
A free cookbook for people living on $4/day - sillysaurus3
http://www.leannebrown.ca/cookbooks/
======
Fundlab
I think it all comes down to what type of meal recipes or what one already has
in stock.

Do u already have complementary cooking resources; powder, garlic, oil etc?
These often overlooked in a buck a day meals.

One thing with western dishes is the attempt to give food an aesthetic appeal.
In places where people live on a dollar a day, they tend to be more concerned
with getting full and not the appealing or garnished outlook of food.

Also, in places like Africa,food is stored! I cant emphasize this more. A
peanut soup or chicken soup could last a span of 3 days to a week. It cab be
served with rice, bread, or other dough meals. After taking servings, the soup
is warmed and placed back in the fridge and can be eaten another day. This to
me is what frugal cooking is. It is easier to tweak frugal eating this way
than shopping fresh groceries every other day.

NB: Pardon my incoherence :)

~~~
keithpeter
I'm cooking for myself all next next week, not for the usual collection of
hungry people, so I shall be making a large pot of vegetable stew. Might try
pot of peanut soup as well! Oatmeal/porridge for breakfast as I have that a
lot anyway.

I think the idea of providing storage times in the fridge is a good one.

~~~
keithpeter
Phase one: ratatouille

Bought two large aubergines (egg plants) and four courgettes (zuchinis?) and
three red peppers, a couple of cans of tomatoes and a can of kidney beans from
local corner shop[1]. Cost less than 4 pounds sterling.

Cut and salted the aubergines for 20 minutes and rinsed the bitter liquid.
Chopped the courgettes and peppers. Put in large oven dish with four table
spoons (60ml) of olive oil. Roasted on gas mark 8 (230C, 450F [1]) for 45 min,
stirring once.

Added canned tomatoes and beans and a couple of garlic cloves and cooked for a
further 30 min at gas mark 6 (200C, 400F).

5 meals...

1\. Served a small portion with rice (cooked in my one button rice cooker).
Rest allowed to cool and stored in fridge. Rice is bought in 10Kg bags from
local shop for Pounds 7.50

2\. A small serving cold on fresh thick white toast for breakfast

3\. Fry onion in heavy frying pan and add ready made Rogan Josh sauce from the
corner shop. Add substantial serving of the ratatouille. Served with rice with
Tumeric/Haldi and naans from the local nan man (1 pound for four naans fresh
cooked at local street side bakery). Yoghurt and cucumber (50p per half)
dressing.

4\. Pasta bake: boil old leftover pastas from various jars. Drain. Stir in
100g (4oz) of cheap grated cheddar cheese (£3.50 for 750g from local
supermarket). Spoon in ratatouille from fridge into base of oven dish. Top
with the pasta and cheese mixture. Serve with cheap Italian wine (5 pounds and
let it breathe)

5\. Liquid reserved from the ratatouille plus a few courgettes used in final
stages of stir fry of cabbage and mushrooms (50p and 1 pound from local
supermarket). Served with rice.

Next: peanut soup but I'm looking for a non-chi-chi recipe. Another local shop
oriented to African Caribbean community sells yam and cassava as well as
tapioca. They have harissa as well, but I find that hard to digest (burns
twice &c).

[1]
[http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/spicy_lentils_recipe.html](http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/spicy_lentils_recipe.html)

[2]
[http://www.godecookery.com/goderec/equiv.htm](http://www.godecookery.com/goderec/equiv.htm)

------
qwerta
On $4/day you should avoid being vegetarian, get cheap food with as many
calories as possible. Better value for money.

EDIT: I get lot of down votes, so just to clarify:

I am objecting to being _exclusively_ vegetarian. People on $4/day have other
problems. I am not saying you should buy junk food. There is lot of reasonable
quality meat, for example fish if you live near sea. Also vegs such as rice or
potatoes are cheap and high on energy

~~~
steveridout
Is this true? I was always under the impression that meat was considerably
more expensive than basic vegetarian food. I know some vegetables can be
expensive but I'm pretty sure cereals and pulses are cheaper than any meat.

~~~
qwerta
I live in Europe, so I can not really say for US. For 1 burger you need like 4
pounds of vegs, so the meat is cheaper here.

~~~
fred_durst
I think there might be a misunderstanding about a typical vegetarian or vegan
diet. Do you believe that most vegetarians and vegans eat primarily vegetables
like broccoli and cabbage? Myself and others I know tend to eat a large amount
of beans, grains and root vegetables as this is typically necessary to get the
required daily amounts of protein and calories.

