Dining On A Dime Cookbook | Tawra Kellam
Dining On A Dime Cookbook
By Tawra Kellam and Jill Cooper
Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book, with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.
Tawra Kellam: Hello. I am Tawra from LivingOnADime.com, the author of the Dining on a Dime Cookbook where you can eat better, spend less. I wrote it with my mom, Jill. We have sold over 500,000 copies, so we are considered a bestselling cookbook now, which is pretty cool.
Suzy Chase: You are a friend in my head. I've been such a fan of your Facebook and YouTube videos for over a year now. I even went out and bought your cookbook, Dining on a Dime. So, supermarket shortages and job losses because of the Coronavirus pandemic mean lots of us are changing things up to make the best of scarce supplies and tighter budgets. You know a thing or two about leaving the grocery store with only necessities and we need your wisdom now more than ever. So let's kick things off with a little background about you and your mother. You are frugal before frugal was cool. Talk a little bit about that.
Tawra Kellam: Well, we were frugal out of necessity. My mom was a single mom. My dad left my mom with $35,000 of debt that her name was on, so she had to pay it. She worked three jobs, got it paid off, and then we became sick with chronic fatigue syndrome and I also got fibromyalgia. My mom, my brother and I all got what we thought was the flu and we never got better over 30 years ago. So we did it out of necessity because my mom only had $500 a month to raise two teenagers. Even back in the late 80s, early 90s, $500 a month was not anything. I mean, that was most people's grocery bill, and that was our entire budget. We didn't have food stamps, we didn't get any assistance like that. That was just the $500 a month that we had. And right before we got sick, my mom had sold a business that her and my dad had started and that's what we were living on. Actually, for three of those years, we lived off of $8,000 total, not each year, but $8,000 got us by for three years.
Tawra Kellam: So that's kind of where this came out of. I was on frugal living groups when I was pregnant and on bedrest with my first child and everybody kept asking me questions, "Well, how do I save money on this?" And I always had an answer for them. So that's kind of how it got started.
Suzy Chase: How did the Dining on a Dime cookbook come about?
Tawra Kellam: So while I was still in that same bed rest, I was reading The Tightwad Gazette by Amy Dacyczyn, really kind of the first book of its kind. Miserly Moms was out too, but Amy's was the first big so to speak book on how to save money. I was reading her book, I was like, "Man, we do all this stuff and more." And at the very end of her book, she said everybody keeps asking her to write a cookbook but she didn't like to cook, and she knew that in order to write a good frugal cookbook, it needed to be really comprehensive and she didn't want to do that. And just right then and there, I thought, well I can do that. Well, did I know what it would turn into? When I told my husband, he was like, "Oh, she's going to make a nice little collection of recipes that we'll give to the family or whatever" He had no idea.
Suzy Chase: So on page eight of the cookbook, you have some useful basics of frugal living. One suggestion is don't get discouraged. I feel like we're all discouraged right now.
Tawra Kellam: Well, don't be. Here's the thing, I know it's bad right now, but I'm a suck it up kind of a person. A lot of people say I'm too harsh, but the reality is, Americans are extremely fortunate. I mean, we are extremely fortunate. I went to the grocery store just yesterday... as of yesterday, it'll have been two weeks since this whole thing kind of started, and there is a lot, still a lot of food on the shelves. There may not be toilet paper, there may not be flour, there may not be sugar, but there's still a lot of food on the shelves and we really need to be thankful for what we do have.
Suzy Chase: So for the folks that have lost their jobs, what is one thing they can do immediately to cut their grocery bill?
Tawra Kellam: Stop spending it on junk. So immediately, the majority of alcohol consumption needs to stop. That's a huge expense. If you want to have a glass of wine or something, that's fine, but really need to cut those alcoholic beverages out, they're super expensive. The next thing, sodas. All of those beverages that are like soda and kids' juice boxes, all those kinds of things, that's another huge expense. The convenience food items that don't have any nutritional value, all the fruits, snacks, jello type things, all of those don't have any nutritional value. So go for things that are like granola bars. Even Pop-Tarts are better than some things. I know there's people out there saying uhhhhhh, but if that's all you have on your grocery store shelf, a Pop-Tart is like eating a doughnut for breakfast. That's really better than nothing. So go for things that will fill you up and not just things that are empty calories.
Suzy Chase: Another suggestion is to drink water with your meals. Talk a little bit about that.
Tawra Kellam: So I was really shocked when I went to the grocery store that all the bottled water was completely sold out. I was like, "What is-
Suzy Chase: Why is that?
