#124 - Five Family Meals Around Five Dollars Each: budget-friendly, ancestral peasant food

Everybody always wants to know - is a nourishing diet an elitist, privileged ideal, inaccessible to people without a huge budget, and only for the super wealthy? In this episode we are going to share five complete meals. Each meal serves a family of five, and each complete meal can be made for about $5USD (£3.71GBP).

Balancing these inexpensive meals against the more expensive meals that can turn up in an ancestral menu is one way you can bring the overall annual food budget down. You can make all five of these menus, combined, for less than it would cost to take your family of five out one time for the cheapest option at McDonald’s - and that’s not even accounting for the life-giving, health-sustaining benefits of your nourishing meals.

Each of these menus has an option for gluten-free and dairy-free, if they aren’t already, and they can also be made ahead, prepped ahead, or even frozen or canned for absolutely speedy preparation. We’ve shared a few books rich in ideas at the end of the episode, and supporters can find our notes for this rather note-heavy episode in a download available at ancestralkitchenpodcast.com.

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What We Cover:

1. What we ate
2. Review from Heather
3. The cost of food today
4. Nine ancestral principles for cutting down a food budget
5. Happy Meal costs! The expense of eating out and Alison's shock at the cost
6. The ideas behind the food: Seasonality, Availability, Fasting or Feasting, Preference and Abundance
7. Meals 1 - 5 and cost for each, and each component
8. Alison's chicken carcass aside - should we do an entire episode on this!?
9. A few inexpensive treats and beverages
10. Books chock-full of ideas
11. Discord discussion on what we can be growing and raising vs buying and bartering
12. INCLUDED Aftershow: The kombucha experiment and extra savings!

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Resources:

1. Alison's Gluten-Free Millet Sourdough Starter
2. Episode 103 – 10 Nourishing Traditions Dishes – Cheaper Than Supermarkets!
3. Meals at the Ancestral Hearth Cookbook
4. Episode 116 – Leftovers and Scraps in a Frugal Ancestral Kitchen
5. Naturally-Fermented Staffordshire Oatcakes Recipes
6. Cheesy Pinto Bean Recipe
7. Simple Apple Crisp

Extra Recipes

1. Pressure-Canned Beans
2. One-Pot Pinto Beans and Rice
3. Pinto Bean Soup with Greens
4. Cream of Corn Soup
5. Andrea's Kombucha Recipe

Books

1. Make the Bread, Buy the Butter by Jennifer Reese
2. Twelve Months of Monastery Soups by Brother Victor-Antoine d'Avila-Latourrette
3. A Cabin Full of Food by Marie Beausoleil (Amazon link)
4. Pressure Canning for Beginners by Angie Schneider

Further Reading

1. The Nella Last diaries give an intimate, day-by-day picture into life with war-time and post-war rationing in England
2. 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff; this isn't a book about food, but it gives surprising insight into the depth of the rationing and the effect it had, and how preciously the food was used that could be had
3. Looking up Wartime Recipes produces tons of amazing and interesting results for cookbooks and websites! Grandma's Wartime Kitchen, The Homefront Cookbook, and others have intriguing and creative recipes. Similarly, looking of Great Depression books can give a glimpse into many recipes and ways of eating during extremely lean times in the US.

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