~~~
lsdafjklsd
I'm vegan and I eat super cheap. Lentils / black beans in a soup or burrito
gets you very far. My luxury meal items are fresh bread or tortillas.

------
AdmiralAsshat
Nice looking book so far.

I think a "preservation" section might be useful, however, advising how long
things tend to keep so that people can have a better idea of what stuff can
stay in the pantry for weeks and what stuff should be devoured quickly. One of
the primary pitfalls of my spending habits is buying fresh produce that I end
up throwing out because I don't eat enough salad to go through the entire box
of spring mix before it starts to wilt.

------
sillysaurus3
I cross-posted this from Reddit (where it originally blew up) figuring that a
bunch of us might benefit from the recipes. I sure did; they're amazing. But
now I'm wondering if I should've let the author submit it instead, so that she
could be here to answer questions or get feedback immediately (like "you
should make the PDF pay-what-you-want because I'm throwing money at my monitor
and it's not reaching your wallet").

Would anyone send her a tweet that her book's being featured on HN?
[https://twitter.com/leelb](https://twitter.com/leelb) Thanks!

EDIT: And thank you to the mods for moving this comment chain to the bottom!
Wish I could've done it myself. I hesitated to even write this comment since
it was offtopic and didn't want it to become the top one, but letting her know
her book was on HN seemed important.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Why not do it yourself?

~~~
sillysaurus3
I don't have an account since it'd probably just stagnate. I guess I could
create a throwaway, but I have no idea how twitter works or whether she'd even
get a tweet from a brand new account (spam prevention). Figured it's better to
leave it to someone who knows what they're doing.

------
riffraff
from a quick skim this looks nicely done. The only thing that missing is <time
required> next to price per serving/total.

Maybe you can make pierogi for .2$ apiece, but especially if you're not
experienced it will take you hours, so if time is part of the equation they
become vastly more expensive than, say, green chile & cheese quesadillas.

~~~
14113
I think this is very important for the market they're targeting as well
(people on food stamps). An often overlooked aspect of poverty is how _time
consuming_ it is. Instead of clocking off work at 5, going home, cooking and
relaxing, you've got to work multiple jobs, leaving far less time to cook, and
far less incentive to cook well. This leads to a downward spiral of
overspending on faster to prepare, but more expensive food (e.g. fast food,
ready meals), and thus a relative loss of income.

~~~
VLM
That is a very popular and heavily promoted belief for cultural reasons. And
of course people like that DO exist. None the less, the "big news release"
late last week / early this week was 1 in 5 American households have no one
living in the household who is currently employed. At all. And labor force
participation rates as a percentage of population, and adult labor force
population, continue to crash from a peak a long time ago. Of the households
where at least someone in them is employed, not all have multiple full time
jobs etc. And at the higher end I can afford the leisure time / I enjoy
cooking to my specifications and tastes. So figure an absolute minimum of 1/2
the population could participate in slow cheap cooking, which is a large
target market.

There are people in a hurry. There is also a statistically provable much
larger group who given the choice of starvation or homemade bread from scratch
clearly have the time and motivation, although maybe not skills, to make
homemade bread from scratch. They'd be better off eating a salad anyway, but
you get the idea.

It is highly likely that the two groups need two cookbooks.

Someone poor and in a hurry needs to buy a $10 slow cooker, that is something
I can say from experience.

~~~
panzagl
This cookbook seems ideal for someone on retirement or disability benefits.

------
pitzips
So awesome! Would love for there to be an option to pay what you want for the
PDF. I wouldn't mind giving a couple bucks if you offered the options.

------
lamby
Congratulations on shipping!

This reminds me a lot of budgetbytes.com (in particular the $X total,
$Y/serving nomenclature), alas without my favourite feature of pictures
_throughout_ the cooking process.

I found those extremely valuable by removing the vestigal risk at trying a
particular recipe, as well as inspiring confidence throughout the process and
finally in identifying things I shouldn't attempt yet.