Tawra Kellam: I don't know, because here in Colorado, we have really good water here in Colorado. So I'm like, "What is the reason for that?" There's literally no reason in Colorado unless someone has an allergy to chlorine or something. I get that. But here's the thing, 98% of the country and 98% of people can drink tap water. I get it. I have lived in Texas and Kansas where I literally had bad water that I could not drink. I get it, but that is not the majority of the country and those are not the people that I'm talking about. Now, if you just don't like the taste of tap water, one of the best tips that my mom has used for years is she will fill up a jug and let it sit overnight in a refrigerator with the lid off and the chlorine evaporates. The number one reason people don't like tap water is because of the chlorine taste. Then you don't have the chlorine taste in the water anymore.
Tawra Kellam: So that's the number one tip for making water taste good without adding anything, is just to leave it sit overnight in the refrigerator with a top off and the chlorine will evaporate.
Suzy Chase: You make it a habit of cooking what you have on hand. I read that you make 10 meals on a regular basis. Can you describe this?
Tawra Kellam: Okay. So people make meal planning way too complicated. As a matter of fact, we've kind of had problems with our website because people ask for meal plans all the time and I'm like, "I don't do meal planning." My mom wrote a whole bunch of meal plans that we have on the website, and they're great, but really mom and I don't meal plan. What we do is we cook from what we have on the pantry. So I keep a consistent supply of things in my pantry, my refrigerator, my freezer. So I always buy chicken, I always buy roasts, I always buy green chilies, I always buy applesauce, peaches, pears, those kinds of things. Then instead of planning a meal for the week, I plan by the day on what I have on hand and what I need to use up. So let's say I have cucumbers that are getting ready to go bad. Well, I would make my side dish around those cucumbers instead of what I had planned because I need to use up those cucumbers.
Tawra Kellam: So what I do is I have 10 meals that I consistently make all the time, or variations of those meals, and I always keep those ingredients on hand. Eating the same food three times a month really is not that often. And I throw in a new recipe once or twice a month. So it's really two to three times a month, you're eating the same thing. Kids love tacos. It's okay to eat tacos twice a month. We love green chili. It's okay for us to eat green chili two or three times a month. People think that you're going to get tired, but what I do is I rotate a fall winter menu and a spring summer menu. So I basically have 20 separate meals divided up between the four seasons, so spring and summer, and then fall and winter, and then I just rotate around those. My family doesn't complain, they love it, and it keeps my dinner planning easy. I don't spend an hour a week planning meals and I really don't spend more than 20 minutes cooking dinner every night.
Tawra Kellam: And usually, more nights than not, it's like literally five minutes cooking dinner, because what I'll do is I'll make a roast on Monday, which takes me three minutes to prepare, and then I'll save that roast and use it Monday as roast and potatoes and carrots. Then on Tuesday I'll make beef and noodles. So it takes as long as five minutes to boil the noodles. Then the next day I'll make beef stew out of it, which takes me five minutes to cut up the carrots and potatoes and throw it all in the pot. So really, I have chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, I do not have the energy to be spending half an hour or an hour in the kitchen. I just can't do that.
Suzy Chase: What's green chili?
Tawra Kellam: It's a Colorado thing, but it's really good. It's probably my favorite. I would say it's probably my favorite main dish. So it's chicken broth, onions, green chilies and garlic, and then salt and pepper of course. And then you just simmer it and you thicken it with corn starch and scoop out the meat and put it in the middle of a tortilla, wrap up the tortilla, like a burrito, and then you put the sauce over the top and you serve it with sour cream and lettuce and cheese. It's really yummy.
Suzy Chase: That sounds amazing.
Tawra Kellam: It's really good, yeah. It's in our Dining on a Dime cookbook. I won't give you the page number because we have several versions out there, but it's in our Dining on a Dime cookbook and on our website livingonadime.com.
Suzy Chase: What are some good ideas for sweet treats that we can make from pantry items?
Tawra Kellam: So you can make pretty much anything. Right now, everybody's going crazy on our Facebook page over our fudge brownies. That recipe is at Living on a Dime too. So many people have been saying over and over, "I always thought I had to have a brownie mix to make good brownies." They were like, "Your brownies are delicious." So, in Dining on a Dime, what we did was we went through and we tested every single recipe to make sure that it had ingredients that were on hand. Most people have all the time, easy to get cheap ingredients. So we have, how to make a white cake. We have, how to make fudge brownies. We have, how to make donuts. Any of those basic recipes, homemade tortillas, all of those, even taco seasoning, homemade taco seasoning, homemade ranch dressing, all of those are in there. We have people, they said, "My family will not eat any ranch dressing but yours. Yours is the best."
Tawra Kellam: I'm not trying to sound prideful, but it really is the best ranch dressing I've ever had. But that's what I do. We go through and we find recipes and we use them as a place to start. But then we go through and we tweak them and change them until they really are the best recipe, because there's nothing more frustrating than going into a cookbook and making a recipe and having it flop and you've wasted all that time and all those ingredients. So we really make sure that the recipes do taste good and people can make them. Even if you're not an experienced cook, they're really simple.
