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Sue McCrory & Anastacia Marx de Salcedo

Thanks to all of you who came out for last Wednesday’s Slow Food on No Dough potluck and author talk! We loved meeting you, tasting your dishes and exchanging tips on eating well on a budget. (And a second apology to those who couldn’t make the rescheduled event; we hope you had good company with whom to share your offering and promise that next time we’ll talk ourselves down from weather mass hysteria.)

Surveying the overladen tables, it was clear that vegetables and legumes are the go-to categories for penny-pinching gourmets (for more on this, read Anastacia’s post next Tuesday). Contributions ranged from crunchy kale chips, $0.05 per serving (homegrown! hard to get any cheaper!) and elaborate salads with chunks of spicy roasted sweet potato, $0.50 per serving, to that good ole Latin staple, rice ‘n’ beans, $0.50 (I won’t tell anyone you sacrilegiously baked it, Brian :-)) and a watermelon and feta salad, $0.75, served in the shell (from Jeff Potter, author of the forthcoming Cooking for Geeks). Attendees and our distinguished panel of judges were badgered into trying everything and then having seconds to select the *drumroll*…

SLOW FOOD ON NO DOUGH CONTEST WINNERS!
(Link to all the winning recipes HERE)

Best Dish Made With Odd Animal Parts
Savory Rice Crepes With Roast Beef by Leisha, $2 per person
(Note: There are those of you who might question our categorization of roast beef as an odd animal part. In fact, it was the only animal part that appeared at the potluck! For some thoughts on that, see next Tuesday’s post.)

Best Dish to Serve Your Brother’s New Vegan Girlfriend (TIE)
White Bean Salad With (Local) Tomato Vinaigrette by Jana Pickard-Richardson, $0.81 per serving
Shanta’s Eggplant Biryani by Nirmal Daniere, $2.00 per serving

Best Dish to Have on Hand During a Three-Day Power Outage (TIE)
Tapenade by Danielle Mollet, $0.50 per serving
Beets With Balsamic Vinegar by Zac Miller, $2.00 per serving

Best Dish With Which to Trick Recalcitrant Children Into Eating Something Healthy (TIE)
Chocolate Fudge Hummus by Judy Kales, $0.40 per serving
Tortilla Española by Liz Canella, $1.00 per serving (as main dish)

Best Dish Using Excessive Amounts of C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁
Chocolate Fudge Hummus by Judy Kales, $0.40 per serving

Cheapest Dish (That’s Still Edible)
Kale Chips by Aravinda Ananda, $0.05 per serving (using kale from her garden!)

The meal was followed by a talk by Amy McCoy, blogger and author of Poor Girl Gourmet Cookbook: Eat in Style on a Bare-bones Budget. She started by lobbing heirloom lettuce, cucumber and basil seedlings and Brockton bean seeds to the audience as a way to emphasize the importance of a garden to her low-cost, high caliber food strategy. Then she shared her blog-to-book story. Newly unemployed after the Great Recession extirpated her television-producing job, Amy had to apply a tourniquet to the family’s grocery spending, but didn’t want to resort to 101 Ways to Ramenize Your Life and that old childhood standby, Hamburger Helper. To keep sane (unemployment can be a little difficult on the ego), she started a blog documenting her daily dinners—and ended up with a book contract! The soft-cover tome is extremely accessible, written in conversational style—I already feel like I know you, JR—and bursting with Amy’s gorgeous photos. So, wouldn’t a nice, icy watermelon-lime granita, $1.25 per serving, be good about now? Just turn to p. 160… (Ahem! That was a hint!)

We’ve already had requests to rachet it up a notch with a potluck featuring slow, cheap and E-A-S-Y dishes (maybe for fall?). Hope to see you all there!