Pasta Sauce

Bill got an ENORMOUS crock pot for Christmas. I was happy enough with my old £5-bargain-from-the-fleamarket-15-years-ago crock pot, but he wanted one that you could take the 'crock' part out and soak it. 

I've been trying to think what to do with this GIANT thing other than cook 16 meals worth of beans at a time. I think of crock pots as being mainly to do with beans or with meat. I don't wish to add substantial amounts of meat either to our diets or our pocketbooks. 



One thing I did remember cooking 20-some years ago when I lived in Salt Lake was the pasta recipe from The Tightwad Gazette.  As I recall it was practically a party day any time I took a jar off the shelf for dinner. 

I had loads of homegrown tomatoes then and I did the proper canning thing with a hot water bath and all. I remember being really paranoid because of the odd case of botulism associated with home canning, so I was very careful to follow the rules. And I promised myself NEVER TO TASTE something I'd canned that wasn't just right - I'd talked to a woman recovering from botulism who'd done just that, even though she knew it was risky. She was lucky to have survived.

The recipe doesn't call for a crock pot, but I remember struggling to get it all into my biggest pan. So I decided to see how it worked in the new BIG crock pot. I used tinned tomatoes (on sale at my green market four 800g tins for £1!), counting them out and squeezing most of the juice/water out. Bill helped me by grinding the onions and green peppers in Grandma & Grandpa's old meat grinder. I cooked everything except the tomato paste in the crock pot (it was barely half full, but those were huge tins of tomato paste) over night. I added the tomato paste the next day, mixed it all up and put it into jars, not quite filling them to leave room to freeze. 

It smelled and tasted wonderful, mainly because of the herbs and garlic! That said, the tinned tomatoes weren't as big as my homegrown ones (and nothing ever compares to home grown tomatoes, right?) so the paste is a bit acidic. I may try adding a bit of baking soda, not being a huge fan of sugar. When I make it again - and I expect I will - I'll probably double up on the tinned tomatoes. Also, I'll probably try cutting back on the oil, maybe by a third to begin with. We're not on a low fat diet by any means, but it's not unusual for us to find processed foods too oily and a lot of older-fashioned recipes are too rich for our taste.

All that aside, I was well pleased with the outcome and will look for other sauces to make in batches to freeze. 

Do you use a crock pot much?

Why Read?

Reader Beryl asked a rather tough question a while back: 

"What makes you add a book to your reading list?"

I don't think I've ever made that much of a conscious decision about why I will or won't read a book.  I grew up reading, in a reading family.  I read almost like other people eat or breathe.  I do know that my tastes have changed from children's books (though I do sometimes still enjoy them) to historical romances (some of which sadly were those silly bodice rippers), to mystery novels and non-fiction (how-to books) and other types of historical novel.  Lately I've been into biographies (of women, mostly), history and social history as well. 

So how do I chose books to read?  There are loads of reasons why I might select a book:

I enjoyed another (or several) books by the same author (Dick Francis, Geraldine Brooks).

It's about a character I like (Peter Wimsey, Phryne Fisher).

It is set in a time period I find intriguing.  This can be generally anything in the last two millenia, though present day settings don't often make the cut unless it relates in some way to the past.  Most of all I love the inter-war period, largely because of the romanticised notion of the upper class lifestyle.

It's about a person who intrigues me.   I have zipped through biographies of celebrities and nobs, but some of the most interesting biographies for me are those of women writers from the inter-war period, like Margery Allingham and Vera Brittain.  I think it was Brittain's Testament of Youth that brought home to me the impact of the First World War, both on individuals and society.

It's set in a place that intriques me.  I read G.M. Trevelyan's English Social History (given to me free) because I wanted to better understand my adopted country.   The Trevelyan family estate being Wallington Hall in Northumberland he also shed a great light on events more specific to this area, which I much enjoyed.  I'm currently plowing through The Seven Ages of Paris and trying to fit together what I know about English and American history alongside what it reports.  I keep meaning to re-read Shadow of the Wind to remind me of Barcelona.

It teaches something I'd like to learn to do.  Reading The Tightwad Gazette newsletters made me aware of how many things I could usefully learn to do for myself, like cook or sew.  I'm still much better at the former than the latter, but I've read books about pressing flowers, gardening, home decorating, all sorts of crafts, how to unclutter (Bill still laughs when he encounters that title), not to mention How to Live without A Salary, and How to Live on Practically Nothing and the like.

