When I make dinner I usually spill about a third of it on the counter and a third of it on the stove top. This, understandably, pisses Valerie off. Before, back when the bright ray of environmental knowledge had yet to light upon my life, I would grab about six hundred paper towels and valiantly sop up whatever I could. This cost us a lot of money and, more importantly, the souls of a thousand trees.

So we bought a billion towels! My mom picked up 60 white cotton towels at Costco for 16.95$! That’s 0.28$ per towel! Those Seventh Generation paper towels can cost as much as .02$ per towel, and they only last once. You can reuse these cotton towels hundreds of times.

Of course a modern urban socialite like yourself doesn’t need 60 towels. Splitting a pack of towels like this with three or even six people would leave everyone with plenty for only a couple of bucks.

Sharing bulk packages like this is the way to go.

No! Not chocolate chip cookies! Meringue cookies are what the People need! They are easy, cheap, and this recipe’s cookies only have 23 calories each!

23 calories!!

Do you understand how little that is? That is like a carrot stick. Sure, they are empty calories that don’t do anything for you at all, but either something like this is around the house, or your resistant “I’m used to buying packaged crap” significant others will buy something that is sure to give you cancer. Plus, we’re in a recession, jeez. Why pay to get cancer?*

MOCHA-CHIP MERINGUES from the “light” issue of Everyday Food (Jan/Feb 2008)

These took no time to get together, and if you bake at all, you will have this stuff in the house, with the exception of maybe the instant espresso powder, but hey get rid of it if you want, then you’ll just have chocolate-chocolate-chip meringues, and that sounds good to me too. Unfortunately, a stand mixer might be necessary.

makes about three dozen

Ingredients:

1/4 c. sugar
1 Tablespoon cornstarch
3 large egg whites, room temperature (don’t cheat on this part)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon instant espresso powder
2 Tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 cup (approx) semi-sweet chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper, set aside.

2. In a small bowl, whisk together sugar and cornstarch, set aside.

3. In a large bowl, use an electric mixer to beat egg whites and salt(with the whisk attachment if you’re using a KitchenAid) on medium speed until very frothy. Beating constantly, add sugar mixture 1 tablespoon at a time. Beat until stiff, glossy peaks form, 6 to 8 minutes total (scrape down the bowl halfway through). [This took me a lot longer, but I think it’s because I put the sugar in too soon.]

4. Add espresso powder and cocoa, beat until well blended. With a rubber spatula, fold in chocolate chips.

5. Drop batter in rough tablespoon sizes onto prepared sheets. Martha and company have perfect little half domes, but they cheated and piped it with a pastry bag, I can tell. Who cares how they look, they will be eaten in like five seconds.

6. Bake until crisp, about 40 minutes, rotating sheets halfway through. Cool completely on sheets, about 20 minutes.

Store them in a container. Just do it.

(Not the People’s cookie.)

*I don’t actually know that Fig Newtons will give you cancer, but they are so delicious and artificial tasting, that they are probably not great for you somehow.

I have these really nice steel All-Clad pans that are a pleasure to work with; they were a wedding present and probably cost 1B dollars. I assume that if my stove was not a piece of shit I’d have lots of pleasant memories of gently sautéing this or that. But truth is my stove slants, the burners suck, and my life is filled with other similarly first world problems.

Also, did you know that Teflon® is a health risk when heated to over 500°F? Not that you are going to ever cook anything at that temperature, unless you suck at cooking, but still.

Plus the afore mentioned All-Clad frying pan is like 14 inches in diameter and is really way to big for when you want to fry an egg. So many problems. Solution: I bought a cast iron pan. It cost 17$.

AND IT TOTALLY ROCKS!

Listen people. First, if you care, the cast iron distributes the heat so evenly that my shit stove no longer burns bacon on one side. Hurrah!

