What did your parents do for Budget Friendly Meals?

[TheMetalChef]

shepherds pie

If I could have convinced my mother/grandmother to make shepherd's pie every night, I would have been a happy little camper.

Alas, our menu usually featured a heavy rotation of frozen chicken pot pies (not that I mind those), Salisbury steak, usually accompanied by canned spinach (ick ick ick), sauerkraut with knockwurst (took me YEARS to be able to eat either of those foods, as terribly prepared as they were in my house) and then the Sunday "boil every bit of flavor out of whatever piece of meat is on sale and serve it with mashed potatoes and gravy made from the water it was boiled in" special.

I alternate between wondering how in the hell I turned into a foodie and being amazed that I didn't turn into one a lot sooner than I did...

 

[chefkathleen]

I alternate between wondering how in the hell I turned into a foodie and being amazed that I didn't turn into one a lot sooner than I did...

Desperation? Necessity?

 

[BH51]

My mother was spin-off of her mother, my grandmother
& the wife of a share-cropper....and they were poor, but
didn't know it...you would be amazed the things you can
do with basic stuff like flour, potatoes, eggs & shortening.
They lived off the land, grew there own vegetables and
raised there own meat...I grew up royalty in comparison..
Still practice my grandmother's cooking concept today...
They raised 6 daughters and a son & wasted nothing.....
They didn't use money for food, they had to have money
for other things....now that's budgeting............BH51....

 

[Snoop Puss]

Thanks for the explanation of SOS. I even thought it might be a jokey spelling for sauce! Pb&js - is that peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?

Cheap food when I was a kid (1960s) - I remember spam, tinned beetroot and mashed potato, my mum used to pour the juice from the beetroot onto the potato as gravy! Sardines or poached egg on toast, neither of which I liked. Baked beans on toast (tinned beans in sauce, not homemade). Sunday lunches were a torment - they'd obviously taken ages to prepare and had cost more, but I hated having to swallow mouthfuls of chewy gristle. I remember lots of minced beef. Cottage pie is still a favourite, though none of the other dishes are.

When I was 14, I did an exchange with a French girl - she came to stay with us for a month, I went to stay with her for a month. She must have been very tolerant on the food front! I remember as I walked into her home the very first time, her mum was taking a tray of stuffed tomatoes out of the oven. I was stunned - they looked like a painting to me. I had my first spaghetti that year too.

When I was 16, the whole of my family went to visit hers. French food was a revelation to my mum too. Having grown up in the war and during rationing in Britain, she'd never really learnt to cook anything but the basics. The food we ate from then on was very different - she bought cookery books, watched the cooking shows on telly, etc. - and she is now a fine cook.

 

[ellakav]

we moved from a very large city where my Dad had worked for an aerospace company to a very rural and tourist-driven area when I was 9 years old. it was a massive culture and financial shock, let me tell you. and my parents were already screwed up-my mother walked out on us not too long after that. my little sister and I knew how hard it was for our Dad to support us, work was VERY hard to come by for someone with his skills and education. for a long time we were latchkey kids and we would make
do with a lot of pb&j and kraft mac and cheese after school. but when he
came home he was always able to cobble something together for us so
that we would have a family meal each nite. looking back I don't know how
he did it. we had a lot of ham and beans in the crockpot. SOS, hamburger gravy and rice, sausage and baked beans, goulash, cabbage, potato and keilbasa, cabbage and potato soup, oatmeal. somehow we never did without. when I was 12 my Dad got a job at a new hospital that opened in the area and he put me in the kitchen with him and began teaching me how to cook. he was fantastic at it, very creative. I took to it easily and still use a lot of the recipes he taught me. my Dad was the 'troubled genius' type. he suffered bouts of depression and was a high-functioning alcoholic.
but he was so gifted in so many things and no matter how badly he was
feeling, he always provided for his girls, always worked his tail off. the times that I had with him in the kitchen learning how to measure and sift
and chop and create are some of the sweetest memories I have of us together and to this day when I make a meatloaf, or spaghetti or chili or
any of the myriad Hungarian dishes he taught me I am briefly 12 years old again. I miss him desperately sometimes.
but those days of beans and cabbage were a HUGE source of uncivilized humor between the three of us!!

 

[chefkathleen]

That's a great story Ella. I loved it. I know what you mean about missing a parent. I'm that way about my mom, although all I have to do now a days is look in the mirror and she's there looking back at me.
I'm a kid again when I make her potato soup.

 

[Thaicooking]

Absolutely, macaronni cheese!! and I really love it ^^

 

[Chile Chef]

Absolutely, macaronni cheese!! and I really love it ^^

Now you sound like me

I have 8 boxes of the cheap mac & cheese stocked in my pantry, which I only use once in a great while if I'm in a lazy mood that day and don't want to cook anything!

