People used to be easily amused. A ride on a painted horse in a circle could’ve been a high point of some Midwestern kid’s year. The sights, the sounds, the smells of carnival rides became the cherished memories people carried through their lives. Even I remember when a carousel ride wasn’t lame, but, of course, I am much older than my physical age.
Videos of a 93-year-old lady cooking Great Depression-era meals are making multiple rounds on the Internet. While I liked the videos, I thought to myself: what do you people eat that makes these meals look like poor man’s food to you? I watched a few and didn’t see anything that I wouldn’t normally cook and eat on a regular non-depression day. Some of my favorite foods are simple, few-ingredient recipes that are easy to cook and hard to screw up. Low cost comes as a bonus, not a goal. Are XO Burgers or Greg’s Fried Chicken supposed to be Depression foods? Certainly not! Yet I bet they cost less than 2 dollars per serving. Here is another recipe that doesn’t cost a lot and is easy to cook:
Ingredients:
meat (beef, pork, if chicken – use dark meat)
potatoes
tomato paste
cabbage (optional)
salt,pepper,bay leaf
Pour a little bit of oil (olive or not) into your dutch oven or a heavy pot. Cut some onions (I used 1.5 medium onions) and saute them on a medium-low heat until they are soft and brown(ish) for about 20 minutes. In the meantime, cut your meat in a bite-size chunks. You don’t want them to be too big (you may tend to overestimate your “bite-size” and make your meat too big to fit in your mouth), nor do you want to cut it too small (you won’t be able to taste your meat). When onions are ready, move them to one side of the pot and raise the heat to medium or little higher. In the free space, brown your meat in batches, keeping an eye on the onions and not letting them burn. Do not dump all the meat at once, it will not brown properly, instead releasing unsightly liquid. When the first batch is browned, mix it with onions, move to the side and proceed with other batches as necessary. Add salt, pepper and bay leaf. You could brown your meat in a separate skillet, but remember that dishes don’t wash themselves. Now add cubed potatoes and mix it all up. Skip the next step if you were born and/or raised in America. Add about half of a medium cabbage, sliced. Americans, get back on board here. Add 1 tablespoon of tomato paste. You can also use salsa if you wish. Lower the heat, cover and cook until potatoes (and cabbage) get soft, mixing periodically. If you notice that your food is burning on the bottom, add a little water. That’s it. Delicious meal in no time and for almost no money.
Remember: a pound of hot dogs costs more than a pound of chicken. You don’t need to be on food stamps to start eating delicious cheap meals. Of course when you “claim your check now” (actual advertisement from my Yahoo Messenger is on the left) you can go back to eating lobster, until then – stop eating crap.
Readers of this blog submitted far better captions than the underwhelming A/C advertisement from the company which is famous for annoying the radio listeners with various renditions of its jingle. I may not be an expert on puns but if you used “hot wife-hot wife” combination, doesn’t it follow that your wife will be less hot when you fix the A/C and it’s in your best interest to keep the A/C not working or you would have to go back to seeing you plain ol’ nothot wife? By the way, the caption contest is open for another week.
I saw this sign yesterday:
I wonder who is the ad-wizard who came up with this one? At the time when “unusual banking” already helped you lose your job, your house, your savings and pension, maybe some usual banking is in order now? Like the kind the doesn’t bankrupt the country. Just an idea.
Lastly, things like this never get old (sorry for the quality, I recorded this from my TV screen):
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebqvm9Nvv90
Update: I forgot that I had this photo of a t-shirt in the window of a local religious-supply store:
Here we see the Lord doing push-ups in his own gym with the cross representing “the sin of the world” on his back. The caption “bench press this” is confusing unless the t-shirt is hanging upside-down, then the Lord would be lying on the cross and bench-pressing the rock. I am just saying: Lord would know the difference between the push-up and bench-press, that’s all.
This recipe is really easy and results in a spread or a dip, name it as you wish. Eggplant is delicious and good for you in a variety of ways including weight loss:
In other words, if you stay with the eggplant diet you will finally be able to attain that figure you were dreaming about, all the while consuming tasty eggplant recipes.
This recipe contains 2 eggplants, dill, garlic and mayonnaise – if you don’t like these ingredients separately or in combination, please move along.
Remove green ends from the eggplants and place them in a pot of boiling salted water.
Sometime during the cooking process try to turn the eggplants over, they will resist and try to flip back, one of you will eventually win, hopefully not the eggplant. You may want to use the lid for that purpose. Check periodically,when a toothpick goes through the eggplant without much effort, they are done. Time depends on the size and shape of your eggplant (if you know what I mean) but definitely over 20 minutes. Just keep checking. Remove from the pot. The next step is to press the eggplant. Place a cooling rack into the sink. Cut multiple slits into the skin of the eggplant lengthwise.
You need some weight to extract as much moisture out of the eggplant as you can. One possible way to do it is to place a cutting board on top of the eggplant and weigh it down with a pot of water.
Two hours later the eggplant should look fairly flat.
I use the meat grinder to chop the eggplant, you can use the food processor, just don’t pulverize it, you are not making toothpaste, it should retain texture. Add plenty of chopped dill, a little mayonnaise and as much garlic as you deem appropriate. Some salt and pepper to taste.
The final product looks like this and can be consumed with crackers or bread, in sandwiches, or on its own.
Warning: In case of extreme weight loss please discontinue.
Recent post by Scott Adams described his vision for the future of public transportation in the new economy.
Suppose the government enacted laws that made it legal for anyone to be a taxi driver in his own car without a special taxi license. And suppose the income was non-taxable. The result would be cheap taxis and high availability. Every time you wanted to run an errand, and had an extra minute, you could choose to pick up a rider and cut your own driving expense in half. Technology will make it easy to match amateur taxi drivers with riders. And the market would keep prices low.
This is very similar to the system that existed for years (and still alive an well) in the USSR and countries that followed it. In addition to pretty well developed system of public transportation and state-owned taxis, a person could just stand on the street, raise a hand and flag down a private car. Both sides benefited equally: a passenger received a semic0mfortable ride for a price comparable to a cab (general price/distance ratio was common knowledge) and a driver made some extra money without making any extra effort. Some people liked it so much that they made it into a part-time job. Others just picked up passengers on the way home or wherever.
Imagine yourself standing somewhere on the Lenin Street (each city had one of these), you raise your hand and soon one of these beauties stops to pick you up:
Soviet Union had its own “Big 3”: GAZ, AutoVAZ, and AZLK; ZAZ in Ukraine produced some of the ugliest and the most unreliable even by the Soviet standards vehicles. Due to the shortage of cars and years-long waiting lists people were happy to get anything with wheels. Sometimes, when at the end of the month autoworkers were rushing to fulfil quotas so they can get their bonus, a lucky buyer would find a bucket of uninstalled parts inside his new vehicle. Despite these cars being 20-30 behind the rest of the automotive world when they came off assembly line, many of them are still on the road closing in on 40 years. Soviet people invented ingenious ways of keeping them going and they turned out relatively easy to fix and maintain.
Remember: a pound of hot dogs costs more than a pound of chicken. You don’t need to be on food stamps to start eating delicious cheap meals. Of course when you “claim your check now” (actual advertisement from my Yahoo Messenger is on the left) you can go back to eating lobster, until then – stop eating crap.
Here we see the Lord doing push-ups in his own gym with the cross representing “the sin of the world” on his back. The caption “bench press this” is confusing unless the t-shirt is hanging upside-down, then the Lord would be lying on the cross and bench-pressing the rock. I am just saying: Lord would know the difference between the push-up and bench-press, that’s all.
