipes throughout the summer to see how I could take the recipes and reduce them down to a simple and very inexpensive form.

Sharon Guenther submitted this very simple and tasty fettuccine recipe to the “How Low Can You Go” contest. We decided to prepare it on a warm summer evening and serve a chilled white wine with it. Here’s the recipe she submitted:

1 lb. of good Fettucini
Zest and juice of 2 lemons
1 clove garlic, smashed and minced
1/4 c. scallions, including tops, sliced crosswise
1/4 c. Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1 lb. fresh asparagus
1/4 chopped, fresh Italian parsley

Set a pot of water to boil for the pasta. Meanwhile, trim the tough ends of asparagus and place, single-layer, in a lightly oiled roasting pan. Lightly spray or brush olive oil on asparagus as well. Roast at 400 degree, 15 minutes or until it becomes aromatic but not mushy.

In a serving bowl, place lemon juice and zest, garlic, scallions, parsley and EVOO. Whisk together gently.Add salt and lots of fresh ground black pepper.

By this time, the water should be boiling so cook the fettucini until it is al dente.

When asparagus is done, cut it all crosswise, leaving the tops intact.

Drain pasta and add to ingredients in serving bowl. Toss to coat the pasta. Add asparagus and top with a generous amount of grated parmesan.

For the scallions, we just used fresh green onions – a simple and easy to grow substitute. We had the rest of the ingredients on hand except for the fettuccine (and I could have made that with some more time), the lemons, and the asparagus. Our total bill wound up being very close to $7 for the meal.

Here’s what we did. First, the ingredients:

You’ll notice two ingredients are missing right from the title: the fettuccine and the asparagus. These were already on their way to being cooked. The fettuccine was in a pan of water soaking (I often do the trick of getting the water to boiling, adding the pasta, then turning off the heat and letting it soak for 20-25 minutes in cooling water, as it saves a ton of energy) and the asparagus was freshly in the oven. I just took the asparagus stalks, chipped off the bottom of each, spread them out on a cookie sheet that had just a bit of canola oil rubbed all over the surface, and stuck the sheet in the oven. Here’s the asparagus, about to go in:

Those of you with a sharp eye will notice an unusual “ingredient” in the ingredient pic – a Ped Egg. Yes, that bastion of infomercials is actually really useful – but not on our feet.

We wound up with a PedEgg somewhere along the line – I honestly couldn’t tell you when. It was likely a gift from someone for some reason, because I can’t conceive of a reason why we would buy one.

So why is a PedEgg in this picture? It’s a great zester. All you have to do is rub it around lightly on the surface of a lemon or an orange or a lime – whatever you’re trying to get zest from – and it neatly collects inside the egg. In fact, here’s the zest of two lemons, added to some of the other chopped ingredients:

Perfect zest – and very easy! If you’re given a PedEgg at some point and have no idea what to do with it – or see a new one for just a dollar or two someday – pick it up. It’s the easiest zester I’ve ever tried.

Anyway, that bowl contains all of the other ingredients in the recipe. When the asparagus and fettuccine were finished, I chopped the asparagus up into smaller pieces, put the fettuccine and asparagus into this bowl, and mixed them:

(I look kind of bushed in that picture because it had been a very long day of waking up way too early and writing and jogging and chasing children.)

Anyway, after mixing it all up thoroughly, we transferred it to our treasured handmade pasta bowl, simply because it looks so nice in the middle of our table:

And here’s what our plates looked like. We served the pasta with applesauce and Virgin Chardonnay:

It was a big hit – everyone liked it. There was enough left over for my wife and I each to enjoy it for lunch the next day, meaning we got six meals out of it for $8 of ingredients – a cost per meal of about $1.33.

Changes I Would Make to Save Cost and Time
I would not make any changes to the recipe itself. However, with some thoughtful ordering, you can go from nothing at all to a finished meal on the table in about twenty minutes. Here’s how to do it.

First, get a pot of water on to boil before you do anything else. Then pre-heat the oven for the asparagus.

While the oven is preheating, cut the asparagus up and put it on the cookie sheet. We used just a bit of canola oil rubbed on the sheet to keep the asparagus from sticking. When the oven’s ready, pop in the asparagus for fifteen minutes.

When the water is boiling, toss in the fettuccine, then cut the heat immediately. Let the fettuccine rest in the water for twenty or twenty five minutes, tasting it near the end to see if it’s done yet. If the asparagus is mostly done by the time the water gets to boiling, you can also just boil the pasta to save some time, but ideally you want to have the asparagus finish 5 to 10 minutes before the pasta so you can cut up the asparagus and add it to the other ingredients.

