Educating the Wheelers

I was going to go to Walmart or Target today, but I think I’m going to push that off. Those two were my biggest budget-busters last month. (Well, second biggest. The 550 dollar dental bill was the killing blow, really.) Sometimes it feels impossible to leave one of those stores with less than 100 dollars (or worse) worth of stuff, even if the only items on my list were “Generic Infant Tylenol” and “diapers.”

Willpower is not my specialty, to paraphrase Wallace.

That’s my current strategy with the grocery store, as well. Hold it off as long as humanly possible. It does help that it’s winter and most of the fruit is pretty hardy and will last a long time. It’s also giving me an excuse to rotate my freezer stock. Audrey is a particular fan of frozen long green beans — she always asks for “Bamboo Salad” (her name for it!):

1 bag frozen Aldi’s green beans or equivalent
A small little bit of balsamic dressing, store bought or homemade
4oz or less crumbled feta
a handful of walnuts

Empty bag of green beans in a colander and run under cool water for a little while to defrost a little. They’re very skinny, so it won’t take long. Put in a bowl with other ingredients. Serve to delighted child.

Heck, she doesn’t even eat the feta and walnuts — that’s just in for mom. I got some of those “spray” bottles of dressing really cheap a while ago, so I just use about 6-7 sprays of that and it seems to be plenty. With that and a restrained amount of cheese and walnuts, the salad manages to be decently healthy.

I’m trying to keep the food budget tight, and more importantly, I’m trying to avoid lengthy trips away from the house now that we’ve passed 38 weeks.  Audrey was born about 5 hours after my very first contraction, and within about 20 minutes after my first contraction, I was 2 minutes apart and would have been completely unable to drive myself home … or even tell someone else where I lived.  Heh.  [In fact, about an hour of that short labor was because her shoulder got hung up.  It would have been even shorter!]  With second labors statistically going shorter than first labors … well.  I’m getting leery about even running errands right now.

With that in mind, our meal plan this week is primarily out of the pantry and cleaning out the vegetable crisper of what we already have:

• Sunday: Gnocchi with Pesto and Turkey Sausage & green salad [It was very yummy, and Andrew’s getting the leftovers for lunch tomorrow.]
• Monday: Pot Roast with Carrots and Mashed Potatoes
• Tuesday: Chicken Souvlaki Bowl
• Wednesday:  Penne with Blue Cheese Pesto, Walnuts and Asparagus
• Thursday: Baked Taco Chicken and Broccoli
• Friday: Thai Roll-ups or Vietnamese Chicken Salad [depends on whether I’m willing to go get a cabbage for the salad]
• Saturday: Low-fat Hamburger Gravy on Whole Wheat Biscuits and Broccoli

With this menu plan, I should be able to avoid going to the grocery store all week, though we will run out of green leafies pretty early in the week. 

[Update on previous post about Audrey’s sickness: She’s better now, thankfully.  She was able to feel better enough around 7:30am to go back to sleep until about noon.  She’s been pretty normal since she woke up.  I, however, am a zombie.]

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.

For various and sundry reasons, it’s going to be a tight grocery week. [Not the least of which is our impending 7600 dollar check to the IRS — thank you again, emergency fund!  Though it’s getting a little cold in there … Heh.]  We will be relying very heavily on the freezer and pantry.

Monday: African Safari Pilaf [No purchases necessary.]

Tuesday: Black Bean Soup and Tofu/Veggie Pasta Salad [No purchases necessary.]

Wednesday: Tunisian Vegetable Stew [All I need to buy is cabbage.]

Thursday: Tomato-Feta Stuffed Sweet Potatoes and Blueberry Cornmeal Pudding [All I need to buy is sweet potatoes]

Friday: Taco Soup [No purchases necessary]

Saturday: Roast Chicken with mashed potatoes, gravy and broccoli [No purchases necessary.]

So, a week’s worth of dinners [and lunches with leftovers] and all I have to get is a head of cabbage and 4 sweet potatoes.  Breakfasts tend to take care of themselves with homemade yogurt and granola.  I also have smoothie makings in the freezer.   I’ll have to pull out 2 lbs of ground beef or turkey from the freezer and a frozen chicken.  I got the chicken a few weeks ago when it was 39 cents a pound, and the ground meat was on sale for 99 cents a pound a while back.  Not too bad.

Monday: Thai Roll-ups 
Chicken in a peanut sauce with red bell pepper and cream cheese on a tortilla.  Uses up last of leftover chicken from last week’s roast chicken and everything else is fairly cheap.

Tuesday: Roasted Red Pepper, Feta and Bacon Pie
Using up some feta I bought on sale a long time ago.  Red peppers aren’t cheap — $1.43 a piece this time of year, even at the local Walmart — but they’re a family favorite food, and I try to use them all over the place.  A made from scratch Bisquick replacement is cheap, but turkey bacon isn’t.  This recipe was handily the biggest grocery expense for the week, but hey, it looked good.

Wednesday: Tomato Mac and Beef
Ground beef from the freezer, everything else from the pantry.  Cheap cheap cheap and easy.

Thursday: Hungarian Mushroom Soup
Mushrooms aren’t necessarily cheap, but it’ll be the most expensive thing in the recipe.  Earlier in the day, I’ll make the stock out of the bones pulled out of the freezer from last week’s aforementioned roast chicken.

Friday: Southwestern Hot Dogs
Uses up the remaining polish sausages from the last time we barbequed.  Cheap as all get out and criminally simple to prepare.  Hey, it’s Friday and I’ll need the break.

