When writer Christiane Jory came up with the idea of creating a cookbook of gourmet recipes using only ingredients purchased at her local dollar store, she struck a nerve. Who hasn’t been drawn into these stores? I confess I can’t resist dropping in to browse every few weeks, just to see what’s new. But as most of us who have entered these establishments know, it’s not ‘all good’.

Some of it is really good, some of it is passable, and some of it is really, really bad. You have to have an eye for what will work in your household, and then, when you see it in stock, buy up plenty of it. Some days you won’t find much of anything you’d even want to feed your dog, much less cook for yourself. Other days you hit the jackpot and find imported off-brand Kalamata olives, something you’ll easily pay $6.99 for at the grocery store for an 8 ounce bottle, for a dollar. Yay. Still, you could bring them home and discover they taste like little brown mildewed sponges. Boo.

In other words, shopping at the Dollar Store is a bit like gambling. You win some, you lose some. I happen to enjoy that. You may not. If you are the kind of person who thinks showing up at half-off day at Goodwill at 8 a.m. when the store first opens is more fun than a chocolate binge, you’re probably the kind of person who enjoys poking around dollar stores. If, on the other hand, you wouldn’t wear a K-Mart t-shirt to save your dog, Dollar Store grazing may not be for you.

The burning question before us here today though is, does cooking with Dollar Store food really save money?

I heard Jory on NPR one afternoon and checked out some of her recipes at the NPR website. You can listen to her interview at the site too. One of the featured recipes there is for homemade chicken pot pies made with canned Dollar Store chicken, canned Dollar Store gravy, canned Dollar Store veggies, canned Dollar store biscuits, and a few other things. Four chicken pot pies came to around $9.99.

To my way of thinking, that’s no bargain. Sure, it’s less than the $4.69 per pot pie you pay if you buy Pepperidge Farms or Stouffers in the freezer section of your grocery store, but you can do better without ever entering the Dollar Store much less buying Jory’s cookbook.

Go to your regular market, buy one stewing chicken, a bag of frozen off-brand mixed veggies, a quart of milk, and an onion, and make sure you keep flour, baking powder, and margarine or butter on hand as staple ingredients, and you can make those same pies for less than $1.00 a piece by making a basic white sauce, mixing in chicken chunks and chopped onion and frozen veggies, then pouring it all in individual baking dishes, and topping with homemade baking powder biscuits or homemade pie crust. Plus, if you make the pot pies that way, you still have a chicken carcass with meat clinging to it that you can use to make stock for chicken soup or chicken and noodles. If you’re very creative you can get three meals out of that one chicken: roast chicken with sides the first night, your pot pies the second, and a pot of chicken soup the third. This is no miracle. It’s just old-fashioned home-cooking; something we haven’t had time to do much of these past ten years. Our mothers and grandmothers did it all the time.

I don’t begrudge Jory her cookbook or the idea. It’s clever and fun, and you can tell she had a lot of fun writing it and making up the recipes. But what bothers me a little bit is the ’slumming’ flavor of the whole idea. Lots of people do ALL their shopping at these stores, and it’s a bad idea. They do it because they are poor and think they are saving money, but they aren’t necessarily saving anything: sometimes they are just buying inferior food. Often they could do better at a regular grocery by learning to cook and learning some basic nutrition.

I like the idea of good cheap food. I’ve always liked this idea. Dollar Store cookbooks are fun and can be useful, and shopping at Dollar Stores can be a good cheap adventure you don’t have to feel guilty about having. But what I’d really rather like to see is a move towards old-fashioned home cooking again; not just because it’s way cheaper and healthier than the way we’ve been eating as a nation in recent years, but because it bonds families and friends together in ways that eating out just can’t, and it connects people to their neighborhoods and each other.

The Dollar Store is fun. But it can’t do that.