Someone recommends it to me.  I trust my sister-in-law Jane's taste in books; she's not steered me wrong yet.  Hazel, a lady in the sewing group saw me at the community centre book sale and recommended The Island by Victoria Hislop.  For 50 pence I took a risk and she was right; I really did enjoy it, not least because Bill and I have seen Spinalonga.

It's an old friend that comforts me.  I've read Mom's collection of Dick Francis probably fifty times over the years.  The books he published after 1990 I can't share with her, but I love them all the same.  Louisa May Alcott's books and all the Harry Potter's are very much along these lines.  

Off the top of my head, this list pretty much explains why I might choose a book.  Why do you choose the books you read? 

Bake and Run!

This is a recipe from The Tightwad Gazette for blueberry cake I've looked at many times over the past 20 years, but never made, cake not really being part of my usual diet.  However, I thought it worth trying and being as how I didn't have blueberries, I had blackberries, I made blackberry cake.  I'm going to try it with apples and maybe even tinned peaches; I'll be dead amazed if this wasn't another Universal Recipe.

Blueberry Cake

2 cups white flour
1/2 cups sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
2/3 cup cooking oil
1 cup milk
2 eggs

Mix the above in a bowl.  Put in a prepared (I took this to mean greased; might even be better if floured, but I haven't tried that part yet)  9 x 13 pan, top with following mixture:

3 cups blueberries
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp cinnamon

Bake at 350 F (180 C) degrees for 30 to 40 minutes.

This is not a terribly sweet cake and Bill said that it really mostly tasted of blackberries.  The cake seems quite light, almost but not quite a sponge cake.   I'd recommend giving it a go.

I had three reasons for baking this cake. 

1)  I have a shed-load (well, actually freezer-load) of blackberries to use up;

2)  I needed something to blog about and this seemed a natural choice given my commitment to review ideas from The Tightwad Gazette.

3)  Trent Hamm over at The Simple Dollar, included this video on a list of things that inspired him.  I wouldn't say it was the best TED talk I've watched, but it was fairly amusing - but not very, either.  According to this speaker, one of the characteristics of a happy marriage is that the woman is thinner and more attractive than the man.  You've seen photos of Bill; what chance have I got? 

The only strategies that come to my mind are to get out there and run some more miles (and miles), and bake a lot more pies and cakes! 

Do you know any really fattening recipes I could try?

A Tale of Two Lists

I said I would write more about how we eat less meat.   I always think it's hard to do less of something without identifying what one will do more. Towards this end, I made up List One and List Two.

List One

beans, poultry, fish, veggie/grain, lentils, FISH

List Two

cheese, eggs, combo, nuts, liver, meat, other treats


My weekly menu includes a fish, a FISH and something from List Two with the other four days filled in with beans, poultry, lentils and vegetarian meals. I don't tend to plan any more detail than the chosen protein. For example I know that tonight I will start with some frozen cooked turkey. Nearly everything I cook starts with dicing an onion and some garlic and whilst I know we are out of tinned tomatoes, I know we have tomato paste...and some vegetables that can be steamed or stir-fried. If I get stuck I can always pull out a recipe book or two for ideas.

Regarding List One

• It might help to know that 'fish' is tinned fish; FISH is not-tinned fish... I get pretty tired of tuna and salmon out of cans and living nearly next door to a cheap source of fresh and frozen fish, it seems foolish not to use the advantage.
• I separated lentils from beans because I never remembered to choose lentils on a bean night and there are many delicious lentil recipes.
• We tend to soak dried beans a cup or two at a time and then cook them in plain water in the crockpot and freeze, but I do keep a few emergency tins in stock in case we get behind.
• In order to make a veggie night more interesting I thought I'd try to explore more grains: couscous, barley, kasha, quinoa, wild rice on veggie night. It often just ends up with regular old rice dish, but sometimes I get more adventurous.
• Veggie night might also include roast veg, but this tends to be an exception as I don't know a low fat approach to this.