------
dmart
Perhaps not your intended audience, but as a college student with close-to-
zero cooking ability, this looks amazing.

~~~
VLM
I would second this obvious suggestion to merely re-market to create something
like a "first cookbook"

As a criticism (and a minor one) decades ago I worked thru school at a retail
food store and WIC program women would come in with a long list of very
specific required products. I'm told this program still exists. So pregnant
poor women must buy precisely 2 pounds of dried navy beans per week. Not 3
pounds, not lima beans, not canned, 2 pounds dried navy beans per week. Ditto
cheeses and rice and specific canned fruit juice for vitamin C. My point with
this anecdote is coordination with that program might help guide further
recipes in the book, assuming it hasn't already been done to maximal ability.
Perhaps similar coordination with food banks to match whats typically donated
with recipe ingredient lists.

A non-coincidental observation I can make is the cookbook is highly non-paleo
and that correlates with poor people who aren't literally starving tend toward
obesity. So a bit more salad and a bit less bread products might be a healthy
idea. A stir fry never killed anyone and they don't cost much of anything
unless you put fancy stuff in. More recipes like the carmelized bananas and
less like the cookies. Less pizza more veggies. Less noodles more salad.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I would second this obvious suggestion to merely re-market to create
> something like a "first cookbook"

On the same site the author has a vegetarian cookbook targeted at people
"people just becoming comfortable in their own kitchens".

[http://www.leannebrown.ca/cookbooks/](http://www.leannebrown.ca/cookbooks/)

~~~
VLM
The other book also contains good recipes.

However, some (most?) of the recipes in the first veg cookbook are both
healthier and probably cheaper than some of the recipes in the poverty
cookbook. (some are the same, at first glance)

And re categorizing the other way, aside from offending vegetarians, in a
first cookbook, it wouldn't hurt to transplant the roast chicken from the
poverty book into the first cookbook. Other than cross contamination its
pretty hard to screw up a roasted chicken, so its a good place for kitchen
noobs to start.

On a small scale, all appears awesome, only on a larger scale is it debatable
exactly which recipe belongs in which book and how much of each kind of dish
belongs in each book. An editor-class of problem more than an author-class of
problem. I can find no author-class problems to complain about, so far, which
is impressive.

------
001sky
I would simply caution that $4/day is an on-spec ingredient pricing[0] and
does not account for actual cost to make these meals. A trained cook in a
professional kitchen could do it, given the acess to storage and ability to
re-use ingredients via a well-structured menu. But the paid-for overhead would
be masking a variety of costs that weigh heavy on the target audience.

> Frequent re-supply and cost-effective quality control of ingredients

> Zero-cost re-application and limited spoilage of non-consumed minium
> purhcase portions

> Abundant prep space, intermediate storage/refrigeration, and sanitary
> control

===============

Quickly glancing this book, Kale Salad on p 16

Hidden costs: Most of the nutritional of this salad comes from dried bread
(1/2 loaf), leaving (1/2 loaf) in the pantry. Likewise, Fresh parmesean
($10/lb+up), anchovies ($2/tin), and dijon mustard ($3/per) leave most of
their value in the pantry as well.

Hidden Nutrition: Most of the calories for the salad come from the bread, not
the kale. Meanwhile, a 15% protein diet needs ~70-80g protein a day/person[4].
The only material protein in this "dinner" salad is 1 egg yolk, and 1 anchovie
split by 2x people. That is 3-4g of protein per head, when a typical dinner
should have ~30g (off by an order of magnitude). Twice as much protein
actually hides in the cheese garnish. But to increase the protein to
reasonable levels, Its tempting to double or tripple portion the cheese...thus
driving up the food cost of the recipe. 4 oz of fresh-grated parmesan is at
least $2.50. That would give you 25g protein/head out of the meal, but the
cost for the salad would be $8 for 2x portions, blowing the daily budget in
just one meal.

In any event, this is an increasingly interesting area for cooks and food
authors[3].

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-Yields-Purchasing-
Professiona...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-Yields-Purchasing-
Professional/dp/111812250X)

[1] Assume 2000 kcal/day, 15%=300kcal. 80g protein is 320kcal, 70g is 280.

