Great ingredients - low cost

[Fat Guy]

Miniature potato latkes on toothpicks use all cheap ingredients but aren't perceived as cheap the way, say, potato salad is.

It sounds like you're going to be doing this when citrus is abundant. You should be able to get a sack of grapefruits at Costco for cheap then. That's a good basis for a high-perceived-value dessert.

How are your molecular gastronomy skills? Sodium alginate noodles can be made from just about anything. Just had some great ones made from beets, coiled up in individual spoons . . . it doesn't get much cheaper than beets.

[JimH]

You can use a pork loin and do a roulade, it's really the perfect size and shape for the job. The you can color contrast the stuffing and use a melting cheese like mozz to hold it together.

[Shalmanese]

Some of the ideas I did for a recent dinner party show off some nice ways of unobtrusively stretching budgets:

* Salads with exotic leaves: If you can scavenge or find a good supplier, often you can get great tasty, exotic salad leaves for a steal.

* Root vegetable medleys: Just potatoes or parsnips can seem like filler but if you throw in a whole bunch of different ones, either into a stew or roasted, then it seems much more upscale with little more preparation time on your part.

* Risotto: Seems very fancy and upscale yet is almost criminally cheap because it's pretty much just rice. A small amount of high quality, expensive ingredient can be stretched very far.

* Beans: Beans are always a bit unusual and can be made to seem very sophisticated, a minted white bean puree for example but cost a few pennies if you buy them dried.

* Good Chocolate: The chocolate itself costs quite a bit but you can give people a big hit of flavour with relatively small amounts of it which makes it quite cheap.

I think the entire 7 course menu I made above came out to a food cost of $15 AUD which is about $10 - $12 USD per person yet I don't think it was noticeable that any of the dishes were visibly cheapening out.

Edited October 3, 2007 by Shalmanese (log)

[Peter the eater]

Some excellent ideas, thank you.

Baby zucchini, at our farmers' markets, in season.

Its looking like my event is in February so not too much fresh local greens. I love zukes best when they are only a few inches long, flowers attached. Maybe I should get one of those "professional chia pets" so I can get some nice sprouts going.

How are your molecular gastronomy skills?

Well, there's no sodium alginate in my pantry - or at least not in pure form. I have read and seen lots but have yet to taste or make. I love the fundamental ideas, and I must confess my undergraduate degree is biochemistry (B.Sc.Hons. Queen's '88) so I see myself as having potential. Once, I did make peanut butter in a pharmaceutical laboratory using only pressure. It was a machine for testing the hardness of a pill - if you put enough pressure on a peanut it undergoes liquefaction - the ultimate smooth!

Wal-Mart has individually frozen small sized birds that I find to be tastier than the double packaged larger ones from Tyson and one per person is perfect. And they are cheap.

Your WalMart has Cornish hens?!? And they are cheap (cheep?!?) They're $8.80/kg frozen here, and they don't look so good. Guess I better get one and try - we do a lot more pheasant and even more quail. I think I have previously posted evidence here.

You can use a pork loin and do a roulade

That is a good idea. Rolling and slicing is very attractive, like brociola or nori.

Salads with exotic leaves

Dandelions! Now there's some cheap if not free. Next February there should still be some caked to the underside of my lawnmower!

Risotto

How could one deliver risotto in bite-sized portions at a buffet? Make ahead, roll and encrust with bread (panko? wonder?) then flash-fry?

Time to go make another mess in the kitchen.

[andiesenji]

Sometimes there are cheaper alternatives that are not obvious and no one will know if you don't tell them.

If you are going to be using bacon as a flavoring - buy a box of "ends and pieces" - very cheap and what you need is the flavor, not the pretty slices. Then, of course, you have the rendered "drippings" which make the purchase even more economical.

Speaking of free deer and other game.

I have in the past been gifted with a lot of wild game simply because the hunters are married (or live with) ladies who do not want to learn how to prepare and cook game. I will do the trimming and preparing and sometimes even the basic cooking, so it can be transferred to their home oven and finished. In return I get some choice bits. When I prepare sausages, I get 1/4 of the batch for my efforts.

Everyone feels like they have gotten a good deal.

I don't do as much as I used to because some of the guys, mostly in the military, have been reassigned to other bases or otherwise moved away, but there are still three who live close by.

When I first moved up here I simply asked at a local gun store if they knew of anyone who like to hunt but needed help with the end products.

A couple or three years ago, I took some carnitas, made from the leg of a wild boar, to an eGullet potluck. The beast was shot in Mendocino county and was huge. The meat was like pork used to be, marbled with fat, red and extremely tasty. Sigh

I just noted Peter's mention of dandelions. If you buy a packed of "French dandelion" seeds, all you need to do is let some go to seed and save them each year. The leaves are long and grow more upright than the yellow-flowered common variety and you can have rotating crops in three or four pots which will keep you in dandelion greens as long as you want, except in the very hot months - they become bitter with temps over 90-95.

Edited October 4, 2007 by andiesenji (log)

[Peter the eater]

don't you mean the floor's the limit?

Oops, how did I miss that one . . . an aspic of floor sweepings? Broom soup?

[Peter the eater]

Winter squash. If you get a huge hubbard squash, the per pound price is next to nothing, and the flesh is delicious. You could make a soup (the really simple one from the Bittman/Vongerichten cookbook always gets raves) or use it to stuff pasta or just roast it.

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[Peter the eater]

In the spirit of good ingredients for little money . . .

I bought an enormous bundle of dandelion greens for 99 cents, behold:

(note: banana is for scale)

The only thing I have ever done with dandelions is mow them down. I have been reading about their virtues and culinary uses, but wow they are bitter. Are they too big and too old? Any suggestions?