My boyfriend always laughs when we go grocery shopping together—not so much for any crazy or adorable antics on my part, unfortunately. No, if anything, he’s usually amused by what I put in the grocery cart versus what he puts in.

When he grocery shops, he buys meat, fresh vegetables and potatoes, and sometimes pasta with sauce. Meanwhile, I’m in the canned good aisle trying to assemble a cardboard flat of various canned veggies and beans (mostly the kidney or black bean variety). Then it’s on to grab salsa and rice, be it the plain minute rice or, if I’m feeling fancy, several boxes of Zatarain's rice mixes. (Their jambalaya mix is to die for.) Sure, I get pasta and spaghetti sauce too, but I try to buy in bulk, with a few extra cans of stewed or diced tomatoes joining the mass of food in my cart.

For some people, that shopping list may be a bit odd. For me, it’s the shopping list that I learned from my dad.

When I was growing up, I was one of four hungry mouths that my dad had to feed, kid-wise. My sisters and I had formidable appetites, and my dad always delivered huge meals bursting with flavors.

Every night, we had some sort of casserole (like pot pie made from Bisquick, frozen chicken, cream of chicken soup and frozen veggies) or what we called “Dad’s Hodge-Podges.” “Hodge-Podges” are made from either pasta or rice, usually with beans, always with tomatoes, and lots of garlic powder and paprika if there’s rice, and oregano and basil if there’s chicken and pasta in the mix. He never makes the same recipe twice, and he has feed us at least 500 variants of the same dish.

During the winter, we could always bet that we were having some kind of soup or chili for dinner. One fan favorite was Dad’s potato soup, usually started from a pouch we found at Aldi’s or Big Lots, and then bulked up with cold cut ham that didn’t make it into our lunch bags and a lot of cheese.

No matter what he made us, I just remember the thing that always blew my mind back then. No matter how huge the pot of pasta, no matter how many scoops of pot pie you had dished out for yourself and devoured, there was always extra food. There were always leftovers, even if you went back for seconds and thirds.

However, Dad made sure that there were always leftovers because we couldn’t afford to waste food. Unbeknownst to me at the time, for most of my childhood, money was a bit tight around the house. The reason that we bought rice and beans and frozen veggies in bulk was because they were cheap. That reason was the explanation behind a lot of things we bought, both at the grocery store and in general.

Off-brand or store-brand cleaning products and cereal, shampoo, and soap? Because it’s cheap.

Thrift stores for back to clothes shopping instead of Aeropostale and Kohls? Because it’s cheap.

I’m not talking about this to garner sympathy. If anything, by cooking and shopping the way he did, my dad taught me to be responsible, both fiscally and with basic survival skills.

He tried to make grocery shopping informative by teaching me how to compare prices not on the surface price but based on how many cents per ounce. True, the Frosted Flakes box was cool and familiar, but you can get at least two boxes worth of cereal in a plastic bag at the end of the aisle and it costs less.

In the kitchen, it wasn’t any different. I learned how to cook rather early on, and to this day, I still bother my dad for his tried and true recipes? (His meatball soup, which is essentially a poor man’s Italian wedding soup, but with more spice, is delicious.) Whenever depression has me in a slump and I don’t want to necessarily cook, I still have options, even if it’s just some brown rice with corn and black beans and a little bit of salsa. (I was so proud of that I had to take a picture and text my dad. I'm not sorry.)

Simple things like discounted food and made-up-on-the-spot recipes, even if they started out cheap, are infinitely more valuable to me because I learned how to make it more from my dad.