FirstInHealth.com is offering a free copy of The Eating Right with Ann Cox Cookbook to anyone who will fill out this form.

I can't seem to find any information on Ms. Cox on Google. But that pizza does look good so give it a shot. It's free!

If you can never get enough cookbooks, here are some other ones I've recently written about for Fantastic Freebies:

• Fantastic Freebies! Diabetic Cookbook
• Fantastic Freebies: Cookbooks from Ragu and Jiffy
• Fantastic Freebies: Gooseberry Patch Fall Favorites Cookbook
• Fantastic Freebies! Light & Easy Recipes cookbook from Merck

I grew up in a "traditional" family with the sort of mom who got up early to make us a big breakfast. I remember eggs, pancakes, biscuits, sausages, toast, and always a pitcher of freshly-mixed juice. We were also firmly on the underside of the poverty line (so it was margarine on our toast and generic brand 'pancake syrup' on our flapjacks).

When I got to be a parent, I stuck to my grown-up spendthrift ways for quite a while, buying cold cereal, scones, bagels and the like, rarely making a big delicious breakfast of biscuits or pancakes or muffins but far more often just picking it up from the coffee shop.

And then one day -- maybe it was the fact that I stopped eating processed foods and cut out white sugar, or maybe it was just that our grocery budget was through the roof -- I made a commitment to start making breakfast, just like my mama before me.

Every day, WalletPop will be bringing you information about a fantastic freebie. Like what you see? Check back tomorrow for more!

Most avid home chefs -- at least the ones I know -- would never pass up a free cookbook. If you fill out this form, Gooseberry Patch will send free copies of its Fall Favorites with Sun-Maid® Raisins & Dried Fruit and Gooseberry Patch Family Favorite Recipes with Sun-Maid® Raisins & Dried Fruit.

A suggestion: uncheck the boxes to receive free tips and special offers unless you feel like you don't receive enough promotional email already.

Every day, WalletPop will be bringing you information about a fantastic freebie. Like what you see? Check back tomorrow for more!

The prospect of a cookbook from Merck might not sound too appetizing -- Zocor brownies anyone?

But apparently the Go Red Light & Easy Recipes cookbook is filled with heart-healthy recipes. If you fill out this form, they'll send you a free copy.

Every day, WalletPop will be bringing you information about a fantastic freebie. Like what you see? Check back tomorrow for more!

OK, so you probably wouldn't rush to your Netflix account to add a DVD about "the world of rice" to your queue. Still, a DVD about the many different kinds of American rice -- featuring 11 recipes! -- is a pretty solid Fantastic Freebie. It's offered by the USA rice Federation. From the site:

'Exploring the World of U.S. Rice' is an informative view of all things rice from paddy to plate. You'll learn about the types of rice grown in the U.S., how to prepare and use each variety and follow top chefs as they create some of today's hottest rice dishes.

If cooking is your thing, order a copy by filling out the very brief form here.

The history of cuisine is pretty fascinating stuff. It's amazing to realize that, with a slightly different climate here, a different trade route there, and a different economy over there, many great foods might never have developed. I can even see this process over the course of my lifetime; for example, America's economic recession in the 1970's sparked a home cooking revolution that was absolutely revolutionary, changing almost every aspect of the culinary landscape. Even now, decades later, it is still playing out.

When I was a little kid, my parents worked and studied in Georgetown, a ritzy district of Washington, DC. The fact that we spent so much time there, combined with my parents' healthy incomes, meant that we ate at upscale restaurants three or four times a week. As inflation increased, however, I noticed that my family spent more and more time sitting around the dinner table. My mother, who had learned a few dishes while living with my father in Korea, started out by cooking either the bulgoki that we loved or a pasta recipe that she had picked up from her Italian godmother. As time went on, though, she got subscriptions to Bon Appetit and Gourmet, picked up a copy of Julia Childs' Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and began stretching her skills in the kitchen. I don't think that her original goal was to replicate the fine dining that she and my father were used to, but that is what she ended up doing. Although they couldn't afford to eat at their favorite Georgetown restaurants, my parents discovered that they could easily afford to make top-notch gourmet food at home.

In an article in the New York Times this week, a chef chronicles his attempts to prepare a week's worth of gourmet meals from groceries bought exclusively at a 99-cent store. The recipes, including baked salmon in coconut sauce and an impressive tuna casserole, looked appetizing. I just can't imagine being able to turn a can of tuna into a gourmet meal, but I have trouble whipping up an edible meal from fresh food too. But that's another story.

