Welcome to The Smart Cook

When COVID-19 put the world inside, it sent us to the kitchen. We had pantry-building to do, then meal-planning. Those of us who had time on our hands baked cakes and made sourdough; those of us who had mouths to feed made PB&J and immediately started thinking about the next meal.

Turns out that all of that was just phase one of how the crisis would change our cooking. And now that the world is on the long road toward opening up, our cooking is entering phase two. We’re staying in the kitchen, but now it’s not just for health reasons—it’s for money reasons, too.

Just as everybody knows somebody who has contracted the virus, we all know people who have had their hours cut, their salaries reduced, or their jobs simply eliminated. Those of us who are lucky enough to still have our jobs are not immune to the worrying; with a recession looming, economic anxiety is in the air.

So today, Epicurious launches a new initiative that hopes to help with all that. The Smart Cook is the next step in our coronavirus coverage: a series of articles that looks at affordable cooking from every angle.

Cooking doesn’t stop in a slow economy—it just gets smarter.

We’re starting with the basics. The first step to cooking within a budget is to figure out what that budget actually is. Financial hype woman Berna Anat shows you how to create—and actually stick to—your grocery budget here.

With a budget in hand, you can start planning your meals. For that, you’ll need affordable recipes, which my colleagues and I now know are harder to find than you may think. When we were putting together the initial stories in this series, we were sometimes surprised that recipes we assumed to be cheap actually cost twenty dollars or more to make. A few ounces of cured meat, a cup of wine, a few bundles of fresh herbs—any of these things can push a recipe out of the bounds of affordability.

To take the guesswork out of finding affordable recipes, we’ve started a weekly column called Dinner and Change, where we highlight recipes that feed four people for a total of around $10 or less. (The first columns in the series feature a vegetable-packed frittata, chicken piccata, and a riff on a muffaletta.)

Food wasted is money wasted, so every Dinner and Change article comes with suggestions for how to use the ingredients you’ll have leftover from cooking. We’re also focusing on using every bit of food, from the dregs of the peanut butter jar to those tough kale stems, in a new column about food scraps called Nothing Wasted.

Soon we will release Cheap Thrills, a series in which some great cooks—people like Zoe Adjonyoh, Julia Turshen, and Hsiao-Ching Chou—reveal their go-to, cheap-and-fast dinners. And over at Well Equipped, our shopping vertical, we’ve rounded up the budget picks from all of our exhaustively-test product reviews, and will continue to uncover less-expensive but still perfect appliances (like this gloriously simple rice cooker).

Epi’s coverage of affordable cooking will be ongoing. Later this summer, we’ll publish a guide to affordable baking, and more installments in Kendra Vaculin’s column about dinners you can make with three eggs and a can. And we’ll develop new affordable recipes well into the fall, and winter, and into 2021, because cooking doesn’t stop in a slow economy. It just gets smarter.