It has been cold and rainy the last couple of days, and the reports claim we might get snow, so like every normal rural American I rushed off to the liquor store the grocery store to get some essentials. I found a roaster chicken for about six bucks, and thought what better than a roast chicken tonight and then some good chicken soup for the next upcoming days. So I picked up a couple onions, a bag of carrots, some celery, some long grain rice, and some peas, and went home. Total purchase cost- less than twelve bucks.
Got home, roasted the chicken, had a little for dinner and butchered the rest for sandwiches and maybe a little chicken salad. Then boiled the carcass to get all the yum out of it, picked the meat off, threw all the veg in, and am letting it simmer for a while. I’ll freeze most of it and gnosh on it for probably the next week or so.
It made me wonder, has anyone ever assembled a cookbook for people on low income budgets that is free? Something that could be just given out at food pantries or soup kitchens or other likewise locations to give people who may not know how to budget and stretch their money? It sounds like the kind of collaborative project we could do here. I’ll set up the website, and I’m sure you all can come up with good, cheap, nutritional recipes, and I guarantee that someone in the readership is a nutritionist who could review the recipes and make them more healthy or highlight potential allergen problems.
It would be a complex project to undertake in the sense of collating all the recipes, but there are so many free resources we could use to do this. We could just use blogspot as the initial starting point blog, and people could even, were they willing, upload videos of themselves making the meals to youtube. Once we have enough recipes, we could even consolidate them into an easy to access .pdf file which would cost nothing for people to download.
With so many people going hungry and so many people becoming obese because eating healthy is harder when you are poor than just eating four 1$ McDoubles every day, and with food stamps and other types of welfare not going very far for people, this could be something really helpful. Maybe something like this has been done before, but I think we could do it better, and given the culinary talents of so many readers here, we could do it in a way that kids could enjoy a variety of tasteful meals that are not only inexpensive, but delicious, nutritious, and stretch the budget.
Just an idea. What do you all think? Could we do something meaningful and useful? Would any of you be interested in volunteering your time doing something like this? It wouldn’t address the most urgent problem that Michelle Obama has been working on, which is that many poor people simnly have no access to grocery stores and fresh food, but it might help a little. And helping a little is just the first step to helping a lot.