Cheap and Easy White Trash Foods

The requirements for white trash foods - must be mind numbingly easy, must be cheap, must have a lot of flavor, and must be fast to get from pantry to table. The following foods can get you from breakfast to a midnight snack without ever having to stray to the fancy sections of your grocery store. In fact, calling these recipes is almost a lie, an injustice to how simple they are.

Breakfast foods

Swamp Toast

This is a quick and cheap way to get something flavorful and starchy with your breakfast. Drop a tablespoon of margarine in a hot skillet and let it melt. Add white bread and fry on both sides. Add more margarine as necessary. This can be as crispy or as soft as you like. Eat with elly or jam. The bread being fried makes it just so much nicer than toast you have to butter and jelly at once. The margarine flavors the whole slice so you don't have any disappointing dry spots.

Sugar toast

Spread soft spread (margarine was always for cooking) on a piece of white bread and sprinkle with sugar. Toast in the oven or toaster oven

Syrup on white bread

For when there's nothing else in the house and you need a sweet fix. You can improve this by using molasses if that's to your taste, or mixing up some biscuits from some generic baking mix (we're going even cheaper than Jiffy here) But then if you're able to make biscuits you can probably make pancakes too and lose the white trash cachet. Still, my dad swears by dipping buttered biscuits in molasses. Maybe a little more old school southern than white trash, but I can see people having nothing but biscuits and molasses for breakfast.

Main Dishes

Frito Chili Pie

This is basically a bag of fritos, a can of your favorit chili, and grated cheese or onions to taste. Baking this "pie" in a casserole is a nice touch but totally unnecessary. To keep with the fast and easy requirement there are really only three steps. Dump can of chili in large bowl and microwave till hot. Add chips and cheese. Stir.

There are all kinds of Fritos available. I always use the small ones, though the large ones would work well if you're baking this in a casserole

SOS

Some call it chipped beef, and it still is made with dehydrated, or chipped, slices of beef, in some parts of the country. (s**t on a shingle) In our house we called it "stuff on a shingle". You could fancy this up by using toasted French bread or sourdough rounds, and perhaps some real mushrooms sautéed with the meat. Substitute a brown gravy for the mushroom soup. But why mess with perfection? Brown one pound of beef, add a can of mushroom soup and heat through. Toast white bread and ladle the meat-soup mix on top.

Tuna Melt Toast

Mix a can of tuna and mayonnaise and spread a layer on white bread. You might want to microwave it a bit to take some chill off the mayo. Top with a slice of processed cheese food and toast. You can stretch a can of tuna to feed two people this way and give them something a little better than cold tuna sandwhich. A really great upgrade to this, but still kinda white trashy, is putting the tuna filling in hot dogs and topping with the cheese slice or grated cheese. Wrap the hot dogs in foil and place in an oven to heat through.

Veggies

Vegetables are almost always canned when you're poor white trash. If mom got fancy she mixed mushroom soup with the green beans (I still love it! Who needs fried onions?)

Fried hot dogs

Slice lengthwise and fry in margarine. Works well with vienna sausages too. Fry eggs in the juices left in the pan to make it a breakfast.

Snacks

Liverwurst on crackers

The white trash version of pate. It's a soft sausage that can be cut or scooped out.

Round Butter Crackes and Spray Cheese. A fancy version would be the bacon flavored cheese.

Desert

Ambrosia - cool whip, mini marshmallows, and fruit cocktail. How can this not be good? Make it ahead of time and the fruit flavors mingle with the marshmallow and cool whip, making it a bowl of fruity whip cream perfection. Cool whip can even stand in on its own for a cheap ice cream fix (not something to make a habit of).

So there you have a basic menu in case you ever want to try this way of eating. My advice is to indulge occasionally, or else go all out and have a white trash food party with your friends. You get to get these cravings out of your system without all the guilt! Or approach it as an introduction to a new cuisine. In any case, its good, cheap, fast, and fun.