I think not. That link is to a story titled 'Delicious, Nutritious, Meal on a Shoestring. Delicious it certainly appears to be. Nutritious is quite likely. But their shoestring must be made of spun gold.
The idea was a three course meal for four people on a 'slim' forty dollar budget.
The winter salad includes real maple syrup, a cup of dried cherries, and a cup of pecans, and according to their cost estimations feeds 12 people 1 cup of salad for just over 12 dollars.
The main course is four skinless salmon filets, marinated, broiled, then sprinkled with chopped walnuts.
The lemon broccoli with garlic looks affordable, providing the broccoli is on sale.
The brownie recipe looks rich, moist, decadently delicious and far too expensive- it supposedly makes 24 brownies for just over 11 dollars, but the cost analysis left out the cost of the butter (over a cup), eggs, sugars, flour.
Yes, they are getting ripped in the comments for calling this cooking 'on a shoestring.' Their lone defender creates a false dichotomy, saying that hey, yeah, calling this 'on a shoestring' was an exaggeration, but it's so much better "than high interest loans from credit card companies, text messaging, high speed internet" and so much healthier than McDonald's or Taco Bell.
My husband calls this the cocaine vs heroine argument. It's not an either/or choice here. You don't have to fix this forty dollar meal OR eat fast food, nor do you have to fix this forty dollar meal OR text message people. That doesn't even make sense.
You can make a nice green salad. But instead of this:
INGREDIENTS:
1/4 cup reduced-fat mayonnaise
1/4 cup maple syrup
3 tablespoons white wine vinegar
2 tablespoons minced shallot
2 teaspoons sugar
1/2 cup canola oil
2 packages (5 ounces each) spring mix salad greens (for five dollars)
2 medium tart apples, thinly sliced
1 cup dried cherries
1 cup pecan halves
1/4 cup thinly sliced red onion
You can buy or make a cheaper salad dressing, use red leaf or green leaf lettuce (1.69 a pound at one grocery store here), skip the cherries and pecans, use sunflower seeds if you must have nuts, add some slivers of fennel (a dollar a bulb at my grocery store this week), toss in some home grown lentil sprouts, and you've got a tasty salad for 12 people for about 3.00 instead of 12.
Instead of walnut ginger salmon at 6.00 a pound (or more), have broiled chicken breasts (boneless skinless breasts and thighs are about 2.00 a pound at Aldi's).
Better yet, have something like a curry over rice, or take a bunch of root vegetables, winter squash, and potatoes, toss them with oil and seasonings, roast in a single layer in a pan in a hot oven, and toss with two seasoned, marinated chicken breasts cooked and diced into bite sized pieces.
I'd love to see the grocery and eating out bills for somebody who thinks this forty dollar meal is a shoestring dinner.
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A lot of their advertisers are restaurants and makers of prepared foods, so they appease them by running stories about "cheap" meals that are really quite expensive and require you to find unusual ingredients. The people who actually try the recipes will find that they end up spending even more than the estimate because they use a small part of what they purchased (for example, the white wine vinegar). The people who are thinking they really should be more frugal and cook at home will try this and decide that eating at restaurants was better.
ReplyDeleteI used to work at a magazine, and it really is that blatant. We would talk amongst ourselves about how useless a product was yet write glowing articles about it. Advertisers who made that product paid a premium for ads placed adjacent to the article.