Dec 4
I have been prompted to inform you all that the blog is on indefinite hold. I apologize for not saying so sooner, and I will post more as soon as I am able.
Thank you for your sincere and appealing readership. It has been incredibly satisfying to write for you all.
This used to be 25 lbs of galas, but we've been snacking them pretty hard all week. It's still a lot of apples.
Over budget.
Spent this week: $165.46
Spent in the past 24 hours: $0
Same old song. We would have been okay, if not for the Thai food.
We spent $110.46 on groceries. That includes $10 worth of ice cream and $6 worth of orange juice. (Pregnancy tax.) We spent $28 at the farm stand of our favorite no-spray u-pick. Their u-pick is over for the season, but they’ve got great deals right now on stuff that’s already picked. That is, 25% anything you buy by the case. We go through gala apples like water around here, and apples keep well on our nice, cold (unheated, uninsulated) sun porch. We got 25 lbs of beautiful organic (minus the pricey certificate) gala apples for $18. That $18 puts us outside of our budget, but we won’t have to buy apples for a few weeks and I’m also going to make and can a few batches of apple butter, which will extend our quickly dwindling toast spread stash. (Must also finish making jam from the rest of the frozen blueberries, and get started on the marionberries.) Bonus: the sunporch now smells very strongly of cold apples. The other $10 was spent on Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, some kind of hot pepper that Billy will eat alone because I don’t care for them, and some gorgeous bartlett pears. We’ve still got half the broccoli and cauliflower, and those peppers, so that $10 goes toward feeding us next week, too… So there was some spending this week that will translate to lower costs in the coming weeks. All that is fine.
To be honest, I can’t exactly calculate what I spent on food last week. I mean, I can, but it would involve lots of measuring and probably some weighing, and it would certainly involve math. Though I do need to practice for the GRE (Shit! I need to practice for the GRE!) I’m not much in the habit of doing math. My math is more along the lines of “another half an onion” or “more cayenne pepper.” But, I am proud to say that save for a $10 supplemental fresh-veggie run, I’ve been able to live off of my combined first Costco and second commissary trips, which cost me $200 total and included booze, pet food, alcohol and most of what I need for Thanksgiving (which I’m not including in this project). I think other than those supplemental veggie runs, I’ll be able to live off of those staples for the next few weeks.
And now that I’m working outside of my apartment, I did something I’ve never done before: last night I made a week’s worth of lunches, so I’m not stuck downtown, starving and spending.
Working the leftovers transformation challenge. Stale bread became croutons. Green tomatoes ripened in a paper bag. As usual, tastier than it is pretty.
Billy’s been on jury duty this week. The first day, I packed him a lunch of leftovers as usual. Yeah. Not a great idea. At work he’s got access to plates, utensils, and a microwave, etc. Oh–and a place to sit and eat. Not so much at the court house. So that first day he had to buy lunch at the food court in the mall. Cheap, it turns out, and filling, but not healthy. He reports that he spent $5 on a heaping saucy plate of something vaguely Asian. The next day he spent $6 for a heaping plate of same (or similar, I guess. I don’t know what the extra buck went for). On the third day, we remembered our humble friend the sandwich, and he went out and bought some meaty stuff and some cheesy stuff and now lunches are back in budget compliance for the duration of the trial.
Besides the two days it took us to figure out the jury duty lunch thing, this week was uneventful, budget-wise. I made some good first steps toward the leftover re-imagining goal. We did, indeed, use leftover beans and rice as burritos for dinner one night. And I made croutons out of some about-to-go-stale bread and then tossed them with oil and vinegar and chunks of tomato from a few of the garden tomatoes that are ripening VERY nicely in paper bags in the sun porch. And then last night I took leftover pasta (elbows, the kid’s current preferred shape), a bag of mixed soup-friendly beans that had been collecting dust in the cupboard, a can of pureed tomato, and the usual soup suspects (onion, garlic, carrots, celery, water), and waved my hands around and turned it into a rather nice minestrone. The celery and carrots were also leftovers of sorts, hanging around from that dinner party last weekend. All I had to buy to make the soup was the pureed tomatoes ($2.99) and a couple onions ($1.21). We had a delicious dinner, and used up a bunch of pasta that would have been tossed most likely or eaten when we didn’t really want it, and a bag of mixed beans that I’d been neglecting because I’m not in the habit of using them. (I’m kind of in a lentil, mung bean, adzuki bean, black bean rut. There are many more beans out there, and I should branch out.)
