Educating the Wheelers

Our Money Matters had a post tonight about the magazines that come into their house.

Ah, magazines.

When I was growing up, we weren’t allowed to get magazine subscriptions.  I don’t remember precisely my parents’ reasoning [though not wasting money would certainly be a good enough one], but I recall leaving childhood with the distinct feeling that subscriptions were sort of, well, naughty.  Or something.

The first magazine I believe I ever scurriously got a subscription to was Interview when I was 12.  The magazine was a lot different back then [late 80s], it still looked like it was Andy Warhol’s magazine.  I may even still have the Nick Rhodes issue at my parents’ house.  You can draw your own conclusions as to what kind of teenager I must have been using this single fact … and you’d probably be right.

These days, like I mentioned in my previous post, I get Taste of Home and I also get Backwoods Home.  I finally let the subscription to my beloved Empire lapse because it’s just too crazy over-the-top expensive.  And it’s not like I get out to see movies anymore.  Heck, with Audrey no longer taking naps, I rarely see dvds anymore!  [I haven’t even seen — or even purchased, thinking someday I might be able to see — the "new" Star Wars yet.  And I’m a nerd!  You don’t want to know what I did when the re-releases and other prequels came out… *sigh*]

My dad got me a subscription to the Wall Street Journal last year for Christmas, and it was awesome, but again, I just couldn’t justify it when it came time to renew.  And let me tell you, they got desperate after a while.  I think the best deal they sent me was 99 dollars for a full year of home delivery and a full year of online access.  But I still let it lapse.

Andrew gets The Week and he loves it, and Audrey got some gift subscriptions to Your Big Backyard [which she loves], Wild Animal Baby [which she loves even more], and Ladybug [which she couldn’t care less about].  She gets so excited to get the mail when there’s something for her.

If you read personal finance blogs long enough, you’re going to get the idea hammered into you that cooking for yourself rather than eating out all the time is a key part of getting your budget under control.  But what if you’re lazy, and a crappy cook to boot?  Then what?

Well, I’m lazy, and I used to be a crappy cook [occasionally still am!].  But these days, almost 100% of our meals are cooked from scratch, by me.  This did not happen overnight, that’s for sure.

So, here’s what worked for me. 

• Start small.  Pick out some recipes online or from cookbooks and give them a whirl.  Maybe on a Sunday, and you can even pack the leftovers for your lunch during the week!  If it turns out, print it out or flag it to use again in the future.  I don’t mind recipes with long lists of ingredients — as long as most of them are spices — but I tend to avoid ones with lengthy or complicated instructions.
• Start with simple ingredients.  When you’re first starting out, you probably don’t want to be chopping up a raw chicken.  I sure didn’t!  Start with veggie meals or "easy to deal with" meats like hamburger, ground turkey, sausages and the like.  You can work up from there.  Also feel free to start with some convenience foods, even though they’re more expensive.  [For instance, bags of lettuce or shredded cabbage.]  It’s still [usually] cheaper than eating out, and you can transition off of them as you get more comfortable and faster in the kitchen.
• Find a good source of recipes.  People always tell you to get an all purpose, generic classic cookbook like Joy of Cooking or the like, but honestly, I wouldn’t bother.  I have one and never, ever use it.  Instead, if I’m looking for a generic potato salad recipe, I just go to google and search on "potato salad recipe" and dig around until I find one that looks good.  Additionally, Joy of Cooking and its ilk and generally not geared towards my cooking criteria: fast, cheap, good.  No, you don’t have to pick two!  At the bottom of this post, I will list the cookbooks that I use most often, or have found most helpful in the transition from eater-outer to cook-at-homer.
• Use the "Taco Bell" approach: six ingredients, a million meals.  Thankfully at our house, we like Mexican food.  As long as I have tortillas, cheese, ground meat or shredded chicken, cans of ranch or black beans, salsa, sour cream, lettuce, etc … we’ve got meals.  Tacos, burritos, enchiladas, mexican lasagna, tortilla pies, taco salad, you name it.  Get some eggs, and you’ve even got breakfast tacos.  [This also works well with Italian/pasta.]

Here’s a typical recipe that I like, swiped from my mom.  There are a million versions of this one around:

Mom’s Veggie Pizza

2 8oz refrigerator crescent rolls [reduced fat okay]

1 8oz pkg cream cheese [lite okay]

3tb mayonnaise [lite okay]

1/2tsp basil & 1/4tsp garlic powder, or a package of dry ranch salad dressing mix

Assorted finely chopped vegetables: broccoli, cauliflower, carrot, red bell pepper, tomato, celery, etc

Instructions: 

Press crescent rolls into a baking sheet to form a crust.  Bake in 375 degree oven 12-15 minutes.  Combine cream cheese, mayo and spices.  Spread thinly and evenly over cooled crust.  Top with vegetable and serve.