While the asparagus and pasta are cooking, prep the other ingredients. Zest the lemon, peel it, and squeeze out the juice. Chop the scallions. Add the olive oil. Add the garlic. Get those ingredients all ready.

When the asparagus finishes, get it out and cut it into little pieces. Add it to the other ingredients and mix.

When the pasta finishes, drain it, then add it to the bowl and mix it thoroughly, then serve it immediately.

In April and May, National Public Radio featured a series on inexpensive gourmet dishes entitled “How Low Can You Go?” Although many of the dishes looked quite tasty, most of the dishes weren’t actually all that inexpensive, often narrowly getting below $10 to feed a family of four, and many involved arduous cooking processes. I decided to try out some of these recipes throughout the summer to see how I could take the recipes and reduce them down to a simple and very inexpensive form.

One “How Low Can You Go” recipe that sounded incredibly tasty (but also pretty unhealthy) was Cheesy Corkscrews with Crunchy Bacon Topping, submitted to the contest by Pat and Gina Neely, authors of the cookbook Down Home with the Neelys: A Southern Family Cookbook. Here’s the recipe, as submitted to NPR:

Cheesy Corkscrews
—
6 tablespoons butter, plus more for greasing
Kosher salt
1 pound cavatappi (or other tubular pasta)
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
4 cups whole milk, warmed
1 teaspoon dry mustard powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
Pinch freshly grated nutmeg
Dash hot sauce
Dash Worcestershire sauce
4 cups grated sharp white cheddar cheese
1 1/4 cups grated Pecorino Romano cheese

Crunchy Bacon Topping
—
1 1/2 cups crushed potato chips
1/2 cup grated Pecorino Romano cheese
5 slices cooked bacon, crumbled
3 tablespoons chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

Heat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Butter a 3-quart casserole dish.

Bring a large pot of generously salted water to a boil and cook the pasta until it’s al dente. Melt the butter in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the flour and cook, stirring, for 1 minute. Whisk in the warmed milk and bring to a simmer, whisking constantly (the mixture will thicken as the heat increases).

Stir the dry mustard, salt, black pepper, cayenne, nutmeg, hot sauce and Worcestershire sauce into the thickened milk. Stir in 3 cups of the cheddar, and the Pecorino Romano, until the cheeses melt.

Add the cooked pasta to the cheese sauce, and toss to combine. Pour the cheese-apalooza mixture into the prepared casserole dish.

Make the topping: In a medium bowl, combine the potato chips, Pecorino Romano, crumbled bacon, parsley and the remaining cheddar. Sprinkle the crumb mixture on top of the macaroni and cheese, and bake for 35 minutes. For a crunchier topping, finish under the broiler for 3 minutes, until golden brown and crisp. Remove from the oven and cool for 5 minutes before serving.

I have a three year old boy and a one year old girl at home and macaroni and cheese is pretty much a guaranteed hit. However, I usually find the stuff out of the box to be pretty blah – I’ll jazz up my own with all kinds of things, but it’s still not the best. Thus, I really like homemade mac-and-cheese recipes – they let me create something quite enjoyable for me and the kids still go wild. This recipe is right in that wheelhouse.

However, it’s awfully unhealthy. Six tablespoons of butter? Five slices of bacon? Potato chips? Six cups of cheese? Four cups of whole milk? Wow. That’s not the most healthy recipe one could make, though the thought of it from a purely flavorful standpoint made my mouth drool. Unsurprisingly, the NPR commenters felt similarly, offering up such thoughts as:

To select this dish as a “meal” is an insult to your listeners.

NPR says “a budget-conscious meal for a family of four that’s healthy”. I guess that we should expect a not-so-healthy option from the owners of a BBQ establishment.

… and so on.

My perspective is a bit different. I fall in line with Julia Child, who advocated a widely varied and balanced diet that included some fat, and she lived a very long life doing just that. For us, a recipe like this is fine if it’s used as a side dish and is complemented with some healthy options – we chose to eat it in conjunction with a large spinach salad, as you can see in the picture above.

However, we did make some substitutes right out of the chute. Instead of using pork bacon, we chose substantially healthier turkey bacon. We used skim milk instead of whole milk. We used low-fat cheeses as well and we used a healthy penne rigate for the pasta because we couldn’t find a healthy cavatappi. Even with those choices, though, this wasn’t the healthiest entree – it should definitely be a side dish.

