Inventive Cheap Healthy Food

"Turning Second-Class Ingredients into a First-Class Meal"

The statistics may be telling us that we in this country are winning the battle against unemployment - that it's lower at 9% than it's been at any time over the past year. But factor in people who are employed only part of the time and so on, and the figure jumps to about twice that. All of which takes us to one unavoidable conclusion - we need to learn how to do a lot more with money we have. Certainly, we've been told (ad nauseum) that it doesn't make any sense to spend money on eating out or on Starbucks lattes (and we get the point already). But that isn't quite enough to help us handle the kind of drop in income and rise in food prices that we've come to experience. If cheap healthy food is what you need to provide your family with so that you can survive and save a little money for an unexpected need, what kind of food do you turn to?

The answer to that would be the kind of food traditional societies in Europe, South America and Asia have always turned to, wealthy or no. They call it peasant cuisine. If that doesn't sound entirely appetizing, it absolutely will, as soon as you take a look at the recipes behind the dishes. These recipes weren’t developed for economic hardship. These kinds of recipes come from countries that are quite developed and well-to-do. If they are sparing in their use of neat for heavy dairy products and if they are high in starch it's because those cultures have discovered how healthful cooking in this way can be - and especially when you learn to use spices the way they have, they can be tasty too. These are cultures that have learned to knock together cheap healthy food with mindbendingly delicious flavors drawn from an exciting and adventurous use of spices. This isn't to push something with hyperbole - you'd agree too - the tangy pasta recipes of Italy, the paella recipes of Spain, and frankfurters from Germany are all examples of how inventive use of cooking technique and spice can turn what would otherwise be a second-class cut of meat into a first-class recipe.

Do you feel that you need an extra dash of salt to add more flavor to a meal? That wouldn't be the healthy way to do it. Instead, try rice vinegar or red wine vinegar or Apple cider vinegar. It'll bring exciting new notes of flavor to your meal that salt just couldn't. Try experimenting with spices like ginger, garlic, rosemary. Not only did these have great health benefits, they make food infinitely more appetizing and imaginative.

Do you marvel at how the Japanese recipes involve slices of meat so thin, they are almost transparent? They didn't learn to do that for their fascination of delicately sliced meat. They had to make do with what they had to make it go farther. As it would turn out, methods like this make for cheap, healthy food. You get less meat in your diet, you save money, and it's healthy.

It could be a new trend in responsible eating, choosing traditional recipes from all around the world. Traditional recipes tend to usually be healthy - because they were designed for times when rich food was just not this easily  available.