What makes this one a winner?  Well, several things.  There aren’t many ingredients, and they can vary based on whatever you have on hand or what’s on sale.  The instructions are broken down into easy, discrete chunks, so you can walk away from it at any time to deal with a feisty toddler and just pick back up where you left off.  It tastes good and isn’t too bad for you.  You can buy crescent rolls and keep them onhand in the fridge and make it as a last minute "what are we going to eat??"  It’s not notably cheap, but it also sure isn’t expensive.  It’s a vegetable crisper cleaner-outer.

Here’s a sample list of cookbooks and other resources that I found helpful when I was first starting out:

• Taste of Home Magazine.  If you grew up middle class midwestern, this is the stuff your mom made.  But it’s a nice mix of the old fashioned stick-to-your-ribs and fresher/healthier stuff.  Both my mom and I have subscriptions and use a number of their recipes … we just never pick out the same stuff.  Heh.
• Cheap. Fast. Good! and Desperation Dinners. — both by the same authors.  The titles pretty well sum it up.  I’ve made quite a few good ones from these.  The Kielbasa, Cabbage and Potatoes recipe from Desperation Dinners was one of the easiest, cheapest, quickest things I’ve ever made, and it’s tasty, to boot.
• Hillbilly Housewife and Healthy Hillbilly Housewife websites.  I know I’ve mentioned these many times before, but they bear mentioning again.  Andrew particularly loved the African Safari Pilaf.
• The Sue Gregg Cookbooks.  These are slightly more complicated than the others that I’ve mentioned [but most recipes are still very straightforward], but they also have the healthiest recipes.
• Dining on a Dime Cookbook.  Wouldn’t you know, I’ve been using this cookbook for some time and only recently figured out that I regularly read the blog of the cookbook’s author?
• The Frugal Family’s Kitchen Book.  This is one of my very favorites.  Worth it for the cornmeal pancakes alone.  I don’t even like pancakes, and I could eat the cornmeal pancake recipe every single morning.  The crazy thing is that there isn’t a huge amount of recipes in here [though the ones that are in here are good], much of the value is in the lengthy commentary between the recipes.
• The Weeknight Survival Cookbook.  This is a good one for when you’re just starting out and very pressed for time.  Not the cheapest route to go, because it’s plans out the entire week for you without regard for sales, but it’s still a good resource.  And these days, even when I don’t do the "Cook 2-3 hours on Sunday, assemble meals in 10 minutes from those parts during the rest of the week" route that it outlines, there are still quite a few recipes in there that I return to and still make.  The Mediterranean Couscous is particularly good.
• Miserly Meals. The recipes in this one are not quite as good as the others, in my opinion, but it really shines in holding your hand through the process of learning how to shop and cook with an eye to frugality.
• More-with-Less Cookbook.  The classic Mennonite cookbook.  It’s less about being cheap than about intentionally using fewer of the Earth’s resources, but pohtayto, pohtahto.
• Saving Dinner.  This has the same issue as the Weeknight Survival Cookbook above in that it’s an entire week’s worth of recipes planned out for you, but even less frugal because the week’s recipes aren’t really built around one another.  [Though she does arrange recipes by season.]  Meaning, every week has a fish recipe, one or two chicken recipes, a crockpot recipe, etc.  So why do I even bother listing it?  Well, even though I don’t think you gain very much with the intended purpose of the cookbook, some of the recipes are truly stellar.  The Thai Roll-ups and the Vietnamese Chicken Salad are in high rotation in this household, and much loved.  If you use Flylady, you’ve probably heard of this author.

We moved around a lot when I was a kid.  My dad wasn’t in the military, he just had the itch and had to scratch it.  I used to joke that we didn’t go on vacation, we moved.  [His father was a carpenter, so they went where the work was.  He probably went to 20 different schools before he was out of the 8th grade.]  I’ve moved a few times in the 13 years or so since I left my parents’ house.  Let’s see: Olympia, Tri-Cities, Seattle, San Francisco, Sunnyvale and Austin.  And sometimes more than one place within those towns.