Anyway…using the leftovers in a different way than how they were first served made for much less drudgery. Leftovers shouldn’t have to be a chore, yeah? I’m thinking the key to leftovers (to be used that same week, rather than making a huge batch of something to freeze and eat again later) with vegetarian food is to plan based on beans and grains. Vegetables are, of course, much better fresh so I try to only harvest and cook as much as we’re going to eat at that meal and maybe for lunch the next day.
Oh yeah…the budget. Here’s the breakdown:
Nov 12
Because with a little effort and a lot of vegetable stock, this:
Becomes this:
The pumpkin was 100% free, as it grew from a volunteer plant that grew from a seed from the compost we spread on the garden. Compost from our neighborhood’s communal bin. Someone in the neighborhood had some pie pumpkins at some point last year, and composted the seeds, and I thank them.
The wilted mustard greens, in all their peppery goodness, were also from our garden though not volunteer but rather planted quite intentionally by me. They were the perfect compliment to the sweet, creamy risotto. We’ve got four mustard plants in the winter garden, and five more squash stored from this summer’s harvest, so I expect we’ll be enjoying this meal several more times before the winter is over. It was the best damn thing I’d eaten in I don’t know how long. So. Damn. Good.
And sure, you can buy a pumpkin and you can buy mustard greens. But it’ll cost you more, and there’s no way it can taste as good. Especially the greens. Nothing tastes quite the same as a vegetable that’s been harvested minutes before eating. That, and for the cost of a packet of seeds ($2.49), we’ll have greens on our table all winter.
The bread? Molasses wheat from an old bread cookbook that belonged to my parents. The book is so old, I assumed it was out of print and I was going to share the recipe with you, but a quick search proves there is a New! Updated and Expanded! edition, so good copyright adherent that I am, I simply recommend you look for this book in a store or library and see if it’s still got that molasses wheat bread recipe. If it does, it makes a damn fine bread.
It’s also quite good toasted, with butter and homemade blueberry jam. So excuse me, please. The fetus wants a snack.
Nov 11
Before I move on to my budget saving tips, will you allow me a moment of self promotion? Thanks. As you can see from the image above, I’m having my annual Casserole Party in Kansas City on Monday. So if you’re in the KS or the MO I hope you’ll enter!
Now, onto more expensive things (the Casserole Party is free!), let’s talk about Costco. It’s hard to believe that I don’t have a Costco membership. In fact, my friend who took me to the big box store today (the same generous friend who took me the to the commissary a while back) was in shock over the fact that I hadn’t been to Costco in at least 10 years. I explained to her that living in New York, having a Costco membership is almost pointless if you don’t have a car. What one would save on groceries would be spent on cabs and car services needed to cart bulky items home. But when one moves to Kansas City and has a car (one spent only $600 on) a Costco membership just might be a worthy investment. Especially when you consider what I “discovered” today.
Nov 10
delicata or della cotta, it's good squash
This post is not about the soup that I made last night. Not that it was a bad soup. Missy even ate the beet greens that were in it after only a few moments of hesitant prodding with her spoon. It’s not about the soup because I made the soup in a hurry. I was sick. I’d spent the weekend blowing my nose a lot and talking in the way that people do when their heads are great sacks of mucous. I felt ready for work on Monday, rode in, and suffered some embarrassment when a co-worker caught me staring blankly at my personal email for, like, seven or eight minutes. Having thus obtained independent verification that I was not in a productive state, I packed it in and went home early.
It’s a funny thing, getting by. For a while, I thought I would “get by” on $50 a week—a big change from the $450 or more I was spending on food each month. And I did, while still eating quite well. A challenge, sure, but a totally doable one.
