Debt Reduction 101

One of the things that I’ve noticed about the crazy economic state that our country is currently in, is that our plight has us looking backwards into history and appreciating what our ancestors did when money was tight.

I’m something of a foodie (Jimmy John’s addiction nonwithstanding) and in a lot of the cooking blogs that I frequent, I’ve noticed a trend where cooks are going back to their grandma’s trusty recipes and making “recession” recipes. I’m not an expert on this by any means, but the emphasis seems to be on nutritious foods that use inexpensive and readily attained ingredients (i.e. – beans and root vegetables versus caviar and foie gras … OK, that was glib of me). Seasonal cooking plays a huge part of recession recipies – eating produce when its in season instead of buying blueberries that are shipped from Mexico and taste like a truck.

I need to be better at embracing some of the tenets of recession cooking – my pantry is very well stocked, but I love to experiment with recipes, so I’m terrible at going to the store to buy ingredients instead of making do with what we have in the pantry.

Interested in some of the sites and recipes affiliated with recession cooking? Here are some links:

Slashfood.com – They started talking this phenomenon on March 25 … of last year. This is a cool article with a bunch of links on resources you can use to cook recession style.

WordPress.com – Bloggers all over are compiling recipes and making comments on other peoples’ cooking attempts. This is a list of WordPress blogs that have the tags “recession cooking.”

Frugalrecipes.com - This is not the prettiest website out there, but it has a pretty comprehensive collection of recipes to make on the cheap. And a lot of them have this sort of intro … “This is a recipe my dear grandma used to make …”

Epicure – I stumbled across this article when I googled the phrase “recession cooking.” In addition to a couple of recipes – the cheap alternative to a night out at McDonalds – this also has a number of links to other frugal recipe resources.

This is another link I found from the Danville article – this one is called The Culinary Review. What I like about this is that it breaks down recipes by how much they cost per serving.

Go vintage – I was lucky enough to inherit most of my grandma’s cookbooks when she moved into the nursing home, but when I was at Savers the other day, I couldn’t believe the number of vintage cookbooks I found on the bookshelves. Especially target older church cookbooks … they mainly truck in basic ingredients (although sometimes you’ll find recipes that specifically call for MSG … hilarious).

At the end of the day, the common theme of these articles is this: You don’t need to live on Ramen noodles or generic macaroni and cheese to eat frugally and save money on groceries. If you have a little bit of time, you can make nutritous meals on the cheap … just like grandma used to.