Anyway, I was at a huge dollar store last weekend in Florida and I have to say I did notice aisle after aisle of food, household cleaners, toiletries, books, toys and other practical stuff-all for a dollar. Since I don't have a dollar store near my home, I was amazed at the array of useful products, although there were also plenty of tchatchkes. I ended up spending about 45 minutes, mostly browsing. I couldn't get back on the plane home with groceries for the week, but I bought a few of my kids' favorite snacks, a carton of lemonade, Easter candy and batteries for my dad's camera.

The only real necessity I purchased was Colgate's sugary sweet watermelon-flavored toothpaste, the only brand my son will use. But this week, I coincidentally read an article cautioning against buying toothpaste from dollar stores. (Okay, I admit I was reading Self magazine while getting a haircut). Apparently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued a warning because some Chinese manufacturers reproduce American toothpastes using chemicals that can be dangerous if ingested for any length of time. Needless to say, I got rid of it. At least it was only a dollar.

When I was four years old, my family moved from a small house in Fairfax, Virginia to a huge place a few miles outside of town. Although the geographical distance was minor, it led to some major changes in our lives. One of the biggies was farming.

We lived down the street from a formerly active farm. My parents made friends with the owner, Mr. Winfield, and he used to "loan" us a plot of farmland in which we would plant our own vegetable garden. For my parents, who had grown up in New York and Boston, it was perfect: they could get the family out in the sun, pretend that they were farmers, and provide us with fresh food. For the kids, it meant long hours weeding row after row of peas and gaining a much greater understanding of the wonders of the modern supermarket.

A few years later, I grew my own vegetable garden and gained a deeper understanding of my parents' excitement. Unlike the dull, flavorless produce in the supermarket, my peas, cucumbers, corn, and tomatoes were bright, fresh, and delicious. I realized that the vegetables that I was used to eating were only a pale reflection of the produce that I could grow. It was amazing.

As I've been working on these Peasant food posts, I've gotten a lot of good ideas from readers. Carol, a truly impressive home economist, pointed out that having a "soup night" once a week was a great way to save on groceries, use up leftovers, and provide your family with a delicious, nourishing, and easy-to-prepare meal.

She makes a fair point. After all, what can be better than a warm bowl of soup on a cold, miserable day? What's more, because soups, stews, and chowders tend to use inexpensive ingredients, they can save you a great deal of money. Below are a few basic tips for maximizing the ease and nutritional value of your soup night.

Stocks and Broths

I love to cook and I love to talk, which means that I love to entertain. Few things bring me more pleasure than having some friends over, whipping up something obscure and vaguely pretentious, and sitting around, enjoying their company. Most people pretend that entertaining is something that they do for friends and family. I have no such delusions: while I do everything in my power to ensure that my guests are having fun, I definitely entertain for my own enjoyment.

Entertaining in my house also tends to be an informal thing, and I like to put guests in the kitchen, stick an apron on them, and put them to work. Some of my best conversations have been around the kitchen table as my friends and I prepare food. Also, having friends in the kitchen tends to make them somewhat proprietary about the meal--they get to tell war stories about making it, while delighting in the other guests' enjoyment.

When I was in college, one of my teachers assigned us Fernand Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism, a three-volume history of the world between the 15th and 18th centuries. It was incredibly dense, fairly boring and weighed about twenty pounds. I read the whole thing, a feat that still amazes me.

I drank a lot of coffee back then.

While I've managed to forget most of Braudel's opus, I remember that he squeezed out forty pages on the historical influence of the potato. Apparently, potatoes are native to Peru and Bolivia, but Spanish explorers brought them across the Atlantic in 1700. Up to this time, most of Europe's carbohydrates and starch came from wheat, which is work-intensive and produces very little food for every acre planted. Think about it: to make bread from wheat, you need to grow a lot of wheat. You then have to harvest it, thresh it, grind it, mix it with a whole bunch of other ingredients, and bake it. To get a comparable amount of food from a potato, you have to grow a potato, dig it up, clean it off, and pop it in the oven. That's it. Of course, it tastes even better with sour cream and chives.

In 1700, potatoes enabled farmers to grow far more food, with much less work, than any other crop. Across Europe, many farmers switched to potatoes. Because potatoes were so easy to grow, the farmers were able to lay off large numbers of workers. Many of these people ended up moving to the cities, where they provided a huge work force for factories, making cheap manufacturing possible. The upshot is that potatoes are indirectly responsible for the rise of the city and the industrial revolution. Not bad for a lowly tuber.

