Christiane Jory did, and was so thrilled with the outcome that she decided to write a book about her discoveries: The '99 Cent Only Stores' Cookbook. It's filled with recipes that make gourmet food out of not-so-gourmet ingredients. (This seems to be the week for 99 cent meals).

Like the NPR reporter who interviewed Jory, I'm definitely skeptical of food that comes from a 99 cent store. Yep, I'll admit it: the often-discolored cans, dented boxes, and brands I've never heard of creep me out. And if you told me you bought wine at the same place? I'd try it, but I'd cringe a little.

One of my first thoughts was, Oh, but the food is probably shipped from far-off countries and sits in warehouses for days. But Jory insists that some of the food at the stores actually comes from local farmers and distributors. Jory relies on improvised and substituted ingredients - evaporated milk instead of cartons of milk, canned veggies instead of fresh - to achieve a tasty meal at a low cost.

I have to say, Jory definitely encouraged me to look for food in different places, and be open to new ideas. The only thing that turned me off was the health aspect. Canned foods and refrigerated croissants can be easy and tasty, but they're not the most nutritious. Maybe next time I pass a Dollar Tree, I'll look around for bargains, but I don't think I would make it my primary source of food. Would you

Eating cheap in Manhattan by buying food exclusively from 99-cent stores. Doable? Yes. Advisable? Perhaps not.

The New York Times then brings chef Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin in on the skinflint action, challenging him to cook a meal entirely of products from Jack's 99-Cent Store. See what he does with a 99-cent frozen salmon fillet .

Wine critic Eric Asimov asks whether it's possible to teach teenagers the pleasures of moderate drinking with a little wine at the table. It works for the Europeans, right? Or does it?

A kreplach face-off in Brooklyn. Oy gevalt!

The Minimalist suggests we try a stir-fry with fermented black beans.

Then, he takes us on a photo tour of the Campo de' Fiori market in Rome. Serious vegetable porn.

In Tokyo, Japanese takes on Western food continue to grow in popularity. They seem to involve a lot of ketchup.

Starbucks buys $11,000 coffee machines in ongoing efforts to revitalize their image.

With the U.S. economy on the rocks, it seems like a good time to take another look at cutting costs in the kitchen. Here's a (decidedly non-comprehensive, not necessarily "foodie-ish") list of some useful budget cooking and eating sites. Please suggest your own favorite cheap food sites as well.

Cheap Cooking: a spare, photo-free recipe site that seems mostly dedicated to people cooking for families. But hey, recipes for rump roast and apricot chicken will work just as well for one - just divide the remains into Tupperware and take them in for lunch. Food storage tips and a cost calculator are super-useful.

Cheap Eats: a blog with recipes, tips, and techniques for cheaper cooking and eating out. Includes an archive of cheap restaurants (lots of fast food), a Hall of Shame (Wagyu beef burgers with foie gras), and a list or recipes for $3 or less.

Better Budgeting: This frugal recipe list tends towards the retro. Think ground bologna sandwiches, cubed steak, and Tater Tot casserole. But come on, who doesn't like Tater Tot casserole?

USDA Thrifty Food Plan: Check out the 78-page PDF on budget food planning, with sample weekly food planners and some admittedly less-than-inspiring recipes (the ingredients for Baked Cod with Cheese are 'cod' and 'Cheddar cheese').

Rebecca's Pocket: One woman's quest to eat organic on a food stamp budget. Includes recipes and musings on food history.

Frugal Recipes: The "heirloom" recipes from the early- to mid-20th century, such as Ladies' Cabbage and Frozen Cranberry Fruit Salad make this site just as useful as a food history archive as a recipe source.

The Culinary Review: Slashfood has mentioned this user-friendly new site in the past, with its recipe cost calculators, shopping tips, and price breakdowns for various Food Network chef recipes (Giada De Laurentiis champagne risotto: $8.83 per serving).

