, and Mary Ostyn’s Family Feasts for $75 a Week, which I picked up for about $10 while shopping at Sam’s Club to “save” money. (BTW, for the Rogers book I have the earlier version, but since Amazon is currently selling that one for $50, the link is to a cheaper one.)Let’s attack the $75 a week one first. Can’t be done in my house. Ms. Ostyn seems like a terrific person, and in addition to 4 biological kids, she’s adopted 6 from other countries—Korea and Ethiopia. Since I’ve barely been able to cope with one child, I’m surprised all her recipes don’t start out with, “First, take a large swig of whiskey”, but she seems a more sensible and able person than I am. Some weeks, I’d be doing well to feed us each on $75 a week, and when we decide to try some new diet book with prescribed menus, well, checkout sticker shock can be pretty devastating. Too bad anxiety doesn’t cause me to lose weight.
If you buy organic food, I just don’t believe you could possibly feed 4 people on $75 a week, and I’d like to hear from anyone that can and how you do it. Maybe if you grow all produce yourself. However, I must admit that following Ms. Ostyn did cut the grocery bills somewhat. I’ve also noticed that if I actually make out a week of menus, this in itself cuts down what I spend dramatically. Even though she didn’t save me a ton of money, her recipes were interesting, as they include a lot of Ethiopian dishes, and a few techniques I’d never heard of, like dry frying onions, then adding oil. Surprisingly, it didn’t not end up being “Cajun blackened” frying pan.
Except for the addition of cayenne pepper, we found the recipes to be somewhat bland. As Nikipedia put it, this is food kids would eat. Just not MY kid, who has always liked highly seasoned food. For example, we tried the white chicken chili recipe, but it just lacked something—maybe a handful of cilantro? And the portions are small (unlike a lot of cookbooks). Now, you have to remember that my idea of portions is pretty skewed. As a kid my aunt used to cook 3 pounds of pasta for 5 people. Even so, I need more than a scant cup of chili for dinner. Hats off to Ms. Ostyn for what she is doing, and her “front of book” is interesting, but the recipes need some work.
Whenever I open Poor Poet’s cookbook, I feel 40 years younger. I bought this book as a teenager when I first ran away from home (something I still would like to do at times). I spotted it in a bookstore in Berkeley, and it was my introduction to budget cooking. At a time when I was lonely, lost and broke, she taught me that style was not necessarily linked to money.
I remember showing it to my mom several years later. She was unenthused—“they’re cheap recipes”. Yeah, well…after a childhood spent gnawing bones clean, Mom believed in MEAT on the table. The rest of us have since realized that maybe that isn’t always such a hot idea.
The Poor Poet eats well—lots of flavor, interesting ingredient mixes, easy to make with ingredients I tend to have on-hand, and cheap for the most part. Ms. Rogers believes that food should feed the soul, and a good meal inspires the creative spirit. I’ve enjoyed this book for many years, but this last month I tried many recipes I’d ignored, although I already had plenty of favorites in the book. Only one flatbread recipe was kind of a dud—it ended up being 4 inch crackers rather than any kind of bread.
My one quibble with this book is that it often substitutes easily available ingredients for authentic ones. Since this book was written in the 1960s, it’s an interesting time travel to realize that most of these ingredients simply weren’t available in the U.S. at that time. These were the days when dinner at a restaurant was your choice of roast beef, ham, fried chicken or roast turkey, not matter paneer or pesto something-or-other. So, Ms. Rogers paneer uses cottage cheese, her Noodles Basilico is delicious, but not pesto, etc. The flavors, if not the ingredients, have stood up well to the test of time. If you can get your hands on a copy (it’s long out of print) I recommend it just to absorb Ms. Rogers’ attitudes toward the art of food. The recipes are a great bonus.
No comments:
Post a Comment