In an earlier post, Tracy Coenen noted the incredible savings that she reaped by cooking at home. Her specific example was a pot of chili. Tracy pointed out that, were she to eat chili at her favorite restaurant, she would pay $8 a bowl. However, by cooking it herself, she reduced the cost to $2.94 per meal. Thus, by preparing her own food, she saved over $5 per serving and probably ate far better.

Although she didn't directly address it, Tracy also highlighted another key money-saving tip: you can save a lot of time and money by cooking in bulk. Although we don't usually count labor among our food expenses, the cost of cooking a meal can be considerable. While it's not as if you have to pay someone to cook your food, after coming home from a long day of work, the last thing that most of us want to do is spend time in the kitchen. If you have to do it night after night, there's a pretty good chance that you'll find yourself falling back on expensive convenience foods, TV dinners, and carry-out food. Sure, you'll start off with cooking every night, but before you know it, you'll fall off the wagon and find yourself settling down to a pizza or Stouffer's and wondering where the money went.

What if, instead of slaving over a stove, you merely had to defrost a meal that you had previously cooked? Many foods will keep for a considerable period of time in the refrigerator or freezer, and will reheat almost perfectly. For that matter, increasing the yield of a recipe is usually just a matter of doubling (or tripling, or quadrupling) the ingredients. Most importantly, by cooking in larger batches, you can spread your time investment out over a lot of meals, vastly increasing your efficiency and leaving you with more time to relax.

When I was a kid, my mother used to complain about how little food I ate. Like every other mother, she would tell me all about the poor, starving kids in India who didn't have enough to eat. I, of course, offered to send them my broccoli. When I went so far as to address a box to "Poor, Starving Kids in India," she told me that I was a smartass. I did notice, however, that we didn't have broccoli again for a very long time.

It's worth noting, by the way, that mothers in other countries use the same line. My friend Christine, who grew up in the Philippines, told me that her mother used to talk about the poor starving kids on the other end of town. This, of course, puts a whole other swing on it.

When I started to cook, I thought about my mother's comments. One doesn't have to go as far as India to find people who are struggling to put food on the table. Somehow, though, the vast majority of parents are able to sufficiently provide for their children. As gas prices push food prices up, it's worth reconsidering the miracle by which parents around the world prepare enough food for themselves and their kids. Personally, I call this miracle "Peasant food."

I know it's not politically correct, but if you look far enough into almost any region's recipes, you'll find shortcuts and customs that clever chefs developed to make food go further. From the use of organ meats in haggis to the reliance on cheap grains in pasta, most traditional cuisines have found ways to stretch the food budget and use every part of an animal. I'm not advocating haggis (which, frankly, is kind of bland), nor am I suggesting a pasta-only diet (which, frankly, is what transformed Marlon Brando from a handsome actor into Jabba the Hutt). Rather, I am noting that a few simple considerations in your diet will help you spend less money on food, will improve the quality of your fare, and will probably make you a lot healthier.

Flavor: Rather than resorting to catchy phrases like "not afraid of flavor" or "embrace taste," I'm simply going to point out that spices are pretty cheap, yet they go a long way toward making food delicious. Oregano, basil, thyme, and fennel seed will spice up most of your Italian cooking, while tarragon, rosemary, lavender, and thyme will impart a kick to French food. Try cumin, red pepper, chili powder, and Mexican oregano in your Latin American foods. A little nutmeg will do wonders for your mashed potatoes, and cinnamon will add another dimension to your Swiss Miss instant cocoa. By experimenting, browsing through Epicurus, and generally figuring out what you like, you will discover dimensions of flavor that you never knew existed. A word to the wise, though: asafoetida tastes more or less like it sounds.

Many of these spices also have health benefits. Garlic, for example, detoxifies the body, lowers blood pressure, and will help with a host of other problems. Ginger alleviates nausea, is a strong antioxidant, and improves blood circulation. Rosemary helps eliminate free radicals, reduces inflammation, and improves circulation to the brain. If you are interested in learning more about the medicinal aspect of herbs, check out Phyllis Balch's Prescription for Nutritional Healing.

Finally, if you find yourself going a little heavy on the salt, try adding lemon juice or vinegar. Acids are a key ingredient in many cuisines, and they can increase flavor without increasing your blood pressure. Red wine vinegar is among the most versatile acids, and can be easily made at home. Simply combine a bottle of red wine vinegar and a bottle of cheap red wine in a large glass container. Cover and place in a dark area of your kitchen. Within a few months, active bacteria in the vinegar will transform the rest of the wine into vinegar.