Hungry, but down to the last quarters in your laundry money jar? Head to The Culinary Review, a consumer guide to food costs, to figure out just how much grub that last $.75 will get you.

The Culinary Review has broken down the costs of various common meals, some of which make a McDonald's Egg McMuffin look like caviar on toast. Make yourself a fruit yogurt smoothie, hard-boiled egg and toast for a mere $1.11 or a cup of black bean soup for $.80.

They also give the prices of a number of Food Network chef-prepared meals. Some are surprisingly expensive - Tyler Florence's mozzarella grilled cheese is $5.59 a serving, certainly pricier than at many diners, while others are grad student-cheap - Alton Brown's baked mac and cheese is a mere $0.96 a serving. Serve that with some sauteed greens or cabbage slaw and you've got lunch for less than the price of a cup of coffee. Also check out the handy tips for saving money in the kitchen (don't buy pre-cut meat) and a list of where to splurge (olive oil, canned tuna) and where to save (canned veggies, cured meats).

The holidays can get pretty expensive, with gifts, food and entertaining expenses piling on until after the New Year (especially if you want to hit one or two after-Christmas sales), so it is always great to find a way to save some money without loosing out on quality. Food is one area where it is difficult to cut back, since price and quality are often closely linked. Paying more will usually get you better meats, cheeses and chocolates, for example. When it comes to wine, however, price are quality are not necessarily as closely inked - not unless you're talking about $100+ bottles of wine, anyway. Since AOL Food has a much larger staff than we do, they went through many bottles of wine to find five great ones that are $5.99 a bottle or less, perfect for serving with holiday dinners or bringing along as a hostess gift to a party because they are guaranteed to taste good without breaking the bank.

1. Trader Joe's Coastal Cabernet ($4.99)
2. Amaicha Torrontes ($4.99)
3. Banrock Station Shiraz ($5.99)
4. Barefoot California Merlot ($5.99)
5. Barefoot California Chardonnay ($5.99)

One of the best things about leftover chicken is that it is perfect for making sandwiches with. Actually, just about any leftover meat (or vegetable) can be incorporated, somehow, into a sandwich because bread and condiments go a long way in making old food seem as good as new. A good illustration of this is this Chicken Salad Sandwich from Cheap Eats. The sandwich is dead-easy to make, mixing shredded chicken, diced celery and green onions with mayonnaise, salt, pepper and a dash of paprika. Once you have the basics, you can augment the filling with hard boiled eggs, dried cranberries or raisins, lettuce, tomatoes or bell peppers. Ever budget-conscious, Cheap Eats also served the sandwich up with a side of leftover smashed roasted garlic potatoes, but as for all sandwiches, a bag of chips makes a perfect acceptable side dish.

American Inventor Spot did a taste test of several types of non-name brand sodas, not comparing them to the major brand equivalents, but just to see how they stood on their own. After all, you can get quite a deal when you buy the store-brand soda instead of a national brand. With brands from Albertsons and Wal-Mart, they rated each soda on flavor, aftertaste, scent, consistency and design before giving it an overall score. Their favorite was Dr. Bold, a Dr. Pepper facsimile from Albertsons.

The problem with generic sodas is that because they vary from place to place, it's hard to know when you're going to get a good one. Fortunately, they're usually inexpensive enough that even if the soda isn't that great, you're only out about a quarter, but I still like to know where I can get a good one. For example, Safeway Select sodas are always on sale and are very good, not to mention that they seem to come in an almost endless number of flavors (though you might want to think twice before buying the diet orange). It's worth picking up a six pack or four when you have a chance.

Do you buy store brand sodas, and if so, tell us where in the comments.

New York City Councilman Joel Rivera is proposing a radical solution to the "obesity epidemic." Specifically, he wants to enact new zoning laws that limit the number of fast food venues that can be built in a specific area. Low-income neighborhoods, which Rivera said have the greatest concentration of fast food restaurants, could be particularly affected under Rivera's plan, which he plans to hold hearings on. He seems to feel that the easy availability of fast food due to the sheer number of restaurants was the biggest contributing factor to the fact that roughly half of all New Yorkers are overweight.