So what happens when you have only $20 to spend on food in a week? Well, you make it work. It turns out that broccoli stalks, when boiled for a minute or two, are a great addition to a bowl of pasta tossed with olive oil, sea salt, and crushed red pepper and that when your mom knows you’re broke, she will totally take you out for barbeque.
It also turns out that when you’ve become accustomed to “getting by,” when your mom offers to take you grocery shopping because you have only $11 for the rest of the week and it’s only Wednesday, you’re totally comfortable telling her ‘thanks, but no thanks, I’ll be fine.” Because you will be.
We had people over for dinner twice this past weekend. I was sure that with that we’d blown our chances of meeting the budget this week, and I was plotting all kinds of percentage systems of food eaten by our family vs food eaten by guests to try to coax the numbers into shape. It was going to be tricky to calculate, though, based on all the leftovers from both dinners. Turns out we’re under budget, so I don’t have to figure those percentages out. Huge relief. I hate math.
On Saturday evening (Halloween), we had friends over for trick or treating and pizza. Okay. We bought two pizzas, which was too much, and we ended up eating cold pizza for breakfast Sunday morning and reheated pizza for lunch on Monday, so that worked out fine, budget wise, because of the number of meals we got out of it. (The health impact of eating pizza three days in a row? That’s a different blog.) So we were fine, budget-wise, with the pizza, but I was sure the entertaining had broken the budget, because on Sunday night we had another family over and they eat meat, and Billy wanted to serve meat, and, well…
Nov 6
I’m late with this entry. I’m discouraged. CNN/Time’s media-repackaging machine coughed our Time Cheapskate blog article back up, bringing with it a piping hot cup of hate. Here are two of my favorites:
fresh hate
I don’t get it. None of the writers of this blog is “an obese pig.” We’re long pig, like everyone else. I don’t think any of us has ever had to use a WIC card, though we’re all glad that they’re available to folks who need them. While I’ll cop to being a slacker of Lebowskian proportions, I can say for sure that Emily is one of the hardest-working people I’ve ever met, determined to eke out a living on the new frontier of journalism. For years, she’s been working the sharp edge of entrepreneurship harder than anyone with a regular office job. As for Cari, I think anyone would agree that being a mom is a full-time job in itself. She’s also a for-real serious writer, another full time job in itself. (Oh, sure, that’s not a real job. Yeah. Go to the bookstore. Pick a novel off the shelf. Do you have any idea how much work went into making it?) On top of that, since the launch of this blog, she’s gone from futzing in the garden to producing a significant portion of her family’s food. I’d be impressed by anyone who can do half of what she does.
Now, it’s obvious that the haters, for the most part, are just rubbing one out with the white glove of sanctimony and moving on. If they were interested in food as much as they were interested in acting superior, they’d post some recipes, and break down their weekly budgets for us. If they were interested in food, but had enough human dignity to leave aside superiority’s Dorito glow, they’d be like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Here’s what I eat.” But they haven’t, not a one.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him think, so I assume that, if the hater brigade were to read this, it’d fall on deaf ears. I can also say, with the stats to back it, that most of them don’t read the blog. If they did, they’d know that we’re not about what they assume we’re about. We’re not showing that we’re better than anyone else. We’re looking at how we spend on food, and trying to lower our budgets while maintaining or improving the standard that we enjoyed in more prosperous times. No, we don’t eat a lot of Hamburger Helper or $0.25 ramen. That’s not how we do. We love food almost as much as we love our families. As a rule, we drive little, and we don’t have cable TV. We prioritize our pleasures, and we list food high. If that keeps anyone down, it’s only ourselves. Speaking for myself, far from keeping me down, my love of food has kept me alive. Food is one of the basic necessities. It is also the most reliable pleasure. It is to the reasoned enjoyment of that pleasure that this blog is dedicated.
And if any of you juvenile fucks out there calls one of my co-bloggers an “obese pig” again, I’m coming out there to kick your ass back to grade school, where you belong.
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