Luxury items: Ingredients like meats and cheese cost a lot of money and can be expensive to prepare, so many native cuisines use them sparingly. In Asian cooking, for example, meats are often sliced thinly to make it easier to cook them. They are then served with large quantities of vegetables, which stretches them out. Similarly, Italian cuisine often uses sausage, ground beef, and sauces to maximize the effect of insufficient or unattractive cuts of meat.

Because cheese costs so much, traditional dishes like Welsh Rarebit, Pasta Carbonara, and Macaroni and Cheese are all pretty much designed to maximize the effect of a relatively small amount of it. Not only does this save you money, but the addition of surprise ingredients like beer (Welsh Rarebit), prosciutto (Pasta Carbonara), and Bechamel sauce (Macaroni and Cheese) can result in some pretty amazing creations.

Grains and starches: From Peru to Ireland, potatoes are a mealtime staple, and even those countries that avoid the lowly tuber make considerable use of bread, pasta, rice, and other grains. The reason isn't hard to see: these ingredients are cheap and filling. Moreover, they help stretch out the rest of the meal. If you're concerned about eating too much starch, try natural grains like brown rice, whole-wheat pasta, and whole-wheat bread. Not only are these also filling, but they are more nutritious than other starches, promote healthy digestion, and don't give you with empty energy.

This, of course, is only a beginning. There are dozens of other similarities that link native cuisines, like the reliance on beans, the popularity of cabbage, and the common use of onions. However, this is a nice start. The key point to remember are that you don't need an expensive steak or a fresh fish fillet to make a delicious, exotic meal.

"Peasant cuisine: Using traditional tricks to cut your food budget" is part of a series on nutritious, inexpensive foods. If you enjoyed it, you might want to check out "Peasant food: How potatoes saved the world," "Peasant food: Behold the lowly bean," and "Cook in bulk and give the chef the night off!" Alternately, if you have any suggestions for future "Peasant food" topics, please contact the author at bruce.watson@weblogsinc.com.

Bruce Watson is a former English instructor, sometime writer, and all-around cheapskate. A co-author of Military Lessons of the Gulf War and A Chronology of the Cold War at Sea, his work has appeared in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, The Roanoker, The Brush Mountain Review, The Eccentric Monthly, The Best of Times, and College Daze. He currently blogs on Crankster.

Part of the problem inherent in cookbook shopping is that it's really hard to take it for a dry run, first. You can get a feel for a pattern book by the photos of the finished object; for fiction, you can read a few pages and see if it draws you in. But you don't cook for how a meal looks, and all the brilliant prose in the world won't save a badly composed set of instructions for a loaf of bread.

But where there's a thrift shop, there's a way. When I page through cookbooks in the bookshelves of a vintage boutique, I'm not looking for favorite subjects or shiniest images. No, I'm looking for the most used book of all; the one with pages splattered with olive oil and flour and tomato sauce. The one whose recipes were followed, and then followed again.

Paying $15 or $20 for a glossy cookbook full of lovingly-composed food photos is great, if you like to experience the way food looks. Celebrity chef cookbooks? Again, you're paying to look at something, and this time it's Bobby Flay or Giada Laurentis; surely attractive folks, I'll give you that, but a cute boy just gets in the way of good food unless he's waiting in the breakfast nook. Cooking from an experienced cookbook is the next best thing to learning from an experienced chef; someone else has already done the trial and error for you. And at 50 cents to a few dollars, you can't beat the price of thrift store cookbooks. All the better to save for the ingredients!

This post was written as part of a series on how to thrift shop smarter. Read more on what to buy, and not to buy, at thrift stores.

When I was in my early teens, my mom and I discovered a fantastic cookbook, Asia the Beautiful. Filled with beautiful pictures and exciting recipes from obscure countries like Burma, Nepal, and Laos, it captured my imagination, and I filled the pages with bookmarks and annotations. A couple of years later, when I started cooking in earnest, I went back to the book and began working my way through the recipes that had gotten me so fired up.

My only problem was that I grew up in Northern Virginia in the late 1980's. Even using the list of suggested substitutions, I was still at a loss for many of the ingredients. Where could I find galangal or keffir lime leaves? Who had screwpine extract? Even lemongrass, which I can now see all over the place, was almost impossible to find back then. In my ever-widening search for exotic ingredients, I finally discovered the international grocery stores. After poking around some of the smaller, cramped places, I ended up at Lotte, a gigantic Korean supermarket. Inside its doors were most of the ingredients that I had been looking for, and some amazing ones that I had never imagined existed. I was in heaven.