Good Cheap Food (Goodbye, old friend)

I'm going through some things.

No, not in the sense that I'm going through some things, in a bad things happenin' kind of way. 

I'm going through stuff. As in tossing things in the trash, recycling, shredding, donating things that I no longer want and/or need.

In the last few weeks, I've brought 20 pounds+ worth of paper to the UPS Store, where Iron Mountain picks up stuff that needs to get shredded. Oh, I have a home shredder, but it's never been industrial strength, and of late it overheats and stops shredding after a page and a half. So I gave up and brought those old tax returns (hello, 2000!) and other items that had some personal info on them. Or my mother's personal info on it.

My mother died in 2001, and in opening file drawers that never get opened, I found all the checks she wrote the last year of her life. I had needed them when I filed her posthumous task return, and there were plenty of them. My mother didn't have a ton of money, but she was very generous with what she did have. 

She also believed in donating regularly. 

Instead of writing an annual $120 to a charity, she sent them $10 a month. Some of her charities got $5 a month. There was also a random check for $3. I suspect this charity had sent her address labels or a pencil, and said that they needed at least three bucks to cover the cost. Knowing my mother, she would have felt guilty using the pencil to do her crossword puzzle, and sent them the money. (Me? I use those address labels, whether I donate anything or not. As long as my name is spelled correctly. I toss the ones that say "Mureen.")

Then there were five official, embossed copies of my mother's death certificate. Stocking stuffers for each of her children? It felt weird tossing them, but out they went. (I did hang on to her last driver's license. Why? God knows.)

In addition to the important paper stuff I shred, I donated a number of items to the Art Room at St. Francis House, where the artists can use old typewriter pads (Eaton's Corrasable Bond!) and Crane's résumé bond (cream and pale gray), construction paper (likely left over from craft projects done with my nieces when they were little), and an unopened package of Sharpies that I opened to make sure they weren't dried up. I also Uber'd four bags full of kitchen-ish stuff to Goodwill.

One item that I figured was unusable was an ancient cook book, the paperback edition of Good Cheap Food, by Miriam Ungerer, vintage 1974, price $1.50, which my mother gave me nearly 50 years ago. 

The pages are moldering, the spine broken. When you open it, the pages fall out.

But I sure got my mother's money's worth out of it over the years. 

That's where I got the quiche recipe that I must have made dozens of times. The cookbook, in fact, falls open to it.

I made a variation of it a few weeks ago when I had a friend over to lunch. (My variation: add roasted cherry tomatoes and shallots.)

It's also where I found my tried and true spaghetti carbonara recipe, which I've made so often I don't even need the recipe.

Another tried and true no-need-for-the-recipe recipe I found there: cannelini with tuna. 

I don't recall making many other things out of this cookbook. For the basics, I turn to The Joy of Cooking. (I used to also rely on a paperback edition of the Fannie Farmer Cook Book, but that one moldered into oblivion a few years ago. 

One thing I have made from Good Cheap is stone-broke hash, which uses canned corned beef. I hadn't made it in decades, but during the covid shutdown, I bought a can and made a desperation meal (or two) out of it. I had remembered it as pretty tasty. Not as good as my mother's scratch hash, made with the leftover corned beef from St. Patrick's Day, ground in the meat grinder that clamped on to the kitchen counter. Now that was delicious. The Good Cheap Food, version, not so much. I doubt I'll be making that one again.

As I was going through my things, Good Cheap Food fell apart in my hands, and out fell the page with a recipe for colcannon, which I had never made. 

The colcannon recipe I follow - which, in fact, I followed on St. Patrick's Day - is from a pub food cookbook my cousin MB gave me, and uses cabbage, which strikes me as more authentic than Ungerer's recipe, which uses spinach. I won't be needed it. I love the real deal, which is yummy. (Ample cream and butter help.)

The Good Cheap Food cookbook is so old and in such bad shape, that to open it is to invite an asthma attack. So I wasn't able to spend much time reading Miriam Ungerer's enjoyable, clear, and witty writing. 

Anyway, I won't say that I'll miss this cookbook. I pulled out the quiche recipe, so I've got what I need. (In truth, I know that recipe by heart, too. It's pretty simple - as are all the recipes for the wonderful, good, simple little meals in this book.) It was definitely time for it to go. Still, it was with a tiny bit of a pang that I tossed the book in my recycle bin.

Goodbye, old friend. You done me good.