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