As a result, I’m not terribly attached to "place" — I am definitely a "home is where you hang your hat" kind of person and there’s not a whole lot my externalities can do to make me happy or miserable.  I have few needs: I don’t want an intrusive environment, and I don’t want things to be inordinately expensive.  The rest is gravy.  [The only place I ever felt like I had to flee was San Francisco.  See my criteria.]  Texas is fairly low cost, and while it isn’t quite the free-wheeling live-and-let-live of the New Hampshire of my youth, it’s close enough.  Heck, with the rise of the Internet, I don’t even require a good bookstore in town anymore.  [Nonetheless, we have them in spades here in Austin.]

Now that I have kid[s] of my own, I wonder about all this in a different light.  Are we going to move around?  Since we’re homeschooling, that would make some transitions easier for them, though it wasn’t that big of a deal for me when we moved mid-school year.  But I guess I don’t think moving was really terribly "traumatic" at all.  My core family was stable and it gave me the opportunity to meet lots of different kinds of people in different types of cities and neighborhoods in different parts of the country.  It certainly taught me not to be provincial in my thinking, and it’s hard for me to get to worked up over insular group/regional pride once you’ve "been around," so to speak.

Then there’s the personal finance angle, though since I’ve only owned a home in two of these locations, it hasn’t always been that big of a deal.  When I was just renting, it was pretty easy to decide to pull up stakes and go if I was going somewhere that offered a job making more money.  [Though it was kind of a cosmic joke to make 30% more in SF than Seattle but have a lower standard of living.]

One of the biggest sieves in our budget is things that we buy that we think we’ll use that we don’t.  Or that we use just enough so that we can’t return it.

Like the new handle/lock set for the front door that required some package mangling to get out, but turns out didn’t quite fit on the door, by just a few millimeters.  Or the shower door in the box next to the bed that was not quite the right size that we couldn’t return because it was a special order?  [Grrrr.  Worse because it’s 100% my fault, though.]  [Did I mention it’s been leaning up against our bedroom wall for over 2 years?]

Or trying to anticipate food demand for the household for the week.  My husband eats large amount of highly perishable fruits and veggies … except for the weeks when he doesn’t.  It’s not east to balance the "there’s no fruit in the house!" vs. having to throw something away that went bad.  Or having to eat all the produce myself.

The stereotypical "nesting" instinct has kicked in for me, big time, not always in completely rational ways. 

Filling the freezer of heat-n-eat foods for after the wee one is born, that makes sense.  Getting plenty of diapers and wipes and cream and milk freezer bags and whatnot, okay, those make sense, too.  Cleaning out the "nursery" and crib and stuff, even though we never even used them for our first child … well, okay.  Sure.

Some of the other things I’m feeling driven to do?  Not quite so much sense.

Now, even when I’m not pregnant, I’m somewhat apocalyptically minded and make sure we have 2 weeks worth of water and at least a month or so’s worth of food and other household provisions stored up.   [I’m not Mormon — which is obvious, otherwise I’d have a year’s worth! — but  I do think they have some good ideas on self-reliance in emergencies.]   Lately, though, our pantries have been looking a wee bit little crazier than normal.  I’m sure the National Soy Sauce Council salutes me, but perhaps we don’t need quite so many bottles in the closet…?

There’s good survival-reasoning in wanting to have everything stockpiled before the new one comes, so I’m not going to knock it.  It would be totally just my luck to have an otherwise very unlikely avian flu outbreak occur right around the end of April/beginning of May.

But maybe we wouldn’t need quite so much mustard to get through it

Now that we’re in the waning days of this pregnancy, it’s been harder and harder to do anything more strenuous than sitting down with my feet up.  [Not that I can even tell where my feet end anymore, I lost my ankles last weekend.]  I am figuring out real quick which frugal habits are well-ingrained and not going anywhere, and which ones will be jettisoned at the first speedbump.  [Well, the ninth-month speedbump.]

I’m still hanging up all the laundry rather than just tossing it in the dryer.  I made some homemade biscuits and gingerbread from scratch this week, but instead of filling the freezer with homemade heat and eat meals for post-birth, I just picked up some pre-made meals from Sam’s Club.

And blogging has gone straight out the window.  Heh.

About three years ago, when I was pregnant with Audrey, I took an infant/child First Aid/CPR course offered by a local fire department.

Last night was the pop quiz.

[Audrey is doing fine.  The offending piece of strawberry has been dealt with.]

I only took the course because I would have felt guilty to not take it.  It’s not the sort of thing that I’m interested in or terribly good at, for that matter.

What I’m trying to say is that if you’ve never taken First Aid before, either because you always forget to, or you’re busy, or you’re not interested, do it anyways!  You never know when you’re going to need it.  Twenty five dollars and a 3 hour course over 3 years ago saved my daughter’s life last night.