While most of us probably have plenty of food in the house right now, we can’t be confident that the situation will be the same in a couple of weeks. Our grandparents and great grandparents knew more about making something from nothing than we do, as we have lived in a time of plenty. Being able to make a nourishing meal for your family when things are scarce is a much harder task when ingredients are scant.
I know many of you have lived on rice and beans at times, or macaroni covered with whatever. What are your best “hard-time” dishes?
Here’s a suggestion from a YouTube cook who lives in Toronto. He has done a lot of videos about old time recipes. This video illustrates a dish that is common in one form or another throughout the world. It’s not “authentic” anything – just easy, filling, and delicious!
Stella's Place 
We can always use some sweeties! This recipe I learned from my Mom. We would fight over them.Just don’t make them on a rainy day, they turn out better when the humidity is low.
Boiled Cookies
2 Cups sugar
6 T. Cocoa
pinch of salt
1 stick of butter
1/2 Cup milk
1/2 Cup peanut butter
1 t. Vanilla
3 Cups rolled oats
Mix the first 3 ingredients in a 2 Qt. saucepan. Add milk slowly and drop in butter. Bring to a rolling boil, stirring quite often. Boil for 4 minutes, or until softball stage. Take off of heat and add vanilla, peanut butter and oats. Drop spoons full onto wax paper, and let cool. YUM!
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And the gouging goes on. I was looking on Amazon and much of their canned food is gone except for 3rd party sellers. I found 15oz cans of Wolf Brand Chili w/o Beans for $11.33 a can (free shipping!) or $9.72 a can with $5.99 shipping. 3 packs of Hormel chili w/o beans for $21.58 (free shipping) and a 6-pack of Idaho premade scalloped potatoes for $86.85 (again, free shipping). There were a few others but I’m sure you get the gist.
I’m contacting Amazon to see if they’re monitoring, or even have a policy, on gouging.
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The boxed potatoes??? The 4/$5.00???? My Gawd…….
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Shades of Katrina, eh?
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There has always been price gouging on Amazon food items. Maybe it’s worse now, but it has always been bad.
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They make you pay for convenience but this stuff’s ridiculous.
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Did you check Amazon Pantry? They are usually much better, and the minimum order is just $35 now. If you don’t have a minimum order, shipping is $5.99.
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Oh yeah, I was just looking to see if 3rd party sellers had jacked their prices up.
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DIL told me a long time ago to never keep those boxed thingies after the ‘expire by’ date, as little buggies start to grow from the flour and other dry ingredients.
Dunno if DIL is correct, but she’s not often incorrect when it comes to food. Plus she’s finally a real nurse, if that matters.
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That can happen. One thing I learned is to keep such things in air-tight containers. At least if you do get bugs hatching in one of your dry pantry items, they won’t spread to everything else. Ask me how I know that.
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Have an idea how you know that…lol
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I haven’t had that problem for many years now, thank God.
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Put dry goods in the freezer when you get them home. Keeps the buggies from taking residence.
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I don’t have enough freezer space, although I do have some buckwheat flour in there.
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Just leave them for a few days to kill the bugs, then move to tightly closed containers .
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I have a freezer that hits below zero and I take my grain products, most of which do contain insect eggs, and freeze them for a week or more at zero. Longer they stay in the freezer before you shelve ’em the more deaderer those insect eggs get.
For things like beans and rice I have in bulk that are not in airtight containers I fall back to using the old LDS ‘put ’em in a bucket with dry ice in it’ trick.
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When times were lean for us, raising three boys during some tough times, my go to meals were beans and cornbread and biscuits and gravy. Mostly we had pintos with a side of mashed potatoes, and sometimes even a tomato or two. Usually we did well enough to have some eggs and bacon or sausage along with our breakfast, but there were a few times that we just had the biscuits and gravy.
I’ve always wanted to try red bean and rice, but I never have.
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Hm. That sounds pretty much the way we ate growing up. We also had fresh fruit since we lived surrounded by a grapefruit grove and orange and lemon trees in the yard. But, I never considered it was because times were hard. That is just the way my mom and dad ate.
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A while back one son was mocking y2k prep, which means he was laughing at his parents. Fast forward to him shopping for quarantine and asks what happens when you eat all your three-week stock three days? My response was to find a y2k prepper and maybe she would sell you a white bucket or two of her stash. Shoot! Ther is some good stuff in them.
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Or a Mormon. Beans, rice, pasta, canned goods….
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Mom used to make amazing concoctions on the weekend with all of the leftovers from the week (if there were any). Soup is always pretty forgiving and you can get pretty creative. She grew up in a big Catholic family so nothing ever went to waste. As she got older, and money wasn’t an issue, we’d still find her chopping up bits of celery and packing in plastic for the freezer. She never wasted anything! She had this tiny stove/oven and my uncle used to joke about there being a genie down in our basement who was passing up things through the oven. He could never believe how she was able to make so much out of such a small oven!
I’m so grateful she showed me how to make my own salad dressings, breads, broths, sauces, and everything else. She was a wonderful teacher.
I miss her so much. I know she and my dad are smiling from heaven knowing that she did everything she could to pass on her knowledge and wisdom to her kids.
I just wish I could talk to her once in a while. I know that she would absolutely LOVE President Trump and I could just imagine her giggling at him giving it right back to those ninny “journalists” in the White House Press Corp.
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We always had a garden, and canned/froze everything during the summer, so we never lacked for anything.
Plus we picked blueberries and elderberries (yuck) plus our own strawberries and made jam.
We picked peaches and apples. Heck, we even picked cherries until the year Mom was up in the cherry tree which split in half. Mom rode that split tree all the way to the ground Yup, we’re still laughing.
So I’ve no recipes to share, except growing, canning, and freezing tips which you all know.
But I could share how to cook lutefisk, koomla (yuck), make kringla and berlinerkrantzers.
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Tuna casserole made with a box of mac n cheese, can of tuna, can of cream of something, half can of milk, and some chopped onion and celery. Corned beef casserole made with can of corned beef, egg noodles, can of cream of something, chopped onions, Velveeta. Pinto beans with Spam, served wih cornbread. Three bean salad made with a can of green beans, can of yellow wax beans, can of rinsed kidney beans, and chopped can of artichokes if you have them.
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Chicken a la king on waffles. Friend’s mom made that every Christmas Eve.
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If you’ve got eggs, make frittatas with veggies and cooked pasta, and they only take a few minutes. In New Orleans they make bread pudding with stale French bread and put in fruit cocktail! They also put whiskey sauce on it, but that’s not a favorite of mine.
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You can also make really good savory bread pudding as a side for meat and poultry.
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