Occasionally you gotta eat a failed experiment, but it’s still worth it to change it up.
I often go for something that works and can be adjusted for variety.
Roast vegetables with rosemary/sage salt. One day might be roast potatoes, another mixed root veg, add a bunch of onions another day. I grow the herbs myself.
Same here, I’ve branched out to grow lovage, hissop, sorrel, all these ancient herbs that have fallen out of fashion for non-commercialization. I think humans ate well back when it was mostly fire roasted veg and herbs!
Foolish to think they can afford the luxury of spices.
Spices are pretty cheap in the US if you don’t mind them being not-very-good, most grocery stores will have a small selection. Still, it’s doable and worth it to keep a small collection of spices even if you’re on a beans and rice budget.
If I try to eat exactly the same recipe for an extended period of time, I find I am much more vulnerable to a fast food craving just for a change of pace. So it works out to be cheaper to get the spices if I account for how my animal brain needs variety.
That one container of single flavour spice costs 10x a bag of ramen or kraft dinner as well, it’s just out of reach for a large portion.
Spice is a luxury, people would be giving up a weeks of meals for a variety of ONE, now add in a second flavor, now you’re not eating for another week.
I guess there are some spices that cost the same as a week of food, but I don’t think there’s anywhere on the globe where that’s true for everything that falls under the “spice” umbrella. A box of craft dinner is about $1.10 where I live, a 1oz. container of dried thyme is about $3.50, which is fairly typical for grocery store spices around me. There are spices that are very expensive and those are out of reach for a lot of people, but I think most almost everyone has access to some cheap spices.
A lot of them are easy to grow / are invasive species that are hard to stop growing: I have mint in my yard and I’m not sure I could kill it if I tried. Every year I cut it back and every year it grows back strong.
You’ll never get rid of mint, it’s tenacious. Cutting it back is probably helping it thrive tbh. Herbs are really easy to grow, and a plant is usually cheaper than a packet of fresh cut herb anyway.