Here’s what we wound up using:

I started off by melting the butter in a pan, then added the flour and stirred rapidly. As expected, it became a lumpy paste quite quickly, looking like this:

This is arguably the most unhealthy substance on earth, but it gets quite a bit better from there.

Next, I poured the milk on top, stirred it steadily over the heat, and waited until it was bubbling. The milk thickened up a bit from the flour and butter but it still largely looked the same, with perhaps just a very slight yellow hint (contributed by the butter):

I then added the spices and the cheese and stirred it rapidly as the cheese melted. It began to look like a very tasty cheese sauce at this point – I couldn’t help myself and tasted it a time or two … or six:

At the same time as I was preparing the sauce, the pasta was boiling over on the other burner. Once the sauce was consistent (and delicious!), I drained the pasta, then added the creamy sauce to the penne, stirring them together. This itself looked good enough to serve as a side dish – and tasty enough, too.

I wasn’t done yet, though. I poured the pasta and cheese into a three quart casserole (note: a three quart isn’t quite big enough to contain all of the ingredients – I had just a bit of extra pasta that wouldn’t reasonably fit). Then I tossed the remaining ingredients together – the chips, the crushed turkey bacon, and the cheese – and put this mixture on top.

Here it is before it went in the oven.

I baked it at 375 F for thirty five minutes, then moved it under the broiler for three minutes. But just after I moved it under the broiler, disaster struck. The kids needed help, so I ran and helped them. When I got back, sure enough…

It was fine, though. The top was a bit crunchier than expected, but still tasty, especially if you broke it up and stirred it into the pasta.

As I mentioned above, we served this with a large spinach salad. We also had a white wine with it – Twin Fin Pinot Grigio. Here was my final plate:

We had a ton of leftovers. We wound up eating this as a side three more times, so this will make plenty unless you eat an exorbitant amount. I would halve the recipe.

Did we like it? We loved it, all of us. The kids ate it like there was no tomorrow and my wife and I both loved the variety of flavors it offered.

Our cost (minus fractional things we had on hand) was $11.04, more than half of which was cheese. Given that we were able to get roughly 16 servings out of our pot, the cost per serving was about $0.63.

Changes I Would Make to Save Cost and Time (and Health)
First, I’d substitute ingredients all over the place. Use margarine instead of butter. Use skim milk instead of whole. Use low-fat cheese. Use turkey bacon. Use whole-grain pasta. Surprisingly, if you want to substitute for the chips, slice some kale and bake it – it tastes an awful lot like a potato chip. These things won’t drastically change the taste but will drastically reduce the fat content.

Second, I’d halve the ingredients and serve it as a side dish. The whole dish would have served a small army, even as a main course. I wound up with an overflowing three quart baking dish – totally overkill for a family of four.

Third, I wouldn’t sweat the cavatappi. Cavatappi can be hard to find and expensive when you find it. Just use whole wheat penne as your pasta, or even elbow macaroni.

Fourth, I’d grate your own cheese. Turn on the water to boil the pasta first, then sit down to grate the cheese. It won’t add any time to the overall recipe, but it will save you some cash.

If you want to get ready for it the night before, grate the cheese and cook the penne. The rest can be done pretty quickly.

With those things in mind, here’s the recipe I would prepare:

Trent’s Cheesy Mac with Crunchy Bacon Topping

Cheesy Corkscrews
—
3 tablespoons butter, plus more for greasing
1/2 pound penne
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
2 cups skim milk, warmed
1/2 teaspoon dry mustard powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
Pinch nutmeg
Dash hot sauce
Dash Worcestershire sauce
1 1/2 cups grated sharp white cheddar cheese
3/4 cup grated Romano cheese

Crunchy Bacon Topping
—
3/4 cup crushed potato chips
1/2 cup grated white cheddar cheese
1/4 cup grated Romano cheese
2 slices cooked turkey bacon, crumbled
1 tablespoon parsley

Heat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Butter a 3-quart casserole dish.

Bring a large pot of water with a pinch of salt in it to a boil and cook the pasta until it’s just slightly firm. Melt the butter in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the flour and cook, stirring, for 1 minute. Whisk in the warmed milk and bring to a simmer, whisking constantly (the mixture will thicken as the heat increases).

Stir the dry mustard, salt, black pepper, cayenne, nutmeg, hot sauce and Worcestershire sauce into the thickened milk. Stir in 1 1/2 cups of the cheddar and 3/4 cup Pecorino Romano, until the cheeses melt.

Add the cooked pasta to the cheese sauce, and toss to combine. Pour the cheese-pasta mixture into the prepared casserole dish.

