Educating the Wheelers

Since we’ve become far more serious about cutting expenses over the last year, we’ve already nailed all the “low hanging fruit” in our budget. As I mentioned in a previous post, it’s like we’re at that stage in a diet where you’ve already stopped drinking soda and all the other easy changes. Now it’s time to start counting calories.

So, every day, I ask myself: What am I doing today, right now, to save or just not spend money?

Some days it’s easier than others. I’m making our yogurt instead of buying it. I’m putting the laundry up on the line instead of in the dryer. I’m staying home with Audrey and playing in the yard with the dogs instead of getting in the car and going, well, anywhere, really. I’m making muffins instead of buying snacks. I’m ensuring that the only lights on are the ones that are in the room we’re currently in. I’m turning off the computer when not in use, and using it less overall. I’m designing our meal plans off the freezer, the pantry, the sales circulars and rejecting recipes that call for expensive ingredients that will unlikely be used up before they go bad. I’m trying to plan a vegetable garden. [That’s a whole other post.] I’m shortening our showers. I’m giving Andrew extra reminders to bring his packed lunch to work. I’m using powdered milk.

I check our finances every day, as a motivator. But I still try to find something new every day, as well. Sometimes I’ll grab The Complete Tightwad Gazette and open it to a random page and keep reading until I find something we could use.

Today, I think I’m going to give The Hillbilly Housewife’s Excellent Homemade Ketchup a try, and probably make another batch of pizza crusts from the Sue Gregg cookbooks to put in the freezer.

I haven’t posted much recently because I’m pretty solidly in “pregnant and crazy” mode. If you’ve ever been pregnant — or more likely, if you’ve ever been married to someone pregnant — you know what I’m talking about. I’m overly emotional, my moods are flying and I’m totally irrational.

What does this have to do with money? Two main things, as of late. The first is that right now we’re in crunch mode on our finances — as I mentioned previously, we’re currently living on a little over 25% of our salary as we readjust to some new and possibly overeager savings plans. So how am I responding to this? By totally capsizing. It’s been awhile since I’ve felt so … driven to want to spend money. My Amazon shopping cart is full of all sorts of crazy stuff, and it’s only by sheer force of will that I haven’t actually purchased any of it. And so on.

The second prong of this fork is that something totally bizarre has happened to my taste buds. I am just not tasting things the way that I used to. I made some homemade mac and cheese the other night that I thought tasted great, and poor Andrew was totally repulsed. [Note to self: don’t make any recipes any time soon that call to add ingredients “to taste.”] I went totally overboard in the adding dry English mustard department … because I couldn’t taste it! I still can’t taste it in the leftovers, so it wasn’t a one night thing. Andrew could taste nothing but the overwhelming horseradishy mustardness.

And today I made a potato/carrot/lentil curry stew which looked awesome on the page — and I must brag, one of my Super Powers is a keen eye for what recipes will taste good when made — and I tried some, and it tastes horrible rotgut to me. All I taste is overwhelming clove/cinnamon — which aren’t even in the recipe, though are a small part of the curry powder — and nothing else. And the dinner I made previous to these two had a similar issue.

What am I getting at? It’s hard to save money when you’re throwing out food that you make instead of eating it.

It’s been a frustrating week.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I need to try to find a way to cut another 1/3 off our budget. I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to do this, since it doesn’t seem to be possible. I take some comfort in the fact that the extra money out of our budget is ESPP, and we’re basically doing a buy and then turnaround right away and sell for the 15%, but there’s a six month lag to get it back. And I don’t want to dip into savings during that time or significantly reduce new savings, either.

This weekend, I planned our menus for the next three weeks with an eye on both money and health. I could get our food budget down farther if we didn’t eat quite so much produce [especially in the middle of winter], but that’s a choice we don’t want to make. We’re in the planning stages for a vegetable garden in the back, but with a toddler and another little one due in late April, it’s going to be tough for me to get one started this year.

So, my grocery bill was 60 dollars this week, and that was including some unnecessary snacks, like ice cream and cones and yogurt raisins. So I think I did pretty darn good.

My next mini-task is to ensure that my husband remembers to take his packed lunch with him every day. Every time he forgets, that’s 7-10 dollars at the taco stand, or Audrey and I driving it out to him. Little notes seem to help, but not always.

There are still some convenience foods in our diet that I’m trying to squeeze out, both for budget and health reasons. One of these is pizza. [Another is the Cheezit Tabasco Cracker, but my utter failure to make homemade crackers is another post sometime. Heh.] We almost never get take-out pizza anymore, and I am working on reducing/replacing the frozen pizzas, save for when I can find a smoking deal, like Albertson’s rare “Buy 1, Get 2 Free” specials.

