I have found that killing rabbits in the open farm fields north of town is EZ food and cash grinding, if you have the dark cauldron skill, or wait for a refugee camp event to appear nearby (they have a cauldron you can use).
It's also incredibly safe as any dangerous encounter while you're on a farm field, you can simply run away to the edge of the map, with almost zero chance of being blocked as long as your speed and stamina are half decent.
Go to the field nearest a forest or rainforest tile, depending on if you also want to farm herbs or be closer to town when you're done, enter field, kill rabbits (one, two, or none can spawn per encounter), pick up the metric fuckton of meat they often drop, optionally gather or eat the veggies on the map too, leave map, repeat. Once you have loaded down your weight limit in raw animal meat, goto forest and chop 2 pieces of wood, use one to make dark cauldron, use the other to put into it along with all the meat, batch cook up smoked meat. MAKE SURE NOT TO BE LOW ON STAMINA before batch cooking, or doing that much may put you to -100!
75 pieces of smoked meat is roughly equal to one gold coin, and can be easily gotten within one trip of doing this, especially if you use the vegetables to stay fed and don't eat the smoked meat while you're out.
Bank it all or exchange for gold. Fastest way i've found to build up food and money, so far.