Make the topping: In a medium bowl, combine the potato chips, cheddar, Pecorino Romano, crumbled bacon, and parsley. Sprinkle the crumb mixture on top of the macaroni and cheese, and bake for 35 minutes. For a crunchier topping, finish under the broiler for 2 minutes, until golden brown and crisp. Remove from the oven and cool for 5 minutes before serving.

In April and May, National Public Radio featured a series on inexpensive gourmet dishes entitled How Low Can You Go?” Although many of the dishes looked quite tasty, most of the dishes weren’t actually all that inexpensive, often narrowly getting below $10 to feed a family of four, and many involved arduous cooking processes. I decided to try out some of these recipes throughout the summer to see how I could take the recipes and reduce them down to a simple and very inexpensive form.

Dal is a delicious simple Indian dish, often served with rice or wheat flatbread (called “roti”). It’s often a mainstay of vegetarian diets because it provides quite a bit of protein, and the rich flavorings make it palatable to us omnivores as well. Valerie Gaino, of Pichilemu, Chile, submitted a delicious Chilean variant on the dish to the How Low Can You Go contest:

3 cups of lentils
2 cups of chopped potatoes
2 chopped carrots
3 chopped tomatoes
1 hot pepper, chopped
1 small onion chopped
2 gloves garlic chopped
16 ounces tomato sauce
1 tsp cumin
a little beer or sherry
a little red vinegar
olive oil
1/2 cup chopped cilantro
salt and pepper

1. Soak and cook lentils till soft. Drain and rinse, set aside.
2. Sautee onions, garlic, hot pepper, and cumin in olive oil. Add beer or sherry.
3. Add potatoes and carrots, cover with water, bring to boil.
4. Add tomatoes and cook till potatoes are soft.
5. Add lentils and tomato sauce.
6. Salt and pepper to taste. (I sometimes add more water or beer if it’s too thick, or vinegar if it’s too sweet.) Add more cumin or hot sauce if you like it really spicy.
7. Throw in the cilantro, take if off the heat. Serve after a few minutes.

One immediate problem I observed is that the “three cups of lentils” likely refers to three cups of lentils after boiling, which means that 1 1/2 to 2 cups of dry lentils should be more than adequate for this recipe. Three cups of dry lentils would make this recipe mostly flavored lentils with a few other pieces thrown in.

Sarah (my wife, for those of you new to The Simple Dollar) handled most of the food preparation for this dish, so most of the notes that follow come from her. Here are the ingredients we used:

First, you simply boil some dry lentils, easily found in the bean section of any grocery store. We only used two cups of dry lentils to start with. Just boil them in a large pot with plenty of water for about thirty minutes or so and they’re fine, then drain the water off of them. This can be done a day or two in advance – store the cooked, drained lentils in the refrigerator. Here are the lentils we had after boiling:

While the lentils are boiling, you’re going to be spending that time chopping vegetables – again, something you can do a day or two in advance. The potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, onion, and garlic all need to be chopped.

We use a special knife called an ulu to make this process easier. An ulu is an all-purpose knife used by the Inuit for many different purposes, but it works really well for quickly chopping small amounts of vegetables. You simply grasp it by the handle and rock it back and forth on a cutting board with the vegetables underneath.

Of course, you can use pretty much any knife to chop vegetables – this is just a recipe where the ulu really comes in handy.

Next, I sauteed the onions, garlic, pepper, and cumin together, with about two tablespoons of white sherry. The same amount of a mild beer would be fine.

Next, add the potatoes and carrots, then add enough water to cover everything, then raise it to a boil. Once the water is boiling, add the tomatoes and then let it boil for ten minutes or so. Check a piece of potato and see whether it’s soft enough for your tastes – if it isn’t, let it boil for another five minutes and check again.

Once the potatoes are finished, it’s basically done. Just add the tomato sauce and the lentils, stir it a bit, season with some salt and pepper, and serve it!

Of course, you’ll want to serve it on something. If you have access to a flatbread, that’ll do just fine. Alternately, you can simply use rice. Here’s our rice steamer in action, steaming while the dal was cooking:

You might also want to have something else on the side. We had a very simple chickpea curry – basically just chickpeas (garbanzo beans) loaded up with curry paste. Yes, we love our chickpeas at the Hamm household!

Here’s our final plate:

This made a huge amount of dal. We had enough for our dinner that night, lunch the following day, and lunch two days after that for all four of us, and we still wound up freezing some of it.

Did we like it? All of us liked it quite a bit. Sarah perhaps liked it the least, particularly on reheating, and strongly suggested trimming the amount of cilantro, which I agreed with. It was delicious, though, and I was happy eating it even the third time.