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Monroe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Monroe)

~~~
thebooktocome
I'm inclined to agree with you, but various hyperboles in your comment make it
harder to do so. Some points you make are made by the author in the
introduction, which also reduces my confidence in your criticisms.

p.5, emphasis added:

> This isn’t a typical budget cookbook, _nor is it a nutritional guide_ , it’s
> a collection of recipes that happen to be inexpensive. Pricy ingredients are
> wonderful, but so are cheap ones—in fact most of our favorite foods can be
> had for pennies—the raw ingredients don’t cost much. _Your time and skill
> add the value._

p. 9, emphasis added:

> In order to encourage fruit and vegetable consumption, _the recipes do not
> feature large amounts of meat._ Many recipe collections created for the
> American audience use meat as the central feature of most meals. My recipes
> celebrate the vegetables rather than the meat.

The $4/day figure is from SNAP, and so only represents food costs anyway --
yes, obviously labor costs matter too, but SNAP isn't very fungible. Few of
the recipes really require much in the way of equipment or space. It's safe to
assume that the typical American family in poverty has a refrigerator, stove,
and microwave [0].

Regarding your analysis of kale salad, I'm unclear why you imply the value of
the other half of the loaf of bread, the rest of the cheese, and etc., are
lost. The author addresses minimum buying requirements by recommending that
people amortize the cost of expensive ingredients. (All of the expensive
ingredients in this particular recipe remain unspoiled for months, and in
particular the cheese has an exceptionally graceful failure mode.) On a
different note, the protein RDA for an adult male (female) is 56g (46g), not
70-80g [1].

You really lost me when you tried to double or triple the cheese. Have you
ever tried to eat 4 oz of parm at once? Gross.

To recap, I think it's easy to inflate the "actual cost" of any meal when one
fails to amortize costs (of all sorts) and assume unused ingredients are never
eaten. I feel that the cookbook represents a meaningful and feasible
improvement in the average quality of the American diet in general.

[0] [http://www.census.gov/hhes/well-
being/publications/extended-...](http://www.census.gov/hhes/well-
being/publications/extended-11.html)

[1]
[http://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/everyone/basics/protein.html](http://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/everyone/basics/protein.html)

~~~
001sky
This is a lot of pedantic "correction". My basic point remains

(1) If I source the ingredients to "kale salad" at retail, it doesn't make the
budget.

(2) If I eat 1/2 of it for dinner, its not a meal.

You can argue all you want about caveats, but people in the market for $4/day
food are going to be reading for things at face value. I understand the market
is not people like me--but then again, I've actually food-costed somewhat
extenstively. One of the lessons of that exercise is that making a
nuturtionally unsound "meal" is trivial and doing it "cheap" is even moreso.
Brushing aside the major constraints of the exercise is missing the point.

The comment about parmesean is also telling. Retail for fresh parmsean--which
I assume is $10--is more realistically higher. And 4 oz split 2 ways is
2oz/head. While you might "gag" at this, its not uncommon for a risotto finish
to be 1/oz a person. And decent product is quite fine to eat 'straight', its
quite normal actually. Parm is actually a generous assumption here because its
protein density is so high per/oz. But that is precisely why it is a costly
ingredient.

Lastly, pantry items are not "lost"\--another mis-understanding. The issue is
that they have spoilage and a cost-of carry that is not insignificant. A pro-
kitchen can cost these out as overhead. A consumer kitchen on a real budget
needs to pony up the working capital, and then needs to keep a speadsheet of
inventory to re-use the ingredients. EG, we have 3/4 of a anchovies pack and 1
egg white now in the fridge...where does that go? In a resturaunt it will get
used with 100% certainty...and most trained chefs will easily find a way
manage that. Most people trying to slog out $4/day migh not have a plan for
what to do with "pantry leftovers" in the same way. This is quite common
affliction for people who don't cook regularly--eg college students, people
with irregular schedules--etc. This is another reason why many avoid "scratch"
cooking altogether as a strategy to "save money", because of food wastage
issues.

Lastly, fresh ingredients are in fact quite expensive. How many calories are
in an 8oz container of mushrooms? 100? for $2? A jar of Pickles? A $4/day book
needs to average 500 calories per dollar. Whilst this is easy with starch, and
with flour/bread, its not so easy with other types of "fresh food". Proteins
and decent vegetables in particular.

Lastly, in any kind of urban environment this is doubly so. Outside of
chinatown or the mission, even at farmers markets, the prices for fresh foods
are typically marked up quite a bit more than preserved foods. Again, this
issue is not faced by a resturaunt cook, but it is faced by the home cook who
has to pay transit/taxi or time to go shopping to source ingredients in a way
which makes efficient use of working capital.

None of this is personally directed at the author--it's more the nature of
this exercise is that many published works in this class take certain amounts
of privledge for granted.

~~~
thebooktocome
> (1) If I source the ingredients to "kale salad" at retail, it doesn't make
> the budget.

This isn't actually a point you made. You never questioned the author's
pricing scheme (which would have been a good point, by the way -- her
methodology is n=4).

> (2) If I eat 1/2 of it for dinner, its [sic] not a meal.

It is completely common for people to eat salads of this size and this protein
content (before doubling or trebling the cheese) as a meal that is also a part
of a healthy diet.

I'm not really sure what to make of the rest of your comments. There's some
good points here somewhere...?