Regarding List Two

• These foods aren't quite as healthy as the ones on List One and some of them are quite fattening.
• I specified liver because we found a bargain price and stocked up on it, but because it's not my first choice of meat we could find ourselves ignoring that supply if left to my own devices (then again, this is my device, isn't it?).
• Combo refers to any recipe that calls for two proteins, ie 'beans and cheese' or 'chicken and cheese' or 'beans and minced beef'.
• I do tend to treat small amounts of Parmesan cheese as a condiment rather than as a protein.
• The biggest challenge to finding new recipes is that so many call for more than one protein.
• The next biggest challenge was to find an egg dish that Bill thought suitable for dinner instead of breakfast (quiche calls for cheese and so it is a 'combo'). I found over time that ignoring his views on the matter was the best solution for this; I noticed he happily ate the dishes I produced from recipes that were largely fried egg added to stir-fried veggies. It sounds a bit weird, but it actually tastes quite nice.
• I'm aware that eggs are quite inexpensive as a source of protein and they are in themselves low fat. They might actually belong in List One, but I haven't caught up with the latest position on these re: cholesterol. Also, our most inexpensive source of eggs isn't convenient and so I buy loads when we go and eek them out. We do sometimes have an omelette for lunch instead of soup and I sometimes use an egg to bind together ingredients I want to 'pattify' (a word from The Tightwad Gazette).
• I don't tend to serve 'white stuff' (potatoes, pasta or white rice) any more than I have to. However, nut sauces work best on pasta (whether white or red pesto sauce or peanut butter sauce). Beans and potatoes or beans and rice are also quite nice occasionally.   We have toast or oatmeal / porridge most days for breakfast.
• Most nights are either something stir-fried or baked along with a large pot of steamed vegetables. These are my stock-in-trade selections. When Bill takes over the cooking he's more likely to make a casserole in the oven or to roast something, which is usually quite nice.

What are your strategies for reducing the amount of meat in your diet?

Slashing Your Grocery Bill - Part II

This is a continuation of my ruminations about the strategies  in the Tightwad Gazette.   Amy published 17 ideas for saving money on food.  Last week I talked about those I think we use well.    For these, I think we are sort of in the middle:


Gardening - The whole of the (small) green space in the back of the house is given over to growing veg and fruit, however, the range and volume of foods grown there aren't very impressive.  This is partly due to the cooler weather and shorter growing season than other areas enjoy.  We have various possibilities for creating greenhouse space that we've not explored, partly out of laziness and partly because travel and gardening aren't always compatible.   I think we could possibly do better than we do, but we need to resolve that conflict and I've not yet got my head around that.

Bulk Buying - In the past we've been excellent at this. So much so that we've backed off and have focused on emptying the cupboards and freezers to ensure we're not storing food we'll never get around to eating. These days we shop with a list and pretty much only buy what is on it. If there is a great deal on one of those items we buy lots of it (I bought 20 jars of marmalade once when it went on sale for half price; Bill eats marmalade 99% of the time, so I knew it wouldn't go to waste). However, I don't trawl the store looking for other bargains, so we don't have the stock we once did. I have a feeling I might soon suffer from the sticker-shock we tightwads sometimes experience.

Elimination of Non-nutritious Foods - Amy's list of junk they still bought included coffee, tea, sugar and cocoa. I would have to add tonic, which I like to mix with the fruit juices I find too sweet, and the occasional bottle of lemonade or soft drink. We also buy wine and (when Jane and Chris come) gin, but alcohol is not included in our food budget (nor are toiletries or cleaning supplies).

Choosing Less Expensive Foods - This refers to the idea of choosing tinned tuna instead of tuna steaks, ground beef instead of beef steaks, fruit and veg in season instead of the same foods all year round, etc.   I sometimes wonder if I've fallen victim to the 'superfood' marketing ploy, as we bought broccoli week after week until we started growing curly kale ourselves.  Adding more oily fish to our diet is another thing that costs more.  Bill doesn't care for chicken pieces with bones in, so I buy boneless breasts wholesale and freeze them separately.   We still buy red and yellow bell peppers and sweet potatoes for their nutritional properties. These are relatively expensive, as are butternut and other squashes. We grow and eat beets but find they are not our favourites.  If they weren't so healthy I'd give them a miss altogether, but I am prepared to eat things I only like a little if I think they are really good for me.  So in little ways due to preference and seeking health benefits we have made more expensive choices.  If I were going to be tougher about the food budget, I'd probably start here by looking up the nutritional value of various foods (again).   

By the way, Bill recently sent me a link that suggested one could save £400 per year buying frozen rather than fresh.   My guess is that frozen is more likely to be cheaper if one insists on eating out-of-season items, but I rarely find better deals (except for frozen peas) in the frozen food section than buying in-season at the green market.


