Cheap Ethnic Eatz · Archive

Cheap Ethnic Eatz: A Montreal Food Blog Remembered

A tribute to Evelyne Budkewitsch's much-loved food blog, 2009 to 2015.

Cheap Ethnic Eatz was Evelyne Budkewitsch's food blog, written in Montreal between 2009 and 2015. HomeCooks keeps this archive so the recipes and stories people once linked to still lead somewhere warm, rather than a dead end.

For six years, Cheap Ethnic Eatz was a small but generous corner of the food-blogging world. It was the kind of place where you might arrive looking for one recipe and leave an hour later, having read about a cheese-making challenge, a homemade marshmallow experiment and a Montreal bakery worth the detour. This page gathers the threads of what the blog was, where it went, and why we have chosen to keep its memory in good order.

What It Was

Cheap Ethnic Eatz was run by Evelyne Budkewitsch from Montreal, Canada, and published steadily from 2009 to 2015. The name gives away the spirit of it: honest, world-spanning home cooking that did not need a fortune or a restaurant kitchen to pull off. Evelyne cooked across cuisines and continents, treating "ethnic" not as a label for the exotic but simply as a nod to the enormous variety of home cooking that people make and love everywhere.

What set the blog apart was how deeply Evelyne wove herself into the wider food-writing community of the time. She was a host for the Daring Bakers and the Daring Cooks, the monthly challenge groups that pushed home cooks to attempt techniques they might otherwise have avoided, from laminated pastry to fresh pasta. Hosting meant choosing the challenge and shepherding hundreds of other bloggers through it, which is no small responsibility.

She was also a familiar name in several collaborative food projects. She took part in the Secret Recipe Club, in which members were secretly assigned another blog each month and cooked something from it. She joined TwelveLoaves, a monthly bread-baking group organised around a seasonal ingredient or theme. She cooked along with Food 'n' Flix, where a nominated film sets the tone for a dish inspired by it. And she was part of Cheesepalooza, a year-long home cheese-making challenge that worked through everything from soft fresh cheeses to firmer aged styles.

One small mark of how carefully Evelyne documented her cooking: her work on jian dui, the Chinese fried sesame balls with a chewy glutinous rice shell, was cited on Wikipedia as a reference. It is a nice reminder that a well-researched home-cook's post can become a genuine source others rely on.

Taken together, these threads paint a picture of a blogger who was curious, community-minded and unafraid of a fiddly technique. The recipes ranged widely, but the tone stayed consistent: friendly, a little playful, and grounded in the pleasure of actually making the food yourself.

The Story Continued

Blogs, like the cooks who write them, tend to grow and change. Around 2015, Cheap Ethnic Eatz evolved into a new home, CulturEatz, where Evelyne carried the same curiosity forward under a name that better captured the mix of food, culture and travel she was exploring. The old blog closed its chapter, but the person behind it kept writing.

If you want the living version of this story, Evelyne still writes at CulturEatz, and that is entirely her own work and her own site. To be clear, HomeCooks has no affiliation with CulturEatz and makes no claim over it. We simply keep the legacy of the earlier Cheap Ethnic Eatz material tidied and reachable; the present belongs to Evelyne.

Why HomeCooks Keeps This Archive

We keep this archive because we share the belief that ran through Evelyne's writing: that real food, cooked well, should be within everyone's reach. Good cooking does not have to be expensive or intimidating, and healthy food and delicious food are not opposites. Honouring a blog that celebrated home cooking for its own sake feels like the right thing to do, and it costs us nothing but a little care.

Explore the Legacy

The topics Cheap Ethnic Eatz covered are gathered across eleven archive pages here. Each one rebuilds a corner of the old blog in our own words, so a link you followed from 2013 still lands somewhere useful. Wander through whichever catches your eye:

Continue reading at HomeCooks

Evidence-based guides on food, cooking and nutrition.

Balanced Eating

The fundamentals of eating well, without fads or fuss.

Diet Styles Explained

Mediterranean, pescatarian, flexitarian and more, compared plainly.

Nutrition Basics

How the macronutrients work and what a good plate looks like.

Seasonal Eating

Cooking with the calendar for better flavour and value.

Chef Food Philosophy

Why food cooked with care simply tastes and feels better.

The Mediterranean Diet

One of the most studied ways of eating, explained.

You can also revisit the original homepage on the Wayback Machine. Explore HomeCooks meals