Leanne Brown, author of New York Times bestselling cookbook Good and Cheap (Workman Publishing Company), stops by the Mother Earth News Fair in Seven Springs tomorrow.

She will hold one of the weekend-long fair's 150 workshops, presenting tips from the cookbook involving grocery shopping, pantry basics and making healthy food choices on a budget.

Brown, a native of Canada, started the cookbook after enrolling in New York University to pursue a master’s in food studies. A class project forced her to imagine what it would be like to be one of the 47 million Americans living on food stamps and create a menu of meal options.

Her menu received rave reviews from her class, which inspired her to create a cookbook as part of her thesis project. Good and Cheap provides easy, healthy recipes that can be made on a budget of $4 a day, the average amount of money given to Americans enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

“I wanted to demystify cooking and show how easy it is,” says Brown by phone. “You can cook so much good food for so little money.”

She uploaded the cookbook as a free pdf to her website, and after weeks of few hits, Brown came home to find her inbox exploding. Good and Cheap had been linked to on social-networking site Reddit, and it immediately started trending. Fifty thousand people tried to download the ebook that day.

The online success was followed by a Kickstarter which earned almost $145,00 for a print run of the cookbook. Brown gave 33,000 copies of Good and Cheap to low-income families, and the rest were sold on a “get one, give one” system that gave buyers a free book to share with someone in need.

Now, Brown is touring the country to promote the cookbook and encourage people dealing with food insecurity. Her biggest tip for those living on a tight budget? Buy versatile ingredients, like flour and eggs.

“Always buy food that you can use in multiple ways,” Brown said. Learning to build yourself a good pantry of stuff you can [use in] a lot of different ways is such a good skill to have." 

Leanne will share other tips from Good and Cheap at the Mother Earth News Fair, from 1-2:30 p.m. tomorrow. Tickets are $35.

The event will be held on Sat., Sept. 19, at the Seven Springs Mountain Resort on 777 Waterwheel Dr., Seven Springs, about 90 minutes east of Pittsburgh.

For more information, click here.