Anywhoo, tonight I made my first totally from scratch pizza. I made the dough about a month ago when a buddy was in town, from the generic whole wheat bread dough recipe in my Sue Gregg cookbook. I portioned that up and tossed it in the freezer. Last night, I pulled out a ball and let it sit in the fridge until tonight. Then I pulled out a pizza sauce recipe from the Backwoods Home Magazine Recipe Anthology — a recipe they call the “59 Dollar an Hour Pizza” after doing the calculations on the difference in price between it and delivered, and how long it took to make. A very small amount of shredded mozzarella and parmesan to keep it vaguely healthy and we were good to go.

It turned out awesome, by the way. Much easier and quicker than I thought it would be — especially with the dough premade — and now we have another high cost convenience food item I can cross of the list.

After nearly a lifetime of money-sucking hobbies, I am relieved to note that almost all of our Christmas presents were things that were more designed to save us money than to make us spend more.

Case in point, I noticed this afternoon that we were running out of yogurt and I went to put it on tomorrow morning’s grocery list when I remembered, “Hey! Didn’t we get a yogurt maker this year from my Godmother?”

I just pulled our first batch out — made with a scoop of leftover yogurt, 3 cups of reconstituted nonfat powdered milk [with extra powder for protein] and 1 cup of leftover heavy cream from Christmas … and, yum, it is good. The bit of heavy cream in there gives it that “Brown Cow” brand yumminess, but for way, way cheaper.

Audrey is really interested in cooking. I suppose since I do quite a bit of it, she wants to know what the heck Mom is up to.

Her first “recipe” that she learned and has been able to make [with help] in the last few weeks is guacamole, which she charmingly calls “avocado seed” after the first step of cutting the avocado in half and popping the seed out.

Today she was rummaging through my stash of Christmas cookie ingredients and fixated on the white almond bark. She brought it to me and said, “Audrey cook.” So, we melted it down on low in a heavy bottomed pan and then stirred in a cup of peanut butter. Into a pan and then into the fridge. Boy, was she thrilled a few hours later when she got to eat her first piece of “fudge.”

Later on, she helped me make a lentil/brown rice salad, and then jambalaya for dinner. She’s really starting to get in there and help!

Everytime I finish a jar of pickles, my inner cheapie cringes when I pour the pickle juice down the drain. I decided last week to try to think of some ways I can put it to use.

I cut up a cucumber and stuffed it into one jar and made some “refrigerator pickles” — after a few days, they were okay, but not great. Then I pulled a really, really cheap roast out of the freezer and when it was nearly but not quite fully defrosted, I cut it up into stew-sized pieces and marinated them in some pickle juice overnight. The next day, I made a beef stew out of it, and I thought that turned out really, really good.

I haven’t thought of anything else yet.

I used to cook a lot before I had kids. And then after Audrey was born, I had to learn a whole new ballgame. Different recipes, different techniques. Nothing too elaborate — and most importantly! — something that could be broken down into a lot of atomic operations that were not too time dependent. For instance, there was a short period of time when I never cooked pasta because invariably I would be tied up in something when it was time to drain the pasta. This sort of thing reached its peak during 14-20 months, the clingiest, highest need period of her toddlerhood.

And then something magical happened a few weeks ago [Don’t ask, because I’m not even sure what], and now not only can we get tasks done around the house, but she’s a big helper. [Her first recipe mastered was guacamole. Oh, how she loves guacamole.]

But this now opens up a lot of new options for us, and allows us a lot more latitude in eating healthier and much more frugally. Right now, I’d say our food budget is down at least 50% from when I started really working on getting it down.

Oh, I am the very worst blogger. A few main reasons: I have a toddler and am pregnant with another; and most of the current homeschooling thoughts and ideas I have, I’ve come to realize that I feel they are still private. So I guess I’m not ready to blog about it all yet. Heh. Not that anyone reads this, but if they did…

The other main issue is that we know we’re going to homeschool, we’re very happy and comfortable with our decision. Not a lot of grist for the blogging mill. Instead, our big project right now is two fold: save as much money as we can, and make our diet significantly healthier.

Thankfully, these two projects help one another rather than hinder. We almost never eat out, and Andrew takes a lunch with him every day to work. We’re also in the process of cutting out most processed foods and making more and more items from scratch. As Audrey gets older, she’s able to start observing and helping in the kitchen — even a few months ago, doing much involved kitchen work was almost impossible because she was still a little too clingy and too flighty to help.

Today was our first foray into using some of the powdered milk we bought. First we made some hot cocoa [yum], and then we reconstituted some regular milk and mixed it about 2/3 - 1/3 with some 1% we had in the fridge. I’m going to let that sit overnight and see how that tastes in the morning. Most of the milk usage in the house is in recipes or steamed up in the morning for Andrew’s coffee, so I think we’ll be able to make the switch pretty painlessly.