I grew up eating the same 7 dinners on rotation because that's all my parents could afford — now every single one shows up on food blogs as "rustic comfort cooking" and costs $28 a plate

There's something deeply ironic about scrolling through Instagram and seeing a food blogger's "deconstructed shepherd's pie with truffle oil drizzle" priced at thirty-two dollars when I remember scraping the last bits of ground beef and instant mashed potatoes from our casserole dish on Thursday nights.

The same meal that once meant stretching a pound of meat to feed five people now appears on menus with words like "heritage" and "artisanal" attached to it.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially when I stand in my kitchen on Monday mornings, making soup from whatever needs using up from the week before. It's a habit I developed during those lean years, and one I've never shaken.

There's something both amusing and unsettling about watching the world discover what we always knew: simple food, born from necessity, carries its own kind of magic.

1. When necessity becomes nostalgia

Growing up, our weekly menu was as predictable as the sunrise. Monday was beans and rice. Tuesday, spaghetti with butter and whatever cheese we had.

Wednesday brought tuna casserole. Thursday was that shepherd's pie. Friday meant scrambled eggs and toast for dinner. Saturday we'd have soup from whatever vegetables were getting soft.

And Sunday? Sunday we'd all gather for dinner together, usually a small roast chicken that my mother could stretch into sandwiches for the next two days.

These weren't choices made from cookbooks or lifestyle magazines. They were mathematical equations balanced against a grocery budget that had no room for error. My mother would stand in the store with her calculator, adding and subtracting, making sure we'd have enough until the next paycheck.

Now I see these same dishes elevated to something almost unrecognizable. That tuna casserole? It's become "sustainable albacore gratin with artichoke hearts and gruyere." The beans and rice? "Heirloom legumes with forbidden rice and microgreens."

Each transformation feels like watching your childhood through a funhouse mirror.

2. The weight of feeding others

Years later, when I found myself alone with two children and a teacher's salary that barely covered rent, I understood my mother's kitchen math in my bones.

There were two years when I had to accept food stamps, and I remember standing in line at the grocery store, hoping none of my students' parents would see me. Pride is a luxury you can't afford when your children need to eat.

I learned to shop the sales religiously, to buy the bruised produce at discount, to make friends with the butcher who would save soup bones for me. Every meal was planned, every leftover repurposed. Nothing was wasted because waste was a word that didn't exist in our vocabulary.

The irony wasn't lost on me even then. During the day, I taught teenagers about metaphor and symbolism in literature, and at night I came home to the very real symbolism of an empty refrigerator teaching me about priorities and survival.

3. Creativity born from constraint

My mother was a seamstress who could look at three remnants of fabric and see a Sunday dress. She taught me that limitations don't kill creativity; they birth it.

In our kitchen, this meant learning that onions could be caramelized to add sweetness when we had no sugar for the tomato sauce. It meant discovering that stale bread, soaked in milk and mixed with an egg, could bind meatballs when breadcrumbs were a luxury.

This kind of resourcefulness stays with you. Even now, when I could afford to shop without checking prices, I still feel a small victory when I use every part of the vegetable, when I transform Tuesday's roast into Thursday's sandwiches.

It's not about the money anymore. It's about honoring the lessons that scarcity taught me.

4. The commodification of struggle

What strikes me most is how these dishes are now presented as discoveries, as if someone just stumbled upon the idea of putting potatoes on top of meat and calling it dinner.

Food blogs write origin stories about "traditional peasant food" without acknowledging that peasants are not characters in a story but real people who made these dishes because they had no other choice.

I see young chefs on cooking shows talking about "elevating humble ingredients" and I want to tell them that those ingredients were never humble.

They were heroic. They were the difference between going to bed hungry and going to bed fed. They were my mother's algebra, calculating how to stretch five dollars into five dinners.

5. What we really hunger for

Perhaps what people are really paying twenty-eight dollars for isn't the food itself but the story it tells. In our modern world of abundance and choice paralysis, there's something appealing about simplicity, about dishes that remind us of kitchens where love was measured in ladles and care came in casserole dishes.

But whose story are they buying? When I see "rustic comfort cooking" on a menu, I think about comfort being a full belly when you weren't sure there would be one. I think about my mother's hands, rough from work, gently placing a plate in front of me with food she'd somehow conjured from almost nothing.

The truth is, these meals taste different when they're a choice rather than a necessity. The flavors change when there's no anxiety seasoning them, no worry about tomorrow's dinner simmering alongside today's soup.

Final thoughts

I still make those seven dinners sometimes. Not because I have to, but because they're woven into who I am. They taste like resilience, like my mother's determination, like my own years of making something from nothing.

When I serve them to friends who compliment my "authentic, rustic cooking," I smile and accept the praise.

But in my heart, I'm setting a table for all of us who knew these dishes before they had fancy names, who understood that creativity isn't about having everything but about making everything from what you have. That's the real recipe worth preserving.