Our total cost (ignoring fractional items we had on hand): $8.29, almost entirely on fresh vegetables. Given the amount we made, though, the cost per meal was $0.69 – pretty nice!

Changes I Would Make to Save Cost and Time
First of all, I’d trim the entire recipe by half. This made far too much food for us as is. Without some significant changes, you’ll either be freezing it – not a great option, since the texture will be ruined – or eating it all the time for days.

Second, I’d cut the remaining cilantro by half – and use dried cilantro. Fresh cilantro has a stronger flavor, but dried will work fine.

Third, I’d chop the vegetables and boil the lentils the night before. Turn on a radio in the kitchen and take care of these tasks in the evening so you can toss the meal together very easily when you arrive home from work the next day.

These changes modify the recipe a fair amount, making it cheaper and perhaps slightly faster. Here’s what the new recipe would be, as modified by me:

Trent’s Chilean Dal

1 cup of lentils
1 large red potato, chopped but unskinned
1 chopped carrot
2 chopped tomatoes
1/2 hot pepper, chopped
1/2 small onion chopped
1 clove garlic chopped
8 ounces tomato sauce (small can)
1/2 tsp cumin
1 tbsp beer or sherry
olive oil
1/8 cup chopped cilantro
salt and pepper

Night before:
1. Chop potato, carrot, tomatoes, pepper, onion, garlic, and cilantro.
2. Soak and cook lentils till soft. Drain and rinse, set aside.

Next day:
1. Sautee onions, garlic, hot pepper, and cumin in olive oil. Add beer or sherry.
2. Add vinegar, potatoes, and carrots, cover with water, bring to boil.
3. Add tomatoes and cook till potatoes are soft.
4. Add lentils and tomato sauce.
5. Salt and pepper to taste. Add more water or beer if it’s too dry, or add hot sauce if you like it spicier.
6. Throw in the cilantro, take if off the heat. Serve after a few minutes.

In April and May, National Public Radio featured a series on inexpensive gourmet dishes entitled “How Low Can You Go?” Although many of the dishes looked quite tasty, most of the dishes weren’t actually all that inexpensive, often narrowly getting below $10 to feed a family of four, and many involved arduous cooking processes. I decided to try out some of these recipes throughout the summer to see how I could take the recipes and reduce them down to a simple and very inexpensive form.

While digging through the submissions, I came across this interesting recipe by Wendy T., who states that she’s “writing a cookbook of economical meals for working people – this is one of my husband’s favorites.” Intriguing. Here’s what Wendy offers up:

1 lb ground beef
1 slice white bread, crumbled
1 tbsp ground coriander
1 tbsp ground cumin
1 small yellow onion, minced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp olive oil
1 egg, beaten lightly
1/4 cup flat leaf parsley, minced
1/4 cup mint leaves, julienned
1 cup plain yogurt (preferably whole milk)
salt and black pepper

In a small bowl, mix the yogurt, a large pinch of salt, and the mint. Set aside.

Crumble white bread crumbs over ground beef and parsley in large bowl.

Place a large frying pan over medium low heat. Add the olive oil and sweat the onions and garlic until translucent. Add 3/4 tsp salt and the coriander and cumin, and saute a minute more. Cool a minute and then add to the meat-bread crumb mixture. Add the beaten egg and mix with hands lightly just to combine. Form a test meatball and fry – taste for seasoning and add additional salt if necessary.

Form into meatballs. Fry in batches in the pan on all sides until cooked through. Drain on paper towels if necessary.

Serve the meatballs with the yogurt-mint sauce. Delicious as sandwiches with pita or naan bread.

A few things popped out at me immediately that indicated this recipe would be a lot of work. First, the ground coriander – dried coriander in the store is not the same thing at all. Ground coriander needs to be freshly ground or it loses most of its flavor. Second, the julienned mint leaves – meaning you’re slicing the mint leaves into thin strips – will be significant work as well, and likely the most expensive aspect of the recipe if you don’t have a source of fresh mint.

In order to try out the recipe as is, though, I did both of these.

I also went through the cupboard and the freezer to see what we had on hand. The only ingredients that we didn’t already have in spice jars were the mint leaves ($2), the yogurt ($0.99), the onion ($0.30), and the ground beef ($2.49 for a pound of lean meat), for a total cost of $5.78. We did, of course, use lots of spices and other materials we had on hand.

Here are the ingredients as I used them.

(The horse statue in the picture is a Breyer version of Man o’ War, included at the encouragement of my three year old son.)

