It's food on a budget, anyway...

Still paying off holiday credit card bills? Tighten that belt! It shouldn't be too hard after having some Good Food on a Budget (Better Homes and Gardens, 1971).

The cover, with its bountiful roast, puffy home baked rolls, and big scoops of ice cream, doesn't hint at the book's favorite methods of making budget meals...

One trick is to simply throw cottage cheese in things. Want tomato juice with breakfast?

Tangy Tomato Cocktail "With white flecks of cottage cheese" (billed as an exciting feature?) means you can save money by not offering bacon or sausage with the cornmeal pancakes.

Want a sandwich?

Spread bread with a cottage cheese and egg filling, then dip in eggs and fry. Call it Quick Blintz Sandwiches so no one will rebel until they realize it's just a fancy name for cottage cheese on eggy bread, not the delicate pancakes wrapped around a seasoned filling as anticipated.

Another budget technique is to take a perfectly good, already-favorite budget recipe, and make it weird for the sake of variety.

Do you yearn for a pizza on a Friday night? Tomato sauce fragrant with herbs? Strings of melty mozzarella stretching and tearing as you grab the first steaming hot slice? Maybe some spicy pepperoni and/or mellow mushrooms?

Well, how do you feel about a pizza that hides chopped-up hard-cooked eggs under a layer of barely-seasoned tomato paste and a puddle of American and Swiss cheeses? It's just another variation of the time-tested favorite Better Homes and Gardens thought you might want to try.

Maybe you'd prefer creamy macaroni and cheese spiked with savory, smoky hits of ham? I foolishly assumed that is what Ham and Mac Bake would be...

But noooo.... The titular "Mac" is macaroni and apples in a mustard and brown sugar béchamel. Ham is not going to fix that.

A final favorite is to have you laboriously make an ingredient that could just as easily be bought, then ruin it with low-cost least-favorite foods. Spend a sunny morning making a batch of fresh, homemade noodles.

Then spend a dreary evening turning them into...

Mackerel-Noodle Bake! Why serve the noodles with an equally low-cost and far more delicious marinara sauce if you can dump in cans of peas, mackerel, and generic tomato sauce instead? Top the whole thing with the orange plastic that is American cheese and you will wonder why you spent the whole day on this shit.

Is this kind of home cooking really your purpose? As you stare down in despair, I can only offer the words of Rick Sanchez: "Welcome to the club, pal."