This has not been a good week for me in terms of not being a big fat liar.

First, I tried to pass off grilled cheese sandwiches as a “romantic” food. Then, half the entrants of the last First Thursday event failed to make it into my inbox, or were accidentaly deleted during the Great Spam Purge of February 2009, but I’m pretty sure it’s not my fault because I’m painfully anal* about things like that (although if you titled your post “I have a wonderful offer from Nigeria!” then it’s totally your fault).

THEN I inadvertently lied to you about the provenance of my tomatoes. And finally, although I’d said I’d post the guidelines for the new food event that’s replacing First Thursdays in yesterday’s Cheap Ass Monday post, I completely failed to do so.

FAIL.

So, here’s the skinny: While there have been some First Thursday stalwarts and polling indicated that people were interested, First Thursdays never generated much excitement, which led in turn to ME not being very excited about it and I require CONSTANT EXCITEMENT. I don’t get that any more since I quit the crystal meth**, so I decided to scrap First Thursdays.

Since we’re all poor now and our economy is going to keep heading down the shitter until it somehow finds an even bigger shitter down which to hurl itself***, Cheap Ass Mondays seemed like a much better idea for an event. Y’all get to exercise your creative cooking muscles and we all get to save money so we can help stimulate the economy by not spending any of it (rim shot!). I’ll be replacing the First Thursday page with a Cheap Ass Monday page, but here are the basics:

  1. In the interest of those whose blogs are not R-rated, the event will be called “The Recession Special: Hobo Mondays.”
  2. The meal must either serve 2 for $5 or less (total, not per person) or 4 for $10.
  3. Ingredient splitting is allowed. I.e., if you used half a can of diced tomatoes, you can charge half the can.
  4. As much as possible, the dishes should use real ingredients. Do not go to Wendy’s and order off the dollar menu.
  5. You cannot take advantage of economies of scale by making enormous meals that serve 200 and come in at $0.10 a person. Sometimes we only have $5 in our pockets and we still need dinner.
  6. At the end of your post, you have to do the math. Pantry staples like salt, pepper and oil don’t count toward your total
  7. The round-ups will go up by end of day the following Friday.
  8. The person who comes up with the most appetizing and cheapest dish gets to feel smug until the next month’s event.

You’re free to determine what constitutes a “pantry staple” for you, and through that we’ll all learn more about what kinds of useful foods to stock for easy and inexpensive meals.

The first Monday in March is the 2nd, so you have some time to think.

GO!

*Betting pool for number of disgusting hits this generates? I’m taking 5-10.

**I am not now and have never been a meth addict. I have enough prescription drugs.

**My prediction: this will continue to happen, with the economy throwing itself down progressively more and more enormous shitters, until we discover a black hole at the center of the universe that is actually a giant toilet. Take that, Hawking.