I made one major change. Instead of mincing the onions, I coarsely chopped them, because I love the caramelized flavor of onions and felt it would add to the meatballs.

Once the work of prepping the ingredients is done, the recipe itself is pretty easy. First, I made the yogurt-mint sauce by putting a pinch of salt, a cup of yogurt, and the mint leaves in a bowl and mixing them.

I then tossed the onions and garlic into a frying pan along with the olive oil and cooked them over medium heat until they were nicely caramelized – taking on a light brown color roughly the same as caramel. I then added a pinch of salt, the coriander, and the cumin, and cooked it for a minute more.

When that was finished, I let it cool for a bit. While doing that, I added the bread crumbs and the beaten egg to the pound of ground beef and mixed them together with my hands, then I added the onion mixture to the meat and mixed that in. The result was a large ball, ready to be shaped into smaller meatballs.

Making meatballs is easy. Just pinch off a bit of the meat – whatever size you like – and roll that bit around in between your hands until it forms a round ball. If you’re not sure what size to make, just divide the ball into equal halves, divide each of those halves into equal halves (four bits), divide each of those halves into equal halves (eight bits), then divide each of those halves into equal halves (sixteen bits). Each of those sixteen bits will make a nice meatball.

So, I rolled up the balls and tossed them into the frying pan.

Obviously, if you chose to mince the onion, you wouldn’t see the large pieces of onion in the meatballs.

I simply browned these in the pan over medium heat, rolling them around about every minute or so. When they became dark brown – the color of a cooked hamburger, roughly – I cut one in half and checked the insides to make sure it was no longer pink. Here they are, about halfway cooked (with some sides looking finished, others still pink, and yet others in the middle):

I chose to serve the meatballs with the mint sauce on the side, a long grain rice and vegetable medley, some steamed broccoli, and a glass of Wandering Grape 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon Shiraz (a free trade wine). Here’s how it looked on the table:

And there you have it!

Did we like it? This meal was a big hit. The kids were not big fans of the mint sauce, but the meatballs were completely consumed with gusto – no leftovers at all. Both my wife and I liked everything – I wound up drowning the meatballs in the sauce after trying them together.

Our total cost for the main course and the mint sauce (ignoring fractional items we had on hand): $5.78. Our cost per meal: $1.45. Not bad. But we can do better – and we can certainly make it less involved.

Changes I Would Make to Save Cost and Time
First of all, I’d skip the coriander and use more cumin as a substitute. If you don’t have a grinder, smashing the coriander seeds will take forever and it doesn’t contribute substantially to the meal, especially when you can easily substitute a bit of cumin for nearly the same effect.

Second, if I was pinched for time, I’d substitute dried mint for the fresh mint leaves. I’d just add dried mint – probably two tablespoons full – to the yogurt to taste and skip the julienning of the mint leaves.

Third, I’d substitute garlic powder for the minced garlic cloves. Although you miss the caramelization of the cloves, you also save the work of peeling the cloves, cooking the cloves, and smashing the cloves.

Fourth – and I did this in my own version above – I’d skip the fresh parsley and use dried. I used 1/4 cup dried parsley and it was perfect.

These changes modify the recipe a bit, but it also reduces the cost and vastly reduces the time. Here’s the new recipe, as I’d do it:

1 lb ground beef
1 slice white bread, crumbled
2 tbsp ground cumin
1 small yellow onion, chopped
1 tbsp garlic powder
1 tbsp olive oil
1 egg, beaten lightly
1/4 cup dried parsley
1/4 cup dried mint
1 cup plain yogurt (preferably whole milk)
salt and black pepper

In a small bowl, mix the yogurt, a large pinch of salt, and the mint. Set aside.

Crumble white bread crumbs over ground beef and parsley in large bowl.

Place a large frying pan over medium low heat. Add the olive oil and gently cook the onions until caramelized. Add 3/4 tsp salt and the cumin, and saute a minute more. Cool a minute and then add to the meat-bread crumb mixture. Add the beaten egg and mix with hands lightly just to combine. Form into meatballs. Fry in batches in the pan on all sides until cooked through. Drain on paper towels if necessary. Serve the meatballs with the yogurt-mint sauce.

In April and May, National Public Radio featured a series on inexpensive gourmet dishes entitled “How Low Can You Go?” Although many of the dishes looked quite tasty, most of the dishes weren’t actually all that inexpensive, often narrowly getting below $10 to feed a family of four, and many involved arduous cooking processes. I decided to try out some of these recipes throughout the summer to see how I could take the recipes and reduce them down to a simple and very inexpensive form.

