Moving into your first apartment can be quite a harrowing experience. Gone are the days of Mom cooking your meals, or even the comfort of a cafeteria meal paid for thanks to the delightfully named “Food Plan.” Nope, this is The Big Time, The Real Deal...it’s sink, swim, or take-out. And while the fast food joints, pizza places & bars of the world may win the battle at first, it’s almost inevitable that you pick up some culinary skills.

For me, my culinary savior was the Frugal Gourmet...I’d picked up a few cooking tips and tricks watching Mom through the years, but she made it look soooo easy, soooo natural that the process was a little intimidating. As I’ve said before, Mom owned exactly one cookbook and I never saw her refer to it – it sat in one of the kitchen drawers, a repository for recipes and columns clipped from the paper. Which she never referred to either.

It also didn’t help that I was a pretty picky eater from earliest memory. And, as my teenage years progressed, Mom’d lost much of the fight that had gone into our earlier culinary battles. I can still recall sitting at our kitchen table, long after my brothers and sisters had left for the playground or family room, staring at a bowl of Navy Bean & Ham Soup sitting on my placemat. Mom “calmly” washed dishes behind me while I stared at the bowl like some kind of retard.

My will won out that time and she finally let me go due to exasperation and more than a little disgust. Sitting here on a cold February night I wish that I had a pot of that soup on the stove. When I got to college I survived on the college staples: delivered pizza, cold brews (make that ANY brews), cheap Chinese food (or the Americanized version of such), fries, cheesesteaks and pasta. Top that off with a serious Vivarin and Mt. Dew addiction and it’s a wonder I made it through those first few years.

My culinary salvation arrived in the strangest of forms – a job with a drug manufacturer. Ostensibly brought in to work for the Marketing Communications Dept., it quickly became apparent that I was being groomed for any work my boss didn’t want. That apparently meant spending a good deal of time flying to hotspots like Columbia, Missouri for conferences on nutrition journalism.

The company was working on a pill that would deliver healthy doses of fish oils intended to thin the blood – and I was there to collect research, talk to nutrition journalists and report back on what was happening. What I found was that while nutrition journalists enjoy a cold brew every now and then, the mostly female (yeah, baby!) profession actually practices what they preach. In other words, they eat healthy meals. As the only guy at these events I was pretty conspicuous. I also happened to be about 10 years younger than most of the attendees (except for the cute intern from the girly fashion rag) and the only person searching out the best pizza, sub or steak shop in town.

I soon found myself facing a dilemma: eat what I wanted, alone, in a nowhere college town or dine with fabulous babes that’d comment on everything I ate. Considering that I was desperately single at the time – and did I mention the cute fashion intern or the hot, older reporter from the burgeoning cable network? – it was an easy decision. By the end of my internship I was eating salads, questioning the belief that cheesesteaks were a member of the dairy group, and flat out rejecting cakes, candies and other sweets.

With my return to Philly on the horizon it became obvious to those around me that a retreat to my former habits was one trip to Pat’s Steaks away. And so they gifted me with a farewell present – the first Frugal Gourmet cookbook. A fixture on my kitchen bookshelf since 1987, it was the first cookbook I ever owned and a work that’s in part responsible for this zine.

This wasn’t like ANY cookbook I’d ever heard about or imagined. Gone were pages and pages of instruction. Instead, the simple recipes were prefaced by a quaint, conversational passage about the dish’s history or author Jeff Smith’s memories. Wonderfully designed and illustrated, I read the book from cover to cover like it was great work of literature...like Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me or Hunter S’s Hells Angels.

Today, the gravy-stained, sun-faded book sits in my kitchen, its binding cracked and both covers missing. The inscription from my boss still remains, “EMIL – No Sealoni here!”, a reference to the fake seafood that was being introduced at the time. Favorite recipes are starred and the glossary, hints and techniques are referenced on an almost weekly basis. But this tale doesn’t end there...

A few months ago, while digging through boxes in a Quakertown junk shop I found the forerunner of that beloved work: Recipes from the Frugal Gourmet, an 80-page booklet published by KTPS-TV, Channel 62 in Tacoma, WA and sponsored by “Friends of 62.” Before rising to prominence in the early 80s with his nationally-televised program, Smith delivered his down-home tips and recipes on a local station. Similar in content to his first book, the 1977 work drives home the same message: cooking should be fun, not too complicated and far from intimidating.

Smith, however, has suffered some professional and personal setbacks in the years since he was the Emeril Lagasse of his time. In 1998 he was sued by seven men that accused the ordained Methodist minster of sexually molesting them while they were his employees at his restaurant and business in the 70s and 80s. In July of last year he reached a settlement with the men for an undisclosed cash amount, though the settlement didn’t include an admission of guilt in the matter. In January of 1999, a Methodist news magazine reported that Smith surrendered his ministerial credentials on July 7, 1998 “of his own volition and without explanation.”

Lawsuits, settlements and falls from grace aside, here’s a favorite recipe based on one of the entries from Smith’s 1984 The Frugal Gourmet. It’s a versatile dish that can be made ahead of time and served with a dry red wine and a simple green salad. Plus it’s great year ‘round...

2 tbsp. olive oil
2 lbs. boneless chicken breasts cut into 1–2” strips
2 cloves minced garlic
6 green onions, chopped
4 tbsp. Marsala wine
2 tbsp. lemon juice
Salt and pepper to taste

Season breasts with salt & pepper. Heat frying pan and add oil, chicken, garlic and green onions. Saute over high heat until chicken is slightly browned. Remove from the pan and set aside. Add Marsala and lemon juice to pan and reduce. Return chicken to pan and reseason. Cook until chicken is juicy but not pink. Remove from pan and reduce juices. Scrape up remaining bits of chicken and pour over chicken. Garnish with chopped green onion.

[This article originally appeared in THG #4]