Second, and more importantly, you just wipe the pan out when you are done. That’s it. It is actually against the rules to use soap/detergent on a cast iron pan. If, by some chance, you forgot to flip your grilled cheese because you were enthralled in The Wire and now it’s formed a molecular bond with the bottom of your skillet, WORRY NOT. I just boil some water in the bottom of the pan*. Boom, problem solved. Read more about caring for cast iron cookware.

Cheap, reliable, easy to clean. What more could you ask for?

* Don’t pour cold water in a hot pan, you’ll crack it.

I cook and Val cleans. This is the way it has been since man first cleaved meat from bone with flint tools. And so it will be forever, amen. To make her life easier, and because I simply must watch The Wire while I cook and cannot be bothered to make sixty trips to the trash can, I use a garbage bowl.

Yes, I got the idea from Rachael Ray. Yes, she is unnecessarily effervescent.

The jist is: throw your “garbage” into a “bowl.” When the bowl is full dump it into the trash. Seriously, it makes cleanup a lot easier — not that I would know anything about that.

Incidentally, I have this set of nesting stainless steel mixing bowls that I got at Costco. They are among my most used kitchen-y type things. They work well for garbage bowls, popcorn bowls, or silly hats.

There are three things that I need often enough to buy in their awkwardly sized packaging but don’t need often enough to use the whole thing before it spoils. You can pat yourself on the back for finding tomato paste for $0.99, but if you only use one teaspoon of it and have to throw the rest of it away, just to spend $0.99 on it again when you need the next teaspoon, you are doing yourself and the environment a disservice that is EASY TO RECTIFY!

Shall we begin? (Before we do, stop reading this and go buy some ice cube trays if you don’t have some already. They are hard to find now, but your grocery store should still have them.)

1. Tomato paste - buy in a handy, resealable tube, as pictured. Tomato paste can be stored indefinitely in the fridge in said tube, and you can buy a bunch at a time on Amazon (for less than $2 a tube) since one tube at a time is a little pricier (between $3 and $4). Alternatively, you can buy tomato paste in cans on the cheap, stick teaspoon-sized dollops on a sheet of wax paper, freeze it, stick in a plastic bag, store in the freezer, and thaw when you need them, but that seems like a lot of work to me.

2. Chicken/vegetable/beef stock - I hardly ever need the four cups that come in the nice cardboard box of organic stock, and since it’s pretty pricey to buy that box, I like to make sure I’m not buying it every five seconds. Use five days after opening??? Please! Freeze that stuff in 1/4 cup increments in an ice cube tray, pop them out when frozen, stick in a bag, store in the freezer.

3. The ice cube tray method is also my favorite way of getting rid of basil, since I’m sorry, I don’t grow my own. I live in a tiny apartment with two cats who will immediately eat anything green, and my Kroger for some reason only sells giant packs of basil at once. Also lucky people with gardens tend to foist a ton on me during basil season. Make pesto according to your favorite recipe (use walnuts instead of pine nuts for a cheaper, more stable version), spoon into the ice cube tray. Then when you are especially broke, you pry one out, sit it in a bowl while you boil some pasta, toss with the pesto and a spoonful of the pasta water, and you have a meal. Single serving cheap goodness.

4. Buttermilk - I bake a lot - biscuits and pancakes and that kind of thing are super cheap, easy breakfasts to make. A lot of the time they require buttermilk, but buttermilk is always sold in huge things that expire in like a week. Also, that means it’s never around when you spontaneously need it, and who PLANS to get up on a Sunday morning and make biscuits. My mom gets around this by adding a tablespoon of acid (i.e. lemon juice or white vinegar) to a cup of milk and letting it sit for a few minutes. I’m not convinced this actually works as well as actual buttermilk (it certainly doesn’t smell as tangy), and the whole point of buttermilk is some sort of chemical reaction. Therefore, I believe Cook’s Illustrated when they tell me that powdered buttermilk works just as well if not better than store-bought buttermilk, keeps indefinitely, and will be around when you randomly decide to make Irish soda bread (below). You can get it in bulk at Amazon, and you might have to since it’s kind of difficult to find (although my friend Kelly just emailed me to say she got it at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart!! Who knew!), but it keeps forever and will save you money. Don’t confuse it with buttermilk blends - those are mixes for pancake making, etc.

