All About Good and Cheap
Good and Cheap is a cookbook for people with very tight budgets, particularly those on SNAP/Food Stamps benefits. The PDF is free (ahora en Español!) when you sign up for my newsletter and has been downloaded more than 15,000,000 times. It is also available in print, and for every copy sold we donate one to someone who can’t afford it.
Good and Cheap had an unusual journey into publishing. It started out as the thesis for my Masters degree in Food Studies at NYU. I made a digital version of the book, but didn’t have any kind of distribution or marketing plan. After some fruitless attempts at working with non-profits, I decided to simply offer it as free download on a simple website in early 2014.
A few weeks later someone posted it on Reddit and I was astonished by the interest! The book was downloaded so many times that first day that it broke my website. Suddenly my inbox was full of kind advice, stories, gratitude, and encouragement from strangers who wanted to get the book out there as much as I did!
With that encouragement and proof that there was an interested audience, I started a Kickstarter project to fund a print run to get Good and Cheap into the hands of those who couldn’t get it online. For the summer of 2014, I worked night and day, along with my now-husband Dan and many generous friends, to make the project a reality. The experience changed my life. We were trying to raise $10,000 but ended up with a whopping $144,681. This allowed us to print 40,000 copies of the book, giving away one for every copy sold to someone who couldn’t otherwise afford it. We made 25,000 available for just $4/copy to organizations who work with target populations. It was amazing! Also completely wild and exhausting and unsustainable. But luckily we got help.
Next I found a wonderful publishing home in Workman Publishing. I never thought the book could be a commercial success; that was why I did it as a master’s thesis. I was so happy to be wrong. Workman was supportive of the buy-one-give-one model from the beginning and have been even more insatiable than I was about getting it into the hands of non-profits at deep deep discounts. In 2015, I got to go on a massive book tour, meeting so many incredible people, sharing stories and generally basking in the glow of all the incredible work people are doing. In addition, Good and Cheap won the 2015 IACP Judge’s Choice Award, I made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Food and Drink, and Food & Wine and Fortune named me one of the Most Innovative Women in Food and Drink. Good grief!
Check Out Some of the Recipes!
Spicy Green Beans
A simple recipe for spicy green beans stir fried until just cooked and coated in a spicy, salty and garlicky sauce. Serve it with rice and an egg and you've got a full meal.
Pasta with Eggplant and Tomato
Pasta tossed in a gooey eggplant and tomato sauce that comes together in the time it takes to boil the water and pasta.
Savory Summer Cobbler
Savory summer cobbler is a play on ratatouille with a big tray of roasted vegetables and savory southern style biscuit topping to soak up all the flavorful juices.
Coconut Chocolate Chip Cookies
It's my youngest sister's (Hannah's) birthday today. Hannah has many wonderful qualities, but one of my favorites is that she is really fun to cook for. She basically likes everything, and is always extremely enthusiastic and goes back for seconds. She's the kind of person you want to make cookies for. So Hannah, these are for you! If you're not a big coconut fan you can definitely skip it and just leave these plain chocolate chip, they are fabulously chewy and nutty. (from Good and Cheap page 155)
Green Chile and Cheddar Quesadillas
Pan-toasted tortillas filled with melted cheddar and green chiles.
Vegetable Jambalaya
Jambalaya is a reader favorite, and it's easy to understand why! This dish takes boring rice and leftover vegetables and makes it into an exciting, spicy, satisfying meal to feed a crowd! It's a perfect way to enliven any leftovers from a large Easter dinner and make them into something new and mouthwatering.
Cheddar and Potato Perogies
Perogies! Delicious, pillowy pockets of dough filled with potato, cheese and anything else you feel like adding, fried in butter and served with sour cream. Great to make in quantity and freeze.
Cool Announcements Alert!
The new year is bringing a new phase for Good and Cheap. Last year was utterly, staggeringly incredible, but would you believe that this year might be even better? I am officially sold out of the 1st edition of Good and Cheap. We gave away over 9,000 donated copies, sold 24,000 at cost to non profits and sold another 7,000 to you! Oh, and the free PDF has been downloaded over 500,000 times so far. But being sold out doesn’t mean this is over. It means it’s just beginning. I'm excited to announce that this summer, Good and Cheap will...
Rainbow Rice
Here are three quick ways to make plain rice into beautiful, delicious rainbow rice. Vegetables are a great way to liven up the usual rice and beans.
Bueno y Barato is here!
Guess what?? We did it!! The long awaited Spanish edition of Good and Cheap, Bueno y Barato, is finally here and will be available in stores and online starting later this summer, officially August [...]
Jacket Sweet Potatoes
Baked sweet potatoes are a fun weekday meal.All you have to do it throw them in the oven and grab a couple of toppings from the fridge. I first got into them when I had a large number of sweet potatoes from a farm share. They were all odd sizes with long knobbly bits and I just didn't know what to do. So I just baked them, grabbed some sour cream and other random sauces and made a little topping bar. We ate potato after potato (these were little ones I swear!) and tried different toppings on each. So easy...
Mexican Street Corn
Elotes (or Mexican Street Corn) is crazy delicious. Turns out that you actually CAN make fresh corn even better. Sweet, spicy, salty, cheesy even tart. All your taste bases are covered. This beautiful recipe, from the streets and homes of Mexico has been one of the most popular recipes in Good and Cheap. So far, not one, but three people have told me they were overcome with tears of joy when they tasted this. It's that good. What are you waiting for? (from Good and Cheap page 60)
