We just had a discussion on Google+ about eating on a budget. Seems I need to write that book afterall. One of the strategies I've always employed is food subsidies. That just means that a cheap food subsidizes an expensive one. Restaurants do this all the time, that's why you have starches (potatoes, rice, bread) with your meats. The price of a starch is a fraction of the price of herbs, spices, aged cheese, wine and meats. Next on the ladder is most vegetables. It's a rare occasion for vegetables to cost more than $1 per lb. When was the last time you bought meat for $1/lb?

So with that in mind I'd like to focus on breads. Now if you buy the budget American white bread you may be able to get it for a dollar for a 24 oz loaf. You can make it cheaper but it's really the yeast that costs so you have to commit to buying a block of yeast to make it worth the trouble. Then there's the rising time etc.. Usually these hurdles are too much and people avoid saving money by buying bread and understandably so. However, flatbread can be easy to make and dirt cheap. Pita usually costs about $3 in the store for 10 ounces. That's a starch for the price of a meat. Pita is fairly easy to make too and I have a Wheat Pita recipe that I like a lot here at The Man, The Myth, The Legend.

However, what I'm about to show you will make even homemade Pita look expensive! I can make 8 pita at home for about $1. If I buy large blocks of yeast and 25 lb of flour I can get them down to about 10 cents each and it takes only 2 hrs from start to finish to make it. Following is how to make flatbread in 30 minutes for 1/3 the cost of Wheat Pita. How is this possible you ask? India! If you had to feed 1 Billion people and they had little to no money I bet you'd find a cheap way to do it and they have. The flatbread I'm referring to is Chapati (or Roti). To make Chapati you'll want to look around for an Indian/Pakistani market and pick up a large bag of Atta (Chapati flour). Atta is a blend of wheat flour and malted barley flour and you should be able to get it for about $1/lb if you buy a 20/lb bag. To make 8 Chapati you'll need one cup of Atta and enough water to get it to come together. Since you're paying about 33 cents per cup of Atta and water is free Chapati ends up being one of the cheapest and easiest flatbreads to make.

Directions:

1. Put one cup of Atta in a food processor bowl. Turn it on and add small amounts of water at a time until it comes together in a ball. Unlike how westerners make bread (put in ingredients, then add flour to get it just right) Indians put the flour in the bowl and add water until it's just right. Be careful not to add too much water because adding flour doesn't fix it. If you're kneeding by hand just dip your knuckles in a bowl of water and kneed by punching the dough down. Food processors however do a good job and you'll be done in about 3 minutes.

2. After the dough comes together put it in a bowl and cover for 30 minutes to let it rest. During this time you can make the rest of your dinner.

3. Heat a flat comal or griddle pan to medium tempurature.

4. Roll the doughbull into a long rope then cut it into eight pieces. One at a time roll each piece into a ball then flaten and roll out into a very thin circle about 6-8 inches in diameter.

5. Lay on the griddle for about 30 seconds then flip. It will puff up if your pan is up to temperature. If it doesn't puff up wait a few minutes before cooking the next one.

6. Brush a little clarified butter on them when done. This is optional but it gives them a nice flavor.  See my recipe on how to make clarified butter (Deshi Ghee).

Chicken is probably the most boring tasting animal on the planet, that's why when we don't know what something tastes like we say it tastes like chicken (meaning it has no strong flavor). However, chicken doesn't have to be boring at all and with a little work we can pick a good chicken, keep the flavor by cooking it right and even add to it using some specially selected herbs and vegetables. 

This recipe's purpose is to molest the chicken as little as possible and add subtle other flavors. The chicken also contributes by giving up a certain amount of it's juices and the runoff from the garlic and rosemary paste which drizzles down into the potatoes and shallots making for a very nice accompaniment.

