Pop and I were trading budget cooking videos ideas back and forth across the campfire.  Dad was all riled up talking about revolutionizing the way people ate, the way we approached food, even the way we grow it.  Well, not really revolutionizing at all…more like seizing control of the discourse from the hands of corporate control.  He was raised by parents who had been young during the Great Depression, and he had never enjoyed the simple food his mother prepared.  He didn’t know that food was one of the joys of the earth until he joined the army and was shipped to Germany.

In Germany he became enraptured with the culinary world, with all of its lore and tradition.  Intoxicated by Berlin in the 60’s he married a husky voiced starlet from the top of the  top 20, bought a new Volkswagen and shipped the whole gang off to America.  His brush with food, with the cinema, with the ancient culinary traditions became the seed for this project wirtschaftlichkochenvideos (budget cooking videos): food  from farm to table, fabricated with the utmost care by someone whose family had performed this task for generations.

My grandfather was so parsimonious that my grandmother had $3 a week to feed a family of five.  It wasn’t until later in my father’s life, after the foix gras experiments, that he recognized the need for budget cooking videos.  An encyclopedia for folks who want to feed themselves well with very little money spent.  His idea of a budget is to have the staples on hand: rice, beans, sugar, flour, salt, butter, oil, vinegars, etc…The money spent only  for the whole chicken, for the vegetables, for the greens.

“The focus on budget cooking videos,” he would lecture us,” is the sure way to gain a following.”

Not necessarily a following, but a wave of people learning to wrest control of their diet from the grips of Corporate Food. The rising tide of obesity and the resultant cost to our food system meant that inarguably the pendulum would swing back in the other direction and food would again be prepared with integrity.  Hence projects springing up offering budget cooking videos for free.

“20 meals for 20 bucks!” my dad’s suggestion for the first series of budget cooking videos.

“Start with the chicken.  Take the breasts off, butterfly them, wrap them around asparagus and provolone, serve with rice.  Heck! Green beans and Swiss!  Roast the breastless bird and pick the meat clean for fajitas on corn tortillas.  Stew the carcass and make chicken stock to create chicken soup.”

“68 cents a pound? 2.76 for a four pound bird, 3$ more for vegetables and you have four meals,” so his energetic rant would go, “We will show folks the way to do this!”  Come check out our budget cooking videos at duckspoon.com