The Winter We Had $40. What I Cooked Is Why I'll Never Buy Convenience Food Again.

My name is Darlene Hollis. I cooked in a school kitchen for thirty-five years, starting the fall after I married, feeding four hundred children a day on a budget somebody in an office set for me. You already try to eat cheap. You collect the recipes, you cook a different one every night, and you shop the sales. Then the month ends and the grocery money is gone anyway. You did the work. The savings never showed up, and you are left thinking you must be doing it wrong. You are not. The method is wrong. The savings do not live in the recipe. A recipe feeds you once. A pot feeds you all week. The women who ate well through hard times were not collecting recipes. They were tending one big pot and dressing it up different every night. Here is the plain reason it works. A dried bean has had nearly all its water taken out of it, so when you buy a pound, you are buying a pound of food and not a pound of water. Soak it and simmer it and that starch swells back up. One pound dry becomes close to three pounds cooked, about six cups. At the meat counter and in the frozen aisle, a good part of what you weigh and pay for is water. With beans the water comes free out of your own tap. Back in 1933 the home economists at the United States Department of Agriculture put out family food plans at four spending levels, and on the cheapest one dried beans and peas sat right near the top of the list. The government knew it. It just quit getting taught. I call it the mother pot. A one-pound bag of pintos ran me a dollar and seventy-nine cents at my store in Lexington last week. Add an onion, a bacon end, a can of tomatoes and cornmeal for the bread and the whole thing came to right around five dollars, and it fed us three suppers with two bags left back in the freezer. A frozen skillet meal ran me nine dollars and fed us one night. In this video I show you the picking and the overnight soak, the two-hour simmer and when to salt it, the quick-soak method for the night you forgot, the three suppers I build off one pot, the scrap bag in my freezer door that stands in for broth, how to freeze it in two-cup portions, and the honest arithmetic against a nine-dollar box. I also tell you where it falls short. The mother pot wants time, and if you are working doubles and walking in at seven o'clock, a can of beans is a fair trade and nobody's grandmother would fault you for it. --- WHAT YOU WILL NEED One pound bag of dried pinto beans — $1.79 One yellow onion, chopped rough A bacon end or a piece of salt pork — about a dollar's worth A can of tomatoes — about a dollar Plain cornmeal for the cornbread A gallon freezer bag for vegetable scraps Freezer bags or wide-mouth jars for two-cup portions A WORD OF CAUTION I use pintos. If you ever cook dried red kidney beans, boil them hard at a full rolling boil for ten minutes before you drop them to a simmer. There is a natural compound in raw kidney beans that a low simmer will not break down and a hard boil will. That is not old wives' caution, that is fact, so do not skip it. Once the pot is cooked, get the leftovers into the refrigerator within two hours and use them within three to four days. If you freeze in jars, leave a good inch of headspace, because beans swell when they freeze and a burst jar is a sad thing to clean. Subscribe if you want the old kitchen arithmetic put down plain, one pot and one honest price at a time. #driedbeans #motherpot #depressioncooking #frugalkitchen #beansandcornbread #oldwaysofcooking #eatingoncheap #southerncooking