1. Inexpensive is hard to plan

You go to the store. You see that steak is a manager's special, 80% off. Suddenly it is cheaper than pork shoulder.

2. Inexpensive is not what people look for in a recipe: inspiration is what people look for in a recipe.

People may want inexpensive. They may have pork shoulder to cook because it is inexpensive. But they go to look for a recipe for pork shoulder, not for 'inexpensive food.'

3. Morals are expensive.

Local, slow food, traditional, authentic ethnic, organic ... these are all expensive.

4. Inexpensive is diverse, expensive is uniform

It is hard to predict what will be inexpensive for different people. It is easier to say "use this brand of this, this quality of that" and get uniform results from expensive materials. People won't blame the recipe source if they substitute cheap stuff, but they would if the recipe used inexpensive materials and then turned out mediocre.

5. Some expense is high-yield.

Mario Batali taught me that the pantry is the place to splurge - small amounts of staples that can work with the stuff on sale. Good spices, good salt, etc that go into every menu item. Things that don't readily go bad, that contribute minor cost components. Spending twice as much on spices can be worth it if they add $.10 to a $2 menu item, but substantially improve the quality.

I would like to add one more thing to that: It's not expense that's the point, but quality. The whole trick is being able to spot good quality ingredients. For example: you may be better off buying that pork shoulder instead of the steak that's on sale if it's better quality.

You can usually find good quality stuff at your local chain grocery if you know what you're looking for.

Try the Cheap Meals booklet as a free download on http://myvesta.org/recipes/

This has helped me reduce food costs. I feed myself on about $150/month.

I just bought a seasoning that for the price makes cooking easy and not expensive. The new seasoning is called Todd's Dirt. The guy who sells it named Todd says you can put the seasoning on anything and make it taste great. He is not kidding. Why pay all the money for fresh herbs or a bunch of bottles of spices, when you get it all in one bottle. You watch these shows and read these articles on cooking, and you are right. The cost is crazy. I strongly suggest to your readers this new seasoning. I love it.

Why buy fresh? Because those of us with an experienced palate can tell the difference and it is a huge difference. Just like any beautician can spot a bottle job a mile away, so can chefs....

Some equipment I use to stretch quality ingredients are a foodsaver and a dehydrater. Foodsavers vacuum-seal and portion sizes as you desire. I buy a whole beef tenderloin @stores like Costco and cut it into chunks I later thaw out and further cut into individual steaks. You can buy gourmet cheese in bulk and it lasts four times as long vac-sealed. I buy expensive berries in larger quantities to save money and vac-seal them.

Dehydrators mean you never throw that unused amount of fresh herbs away. Herbs dehydrated and not pulverized blow away dried herbs you buy at the store and are cheaper!

I also cook a lot of authentic Mexican food when I need to economize. The key word is authentic-American versions add way more meat and cheese. Costco charges 79 cents a pd. for whole chickens.

I also fish whenever I can, especially when I get the opportunity to go to Alaska. Two summers ago, I flew back with 45 lbs. of flash-frozen wild salmon. It lasted a year and it felt really weird the first time I had to go buy it in a store. Another item that really helps you save and plan ahead is a small chest freezer. They cost pennies to operate, and paired with a vac-sealer, allow you to buy larger cuts of meat.

With a little equipment and a little planning, saving money becomes a routine and quality doesn't suffer.

Isn't part of the problem that people don't know how to spot what's good and what isn't?

I almost never see anyone smelling tomatoes, pushing a finger into a piece of meat or even looking at kill dates. They wouldn't know a good piece of fish from a bad one if you hit them in the face with it.

I always maintained that the measure of a good cook is their ability to make the cheapest ingredients taste wonderful. Skirt steak, lamb or pork shoulder, chicken legs - all of these things are not only inexpensive to start with, they go on sale. One of my very favorite meals in the whole world is smoked pork hocks and beans.

A topic on which we basically agree - hock and beans. =)

...with beer. Good beer, too, none of that commercial crap.

Or really good braised short ribs. Minimum four hour braise. With a good Cab.

Sorry, was going to reply but got caught up braising ribs. And then frying chicken. And then eating. And sleeping.

Braised short ribs... kalbi chim... whoa.

...that we seem to be all about the comfort food? Why is that, do you think? I heard a theory the other day that it was about the economy.

Nah...I just like that stuff. Foie gras, sauteed, a little bit of balsamic....on toast. Sigh.

(Note: I live in Chicago. If I want the delectable liver product, I must either go to Milwaukee for it or order a "special appetiser" at one of my favorite restaurants. This is a $22.00 salad with a free "garnish". They just can't sell the stuff, right?)

Hmm. I like foie gras just fine, but I'll take chicken livers on toast too... I usually buy them in the 5 lb tub from the 'fresh killed' chicken place in the Portuguese (Brazilian) neighborhood. What doesn't go on toast ends up in dirty rice.

