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.

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.

I can be pretty tight-fisted with money.  But there are some things that I am totally not price conscious about.  Number one with a bullet on that list is scorpion control.  Just a few days ago, I had the hubris to comment on How to Be Poor’s blog that I hadn’t seen a scorpion in quite some time.  In fact, it had been several months since the last sighting.  

So you know darn well what was waiting for my padding little feet this morning as I went down to the kitchen.

Our current pest control service is pretty good — hey, once every few months is better than one or more per day! — but whenever I think there’s a limit to how much I would pay for 100% never-see-another-scorpion-again, another little evil guy comes into my life and obliterates that ceiling.

It’s unfortunate that short of a solution that would probably wipe out all life in my neck of the neighborhood, there does not seem to be any 100% never-see-another-scorpion-again solutions.  But if there were, I would pay dearly for it.  I don’t think there’s anything else in my life that can work up the same heady mixture of rage and fear as those little bugs.

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.

My dad always likes to talk about the concept of "secret economies," or the strange little frugal/cheap practices that we practice, even if they don’t make sense in our overall money handling schema.  Even non-frugal [especially non-frugal?] people have secret economies.

My father’s personal example is paperclips.  Whenever he sees a loose paperclip, he grabs it.  Whenever he can salvage one, he goes for it.  He started his own business 20-some years ago, he bought a 20-box pack of paperclips.  Nineteen of those boxes remain unopened.

Now, my father is not a particularly frugal man in many ways.  He’s a busy guy with his business, and will often eat at least two meals in a restaurant per day.  A very small tweak in some other aspect of his life would more than cover the paperclip expense, and yet he still does it.

My mother saves napkins.  If she goes to a fast food place or restaurant that gives out napkins, she folds up the extra and puts them in her purse.  Her napkin holder at home is a cornucopia of different colors and sizes.

Since I’ve taken a decidedly frugal turn, I’m not sure what my secret economies are anymore.  I suppose in the case of an actively frugal lifestyle, you can count things that you are driven to do, even if they are of dubious thrift value.  For instance, I am very weird about air conditioner use in the car.  Even in Texas, even in the summer, I turn it off while going up inclines or any time I have to accelerate.  And then I turn it right back on again.  [Yes, it drives my husband crazy.  No, I don’t know why I must do this.]

My husband and I both have birthdays in April so it’s time to start thinking birthday gifts.

I have always hated gift buying because only about half of the time do I find something I really think the person would like, and the other half the time I’m having to scratch my head and waste money on something, anything. 

My family used to have the habit of pinning a gift label on someone.  This may have happened to you.  Someone buys you something one year and, not being a total jerk, you end up saying, "Thanks for the frog towels!  I love frogs!"  Well, then word gets around to the rest of the family that you "love frogs."  You will be getting frog-themed gifts from everyone from then on.  I was tagged with frogs, my grandma with owls [and then lighthouses], my mom with pigs, etc.  I had almost ten years of frog-themed gifts.

And then came the Internet.  Sweet, sweet internet.  I made an Amazon wish list as soon as they made them available, and have actually received gifts from my family that I like and are useful  — albeit not exactly a surprise — ever since then.  Even my non-computer-using relatives just give my mom a check and she orders something in their name.  [Now if only they would make their own wish lists, I would be set … ]

In the handful of years that my husband and I have been married, we seem to have settled into our own routine.  If we find something we really, really think the other person would like, we get it for them.  If not, we ask them what they want.  Or tell them to find something that they really want that they probably wouldn’t be able to normally justify spending the money on, and order it themselves.

For instance, today I just ordered my own birthday present, and I know I’m going to love it.  I got two dvd sets from The Teaching Company — their new on the history of the Popes and the Papacy, and another series on Herodotus, the Father of History.

It’s not exactly the height of romance, but it’s a bit more satisfying.  I suppose it would be much less so if you didn’t budget and already always bought yourself whatever you wanted.  But since we have tightened up the budget more and more over time, it’s become more fun to try to decide how to spend my birthday/Christmas/etc "mad money" on myself.  [Last Christmas, I got myself the complete Backwoods Home Anthology sets, and my last birthday, I got myself a year long British Literature course that I’m still working through.]

Yesterday, I was looking out the window while Audrey and I were sifting together some flour, salt and baking powder.  We were assembling some homemade Bisquick-style mix.  Out the window, I could see the team of about 10 guys and their 6 or 7 vehicles laying down our new driveway.

I’m going to be writing a 3741 dollar check for that driveway.  I only saved about a buck by making the baking mix myself.

There’s a money cliche that people will drive 20 minutes out of their way to save 5 dollars on a 20 dollar item, but won’t do it to save 5 dollars on a 500 dollar item.  And yet five dollars is five dollars.  Yesterday felt like it could be the inverse of that cliche.  Should I have just gone outside and asked the foreman if he’d take a check for 3740 dollars instead and just pick up some store brand bisquick?

My mom called later and I asked what her thoughts were.  She pointed out that one of the reasons that we could write a 3741 dollar check instead of putting it on the credit card is because we make our own Bisquick.  Oh, that single dollar doesn’t mean too much in the scheme of things, but the mindset that drives you to do it saves money everywhere and adds up.  Additionally, it was kind of fun.  I have about 11 hours a day alone with Audrey, and that time has to be filled, preferably with something that’s remotely educational or otherwise beneficial.  If I had made the mix myself, it would have taken less than 5 minutes, instead we had about 40 minutes of pouring and sifting and fiddling with flour.  And laughing.  It’s a mess, but is a lot of fun with a two year old.