Jose Andres’ Moorish-style chickpea and spinach stew looked and sounded delicious – a vegan recipe that appeals to a burger-eating guy like me. Andres’ recipe was submitted as follows:

9 ounces dried garbanzos (chickpeas)
Pinch bicarbonate of soda
6 garlic cloves, peeled and whole
1/4 cup Spanish extra-virgin olive oil
2 ounces white sliced bread, with the crusts removed
2 tablespoons pimenton (Spanish sweet paprika)
1 pinch Spanish saffron
2 tablespoons Spanish sherry vinegar
1/2 pound spinach, washed and cleaned
1 teaspoon ground cumin
Salt and white pepper to taste

The day before you cook, soak the chickpeas in cold water with a pinch of bicarbonate of soda. The next day, drain and rinse the chickpeas.

In a big saucepan, combine the chickpeas with 2 1/2 quarts of water. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to low and simmer for two hours, until the chickpeas are tender. Every 10 minutes or so, add 1/2 cup of cold water to slow down the simmering. By the end, the water should have reduced so it is barely covering the chickpeas. Turn off the heat and let sit.

In a small saute pan over medium to low heat, brown the garlic in 1/4 cup of the olive oil. When the garlic is browned, after about 3 minutes, remove from the pan and set aside. Add the bread and brown on both sides, about one minute each side. Remove the bread and set aside.

Remove the pan from the heat and allow to cool for a few minutes. Add the pimenton and saffron to the saute pan, and the sherry vinegar immediately afterward to prevent the pimenton from burning.

In a mortar, smash the reserved garlic and the browned bread to make a very thick paste.

Bring the chickpeas back to a low boil and add the spinach. Simmer for 5 minutes. Add the pimenton mixture along with the garlic and bread paste, to create a thick, stewy sauce. Simmer for another 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste, and serve immediately.

Got that? It seems rather … involved … to me, but the end result sounded fantastic, so I gave it the old college try.

I went through the cupboard and discovered what we had on hand. We had some ordinary extra virgin olive oil, plenty of slices of whole wheat bread, sweet paprika (I decided pimenton was a bit much – ordinary paprika should do), saffron, red wine vinegar (which we decided to substitute for the sherry vinegar), cumin, salt, and pepper – all of these items can be reasonably expected to be found in the cupboard of a person who cooks regularly.

I then purchased half a pound of spinach for $1.66, a pound of dried garbanzo beans for $1.99, and a garlic bulb for $0.30, finishing out the recipe for a total cost (to us) of $3.95.

I then put the beans to soak overnight with just a tiny pinch of “bicarbonate of soda” … which is a five-dollar term for plain old baking soda. I made the conscious decision to use all the beans in the soup and increase the other ingredients by roughly 50% in order to make plenty of the stew so it could be enjoyed for lunch the following day.

I then set the beans on to boil in a small pot for two hours, adding a cup of water every ten minutes or so. Trust me, if you try this at home, it won’t take this much work – see my conclusions below.

With the beans well in hand, I pulled out the other ingredients and set to work. First, I peeled out the cloves, then I decided I should probably take a picture of the ingredients I used…

I then took 1/3 cup of the oil, tossed in the garlic cloves, and began to brown the cloves over medium heat. This part smelled fantastic – my mouth was watering.

When the garlic cloves were fairly brown, I took out the cloves, then put a piece of bread into the hot olive oil, flipping it after twenty seconds and removing it after twenty more, then repeating it with a second piece. If you waited much longer, the bread started to burn.

I then took the bread and the cloves and smashed them into oblivion. We own a mortar and pestle, but I couldn’t locate it, so I improvised with a spoon, a bowl, and some extra time. Here’s the “mash” I wound up with.

I put the spinach in with the chickpeas and let that cook together for five minutes. Meanwhile, I put the saffron and red wine vinegar in with the still-hot garlicky olive oil, then, confused as to what to do with the cumin, tossed that in there as well. I stirred this up a bit, then added the saffron/vinegar/olive oil/cumin mix straight into the chickpeas, then dumped in the obliterated bread and garlic and stirred, letting it boil for five minutes more. Here’s what it looked like, near the end.

As with many soups and stews, a hearty bread on the side is a good idea. We picked up this loaf for a dollar on sale rather than making our own and had it on the side.

And then, the meal is served!

We had enough stew for all four of us as well as lunch for all four of us the following day with still a fair amount left over. If I were to do it again, I’d make less soup.

