This past week I've been working on a quilt for my newest Great-Grand due in March. Seems like when I am sitting in front of a sewing machine with nothing but fabric pieces to look at, my mind tends to wander. Lately, what with grocery prices still headed skyward, I try to think of ways to still eat three meals a day without wrecking the budget.
Thinking back to my childhood, some of the ways my mother cooked meals are beginning to make sense. After all, my family wasn't exactly living high on the hog, so to speak. Due to Mother's ever worsening arthritis, there were doctor bills and hospital bills in addition to the normal family expenditures.
My family had one meat and potato meal per week, and that was on Sunday. Dad was lucky enough to be able to rent out the ten-acre field that was part of our property to a neighbor who paid in beef instead of dollars. That's where the roast beef for dinner came from.
I wondered for years why Mother always made a pot of rice to go with the chili. It finally dawned on me that the rice stretched the meal to feed all five of us.
Bread was always homemade. Bread made at home cost a lot less than a loaf of bread from the store.
Casseroles were a common meal. Or, if you live in Minnesota, they are hot dishes. Goulash, tuna noodle hot dish, chicken and rice hot dish. You get the idea.
We canned and froze all the food we could lay our hands on.
I find myself looking at recipes for the kinds of meals Mother made and at the home canned and dehydrated food on my shelves for meals. Thankfully, I have stockpiled pasta, rice and lots of flour and sugar. I live on a fixed income. My cost-of-living increase for Social Security this year was a whopping $44. Frugality is necessary.
Until inflation is under control, if it ever is, seems to me that a frugal approach is the smart way to go. Those of us who have been stacking it high over the years find ourselves in a much better place than do those who haven't yet figured out that prices aren't apt to go down any time soon. It took several years to put us in this mess. Going to take time to fix it.
Check Grandma's cookbooks for cheap meals. Continue stacking it high when you find a decent sale. And pray. A lot. We need all the help we can get.
My mother would say: "If that doesn't fill you up, we have plenty of bread and butter." We never went hungry, but ate a lot of beans. My mother could stretch a ham to almost a week of eating. Her meatloaf (best I ever ate) was stretched with oatmeal.
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