Recession Cooking from a California-Okie

Welcome to the Recession Cooking blog!

As a recently graduated, newly unemployed journalist, I'm looking for ways to practice my craft, but not give away my best stuff for free. Writing about food is the best way to do this, because we all have to eat, cooking from scratch saves money, and using less-than-fresh food is one way that my relatives coped with the Great Depression. Hopefully this will give you new ideas about cooking, encourage you to try something new or different, or at least give you a chuckle or two.

I currently live in California, but I was born and raised in Oklahoma. While I lived in the Sooner State, having ancestors that endured the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl was a source of pride, but something I never really thought about in depth. Living in California, I often meet people who say, "my grandparents moved here from Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl." Now I take great pride in knowing that even though some family members came to Bakersfield for the oil boom, most of them returned to their home state.

This is inspired by all of the wonderful people in my family (mostly women), who have spent so many years cooking and creating amazing concoctions for holidays, birthdays and Sunday dinners. In addition, I have to give credit to my friends that inspire me: Sindya, who lived on a food stamps budget for a week as a food-writing experiment; Novella, who raises farm animals, grows fruits and veggies and cultivates bees in the gritty West Oakland neighborhood known as Ghosttown; and Caesaré, a social/food justice advocate and vegan chef.

I'll be posting at least once a week, and I encourage you to post comments or submit your own creative food creations. Hopefully I can convince a few of my friends to write guest blogs every now and then. Enjoy!