Portion Comparison - This also refers in part to choosing less expensive foods. For example, instead of paying for boxes of cereal, make a batch of pancakes from scratch. Amy once published that the price per ounce of brand name cereals was on a par with beef steak. On the cereal front, I can recommend raw oatmeal (porridge) with sliced bananas, milk and sugar.   If you don't care for this idea, home made muesli is not too hard.  Another aspect of this that she doesn't mention is something we're guilty of: when we have a whole roast chicken or a gammon joint we probably don't contain ourselves to a single portion at that first meal, we rather pig out. It's a small luxury, but it does contribute to the increase in our food budget.


Preservation of garden surplus - When we have surplus we definitely freeze it, but this is not a common occurrence. As a rule, we just eat our way through whatever is available because the volume isn't that great and/or because the plants will last long enough for us to finish them off.


A Price Book - I certainly did this when I first come across and food seemed much more expensive to me than it was in the US. I'm not as good at keeping up my price book now.  Prices around here stayed very much the same for a long time and I pretty much knew what was a good deal or not.  Then, right I retired (of course!) everything everywhere seemed to inch (or leap) up.  Our grocery bill has remained relatively low in part because we had so much stock.   I'm still confident that buying fruit & veg at the green market, fish at the fish quay, making bread at home, buying meat and poultry in bulk and dividing it to freeze, buying dried beans and herbs from the Asian market (once a year) is our best bet, and price comparisons still seem to show our local Morrisons is less expensive than other supermarkets.  But I will make more of an effort to update the price book.


Maintaining an Optimum Weight - I do appreciate that if one is not supporting an obese weight one can buy less food.  We are both within the healthy weight range: Bill at the bottom and me at the top (so of course I'd like to weigh less).    I could argue that Bill runs a lot of his calories off and if we didn't support his running we could buy less food, but  That's not going to happen because his running has so many benefits that whatever food he consumes is cheap at twice the price.  Also, and I see this counters my own, instead of spending more to eat less carbohydrates (potatoes, rice, pasta) and more protein as a weight loss strategy, I really should just run more than I do:  inexpensive carbs are the ideal running fuel.

Waste Nothing - We eat nearly every bit of our leftovers in soups, quiches and casseroles. We make stale bread into bread crumbs, old fruit into spice cake and we eat our oldest veg first to make sure it doesn't get wasted.   We don't return to the green market until we are down to eating tinned or frozen as a way of ensuring all the fresh veg gets used up. On the other hand, I'm aware that we could do more with the fish we buy, making fish stock; the same could be said of whole chickens or turkey stock. Fish based soups aren't something that appeals much to me, though I should at least try it once.  As to chicken or ham stock, as these contain animal fats.  So, in spite of their use making the food go further, I'm wondering if it doesn't run counter to the other health-based choices we try to make.    Does anyone ever consider this issue?

These don't happen in our house:

Buying Marked Down Damaged Goods - It is one of my pet peeves about British supermarkets that they don't feel the need to mark down any sort of damaged tin. I've yet to discover any place like the 'dented can' place I used to shop in Oklahoma City.  All I can do is try to ensure I get items with perfect packaging, as wonky tins can sometimes be difficult to open.


Coupons - I rarely buy a newspaper and even when I do, I don't see coupons in them unless it has to do with money off a McDonald's meal or the like. I never used coupons much in the States, preferring to avoid the marked up convenience foods they were for. I can't recall ever seeing a coupon discounting a package of lentils or a litre of milk.

What strategies - if any - do you use to keep your food costs down?

Slashing Your Grocery Bill - Part I

This was a title of a Tightwad Gazette article in the January 1991 issue.  I'm aware that our food bill has crept up to around £132 per month (the average for 2011) and after re-reading this article I can see some reasons why, in addition of course to the fact that food prices have actually increased a bit.  Amy recommended no fewer than 17 strategies, some of which we are quite good at, but not all.  I think we're pretty good at:

Buying Store/Generic Brands - Our main supermarket source has recently changed its generic packaging scheme (for who knows what reason), but until they did I would have said I had about the 'yellowest' shopping trolley in the store.  I've read and heard from too many sources that the packaging plants change the label, not necessarily the contents.  I always buy generic unless my experience tells me otherwise.  Recently Morrisons have started to stock only a limited amount of their generic brands, some of which are nearly half the price of the next best offer.  I will have to start shopping earlier in the day if I want the best crack at these bargains.

