OPB’s “Superabundant” explores the stories behind the foods of the Pacific Northwest with videos, articles and this weekly newsletter. To keep you sated between episodes, we’ve brought on food writer Heather Arndt Anderson, a Portland-based culinary historian and ecologist, to highlight different aspects of the region’s food ecosystem. This week she reflects on how we can all live deliciously on a budget, and offers a recipe for spaghetti al limone with smoked sardines and garbanzos.

The “Superabundant” test kitchen is cooking up a new format, switching the newsletter’s focus to small bites and a recipe. The longer food stories you crave will continue to appear at opb.org. We’ll let you know when they’re up!

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With food costs continuing to rise sky-high and no end in sight to inflation, it makes sense to find ways to trim the fat anywhere we can. But eating on a budget doesn’t have to be a bummer — in fact, today some of the fanciest restaurants serve dishes created out of impoverished necessity. What humble bean stew appears on the menu of top-class French restaurants? Read on to find out!

Small bites: High tech fruit mech, Cowlitz people reclaim their food sovereignty, and food pantries feel the strain

Freshly picked morsels from the Pacific Northwest food universe:

A Jetsonian solution to a modern-day labor problem

OPB’s Noah Thomas reports in a new episode of Oregon Field Guide that Washington’s apple growers have a futuristic new way to keep the doctor away — one promised to cartoon-viewing Americans decades ago: helpful robots to do our chores for us. Between unseasonal snowstorms and summer droughts, farmers and fruit growers face enough hardships without having to worry about who’s going to harvest the crops. But with no end in sight to labor shortages, there may not be many options but to let robotic arms pick the apples. Disappointingly, the robot’s developers Advanced.Farm opted not to call their line of fruit-picking arms Robo-Picky 3000 but if they expand their line of high tech fruit mech beyond what’s needed for harvesting apples and strawberries, they can just have that idea for free.

Watch the Robots episode of “Superabundant”

Cowlitz people reconnect with their traditional foodways

The Cowlitz Indian Tribe have reclaimed their right to gather traditional foods at the Ridgefield Wildlife Refuge, in a new agreement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the refuge. Earlier this year, tribal members published the results of their first food sovereignty assessment, revealing that many Cowlitz people, particularly elders, struggle with food insecurity and access to grocery shopping, but more importantly, they feel disconnected from their traditional foodways. This new agreement aims to repair that connection, as well as supplement the people’s diets with foods they gathered and ate on land they historically inhabited.

Food pantry shelves run low in Southern Oregon

Food pantry visits jumped by 41% between February and March, reports Rogue Valley Times’ Erick Bengel. This should come as little surprise, considering Congress scaled back SNAP benefits to pre-COVID levels last month (without adjusting for inflation or soaring food costs) and ended universal free school lunch last June. With a nudge from Gov. Tina Kotek, Oregon’s Legislature approved a $7.5 million boost to the Oregon Food Bank, which distributed 44.4 million meals to hungry people across its network last year.

Eating well on the cheap

Whether you’ve got a big tax bill or are a budget-minded shopper all year long (by necessity or choice), it’s always good to have a few inexpensive and fast meal ideas at the ready. Growing up below the poverty line informed the way this newsletter’s writer cooks and eats at home; though she is no longer impoverished, she still often gravitates toward low-cost meals centered on beans, soups and pasta because they’re satisfying, easy to prepare and easily zhuzhed with a sprinkle of fresh herbs from the garden (or a neighbor’s yard, since there’s a rosemary bush on every Portland block and oregano grows like a weed).

There’s sort of a romantic notion that behind every great chef is a parent who made do, turning scraps and bones into humble dishes that are as restorative to one’s soul as they are delicious, but the fact remains that need drives creativity. Anyone can make A-5 wagyu and truffles taste good, but show us a cook who knows her way around a pot of stew and then you’ll see true artistry. Today, it’s not uncommon to see cassoulet, a humble country dish of beans and meaty odds and ends, on the menus of the finest French restaurants. Sure, adding a leg of duck confit and fresh sausage makes it better, but at its core it’s a pot of pork and beans with bread crumbs on top.

Plenty of dishes and ingredients that we consider high-end today have humble origins. Lobster is a notable example — a giant sea bug once relegated to the tables of prisoners and enslaved people — but wild-foraged ingredients like ramps and nettles, collected for millennia by Indigenous people and later by poor country folk out of absolute necessity, now make an appearance on Michelin-starred menus. Not to mention that Esquire’s best restaurant of 2022 serves the cuisine of one of the world’s poorest countries. Seemingly out of nowhere, tinned seafood has never been more trendy.

During World War I, when rationing ruled the menu, books like “An All-Western Conservation Cook Book,” published by Portland’s now-defunct Evening Telegram in 1917, shared recipes for very modern-sounding pickled nasturtium seeds, gluten-free potato bread, and roasted pheasant, all with costs delineated down to the hundredth of a cent’s worth of gas needed to cook them. Domestic economy was once a cook’s duty, but now being able to prepare a penny-pinching meal is a flex for Top Chef contestants and the entire impetus for shows like Struggle Meals, now in its 8th season.

As generations of home cooks have taught us, preparing a beautiful meal doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming, and it doesn’t even require a lot of talent in the kitchen — it only takes a desire to make the most of what you have.

Recipe: Spaghetti al limone with garbanzos and sardines

Is there anything legumes can’t do? They’re at once a fiber-rich protein and nutritious vegetable, all while being of the most delicious ways to eat for mere pennies. A pressure cooker is your best friend here — it’ll cook a bag of dry bulk-bin beans in around 30 minutes, no soaking required, but you can always cook them the old fashioned way (or used canned beans). Tinned seafood is enjoying a renaissance these days, but if you don’t like sardines (a great source of calcium!), canned tuna is also great here; likewise, any white bean will be perfect in this dish. Struggle meals never tasted so sophisticated. Serves 4 (at a cost of around $1.00 per serving).

Ingredients:

8 oz dry spaghetti

¼ cup olive oil

4 cloves garlic, minced

1 3.75 oz can of sardines, preferably smoked in olive oil, drained

1 ½ cups cooked garbanzos (or a 15 oz can, drained and rinsed)

Zest and juice of 1 lemon

Salt and pepper

3 tbsp chopped fresh parsley

Shredded parmesan cheese and red chile flakes for serving (optional)

Instructions:

1. Cook the pasta in salted water according to the directions on the package, reserving a cup of the cooking water before draining the pasta.
2. While the pasta is cooking, heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium-low heat. Sauté the garlic until glossy and softened, about five minutes, then add the sardines and garbanzos and cook until warmed through, another five minutes.
3. Add the cooked pasta to the pan and stir to combine. Add the lemon zest/juice and stir everything together with enough of the pasta cooking water to make a light sauce to coat the spaghetti. Adjust the seasoning as needed, then sprinkle on the parsley, parmesan and chile flake (if using) and serve.