I am obsessed with tips like these. I collect them like they are Hummels. Cook’s Illustrated magazine is chock full of them, if you are interested in that kind of thing. They told me to let my bread rise in a crock pot insert. And now I do. I feel like an idiot admitting that that excites me.

Val loves Doritos. But, let’s be completely honest everyone loves Doritos. To be utterly honest, I love anything that’s got brightly colored packaging and xtreme slogans. The problem with food like that, other than it completely fatifies you, is that it cost 3 – 4$ a pop. Too much for my meager budget, I’ll tell you that right now. (PS. It is really meager).

Here are two things I make that are absurdly cheap — like, third world cheap — and delicious.

Hummus

Hummus is da bomb, yo. It is so easy, forgiving, and — most importantly — cheap. You can eat it on practically anything: pita, stale bread, fresh bread, vegetables, chicken, or anything you can scoop with. It is versatile, comrade. A big tub of hummus, the good stuff, costs around five bucks. You can make your own for under one single greenback. I follow this recipe as a starter and add whatever tickles my fancy — tonight it was cumin. Seriously, it takes about ten minutes.

Two things. First you’ll need some sort of automated food chopping device — either a blender or food processor. Second, tahini is going to cost you. Sure it’ll run you 6 – 8$, but you be able to make your weight in hummus with it.

Popcorn

Did you know Orville Redenbacher runs the world’s largest corn racket from the bottom of his icy cold grave? There is no reason you should ever pay more than 0.25$ for a giant bowl of popcorn. Buy popcorn — like, the kernels — and pop it your damn self. It takes ten minutes, and you can pour REAL BUTTER AND SALT on it. It seems fairly obvious to me.

For a super fun time put some paprika on the finished product and call it a day.

I can’t, like, plan a delicious meal with ten sides and dessert for every night of the week, even though I love to cook.

Here are my reasons:

1. Money, of course
2. Time
3. Spontaneity. I like order a lot, but I want to be able to be like “I have had a super bad day, let’s go out and get something to eat somewhere and treat ourselves” every once in awhile. Most of all, I want Cam to be able to say “You have had a super bad day, let me take you out to eat at your favorite place and also give you thirty gifts,” without me having to say, “That all sounds great, but I have GOT to make chicken breasts again, otherwise my whole plan will be thrown off and I will die.”

My strategy at the moment is (though subject to change) to sit down at some point, usually on the weekend, with the current issues of the several cooking periodicals I get and try to find some healthy recipes that meet the following objectives:

1. Use staples I have in the house, reducing grocery bills.
2. Use some of the same ingredients (like cilantro - who ever uses a giant bunch of cilantro for one meal?) (Chicken broth, parsley, bacon, chives, green onions, basil…all of these are good examples).
3. Use some of the specialty-type things I bought while splurging on something else, so that I can feel like my splurge isn’t really a splurge. I get tons of satisfaction from finishing off bottles of things - especially from my vast spice, oil, and vinegar collection.
4. Heat up well so that one of these meals can last for two days. This way I can just plan two or three meals a week.

This is working pretty well. By using my periodicals, the cookbooks I have that are organized by season, and the knowledge I have accrued from reading books like How to Pick a Peach, I try to get as much seasonal stuff as possible. I try really hard to get good ingredients that are environmentally responsible and local (if possible), but sometimes the People can’t afford these, so I feel like I’m always making judgment calls.

Anyway, it’s stressful. I’m trying to incorporate grocery circulars into this routine, but it is so much work. I have a job and tons of DVDs that need watching. Sometimes I get discouraged, and it all seems like too much. I feel like I’m always feeling guilty about either spending money or getting processed stuff because it’s cheaper or easier. THERE HAS GOT TO BE A BETTER WAY, right? I’m going to find it. Or you are going to tell it to me.