 

[ellakav]

That's a great story Ella. I loved it. I know what you mean about missing a parent. I'm that way about my mom, although all I have to do now a days is look in the mirror and she's there looking back at me.
I'm a kid again when I make her potato soup.

thanks. those are treasured memories during what was at times a
very difficult time in our lives. Dad and I knocked heads. A LOT.
we adored one another, but we were at odds SO much of the time!
I realized after we lost him that the reason why was because we
were so alike, he and I. out of his 3 children, I inherited the most
from him in the way of personality traits and temperament. the
younger ones got all that high intelligence.but I got the artistic
side of him! also a few other things, but I beat those long ago...

one of the other things he taught me to make when I was a kid
was spaghetti sauce in a large amount. then we'd freeze individual
portions for the future for those times when we were tight on money
or just wanted something quick and easy for dinner. he made a killer
sauce and I use that 'recipe' to this day. I typed it that way because
I wouldn't be able to write an actual recipe! my Dad was one of those
cooks that measured nothing. he did everything by sight or taste and
that's pretty much how I do it, too!

 

[Pookahberry]

During the week, we would have fried salt pork, left over potatoes chopped up with onions and fried in a cast oven frying pan, along with this we had creamed style corn. Some call it slum gullion , we called it American chop suey, also poor mans soup was a big hit made with salt pork onions and diced potatoes and if we had flour mom made biscuits.But, on Friday night when Dad got paid he would bring home a steak and we would have french fries.

 

[Angdeer]

In our house it was caned soup with way more water than it called for or if we were lucky spaghetti. So sad. Its crazy how much our food bill is every week though.

 

[PrincessFiona60]

We had mostly casseroles, a whole chicken once a week, lots of soups and stews. All homemade. Dad wold buy a half ham, bone-in, dice it all up and measure into 1 cup portions then freeze it. We had ham, onion and cheese waffles at least once if not twice a week. The ham bone went to bean or split pea soup. Once a week we had a huge dinner salad with one can of tuna for 6 people. Powdered milk for baking and cooking. We gorls tried to make things interesting by looking for different recipes with what we had on hand. Both of my sister now cook "out of the box," and they hate to cook. My brother and I are the only ones to embrace the love of cooking and playing with our food.

 

[DaveSoMD]

I remeber two specifically.. Hamburger and Beans is one. Brown 1 lb ground beef in a skillet and add 1 can of Campbells Pork and Beans and heat through. I still remember eating that from my Flinstones "log" dish. The other was macaroni and pork chops. Mom would use the left over pork chops from a previous meal, cutting the meat off the bone and then cutting it in bite sized pieces. This was fried to reheat it and then cooked elblow macaroni and Campbell's Tomato Soup were added and heated through.

My Gram is the queen of making meals from nothing/leftovers, being born in 1914 and living through WWII and then raising 3 kids on her own. But she is another topic entirely.

 

[jcv]

I loved almost everything my mother ever cooked. It wasn't until I was grown that I found out most of it was really cheap - after all, she did have to feed 5 kids.

we often had things like hamburg and gravy over rice, sliced hot dogs and french fries, canned salmon with cubed potatoes and peas in cream sauce, scalloped potatoes and ham, baked macaroni and cheese... the list goes on and on. I miss all that stuff. Some of it I can make but my family won't eat any of it.

 

[Selkie]

What did your parents do for Budget Friendly Meals?

They had only one child!

 

[vagriller]

My dad hunted, and our freezer was always full of venison. So much so that when I went to a friends house and had burgers that I asked what the burgers were made of! They said it was just regular beef. Guess I was used to the lean deer and elk burgers. Also my parents grew an enormous garden, canned the extras, raised chickens for eggs. Then they traded eggs for milk with someone at our church that had a dairy. They stocked food (bought on sale) and cooked most everything from scratch.

 

[JamesS]

Food was something that was never compromised on in my family. We only had one car, didn't go on vacations or have a recreational budget beyond a trip to the movies every couple of weeks...but always had fantastic meals.

 

[justplainbill]

Spanish rice, spaghetti and meat balls or neck ribs, spaghettii with Pesto Genovese, pot cheese and buttered noodles, lekvar and buttered noodles, pot roast with noodles or mashed potatoes, string bean salad, fried pork chops, fried chicken, fried codfish, fried eggplant, potato soup, bean soup, pea soup, chicken feet soup, scotch broth, tripe stew, boiled tongue in caper sauce, stewed tomatoes, chopped creamed kale or swiss chard, escarole, corned beef and cabbage with boiled potato, frikadellen, goulash, liver & onions, Sicilian pizza, minestrone, creamed lima beans, string beans in sour cream sauce, grated zucchini or cucumbers in sour cream sauce, pickled beets, potato pancakes, apple fritters, stewed peaches, stewed figs, oatmeal, farina, tapioca pudding, chocolate pudding, butterscotch pudding, egg sandwiches, grilled cheese sandwiches, bologna sandwiches, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, cream cheese and jelly sandwiches.

 

[stickybun]

ha! I grew up in a poverty stricken area, so we made due with a lot of cheap meals. One my mom made often was canned tomatoes and pasta. Macaroni and cheese with sliced hot dogs. I remember more often than once eating crackers dipped in hot sauce... I used to mix ranch and bacon bits and dipped crackers in that, as well. All in all, we had a lot of pasta.

 

[chopper]

My lunch that I took to school was often times sugar sandwich and a boiled egg.
We had spaghetti at least once a week for supper.