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.

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!

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.

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.

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.