Betty Cunningham has been cooking for a small crowd each night — and noon, and morning — for most of the last 30 years.
Cunningham, an Iola mother of 12, five of whom are still at home, learned by necessity how to stretch a budget as well as a meal.
“I watch for sales and I buy in big quantities,” Cunningham said. She also stays away from expensive cuts of meat such as steak, and instead builds meals around ground beef and chicken.
Mainly, she noted, “I do a lot of cooking from scratch to save money.”
Almost every day at the Cunningham house, something is baking, be it bread or rolls or homemade pizza.
“It’s tempting, when you walk through a grocery store, to buy cinnamon rolls and stuff, but then I think, I can make that for much cheaper,” Cunningham said.
A dedicated Iolan, Cunningham secures all her necessities locally. The farthest her family ventures to shop for food is Chanute, where her husband works and will pick up groceries afterward.
“He’s learned what to look for, what price range,” she said of her husband’s efforts.
“It’s funny, so many times I’ll think I need a certain item, but I didn’t tell him, and he’ll come home and say ‘Oh, I got eggs for you,’ or whatever, and it’s what I needed.” Cunningham chalks up the seemingly psychic connection to long years of marriage.
Despite having to feed so many, Cunningham doesn’t plan menus in advance. She is never quite sure how many she is cooking for anyway, she said. Several of her children, now at college, may or may not come home on weekends. A couple of married sons also occasionally pop in.
Her son, Michael, jokes that his mother just starts cooking chicken or hamburger and thinks what to do with it afterward. The two staples are the centerpiece of most of her recipes.
“What I learned growing up was how to make basic American food — potato soup, Spanish rice, chicken and noodles, meatloaf,” Cunningham said.
Her favorite recipes are from meals served at church dinners, or those she’s “simplified for kids.”
Meal preparation has gotten trickier as her children have aged — the youngest is now 10 — and their tastes have evolved, she said.
“The kids come in and say, ‘That’s what we had for lunch at school’ or ‘I don’t like that.’”
Sometimes, she acquiesces and changes mid-stream.
“The boys come in and one adds one spice, another adds another — by the time they are through, it’s spicy. We had some chili one time that was so spicy it made your eyes burn,” she said.
Not a fan of spicy flavors herself, Cunningham has branched out of late to keep the kids’ interest in home-cooked meals.
On one adventure to a restaurant her children raved about, she was surprised to find “just home cooking.”
AN EVEN bigger challenge than pleasing all is just keeping enough food on hand.
“With teenage boys, their stomachs are like bottomless pits,” she said. “They can eat a meal and they’re still hungry.”
So, typically, there is always something on the stove, on the counter, in the oven — it seems that Cunningham never stops cooking.
“Last night I canned pears,” Cunningham said. “Today I was going to make jelly.
“I have to multitask,” she noted. “If I start bread dough, I have to let it sit, so I start on laundry; then I add a few ingredients (to whatever is cooking), then come back and knead dough, then go work on something else.”
And, she noted, “There’s always dishes, too. I’m probably the only person in town — besides a restaurant — who can run my dishwasher twice a day and still have a sinkful of dishes and pots and pans.”
Yet for fun, Cunningham loves to bake. “I spend extra time doing that,” she said.
She loves baking so much that her oven is on year round, even in the heat of summer.
Known for tender, light rolls, moist apple cake and pizza crust so good it is used for both savory and dessert pies, Cunningham admits her baking wasn’t always perfect.
She remembers a specific instance at the beginning of her 31-year marriage to Glen.
Cunningham tried baking bread as her mother did.
“My mom’s recipes were to add a pinch of this and dump a handful of that,” she said. “She didn’t measure anything.”
For bread, Cunningham was told “to put as much flour into the dough as you can until it’s not sticky anymore.”
Which she did.
“Those first two loaves, well,” she said, “We ate the one, then Glen said we could varnish the second and use it as a doorstop.”
She was saved when a friend gave her a recipe for 60-minute rolls which used — of all things — measurements.
The rolls “came out perfect. Her recipe taught me how much flour to use and proportions for baking,” Cunningham said.
One favorite in the Cunningham house is homemade hot pockets.
“My kids started buying them at the store and they’re so expensive,” she said. “You can’t buy enough to them to feed a whole family. So I just made up my own recipe.”
Cunningham uses a yeasted dough, cubed ham, sour cream and Velveeta cheese to create the tasty treats. They take about two hours to make, she noted. Even so, the price per unit “is a lot less than what you’d pay in the store, I’m sure,” she said.
Cunningham initially thought she would bake and freeze the hand-held sandwiches, “but they all get eaten as soon as they come out of the oven. There’s never any left over to freeze.”
Despite the hours she spends each day cooking, Cunningham’s kitchen is basic. There is no Kitchen Aid mixer. No Cuisinart food processor. No oven-safe silicon spatulas or potholders.
She uses tried-and-true tools such as a wooden-handled pastry cutter. Battered baking pans that show the dents of time.
She doesn’t seem to mind, though.
“I love to cook, and I love having a big family to cook for,” she said. “It’s a lot more fun sharing when you eat.”
