So, Leanne Brown is an expat fellow Canadian currently studying in the States, and as some sort of project for her master's degree in food studies from New York University, she's put together a low-income cookbook project full of recipes designed to help economically disadvantaged persons with limited culinary experience feed themselves healthily for just $4 USD per day in typical US urban not-completely-food-desert areas.
In accordance with this goal, said budget cookbook,
Good and Cheap is available as a free downloadable PDF on her website, and there's also a charity Kickstarter project meant to outright donate X number of print versions of the cookbook to low-income persons who could use a physical copy due to lack of Internet/home computer/e-reader, as well as heavily subsidize the distribution of even more copies to non-profit organizations worldwide for $4 apiece (+ shipping) to low-income persons whom they believe will benefit from it.
The DRM-free PDF download of
Good and Cheap (and an earlier vegetarian beginner cookbook,
From Scratch) can be found directly on
Brown's personal website. These are really rather nicely laid out, with pleasant photographs and helpful background information, as well as some very reasonable-looking easy recipes. Including
poutine!
Here's the link for the Kickstarter, which ends on Sunday the 13th, and $5 USD will get you a credit in the final book (and technically also a copy of the PDF, which is already being offered totally free), as well as further subsidizing the stretch goals of underwriting additional print copy donations to the needy (currently up to 4,400 donated copies and 17,000 $4-for-non-profit copies, and hoping to reach 4,600/18,000).
Myself, I have literally paid more than the CAD equivalent of that in library overdue fines this season alone, so I figure trying harder to return/renew my books on time and putting the anticipated ensuing funds towards helping those with fewer socioeconomic resources than I is A Good Thing™, so I will be pledging shortly once I've finished posting this. Plus, I get my name in the credits.
Happy reading (and cooking, and eating)!
(But try not to do too much of said cooking and eating of the poutine, which we up here in Canada lovingly refer to as "heart attack in a cup" for reasons which you probably don't want to discover personally.)