Saturday: Chicken Tacos
I’ll pull frozen chicken breast out of the freezer, thaw a few days and put it in a crock pot with some homemade taco seasoning all morning.  We’ll have tacos that day to use up Monday’s tortillas, and any vegetables that are just hanging on then use the leftover chicken in salads and probably a mexican lasagna next week.

- 

I checked the sales circulars for the three main grocery stores near our house, and nothing looked particularly good.  So this week, everything is coming out of the freezer and pantry for the most part.  I went grocery shopping this morning and hardly had to buy anything but the produce and dairy perishables.  Leftovers will be packed up for Andrew to take to work for lunch.  As for breakfast, I’ll have homemade yogurt and granola all week, plus leftovers and sandwich fixings.

Unfortunately, I don’t know offhand exactly what I spent on groceries this week since I went to the local SuperWalmart and had large amounts of non-food items to get, as well.  But it wasn’t much, that’s for sure.

[Update 3/21:  cleaned up the formatting a bit - agw]

As part of my ongoing budget slash-and-burns, I’m always trying to stop purchasing more and more convenience foods. Some items make sense to purchase [too much time to duplicate for the money saved], and some do not.

I hate to waste food and have been working on more interesting ways to use things up. Take bananas. My husband is the big banana eater in the house, but won’t touch them after they start to get a little spotty.

If I don’t have much time, I just toss them as-is into the freezer, and later when I take them out, I peel them slightly defrosted with a paring knife and use them in whatever recipe. Pancakes, waffles, mashed into french toast bath, smoothies, the usual. But I get pretty sick of banana bread and muffins pretty quickly.

This is my new favorite way to use them:

Banana cookies.

2-3 ripe bananas, mashed in a bowl
1.5-2c uncooked oatmeal
1/3 cup oil
Splosh of vanilla
Handful of dried fruit, whatever you got. I like chopped dates.

Mix it all together, let it sit for awhile and soak into the oatmeal. Then drop spoonfuls onto a greased pan [mush it down, they’re better a bit thinner] and bake at 350 until done. Usually about 10 minutes or so. Can be up to 20, depending on your stove, and how thick you made them.

Love them, love them, love them. And if you can get your dried fruit cheap, fairly frugal, too!

When I got out of the shower this morning, I got quite the whiff of surprise when I was toweling my hair dry. What was that weird smell?

Aha!

The laundry was hanging on the line yesterday when we started up the grill for dinner yesterday. The towel and everything I’m wearing today smells like bbq.

Audrey and I will be heading up North to my parents’ house this week for three weeks of extended family fun and vacation. We do this about 3 or 4 times a year for a variety of reasons — it’s a big vacation for Andrew, who can work work uninterrupted on whatever projects he might have in the hopper; and it’s a big vacation for me, because my folks are super-helpful with EVERYTHING and Audrey loves them and I get to relax. It’s a win-win for everyone. And since we’re gone so long, Andrew will often fly up for a weekend himself to visit us visiting. Heh.

We can usually get the flights pretty cheap, so the big frugal challenge for us is how to keep Andrew well fed without breaking the bank. [In other words, no Central Market deli 5 times a week at 15 bucks a pop for lunch or dinner, as tasty as that would be.] The food budget when Audrey and I are gone is usually much higher than when all three of us are there since I can’t do the planning and cooking.

The first thing I do is start about a month beforehand scanning the circulars for loss-leader frozen pizzas and the like, and fill the freezer with tasty, easy to heat up meals for dinner. Then yesterday, I had Andrew select a handful of recipes for me to make for him that I’ll individually package for him so he can grab them on the way out the door to work. But that sort of thing will only last a week.

He came grocery shopping with me yesterday, which he doesn’t normally do, and we got a bunch of basics for building sandwiches and tacos and whatnot, so hopefully he’ll just have to pick up mostly produce and dairy for himself while I’m gone.

So, with this preparation, he should have more breathing room for “treats” while he’s on vacation without the expense of every meal being a treat, so to speak.

Well, yesterday’s goals ended up being totally off-base. I didn’t end up making homemade ketchup because I remembered we still had a fair amount of store bought in the fridge, and I have nothing on the meal plan in the next week that calls for it. So, uh, yeah. Heh. Maybe another week.

And I didn’t end up making pizza dough because I saw we only have about a cup’s worth of whole wheat flour left after making the lemon thyme loaf cake thing the other night.

But I remembered that Albertson’s was having an 8 hour loss-leader sale from 3-11 yesterday, so Audrey and I headed up at 2.45 to pick up flour, bananas, and everything from their sale that we thought we could use. Audrey and I are going out of town for a few weeks soon and Andrew will be left to his own devices, so I picked up some of the frozen pizzas, 3 for 5 dollars. I’ve been gathering these up for him everytime I see them on big sale, so he’s got about 10 or 12 in the freezer now for when we’re gone.

[As Andrew said the last time we came in from out of town, “Can man live on pizza alone? Apparently, he can!”]

So I did end up spending money yesterday, but it was less than 40 dollars, and it was almost all deeply discounted pantry stock up. I also made some really, really good homemade blue cheese dressing to go with the Buffalo Turkey Wraps I made out of Monday’s leftover Turkey Breast. Cheaper than the “good stuff” you can get at the store, probably on par with the cheap stuff, but way, way better tasting.

Today I’ll make the pizza crusts. No, really!