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.

The problem is, as always, the takeout thing. Some days you’re either too busy or too tired to cook, or you just really, really, really want someone else to do the cooking. Or nothing will satisfy you but something very specific that would be a huge pain in the ass to try to make yourself. Friday was one of those evenings. I was tired as hell and just couldn’t be arsed to cook. Thai food it was. It did give us each leftovers enough for lunch the next day, but still. $27 for takeout that night? Yeah. We need to be careful with that. Be sure that as this pregnancy continues and once the baby is here and we’re ALL as tired as I am now that we don’t resort to takeout more than once every other week or so. It just adds up too fast.

So, nothing new here to report. I’ll show you the apple butter after it’s made.

Oh! That reminds me! We also got a big pumpkin for 33 cents at the farm stand. All pumpkins were three-for-a-dollar no matter the size. It’s big enough to give us some soup and more risotto AND some pumpkin butter. Mmmm…pumpkin butter. Canning pumpkin butter is kind of controversial, because pumpkin is a low-acid vegetable. Low-acid foods don’t preserve as safely. I’m thinking just a small batch of pumpkin butter to store in the freezer…

Heh. With all my free time, that is. I’ve got all these Little Suzie Homemaker plans, but I’ve also got a kid, freelance work, and a novel in revisions that’s begging for my attention. Oh yeah…and that husband guy. It’s enough to make you want to order in some Thai food, you know?

This $50 a Week thing has been great for our family budget, but it’s definitely added a good deal of pressure for me. Our definition of eating well is fresh, local, and organic. To be able to continue eating that way while keeping to the budget has meant that I need to produce as much of our food as possible, be that by growing it, baking it, or canning it. That’s a full-time job. But I’ve already got three jobs: Mom, novelist, freelance editor. Add farmer and baker to that and I’m fucking tired. And the berries aren’t even canned yet.

Yeah. Maybe we’ll have Thai again tonight.

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:

Groceries: $112.60
Billy lunches: $11

Total: $123.60

Under budget by: $1.40

Ta da!

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.

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.

This might be like me telling you the Earth is round, but even if you never buy anything at Costco, a membership is totally worth its weight ($50, to be exact) in free samples! I’m fairly certain I consumed about 1,000 calories (and not all of them were empty) in the hour-and-a-half I spent at Costco this afternoon. I had Pirate’s Booty, some nasty wannabe Powerbar, a gummy vitamin, a chicken quesadilla, sweet & sour chicken and three different flavors of organic Greek yogurt. I even passed over the sparkling cider (grape flavored, ick!) and potato chips.

My parents used to joke that on weekends, they’d just take my sister and me to the grocery store and feed us off of the free samples. There was a time when I was embarrassed by that (around the same time I was embarrassed by the generic products that sat in our kitchen cabinets), but as someone who’s trying to eat on a budget, I have to admit, my parents were pretty damn clever.

I am happy to follow after them with my coupons and Costco membership in tow.

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.

I had been planning to make stuffed peppers. I don’t like stuffed peppers. But, as part of my campaign to like the things I get from my CSA, I was determined to take the half-dozen green peppers I picked up on Saturday and make the most of them, not half a pepper at a time in pasta sauce this time, but all at once. I went by Fairway, and picked up 2 lbs. of sweet Italian sausages at $3/lb. My plan was to layer this in the peppers with polenta (made from the fancy-pants cornmeal I bought the weekend before) and cheese (most likely a reliable New York State cheddar I’ve been buying for about $5/lb.). Standing dizzily in the paper towel aisle, with Bounties and Brawnys swimming around me, I realized that this was not to be a stuffed peppers night. This was to be a night for something simpler.

Last week, I met with a guy I’m working with on a corporate video project, to pick up some tapes that I had to capture (capture is video-speak for put-into-the-computer). He also gave me a couple of packets of soup, explaining that he and his wife bought them, and, both being vegetarian, resolved to give them away when they realized that the soup packets contained chicken bouillon. These were free food — and not just free food, but free fancy-pants food. These were those Alessi soup packets, in the faux-brown-paper foil packets, that have cropped up in upscale grocery stores over the last few years. I’d never bought them, assuming that they were a bit expensive for what they were. I was happy to take them off my colleague’s hands. And when I got home, head spinning with my cold, I figured: soup. (I was down to one-word figurations.)

I can’t so much as open a can of Progresso without having to doctor it up a bit. So, I diced up half an onion, a little garlic, and a hot pepper, and sauteed them in a little olive oil. I broke half a pound of the sausage meat free from its casing, and sauteed it with the onions and all until it began to brown. After that, I followed the directions, adding a certain quantity of water to the pan, bringing it to a boil; adding the soup mix; returning to the boil, and simmering for twelve minutes.

It did not smell especially good. It did not taste especially good, either. It had that powdered chicken fat, dried celery, and MSG smell that, to me, characterizes cheap soup foundations. Which this was. (”Alessi,” I later learned, is a tradename of Vigo, makers of the cheap rice-and-beans mix that I stockpiled in college.) It was also, for a supposed Tuscan white-bean soup, insipidly thin. I added another pepper. I added minced parsley. Not enough. I added a cup of homemade chicken stock, a can of beans — habichuelas pintadas — and a cup of shredded beet greens. Goya, the CSA, and the last remains of my $13 chicken to the rescue. The beet greens turned the soup a funny pinkish color of which I wasn’t a huge fan, but it was good enough to eat for dinner, and breakfast and lunch following.

At this point, you might ask, if I went to all that trouble to mask the soup base, why not simply start from scratch?

Why not, indeed?

I didn’t take any pictures. Instead, I offer the above portrait of the pasta I made on Sunday night, with a red sauce incorporating onion, garlic, one of the delicata/della cotta squash from this weekend’s CSA haul, and another cup of chicken stock. The squash cooked down to a pleasantly, slightly-stringy consistency, and spread itself throughout, lightening the tomato as it went. The sauce contained more or less the same set of ingredients — minus the sausage and the Alessi soup mix — as the soup I made the next night. The results were wholly more satisfactory. I also toasted up the seeds, salted them, and ate them as a snack.

whole-wheat penne with a tomato-squash sauce

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.

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…

Damn. Good meat is expensive, hunh? I guess you folks must really, really like the stuff to fork over that much cash for bloody lumps of someone else’s body. (But no judgment.)

Billy made some kind of beef something that all the meat-eaters in attendance liked quite a bit. The bill for the groceries for that meal alone was $47.47. Yeah. I was sure we were going over budget. But then the leftovers thing kicked in again. Billy got a bunch of meals out of the leftovers from that dinner. It fed him for days.

You see where the desire to liven up the leftovers in my previous post comes in now? Things got pretty repetitive around here. But we did it. We held to the budget, and ate what food we had in the house rather than waste it. Yay us.

The breakdown:
Groceries for the dinner party: $47.47
Groceries for the family: $45.17
Pizza: $21

Total: $113.64

Under budget by: $11.36

Cool, hunh? Maybe we’ll make it just fine without adding on for the new kid.

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.