When They instructed me that this week’s restaurant column should dwell on the theme of “Living With Less,” I thought back on the years I spent living under austerity measures — two decades and counting! — and came to an unavoidable conclusion: when you’re cash-strapped, restaurant meals that don’t come out of a vendor’s cart are few and far between, and even a $3 tube-steak seems out of bounds when you can get a dozen sawdust-and-cartilage no-name weiners from the grocery store for less. Then there’s the leftover cooking water (“hot dog broth” to some), which can be repurposed for any number of dishes you would only eat if you had no other recourse. But I digress.

While my lucky parents spent part of their childhoods drinking powdered milk and eating bacon-dripping sandwiches, our more global world connects us to the impoverished eating traditions and cheap ingredients of cultures that have had millennia of practice at subsisting on next to nothing. These lessons formed much of my early cooking education, itself a precipitate of bohemian tendencies and scanty income.

I naturally gravitated toward vegetarian cooking because onions, dried beans, and rice were cheap and because there were plenty of Indian, Chinese, and Central and South American inspirations to create the impression of variety. And though I’m a full-blown omnivore again, the habits of my woodshedding days have lingered and deepened, largely because I’m a shitty meal-planner. Odds and ends accumulate in my fridge, often neglected until they threaten to change from solid to liquid, now stand a fighting chance of actually being consumed thanks to a few handy rules of them I humbly offer here for your edification and/or amusement.

Think Locally, Shop Ethnically

As noted, various eating cultures offer many pointers on creating cheap meals, and it’s no less true that ethnic grocery stores, in addition to supplying the ingredients you need to make ethnic dishes, are cheap sources of quality produce, dried spices, condiments, and other staples. The Italian Centre, Lucky 97, that Vietnamese grocery on 98 Avenue and 108 Street I can never remember the name of (and couldn’t pronounce anyhow), and various grocers in Mill Woods are just a few examples of places where your dollar will go farther than at the humongous boutique supermarkets springing up everywhere.

A handy point of comparison: check out how much a bale of fresh basil costs you in Chinatown versus how much a little plastic snapcase of the same herb costs at the big box grocery store. I rest my case.

Extend Your Spice Rack

Used to be you could get by on the classic dried seasonings — basil, oregano, chili powder, et al. — for all your flavouring needs, but as worldly cheapskates of refinement and taste, you’ll need to step up your game. That means not just adding cumin or garam masala to your arsenal, but exploring the wonders of prefab spice blends, smoked paprika, kaffir lime leaves, tamarind, hoisin, fresh ginger, and other savoury delights.

I’ve found if you keep a tub of Thai curry paste (a potent, imperishable flavouring compound available in red, green, yellow, and Phanang) and a can of coconut milk around, you can transform any three remotely compatible ingredients (“Leftover shrimp ring, cherry tomatoes, green beans — go!”) into a satisfying meal with rice.  Have some other exotic spicy stuff like harissa, a complex Moroccan spice blend that goes in anything tomato-based; adobo sauce, made from smoked jalapeños, that’s perfect in roasted yam or sriracha (also known as “rooster sauce” for the picture on the bottle), a livid red Vietnamese condiment for those who find ketchup too tame.

Go Easy On The Meat

We’ve all heard about the environmental and health impacts — never mind the cruelty — of industrial feedlots, but there’s another reason for not basing every repast around a slab of cooked flesh: it’s usually the most expensive part of the meal.

Once again, ethnic cuisine comes to the rescue. Many cultures have strong vegetarian traditions that are at least relatively simple to approximate, from veggie stirfries to lentil dal to pasta alla fagioli. A Protuguese friend of mine often serves a traditional dish of boiled eggs, potatoes, carrots and beans tossed with extra virgin olive oil, white wine vinegar, and coarse salt that, despite its simple ingredients, is a big hit with family and friends. No stingy gourmet can afford not to have a few meatless entrees in their repertoire.

Go On, Have A Little Meat

If you think of meat as another flavouring agent, you can make small amounts of it go far. One of the best meat bargains I can think of is the whole smoked turkey drumstick from K&K Foodliner, a dependable German grocery and smokehouse on Whyte near 99 St. For three bucks, you get what is, in effect, a small ham about the size of a toddler’s arm — a dense, pink cudgel of intense-tasting poultry that can be thinly sliced into a week’s worth of sandwiches and still leave you something to eat with your eggs on Saturday morning.

I’ve found lean lamb sausage from the farmer’s market to be another versatile ingredient for sparing use in pastas, soups, couscous dishes, omelets, and midnight fridge raids.

Invite The Neighbours

Perhaps this sounds counterintuitive to the hungry miser, but food always tastes better when there are a lot of people around the table. Besides that, it shifts the burden of hospitality onto your guests and often leads to the best kind of food there is: the free meal.