Suzy Chase: So your latest YouTube episode is so informative. It's called, What to Eat When They Buy Out All the Food! - Surviving Panic. You talked about what to do when bread is all sold out. Is there a hope if the bread is sold out?
Tawra Kellam: Yeah. So here's the thing with bread. People panic about bread, but there are so many more things that you can use instead of bread. So first of all, when you're at the store, the bread aisle may be sold out, but go check your bakery. Here I've been to four different stores, and every single one, the bakery was completely filled, but the bread aisle wasn't. Now, those breads aren't going to last quite as long as the regular loaf breads, but you can freeze bread pretty easily. So if you bring home a loaf of French bread... like yesterday, they didn't have anything but French bread at my store. So I got a couple of loaves of French bread. And then just slice it up, take out a few pieces, put the rest in your freezer. It's freezes really, really well. But now I know I'm going counter to pretty much every single YouTuber on the planet, but now is not the time to be learning how to make bread.
Suzy Chase: Really?
Tawra Kellam: Everyone keeps saying, "Oh, I'm showing you how to make bread." And I do have a super simple foreign ingredient, no need bread recipe that I'm getting ready to do a video on. But here's the thing, if you don't already know how to make homemade bread, now is not the time when you can't find flour to be experimenting with a little bit more difficult recipe of making bread. If you've never kneaded bread or anything like that, it can be intimidating. So what can you use instead? Use some rice. You can use potatoes, you could make muffins, which are super easy. You could make biscuits, which are fairly easy. You could use pretty much anything that's a starch, like corn tortillas, flour tortillas, if you can find those. So don't get just stuck thinking you have to have bread, you don't have to have bread. I know bread is what sustains life, but there are so many other options out there that right now really if you've never made bread before, I would not suggest wasting valuable flour on bread.
Tawra Kellam: Another thing on that is, homemade bread tastes really good. I mean, it tastes really good. So what happens in my family, they will just eat the whole entire loaf right away. Where my muffins and biscuits, they're tasty, they're really tasty, but they don't eat them quite as fast. So make foods that your family will be able to eat, but they don't just eat it all in one sitting and it's gone.
Suzy Chase: I remember growing up with a single mom making many a sandwich out of a hot dog bun.
Tawra Kellam: Yeah, hot dog, hamburger buns are really great. We use those all the time. If you have them leftover, you can put some butter and sprinkle some cinnamon and sugar or garlic powder on there and broil them and they're super tasty. Yeah, you can toast them and use them instead of hoagie buns too
Suzy Chase: In your grocery store, it was crazy that the lunch meat was all sold out, but the deli was all stocked full of meats and cheese.
Tawra Kellam: 10 feet away. I know. I was just like, "What is wrong with you people?" Right now, we're in the middle of a crisis, but any time. That's one reason why my family isn't panicking, because I have never just done one thing. When prices went up several years ago from... What's it? I think it was 9/11 maybe. Grocery prices went up. Everybody was totally freaking out. I wasn't freaking out. I just didn't buy boneless skinless chicken breasts. I used other things. I used chicken quarters. We didn't eat chicken. We ate beef because beef was cheaper then. We ate ham because ham was cheaper then. So I've always been one of those people that, when you don't have one thing, what can I use to replace this instead? That's where people need to start turning their thinking, is, "Okay, what can I make instead?
Tawra Kellam: I don't have bread, but there's something else that I can make instead." It's actually very easy. You just need to get into the habit of thinking that is more what it is.
Suzy Chase: There's one particular supermarket tip in the cookbook that caught my eye. It's buy the smallest packages. What exactly does that mean?
Tawra Kellam: Well, so everybody says, "Buy in bulk." Mom and I think that's probably some of the worst advice you could have, because here's the thing, you go to these big warehouse stores, that mom and I are not fans of, let's say you get this huge package, five pounds of cheese. Okay, that's all well and good, but can you really use five pounds of cheese before it spoils if you're an average three to four person family? If you can, that's totally fine. But the majority of people don't. So what we have found is that people actually save more money when they don't buy in bulk because they're not wasting food that spoils. They're not dealing with packages that are big and bulky and heavy and they're dropping them and wasting food from dropping them because they're hard to handle. I mean, those two, three pound, I don't know how many pounds they are, containers of peanut butter at the big places. It's like, "Seriously, who has room in their cabinet to store that?"
Tawra Kellam: And the price, actually now a lot of times the big bulk ones are actually more expensive than the cheaper ones, especially if you want for sales. So we don't recommend buying in bulk. We recommend actually buying smaller packages. And if you want to stock up for times like now, that's fine, but I'll tell you, all my peanut butter is in little one pound containers because I don't buy great big packages of food because I don't want it to spoil.