This time around I waited about 20 minutes into the roasting and added sliced Sweet Potatoes which was very nice. Also instead of using just Yukon Golds I found a bag of mixed tiny potatoes at the store comprising of Yukon Golds, Purple and Red Bliss. The best tasting out of these three in this recipe is the Yukon Golds so this mix doesn't add to the quality of the meal however it does make it pretty. Yukon Golds just have the right amount of waxy texture and the right amount of starch to soak up the chicken's juices and yet hold themselves together. 

Try out the recipe and let me know what you think.

Recipe: Garlic and Rosemary Roasted Chicken with Yukon Golds

Gallery: 

Using Food Subsidies at Home

Something I'll surely be talking about later is food subsidies. I often hear the argument that people can't afford to eat well. I understand that money is tight but I also understand that when the cost of each plate is important (as apposed to the monthly food bill) and the cost of each ingredient on that plate is known you have a lot of power and flexibility to afford better food. Maybe I need to explain.  In the restaurant business inventory cost is everything. You can't just make great food and send it out the door without knowing what it costs and one of the tricks to providing a great meal for a profit is to know the cost of *everything* on that plate. If you go out to dinner at a decent restaurant and you analyze the food on your plate you'd think that a bit of meat, some veggies and a starch is a balanced meal but you may be surprised to know that the items on that plate have little to do with nutrition and a lot to do with economics. Restaurants are in business to make money, not go broke. 

Let's take a closer look at what they do. I've somewhat randomly picked a menu from a local Seattle restaurant – The Pink Door. A swanky Italian/American restaurant with no visible name to be exact just a.... wait for it.... pink door in Post Alley near the very famous and tourist infested Pike Place Market. http://thepinkdoor.net/

Example Food Subsidy

We'll take a look at a few items on their dinner menu.

b u t t e r n u t s q u a s h r a v i o l i d e - c o n s t r u c t e d burst in your mouth mushroom consommé ravioli over creamy squash purée & fresh herbs 19

Let's assume they're going to give you 1.5 lbs of food here and we're going to divide the weight into pasta and squash since the latter is not only the filling but has it as a base too. That leaves us with ¾ lb of pasta dough and ¾ lb of butternut squash. Naturally the squash is going to have some herbs and spices in it which we don't know but they will be mere fractions of an ounce in weight so for our purposes negligible. We also see that we have a mushroom consommé in the filling. The material cost of making a pound of pasta is roughly 60 cents. The cost per pound for butternut squash is about $1. We don't know the mushrooms used but just for the sake of argument they're Portobella which usually run about $7/lb. That's a lot of money in comparison to the rest of the meal but if we only have ¾ lb of ravioli filling then the amount of mushrooms is probably in the 2 oz range or about 45 cents. Add in a half an ounce of fresh shaved cave aged Parmesan ($25/lb) and we're sitting squarely at $2.50 cents for this meal. If you want to really do it up some nice home baked rolls would be great. That would bump the cost to a whopping $2.75.

• ¾ lb pasta - $.90/lb

• ¾ lb squash – $1/lb

• 2 oz Mushrooms - $7/lb

• ½ oz grated Parmesan - $25/lb

Total material cost is $2.75. How do they get away with charging $19 then? Part of it is to cover the cost of the building, wages for the chefs and wait staff, profit for the owner and so on. We made a dish with $25/lb imported cheese and fairly expensive mushrooms by subsidizing the cost of the expensive items with the cost of the cheap ones. In this case pasta, squash and bread are the cheap items. I'd bet that part of this dish also subsidizes more expensive dishes. That's right, not only do we have subsidies going on within a dish but between them. Let's do another one with even more specialty items. More after the jump.

I'd love to have a big wood fired hearth oven but that's just not happening anytime soon. In the past I've used Pizza stones to approximate the same but after a while they crack and can be a bit expensive ($25) to replace. They also don't fit my oven since they're round and for the same reason only allow one pizza per stone to be cooked. What I've really been looking for was one large square pizza stone that would better cover the rack and allow me to cook several pizzas at a time. I've found a few square stones but strangely they don't fit my standard sized oven very well. It baffles me as to why someone wouldn't make it the same size as the oven. Maybe cost is the reason, it usually is.

