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I don’t clip many recipes, or buy many cookbooks. I do have a couple of notebooks in which I wrote recipes, but they seem out of touch with the way we live now. Many of them were from Kraft, or cooking magazines and websites. I don’t buy canned soups, or prepackaged seasonings, or cake and biscuit mixes. I can’t afford them now. I can’t afford expensive ingredients like chocolate or wine.

People often say, “I’d love to have the recipe!” But I find that most people don’t cook half the recipes they collect. I worked as cook for a family that had three kitchen drawers stuffed with clipped recipes. There were thousands of recipes, more recipes than anyone could make in a lifetime. They were foodies, with pantries and freezers full of ingredients. It was a daunting task to use the food they had collected before it wasn’t useable anymore. I spent probably an hour a day sorting through the stacks of clipped recipes, looking for ones to match the ingredients on hand. They would pick out ones they wanted to try, and it was easily a $200 trip to the market every week, in addition to using what was in the house.

Now, I might have $200 a month for groceries. I have to cook from basic ingredients, and the cheapest ones. So convenience and packaged foods are not on my shopping list. We eat as much local produce as we can get. Some of it is from Milli’s garden across the river, and we are just eating from our own. We will share some of our tomatoes, radishes and beans with her and her husband. I bought fiddleheads, a local wild-gathered delicacy, through Milli at a very good price and I still have some in the freezer.

I cook enough of some foods for three meals -  beans some cuts of meat, quiche. This saves on energy and time overall. I try to alternate leftover meals, and some I freeze. Some months we get down to the last few days without money and I need to cook meals that involve two potatoes, a carrot, half an onion, a handful of lentils and a cup of rice. (The answer is curry with spiced potatoes.) Quiches make good ingredient stretchers, if the basic ingredients of flour, shortening, eggs and milk are on hand. The added ingredients may include cheese, mushrooms, bacon, onions or leftover ham or chicken. Herbs may be part of the seasoning. A basic meal made with garden lettuce salad is supplemented cooked vegetables, cheese, hard-boiled eggs and leftover meat, with a homemade salad dressing. Bottled dressings are convenient but they contain all sorts of ingredients that are unhelpful for good health. They are mostly sugar, salt and flavour enhancers in soybean oil and cheap white vinegar.

Once the basic cooking methods are learned, the cook doesn’t need a lot of recipes. Recipes pushed at us by the food companies are meant to keep us hooked on sugar, fat and salt.

Library of Congress photo

These are the cookbooks I use the most: Edna Staebler’s Food That Really Shcmecks; Doris Janzen Longacre’s More-With-Less Cookbook; Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I have some ethnic cookbooks I use as well, and more on that another time. The first two cookbooks are both Mennonite in background, and I don’t need to explain the stellar Julia. This is the tome for learning genuine French country cooking. A lot of cream and butter get used. But Julia lived a good life of many years; butterfat and decent wine didn’t hurt her a bit.