Suzy Chase: With boxes of pasta overflowing in so many cans of beans, I'm thinking about flavor more than ever. How can we save money on herbs and spices?
Tawra Kellam: Well, first of all, if you're thinking of prepping for situations like right now in this pandemic that we're in, stock up on salt and garlic powder and onion powder. If you get just those three spices, that will take care of 90% of your seasoning meat. Get garlic powder and onion powder instead of garlic salt and onion salt, because you can always add salt and the garlic powder and onion powder go further. Don't think that you have to buy these great big, once again, massive things of spices. I see people who have two people in their family and they have a one pound jug of taco seasoning, and there'll be dead before everything else is. It's just like, okay, this is crazy. People buy these humongous things but it's actually not cheaper. And I'll the honest, I get all my spices at Walmart or Dollar Tree, they're a lot cheaper.
Tawra Kellam: I get them once again in the small little containers, but they're a quarter of the price. That's the way I save on spices. I don't have a lot of spices. There's no reason to have 50, 60 spices in your spice cabinet? I have more than I normally would use because I'm recipe testing, but I normally have about eight, maybe 10, maybe not even that many, closer to eight I think, spices that I use on a regular basis and that's it. Then the three, salt, garlic, and onion powder, those three I use 90% of the time. When we were at the store yesterday, I was shocked that really people aren't buying salt. Guys, if you are going to be going through something, you need to have seasoning, and salt is the best seasoning that you can buy to make your food taste good.
Suzy Chase: You have recipes for everything in this cookbook. It's more than a cookbook, lip balm, window cleaner, laundry soap disinfectant, and even skunk smell remover. I love it.
Tawra Kellam: I wanted to make sure it was comprehensive. And it's over 600 pages, but it's still not comprehensive enough to the point where we have volume two coming out in a couple of months. But I wanted to be sure that if you could get basic items, you could make whatever you needed to help you get by. So that's kind of why we put lip balm and laundry detergent and all yogurt, all those things in there. That's to help you make it at home when you need to.
Suzy Chase: How are you testing recipes for your new cookbook and can you tell us a little bit about it?
Tawra Kellam: Well, so thankfully, I got 90% of my recipe testing done before this pandemic hit. But I will tell you, I am having a little bit difficult time because I don't want to waste ingredients right now. So I'm being very careful. Instead of testing five to 10 recipes a day, I'm only testing one or two that we are actually using to eat with our dinner. If the recipe doesn't quite turn out like we had thought, we're still eating it, I'm going to doctor it up. I made a pizza crust the other day for my gluten free dairy free cookbook that's coming up and didn't really taste that great honestly. But I was like, "Boys, we are not wasting food."
Suzy Chase: Dig in.
Tawra Kellam: Yeah. It wasn't horrible by any stretch of the imagination, but it wasn't the wonderful fluffy pizza that everybody's used to. So right now, I'm just testing with things that I already have. As I go to the store, if I happen to see it, I have something, I will pick it up. But it is a little bit harder right now, but I'm still getting one or two recipes tested today, which is pretty good.
Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called, My Favorite Cookbook, aside from this cookbook, what is your all time favorite cookbook and why?
Tawra Kellam: I'll be perfectly honest, it's my cookbook. I'm not just saying that, I truly do not use any other cookbook at all. I don't even have them in my kitchen. This is the only cookbook I have. And I wrote it because it had all the recipes that I wanted to make on a regular basis. So I truly don't use any other cookbook. When I'm recipe testing, I have a question about something, I will go to Betty Crocker. If I need to look up and cross-reference and see, okay, wait, these directions don't sound right, how did Betty Crocker do it? If I didn't have Dining on a Dime, I'd probably do Betty Crocker. But I truly I don't use any other cookbooks. I don't want to have any others that I use. I don't.
Suzy Chase: I love it. That's a good testament to your cookbook. So where can we find you on the web and social media and YouTube?
Tawra Kellam: We're all over. We're livingonadime.com. You can go get our Dining on a Dime cookbook there. We are on YouTube, Living on a Dime To Grow Rich. We are on Facebook, Living on a Dime. We just recently changed our name because we want people to be encouraged that you're not living on a dime to wallow in your misery, you're living on a dime to move yourself forward to financial freedom. My husband and I are completely debt free. Our YouTube videos or Facebook page or Pinterest page, we have a huge Pinterest page, and our website are all geared to help people get out of debt and become financially free so that they are not stressed out about money.
Suzy Chase: Oh my gosh! Thanks, Tawra. We needed you. Thank you so much for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.
Tawra Kellam: You're welcome. I appreciate you having me. Thanks so much.
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