Today I am thankful for some of the depression-era cooking skills I somehow picked up from my mom.
I have no recollection of actually being taught any of this. And the specific stuff I'm making isn't necessarily anything mom would recognize. But the spirit behind it? I inherited that from my mom.
We had some steak. Nice steak. And part of me wanted to just make a steak and potato dinner... but really, 2 pounds of steak doesn't feed all 7 of us if we do it that way. So instead, I cubed it up, fried it, and froze it in two roughly 1-lb packages. Adding broccoli and sauce of some kind, putting it over noodles or rice... each of those 1 lb packages will feed us a dinner.
And I took all the fat and covered it in water and simmered it. Put the broth in the fridge, so I'd be able to skim off the "yuck" and picked the meat off the fat... grabbed a little dab of this, a little dab of that... and we had beef stew for lunch today.
So that is three meals from one cut of steak... a lunch and two dinners.
That is something my mom would have done. And I am grateful for having had the chance to absorb that make-do spirit. Even if it means that I am never able to make the same meal twice... because every meal I make seems to be a version of 'how can I make the most of what we have right now?'
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