Good cookery is not an extravagance but an economy, and many a tasty dish is made by our Continental friends out of materials which would be discarded indignantly by the poorest tramp in Whitechapel.
I'm not a particularly good cook. Part of it is that it is the kind of cooking anybody could do if they bothered. It's improvisational. I cook with whatever I have laying around.
I learned from my two years' experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one's necessary food; that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength.
What a marvelous resource soup is for the thrifty cook - it solves the ham-bone and lamb-bone problems, the everlasting Thanksgiving turkey, the extra vegetables.
I've been using carrot tops to make pesto and broccoli stalks to make broccoli 'rice.' There's no reason to throw those things away - just get creative.
Hell, when I was growing up, I could make a meal out of a package of Top Ramen and a bottle of Windex.
You can serve good food on a budget provided you don't waste it.
And then you bit onto them, and learned once again that Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler could find a use for bits of an animal that the animal didn't know it had got. Dibbler had worked out that with enough fried onions and mustard people would eat anything.
It's a challenge to demonstrate that you can prepare some really interesting food with humble ingredients.
I think that a lot of us at home are iron chefs in their own right in that we have to come up with meals real quickly.
My mother really would make these dreadful concoctions. She really prided herself on something called 'Everything Stew,' where she would take everything in the refrigerator, all the leftovers, and put them all together.
Every peasant cuisine has incredible ingenious tricks for getting a lot of nutrition out of a small amount of ingredients. There are people who don't have the money to invest in better food, but perhaps they have the time. There's a trade-off: The more time you're willing to put into food preparation, the less money you have to spend.
I am the MacGyver of cooking. If you bring me a piece of bread, cabbage, coconut, mustard greens, pigs feet, pine cones...and a woodpecker, I'll make you a good chicken pot pie.
One thing that improved my cooking skills was being a poor student in California... If you don't have much money, you have to learn to cook.
My favorite way to cook is to look in my cabinets and see what I have. That's the most fun. 'I don't have tomatoes, but I have this chili-garlic sauce from the Asian grocery store. Let's throw that in there and see how it affects my beef barley soup!'
Spare feast! a radish and an egg.
When my mother had to get dinner for 8 she'd just make enough for 16 and only serve half.
When you don't have much money, cooking can be incredibly reassuring. You feel like you're doing meaningful work.
French cooking is really the result of peasants figuring out how to extract flavor from pedestrian ingredients. So most of the food that we think of as elite didn't start out that way.
I love to cook. My dad's a really excellent cook and his style is: Look in the fridge and make whatever there is with whatever ingredients you have and I like cooking like that, too.
