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 just wiped out a months and months of “save a dollar here, save a dollar there”s.

We didn’t have a whole lot of notice between deciding to look for a job in MN, and Andrew actually accepting a job up there. Once we knew we were going to start looking up North, we started eating primarily out of the freezer and doing our best to clear it out.

But eventually we had to start packing up the kitchen, and now it’s time to unplug the garage freezer. In addition to the bazillion ounces of frozen stockpiled breastmilk that I ended up having to donate, there was what turned out to be 8 full bags of roasts, steaks, chicken breasts, bullets of ground turkey, turkey sausage, hamburger, frozen fruits and veggies, pounds of butter … yeah. Everything that I had bought on big time sale and now wasn’t going to be able to use up.

I ended up giving it to my neighbor, who has extra freezer space and who held and rocked our baby — and entertained Audrey — for almost 5 hours tonight so Andrew and I could be free to work on packing. She’s going to share it with our other, retired neighbor who we’re quite fond of.

At least it’s going to a good home!

[If you’re squeamish, avert your eyes right now! And, of course, since we homebirthed both of our kids, there were two wrapped up placentas in there, too. Yeah, yeah, I know there are things you are supposed to do with them — bury it, plant a tree over it, etc — I suspect that a large number of people end up doing precisely what we did: stick it in the freezer and then completely forget about it.]

There are many reasons to breastfeed your baby, and of course the one most relevant to this blog is that it’s substantially less expensive than formula. And, hey, it’s the natural thing to do, blah blah blah.

It can also be terribly difficult.

Unfortunately, that is the boat that we are in. Both of my children have been born with large overbites, with very short and physically traumatic labors. I have heard fairy tales of people who are able to put their newborns to the breast and they magically latch on, but that’s nothing like my experiences have been.

Audrey didn’t eat at all for almost the first 72 hours after her birth because she could not latch. Thankfully, I already had a really great pump and my milk was already starting to come in. At first we fed her with drops of milk on our fingers, then we used a plastic syringe, and then finally we graduated to the small bottles that come with the aforementioned Medela pump. We then worked with Barbara Wilson Clay, a nationally renowned lacation consultant/expert who thankfully happens to be local, and she was able to get Audrey to occasionally latch with the help of a nipple shield. But it was still a matter of pumping every two hours around the clock for those first three months until one day, magically, she was able to latch on her own.

After the proverbial “10 fingers, 10 toes” wishes I had for Owen, the next was “Please oh please, let him latch.” But it wasn’t to be. On the other hand, it hasn’t seemed as bad this time around. Perhaps because we’ve been through it before and I know there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, or perhaps because the situation is not quite as bleak this time around — after the first few days, I’ve been able to get him to latch about once a day, when the circumstances are exactly perfect. Audrey was so frustrated by latching that she would cry whenever I held her. Those were dark days. Owen doesn’t do that. With his rare latch, plus Audrey’s continued nursing, I only have to pump every 4 hours or so, which makes a huge difference. Plus, with Audrey’s help, I’ve so far been able to avoid engorgement and mastitis, both of which plagued me when she was the little one.

I am a terribly, terribly stubborn person and it’s funny how the same trait that made me a pain in the rear as a child and in the majority of relationships in my life has been such a great boon to me as a mother. Not only can I unflappably outlast any tantrum/meltdown, but I see the prospect of another three months of pumping as a challenge I know I can beat.

It’s going to be hovering near 100 degrees for the next couple of days.  And, alas, the air conditioning is now on.  I’ve got it on 76 and all the fans on in the house, which is still enough for a line of sweat on my brow when my big swollen-belly body tries to run around and do chores, but not so bad that I’m lying on the floor saying, "Aaaaaaaarrrgghhhhh."  Most importantly, it saps the that terrible, terribly humidity out of the air.

It’s expensive, sure, but my golly, it sure is bliss right now.

Oh, and I finally updated my blogroll some along the righthand side.   I have been really lazy about that.  

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.]

We have two cars in our household, a Toyota Echo and a Honda CRV.  The Echo was mine before Andrew and I married, but he drives it now because it’s an ideal commuter car.  [It gets very, very nice mpg.]  His commute is less than 10 miles each way, I think he puts some gas in every other week.  The CRV that I drive isn’t quite as fuel efficient, but it does fit two car seats and two dogs quite nicely.  Audrey and I will, maybe, make one 10-20 mile trip or so during the week, and some weeks we don’t drive at all.  If we go somewhere as a family on the weekend, it’ll be in the CRV, but I do our grocery shopping on Sunday morning in the Echo.  We put a half a tank of gas in the CRV every week and a half or so.

Honestly, I think gas could be 5 dollars a gallon and it wouldn’t even make a blip in our budget [save for other things, like groceries, that would become more expensive due to shipping increases, etc].  I feel very blessed in that regard.  Being a homebody has many financial advantages.

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.

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.

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.]