Saving Money with Old Friends

In the name of saving money during the expensive mid-December season, let's look at a budget cookbook.
Admittedly, Money-Saving Main Dishes (U.S. Department of Agriculture Home and Garden Bulletin No. 43, slightly revised September 1974) is not very flashy. Most of the recipes are for pretty basic dishes like broiled fish and stewed chicken. I got the booklet in large part just because I love the stylized soup bowl, emblazoned with flowers and wafting a delicate ribbon of steam toward the ceiling, on the cover.

Some of the book's recommendations amused me too. For example, I never realized how similar the recipes for spaghetti and Spanish rice tended to be until I saw this:

Just swap out the spaghetti cooked separately for rice cooked with everything else, maybe add a smidge of chili powder if you feel crazy, and leave off the grated cheese topping, and ta-da! Spaghetti with meat sauce is Spanish rice.

In case you love pictures of spaghetti dished out to resemble a target, here's the accompanying photo.

Another common and generally cheap dish gets a bit of an upgrade a few pages later:

Turn those appetizer deviled eggs into a main dish by stuffing them full of chicken. (Plus, dad can make lame "chicken or the egg" jokes at lunch, so your entertainment is covered too.)

And if you need a salad to go with your spaghetti, Spanish rice, or chicken-stuffed eggs, well, you can always throw some canned grapefruit and cottage cheese together on a bed of greens.

Maybe the maraschino cherry and peanut dressing will somehow make it more edible? (Don't hold your breath on that one.)

And finally for nostalgia's sake, I was excited to see that the book also had a version of a childhood favorite cheapie.

I know, this is NOT an exciting recipe. It's just exciting to me because my S.O. thinks it's weird that my family never really had hot dog buns when I was a kid. It was just cheaper to use slices of bread that we already had on hand anyway, so here's PROOF that we were not all that unusual. And since I generally hate condiments, I always garnished my hot dog with a slice of cheese stuffed in the middle. Granted, I never actually broiled those hot-dog-and-cheese-on-bread creations, but at least someone else thought it sounded like a good combination! And that super-simple "recipe" somehow made it into an actual cookbook. It's like randomly running into a friend I hadn't seen in 20 years.

I was so excited, I even took a picture:

I'm not sure why good old Cheese-Frank has taken to hanging out with a bad influence like mustard, but I was still glad to see him again. He still looks good otherwise!