~~~
001sky
Eating a dinner with (lets call it) 8g of protein leaves you to source (lest
call it 60/per day) 52g of protein in breakfast and dinner.

Lets say our bunhc of kale is $3, bread $4 other stuff is "free". This leaves
us with $7/2=$3.50 food cost. So we get about $1 to split for extra stuff for
lunch. We can easily make egg/toast for breakfast, for $.50 cents (egg and a
tbsp of jam), and get 5g protein. So now, we need to eat our lunch: 1/3 loaf
of bread, 3/4 jar of sardines, and some mustard. Mix in the olive oil and its
a reasonable amount of food. But there is only 15g of protein /per 100g in
preserved anchovies. So, lunch plus breakfast is ~20g and 1/2 salad is 8g,
total of 28... In other words, you are missing your protein intake by 50%. So,
the price for eating kale salad while sticking to $4/day--even with generous
assumptions--is that the rest of your meals need to make up for it. This is
only realistic with a certain level of culinary sophistication. The type of
basic re-purposing of ingredients illustrated above is much more likely in
reality. And the tradeoffs there are you have to stomach a sandwich that some
may condsider an aquited taste (although with 1/2 a lemon and some parsely not
so bad) for lunch. But the real issue is scalability ans sustainability: over
time missing 30g protein a day...is no problem for one day...but it is a
problem as a lifestyle.

If you have the skills/education and priveledges needed to access cost-
effective fresh ingredients, whilst maintaining an active pantry...and/or you
are the type of person to do spreadsheets of food cost...life isn't so
hard...but one is assuming away many of the difficulties that face the $4/day
folks on food-stamps, IMHO.

------
mryingster
These are amazing looking cookbooks! I love the layout and photography. I am
going to have to try a couple recipes! Congratulations on publishing!

------
mikegillman
Thank you for this. It is very helpful to think of all the combinations I can
make cheaply or quickly, with only a few ingredients. Reminds me that we don't
need to go overboard to make something tasty.

------
rtfgj
4$ is expensive.

I eat only white bread and cheese. Sometimes with a tomato. Those are the only
things that parents buy. (Also meats but i'm vegetarian).

Potatoes are good and cheap (0.3$ per kg), but:

\- I won't eat anything that I touched with bare hands, so I would have to buy
some single-use gloves.

\- Right now I don't have my own pot. And I'm saving for a phone so I don't
want to spend 10$.

\- It takes more than hour to prepare them.

I recently added multivitamin tablets to diet. Almost all vitamins, for 0.1$
per day.

~~~
illegalsmile
what? i'm having a hard time even understanding what's going on here. there's
no logic behind not eating anything that you touched with your own hands,
doubly so when they're to be cooked. you need your own pot to boil water in?
potatoes take some time but not an hour. multivitamins aren't a replacement
for a poor diet.

------
soggypopsicle
This looks really good. I'm currently eating for 5-6$ a day and am vegan so
I'm looking forward to trying this out.

------
merrua
I came across this site years ago
([http://www.hillbillyhousewife.com/](http://www.hillbillyhousewife.com/)) and
it serves the same group. Easy recipes, as low cost as possible to feed
familes.

------
tetristhemovie
This is useful, but a good portion of these recipes aren't useable in an
office environment. Curious if anyone has something similar, but where are you
limited to, at most, a microwave and/or toaster oven.

~~~
illegalsmile
making a large quantity of burritos at once can be inexpensive, last a long
time and they're easy to heat up in the microwave. salads are easy to make at
the office as are sandwiches. most leftovers from home can be brought in. i
guess i've never seen the office as a place to get your cook on.

------
ctdonath
Nicely done. A buck a plate is entirely doable, but there's been a lack of
resources convincing people of it.

...even has a recipe for Poutine (a defining Canadian appetizer)!

~~~
mrcharles
Poutine is a meal.

------
jstalin
Nutritional info would be helpful.

------
Avshalom
... although telling people to caramelize onions as part of a snack is some
kind of evil.

------
frigg
I get a 403 on Good and Cheap pdf.

~~~
joebo
Try this one:
[https://googledrive.com/host/0Bxd6wdCBD_2tdUdtM0d4WTJmclU/be...](https://googledrive.com/host/0Bxd6wdCBD_2tdUdtM0d4WTJmclU/beyond-
rice-and-beans-small.pdf)

It's what's shown on the mailing list signup

~~~
frigg
Thanks

------
tribaal
That's a very good idea!