Another option is a full hearth kit for the oven which provides stone walls and lining but costs a lot more money. My solution for now is to line the shelves of the oven with unglazed quarry tiles. I need to trim a little off one line of tiles to get it to fit and I'm also going to attach them somehow to a sheet of metal so they'll all remain flat when I have them in. I'm thinking of picking up the cheapest unrimmed cookie sheet for this purpose and using Kent HT silicone (food safe and withstands heat to 600 degrees). I paid $10 for enough quarry tiles to cover two racks so I may even experiment with a double layer of tiles to hold more heat. A hearth kit for $20 and a little elbow grease, not bad.

Desi Ghee

Sometimes I want to be fancy. Food is fun. I could just throw some beaten eggs in a pan until they're solid, toss some egg soaked bread on the grill and fry up some bacon but what fun is that? 

My daughter had been asking me for French Toast so I gave in today and mixed an egg, some flour, sugar, salt and milk together to slather onto Texas Toast. The eggs were totally French style done in a double boiler. I didn't have any morels or truffles so I just added a touch of vanilla to them. The Bacon was coated with cracked pepper. 

The fancy part comes with the preparation. I cut off the top of the egg with your typical $20 "cut a muffler pipe" knifeset by ginsu (I think they're called Master Chef now) serrated knife. I washed out the eggshell nicely and filled it with the French style egg custard. 

A strip of bacon pressed flat while fried worked nicely as the dipper utensil for the eggs. Overall this fancy breakfast didn't cost any more than the traditional "slap it on a plate" method but was more fun for sure. 

You don't have to go out to breakfast and spend a fortune for something with pizzazz. 

Several years ago I decided it was time to get serious about smoking meat so <joke> I lit one end of a chicken</joke>.... nevermind. What I really meant to say was that I'd gotten serious about BBQ and in time started working on the absolute best version of traditional American BBQ fare according to me. It has a nice tang in it, isn't boring with the peppers, carrots and celery and is actually quite smooth and sweet too. It's a nice blend I think.

I'm a perfectionist so I can take quite a while to get it all worked out and as soon as I do I'll upload the recipes. This recipe is for the most part done. Anyone can do Macaroni Salad right? Yes if you want plain old Mayonnaise and noodles for dinner. What I've created here I really like and make it often for my lunches even if I don't BBQ. The ingredients list is longer than traditional Macaroni Salad and a few my be surprising but you should just trust me on this one and make it. I usually use the 2lb bags of mini sweet peppers but when I can't get them I'll use regular sized red, orange or yellow bell peppers.  I've specified just ONE red bell pepper to keep the cost down but if  I'm making a double batch I like to put one red and one yellow or orange bell pepper in it. I've tried green but to me the flavor is too bitter for what I am trying to accomplish. 

Also on the recipe I've made a note about the sweetened condensed milk. I've tried several while creating the recipe and something falls flat when I use *whatever* brand. However, I've always had good luck with Nestle La Lechera sweetened condensed milk that I pick up from the local Mexican grocery for about $1.60. If you buy it from your local white man's grocery you'll pay at least double. Since you have to pick up a few veggies anyway it may warrant seeking out the Mexican Tienda. 

If you're going to use nasty iodized table salt then cut the amount in half. I don't like my food tasting like bitter soap so I use fresh  ground sea salt in my recipes and you should too. Also one last note. I've mentioned in the recipe that it gets better if the flavors meld. This is very true and you'll notice the noodles soak up some of the soupiness and the flavors are more balanced the next day. If I were having a BBQ I'd make this the day before. If this isn't possible don't stress it because the worst rendition of this you could make will be better than anything you can buy from the store.

Recipe: Zesty Macaroni Salad