June 11, 2005
Legacy
Cookin’ Cheap was a TV show out of Roanoke Virginia PBS back in the late 70’s, as memory serves. Larry Bly and Labin Johnson. Your PBS station might have carried it. It was not a winner for syndication. Labin of them has passed into the great canned soup kitchen of the beyond. One’s still around. They showed me that cooking can be fun and cheap. There are archives of their recipes.
Think of tasty, quick and affordable as the legs of a three legged stool. Remove one and the stool is unstable. The bubblly Racheal Ray goes for quick — “Veal cutets only take a few minutes and the cheese comes pre-grated from the the mega mart, How cool is that!”. We’re giving up the cheap leg, and possibly the tasty leg. Emirl has a full staff of cooks behing the curtain. It’s not cheap or fast except in TV time.
It’s time for someone step forward and write about the cheap. I’ll not worry about quick if I can get tasty and affordable. Cooking Cheap. I’ll miss the mark in both directions. Sometimes you can get all three and sometimes my stool breaks on the taste leg. Open a can of mega mart chili for backup, a beer and see what happens.
I do have specialized equipment for smoking meat and it wasn’t cheap. It’s not out of the ball park expensive either, Cheaper than a month of health insureance but you’ll need that too. Lastly, I cook meals for a single person. Sometimes the recipes are for two or more if the leftovers are good enough. If your cooking for 4 or 6, you could probably double them or triple them but I haven’t tested that and I’m not likely to.
Feel free to email me at the “Contact” link.
April 15th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
We “stumbled”across the show shortly after we got our big dish. We lived in the country and without the dish at that time we wouldn’t have seen much tv. We really enjoyed that show and were greatly saddened to hear of Labin’s passing. We sent an email with our condolences and Larry was nice enough to reply. I look back at that show and realize to keep it simple.
May 7th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
i loved cc so much, thank god i taped alot of episodes i wish they would put out the shows on dvd
May 12th, 2008 at 1:41 am
I loved that show, too. my father turned me onto it when I went to live with him when he was terminally ill. We’d always watch the shows together and laugh and laugh. I wish I had them on dvd. Larry and Laban were great!
July 7th, 2008 at 5:07 am
I loved that show so much on Saturday. It kept me in stitches! I really wish they would put the seasons on DVD!!!
July 23rd, 2008 at 7:01 pm
I also LOVED the show and would buy it on DVD.
Maybe Larry Bly could look into that…
July 25th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
I’ve been looking for Cookin’ Cheap episodes all over the Internet, and haven’t found a single one. I’m going to spend this weekend browsing all the VHS tapes I have left in the hopes of finding one. I haven’t much hope - I might have taped one or two, but I also don’t have a lot of tapes from that era any more. I did tape their radio show one day in 1994, and listened to it today. They were just as funny on radio. They had an old South kind of charm and gentleness that is rarely seen these days.
September 29th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
It IS indeed time to bring back Cooking Cheap !
Great show with great guys
October 13th, 2008 at 8:40 am
please put it on dvd. many people would buy it.
November 26th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
I emailed Larry a few years back and asked him about “Cookin’ Cheap” and he said that the PBS station where they were produced owned the rights to the episodes. He didn’t believe that they would be releasing them for purchase. I hope that this situation has changed though because I too would love to see them again.
Larry currently writes a column for the Roanoke Times http://www.roanoke.com/entertainment/food/wb/184798