A professor of urban policy and planning at NYU offered a reassuring voice of reason, noting that such laws could not be applied or enforced because they couldn't distinguish between different types of fast food. In New York, a city that is perpetually on the go, far more than pizza and burgers can be considered fast food.

The best place to get a cheap meal is no longer your local McDonald's, Burger King or other fast food establishment - it's Costco. The warehouse store, known for its enormously sized products and low prices, is also known for good eats at even better prices.

The first way to eat there, and certainly the least expensive, is by stopping in for free samples. The store gives out samples of many of its products every day, with the highest concentration of sampling stations set up around meal times. The range of foods is huge, form coffee (roasted in-store) and cookies to crab cakes and beef taquitos. Even without making a second round through the tables, there is a lot to eat.

When I was growing up in California, I noticed that chicken-fried steak seemed to be a popular item on school lunch menus and in dormitory dining halls. I never actually knew what it was, so I never ordered it. Was it really chicken? Was it steak? Every time I came across it, it was round, flat and breaded, with what appeared to be dark-colored meat inside. The "steak" also never looked appetizing.

As it turns out, chicken-fried steak is a variant of schnitzel. It is popular in the Southern US, perhaps especially in Texas. The dish is a cut of beef that is pounded until very thin, breaded and fried. The cheapest, least tender pieces of beef are usually the ones that are used for this dish, since the pounding softens the meat and the majority of the flavor comes from the fried coating and the cream-based gravy that the dish is inevitably smothered in.  And even afficianados will tell you that the best parts are often the coating and the gravy.

Yesterday's San Diego Union Tribune featured an article about several new offerings from French winemakers who are taking aim at the low-end wine market in the U.S. XL Wines' Jet Lag comes in 8.8 ounce screw-top bottles that look like shampoo or cologne and are meant to fit in a carry-on bag. Sounds pretty close to a hip flask. According to the article, other XL offerings include bottles with no names, only clock faces and times of day on the labels. Then there's Los 3 Bandidos, a Pancho Villa-inspired French wine with advertising mired in bullet holes and tales of Mexican revolutionaries. Most are expected to sell for $8-$10.

Perusing the latest issue of Cook's Country, a publication I quite enjoy, I was astounded when I came to the "When Things Go Wrong in the Kitchen" section at the back of the magazine. It is intended to be funny, but what it really shows is that people need to learn when to throw things away. No matter how thrifty you are or how closely you need to watch your wallet, sometimes it is simply best to throw away your mistake and start over from scratch. A good time to consider this action is when food is burnt, bad or if you have been eating leftovers for more than a couple of days.

Witness the following incidents, all harvested from the kitchen disaster stories in Cook's Country:

• A woman wanted to make homemade noodles the way her grandmother did. The recipe looked like it would not make enough, so she added to it until it was several times the original size. She and her husband ate noodles for more than two weeks and it was years before they wanted to eat them again.

According to Gastropoda, the latest thing in the food sections of major newspapers is utilizing stock photos to illustrate recipes. "It’s more insidious than outsourcing journalism -- why should the Wall Street Journal shoot a fresh creme brulee from a New Orleans chef when there are iconic images to be had for almost nothing? All cremes brulee are alike, no?"

It's economical, sure, those photo stylists and food photographers are pricey. And then there's the cooking. What food writer wants to cook? Especially when the good people at the USDA are working so hard baking apple pies for you. For free.

Gastropoda says that USA Weekend was the worst offender. I checked with the Oregonian "Food Day" that arrived on my front steps today and was pleased to see Oregonian photo credits under every picture. I'm wondering if this is isolated to a few national papers for whom food sections are not a focus or is more widespread. How 'bout your local paper?