Hello Chris!
Thursday May 02 1996 10:25, Chris Behnsen wrote to All:
 CB> Hi..  I'm a male, 17, almost 18, and am moving out of my house in
 CB> about 4-5 months.
How well I understand your situation. Some 35 years ago, I was a 20 year old 
in exactly your situation! Unfortunately, there wasn't such a beast as Fido, 
and a computer such as I'm typing at here, didn't exist. The largest machines 
were the mainframes that some banks were beginning to use, but they cost 
around a million dollars. Of course, my machine is 5 times faster with 10 
times the memory and a hard disk enormously bigger. :-0)))
Anyway, I didn't have any one to ask really, but I was amazingly lucky to 
find that a couple of Indian lads lived next door to my apartment, (in fact a 
room in a large victorian house in west London)
 CB> What I would like is some good recipes for Living-Alone bachelors...
 CB> But something good, as I have very fine tastes...:)
OK. First suggestion. Remember that a pound of meat is real cheap at $3 
canadian a pound (I gather you're from BC.), while a pound of vegetables 
would be real expensive at that price.
Second suggestion. Remember that farmers, living on the land, learnt ages ago 
to make the very best of the limited range of produce at their disposal, or 
starve. So what we call in France, Cuisine du Terroir (I presume that as a 
Canadian, you're bilingual) tends to combine excellence and cheapness. Of 
course there's a trade off, and that's usually in long cooking and/or 
preparation time.
Third suggestion, remember that it is in the East (west for you) that people 
long ago evolved cuisines adapted to make small quantities of meat go a long 
way.
So, to be practical. Look to Indian, Thai and Chinese cooking.  Look to 
French and German country cooking. Have a good look at the recipes that 
Carolyn Shaw has been posting here. While they're not much good at the level 
of detailed instructions of how to do the various techniques you need to 
learn in order to cook, they consist of a good cross section of the sort of 
things people of modest means were cooking to eat as well as they knew how at 
the turn of the last century (Penn dutch).
I'll look out some of the recipes that I think will be cheap and good, but 
you will need some teaching as to the various techniques used to cook 
successfully.
For that, I cannot do better than to suggest you get a book called "Mastering 
the Art of French Cooking" by Beck, Bertholle and Child. It's a Penguin 
paperback and still available in print. I learnt French cooking from it some 
25 years ago, which is a measure of how long lived - and therefore how good - 
it is. ISBN 0 14 045 119 1. It gives really clear instructions on things like 
how to beat egg whites, and incorporate them into something else - useful for 
baking, desserts, souffles etc. How to chop onions, shallots etc. you may 
think that's trivial. It isn't. It's fundamental. Anyway, that's enough for 
the moment. On the next few pages, I've posted a cross section of recipes.
All the Best
Ian
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