It astounds me how the most modest ingredients make the most fantastic food: old bread, sugar and eggs make creamy bread pudding; flour, water and eggs make pasta; the cheapest cut of beef, carrots, onion, celery and time for a great stew; a chicken carcass and some veggies for a rich, thick stock; flour, water and yeast for bread.

I made polenta last night to eat with the leftover ragu, and it's basically 2 cups of boiling water, 1/2 cup basic cornmeal (about 10 cents' worth) and a lot of stirring (of course, I added butter and Parmesan at the end, but you could have a very respectable, creamy polenta just by adding a lot of salt and freshly ground pepper - but even a wedge of Parmesan can be a modest ingredient when you consider how far you can stretch a chunk). The ragu, which disappointed me the first time, was transformed by the modest cornmeal mush. Frugality is highly underrated.