Well, my wife is a cook (chef de parti) at a fine dining New American restaurant. She trained at the New England Culinary Institute, and is also very familiar with asian cuisine.

Anyway, even before she and I met, I was trying to rediscover the charms of haute cuisine; the old stuff, escoffier; not bistro, but the formula recipes that paired an ingredient with its 'proper' garnish and sauce.

I had already eaten my way through a lifetime of Kosher NY food, Korean and Chinese immigrant food, Japanese home cooking, and anything deeply discounted but not 'prepared' or 'packaged' that my mom could get.

So my sense of comfort food was deeply distorted in strange and unpredictable ways. I take comfort in sushi, shepards' pie, kimchi, udon, burgers, chopped liver, knishes, and raw mussels... in fact, I can't think of anything outside the realm of molec.gastro. that strikes me as adventurous, though so many friends find almost anything spicy or raw oddly exciting.

Instead of chasing excitement, I'm always trying to go back in time, to find balance. What makes a meal in each tradition cohere, and do the dishes in that tradition somehow work with each other, nutritionally, physically, in taste, etc, to hold the meal together? Or is it just a random assemblage of what was affordable and available?

It's a question I'm having trouble solving, in part because I feel like ingrediants have changed so much. Now, seaonsality and breeds are always in question. I can try something from anywhere but not really anything from here. So how can I experience what it was like to make apple pie in a season of overubundance with small tart apples slightly bug nibbled? Instead I have a few perfect, polished, ruddy and tasteless monstrosities picked unripe and shipped from goodness knows where. How do I know if the pie tastes right, then? that would throw off any pairing and the whole meal...

The Boy grew up on a farm, I grew up suburban and rural. We always had a massive garden, killed our own poultry, baked bread, etc. I come from a long line of indifferent to lousy cooks, so the freshness of the ingredients was what saved us from total malnutrition. It's pretty difficult to screw up with, say, salad made from greens that you cut ten minutes ago and carrots that were in the ground only a minute or two before...

That said, it's made both The Boy and I incredibly particular about produce and meat. I routinely smell every piece of produce I buy. People look at me strangely, but I don't care. I can tell if the fennel is stale or the kale was grown in sand, and it makes a difference to us. Mom used to make great chevre, so now when I buy it, I have to ask for a smell and a taste. It's a bummer when you know what things are supposed to taste like, isn't it?

As for meat...American beef just isn't that great. Mind you, we grew up in Alberta, which produces some of the best beef on the planet, none of it corn fed. I think it's the corn that we don't like. It makes the fat yellow, and makes the meat taste like margarine. Not appealing. We make do with bison and eat a lot of lamb.

Now that we live in Chicago and haven't got room for a garden, we rely heavily on farmer's markets in the summer. We also bought a freezer, so we can freeze apples and pesto and whatnot to make the good stuff in the winter.

There isn't anything packaged in our house, except for a few things like beans in water and tomatoes. We didn't grow up with that stuff, and our mothers would rather stick a fork in their respective eyes than even considering changing now. Over 40 years ago, they were the slow food movement. They were the organic folks.

Strange, eh? The smell of a really good tomato, or a buggy, but fresh apple still warm from the sun is comfort food for us. Cooking is a lot more fun with the good stuff in the pantry.

Ah jealousy. I grew up mostly suburb, some farm. Dad had a 1/2 acre garden for the first years; we always had the summer house near farms. Fresh corn, some veges, ... but never fresh meat, really. I've done some farm shares lately, wanted to butcher some meat, but I'm a bit thrifty (and quality is pretty low in the supermarkets anyway). So, I don't know what I'm missing most of the time. =(

I don't know how close you want to get to your meat, but as the kid who had to clean out the chicken house (Aside: another great lie that parents tell their kids, "When your brother's old enough, he'll do it." HAH!) I can tell you that there were many times I would have loved to go to a nice, clean butcher store....

Everyone that has a farming fantasy should really go and live on a working farm for awhile. Mom raised goats for the halal market and made chevre. We also had meat rabbits, ducks, chickens, turkey and sometimes geese. There was the occasional pig, too. And then, of course, there was the almost two acres of garden.

This is cubic, unending work. Calving time, kidding time, caring for the tiny chicks all has to be done, on time and correctly. That one miserable nanny goat always had bloody triplets, and always between eleven and one in the morning. The goats don't care if you have pneumonia, they have to be milked. The eggs have to be picked, everyone needs to be fed and watered and the barns need to be cleaned.

For the big stuff - pigs, elk, deer, moose, steer, etc., we would send the creature off to the local butcher and drive home after a day or two with neatly wrapped packages for the freezer. It beat the heck out of taking two days to process a hundred chickens...