Did we like it? I liked it quite a bit and thought it was just right. My wife wasn’t sure at first, added significantly more salt, stirred her bowl, and then seemed to like it quite a bit, having a small second bowl. The children didn’t like it nearly as much, though they both enjoyed the bread.

Our total cost (ignoring fractional items we had on hand): $4.95. Our cost per meal: $0.62. Not bad. But we can do better – and we can certainly make it less involved.

Changes I Would Make to Save Cost and Time
First of all, I’d buy two cans of garbanzo beans instead of soaking and boiling the beans. The dry beans are cheaper and they are nominally better for you than canned, but for most working families, the distinction isn’t enough to make the effort worth it in this case.

Second, I’d cut the saffron. Saffron is easily the most expensive item in the dish and you’re only using a pinch of it. Although it does add a nice, subtle flavor, I think it can be dropped without too much concern.

Third, I’d substitute garlic powder for the cloves. Although you miss the caramelization of the cloves, you also save the work of peeling the cloves, cooking the cloves, and smashing the cloves.

Fourth, I’d use bread crumbs instead of “cooking” the bread and smashing it. Obviously, this change is for similar reasons as stated above.

These changes modify the recipe quite a bit, but it also reduces the cost and vastly reduces the time. Here’s the new recipe, as I’d do it:

Trent’s Moorish Chickpea and Spinach Stew

2 cans garbanzo beans/chickpeas
Garlic powder equivalent to six cloves
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
3/4 cup bread crumbs
2 tablespoons paprika
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon cumin
1/2 pound spinach, washed and cleaned
Salt and pepper to taste

Rinse the chickpeas thoroughly, then put them in a pan, add 1 1/2 cups of water, and bring it to a boil. In another pan, bring the olive oil to a boil, then remove from heat for two minutes. While stirring the olive oil, add the paprika, the cumin, the red wine vinegar, then the bread crumbs (slowly). Set this aside. When the beans are boiling, add the spinach and allow it to boil for five minutes, stirring a bit. Add in the olive oil mixture, stir, then allow it to boil for another five minutes. Serve, preferably with bread. This should be enough for at least three meals.

The fourth episode of The Simple Dollar Podcast focuses on food. I talk about ten tactics for reducing your food bills without reducing health and taste and include a lot of recipes and food suggestions along the way. I also tried a different approach – instead of reading from detailed notes, I tried a more conversational tack. Total time – 21:46.

Listen In!

Other options for enjoying The Simple Dollar Podcast include:
Listen to this episode on a separate page
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Though I hope you do subscribe using one of the above methods, don’t worry – each episode will be featured in its own post, much like this one, on Tuesday afternoons. The podcast itself may appear earlier than that, however, if you subscribe using one of the above forms, but the notes won’t appear until I post about it here on The Simple Dollar.

Episode Notes
Here are some additional notes that go alongside the comments in the podcast. Approximate times for the corresponding links and notes are listed.

0:00 – The theme song is a public domain recording of a Camper van Beethoven concert on October 25, 1986. Listen to the concert in its entirety.
0:29 – Some background reading – tactics for making healthy, simple, and cheap meals for you and your family.
1:57 – You’re not “frugal” if you don’t buy the cheapest thing, right?
3:11 – Read my review of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food for more on finding real value in food.
5:58 – and that’s the way … we be-came … The Brady Bunch!
7:20 – Here are six examples of simple main dishes based on such staple ingredients.
7:52 – A detailed guide to the art of the marinade.
8:06 – The basics of kitchen spices
9:03 – Is a deep freezer worth it? Yes!
10:11 – This is a great strategy for saving time and money – we do it with more than just chicken breasts.
10:23 – Slow cookers rule! Here are five great recipes for it … and five more.
13:30 Bulk buying can save a ton of money – more than you might think – if you do it right.
13:55 – Here are nine great ways to re-use leftovers in the same vein.
14:12 – … and how to make straight-up leftovers more tasty.
15:54 – Additional details on the “flexible casserole” including a version similar to what I talk about here.
17:11 – Just make your own cream sauce – as healthy as you want it.
19:11 – The neighborhood cooperative concept – or even just cooperating with a neighbor or two – can save you tons of money.
20:01 – Here’s a great way to start planning your meals.
21:40 – A preview of next week’s topic.

One thing I’d like to do in a future episode is have an audio reader’s mailbag. If you have a microphone on your computer and can record an MP3 of a simple, short question you might have on personal finance, careers, pop culture, or anything else you’d like me to answer, record it as an MP3 and send it to me. Keep the total recording under 15 seconds, please. Also, if you use Skype, feel free to ask your question that way – my username is trenttsd.

Comments and suggestions welcome.