If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Upon realizing that we need to include more vegetables and fruits in our diet to keep future medical expenses down, I went onto Safeway’s website, entered our zip-code, pulled the “produce” menu and cross-referenced it with the state list [...]

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The cheapest fruits and vegetables are the one’s you grow yourself (we’re working on it). A secondary choice for the more social and enterprising kind is to ask people if you can come and pick it off their lawn or trees in exchange for, say, half the loot. For the less enterprising, I suggest loss [...]

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Food rationing has returned to the US for the first time since World War II. Along with the ongoing bet of which will reach $5/gallon first — gas or milk (I say gas)– this is one of an emerging list of symptoms that the idea of exponential growth of the economy and people on a [...]

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A reader asked me how I combine the warrior diet with extreme frugality. The simple answer is that I don’t. I don’t follow the warrior diet to the letter, nor am I nearly as frugal with the food budget as I used to be (less than $200 per month for two people in NorCal is [...]

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One cooked cauliflower for the elven kings under the sky,
an equal volume of boiled potatoes for the dwarf lords,
nine dashes of pepper for mortal men, doomed to die.
One pan for the dark lord, also a lid,
and enough eggs to rule them all and in darkness bind them together
in the pan of Mordor - Served with [...]

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Here’s how to make refried beans (unit cost: negligible)
First you get a 20lbs bag of pinto beans for free at freecycle.org
Second, you take a large bowl and soak the some beans in water all day.
Third, you cook them in a pressure cooker. An ordinary pot works as well, but it takes 3 times [...]

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You may be surprised to know that paying $10 for a $2 meal is not my biggest problem with eating out. Rather it’s the abundance of choices on the menu. I don’t like choices. Why do I have to spend time reading a 10 page booklet to decide what to eat? If I go out [...]

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You need a bag of mealy potatoes, an onion, some eggs, and a ton of cooking oil. This will basically be a meal so full of fat, starch, and cholesterol that you’ll be able to hear your arteries hardening while you eat it.
Peel about 2-3 times the number of potatoes you would usually eat as [...]

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Step one: Figure out what you need
When I was single, I eventually figured out exactly what I needed (see my minimalist kitchen post for details) to cook my food). Since getting married it is clear that those needs have changed. Without an inventory analysis (*) it is impossible to know what needed and what is [...]

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Cheap, fast, very filling, and filled with starch, cost <$1/person.
Ingredients:

2 pounds of potatoes
6-8 cylinders of mystery meat (hotdogs)
paprika
1 large onion
1 cup of milk
1 small can of tomato paste

How to:

Peel the potatoes and boil them.
While they boil chop the onion and fry them golden brown in a large pot.
While they fry, cut the hotdogs in slices [...]

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