Free Food - We graciously gratefully accept all offers of free food and routinely pick blackberries when they are in season.   We did go pick some sloes, but I confess that they remain in the freezer until I get around to buying gin and figuring out which recipe to use.  (Suggestions welcomed!)  This gives us a crack at green beans, rhubarb, apples and, once, even gooseberries.

Preparing Foods from Scratch - On the rare occasion when we have custard, we make it from power not scratch and our Christmas puddings (sort of a fruit cake - Brits use the word 'pudding' like Yanks say 'dessert') come in a box.  I know it's also possible to make hot chocolate from cocoa, but I find the mix is cheaper than the ingredients.  Other than these exceptions I can't think of anything we don't make from scratch, e.g. if the recipe calls for a tin of cream of something soup, I make white sauce and add the something (or a substitute I have on hand).

Eat Fewer Meat and Potato Meals - We eat meat perhaps a couple of times a month at home, but usually order a meat entre on the odd occasion we're eating out.  When we have meat it is usually as part of a stir fry or casserole or used to flavour beans.  We both love our roast beef or ham, but meat does no favours for one's pocketbook or one's health.

Vegetarianism - Looking at our evening menu for about a two month period, we ate vegetarian 47% of the time.  This is quite inexpensive.  However, 45% of the time we eat fish or poultry, and these don't tend to be as cheap.  The other 5-7%  probably involve meat.  Lunches - particularly in cold weather - tend to be soup made from whatever leftovers are on hand.

Elimination of Convenience Foods - Of course this relates closely to Preparing Foods from Scratch, but one of Amy's pet peeves had to do with individually packaged single servings.  I must admit that we routinely buy four packs of a generic fruit yoghurts because by weight they are cheaper than a larger container of fruit yoghurt.  However, I can't claim to have done the math recently for whether they are cheaper than plain yoghurt with fruit, jam or honey added.

Next week, I shall be making my confessions about what we don't do so well...

Do you use any of these strategies to reduce your food costs?

Tightwad Gazette Revisited

I owe Amy Dacyczyn (pronounced decision) a lot, in fact I need to thank her for pretty much my entire lifestyle these days.  She's the one who taught me the game of frugality.  It started out as a means of survival (take a spend-thrift second husband with a good-weather dependent income; a surprise 20-month-old step-son - yikes! the price of diapers, not to mention daycare!; a secretary's salary; a recently deceased father who left thousands of bills at double-digit interest rates along with a house worth keeping; oh, and an ex-husband who let the house we shared go into foreclosure...with my name on the mortgage; did I mention I was working on finishing a master's degree in night school at this time?). 

Amy didn't just share tips about how to save money, she wrote brilliant editorials that helped me develop a different attitude.  She changed how I looked at money; at goals; at other people, particularly The Jones's; at other resources such as time, energy and various materials; at advertising and at the consumer society in general.  She championed the use and development of creative approaches and of tightwad experiments.  She taught me the guidelines of the game and made frugality fun.  There was also a hefty helping of respect for the environment and gratitude for the gifts of a loving family and being raised with a work ethic.    If you haven't ever read The Complete Tightwad Gazette, I can't recommend it highly enough, even if you don't feel you need to be frugal.  Interestingly, the used prices on Amazon.com/co.uk suggest that people are taking her ideas more seriously these days.  Not that I've ever owned the book myself.

I still cherish my original, now tattered, newsletters.  In the years that I barely kept my head above water, I looked forward to receiving each issue like a drowning person welcomes the life raft.  

Beyond survival, tightwaddery became a means to get what I wanted (to own a home in my new city, Salt Lake City, where the rents were double those in OKC and house prices were soaring).  My mom died less than two years after my dad, I left my hometown of 35 years for a new job (I'd finished the master's) and my marriage was increasingly hard work; we didn't share the same goals at all.  Playing the game was a welcome distraction from sad realities. 

When the marriage finally ended, I wanted to keep the house I'd scrimped and saved for.  This meant saving up again to pay out half of the equity, almost half the original price in only a couple of years.   My ex had a small house in OKC we'd re-mortgaged together for a better interest rate.  I'd learned from my first experience and required that he take my name off that mortgage before I paid him the $17,000 equity I owed.  It took him a while to arrange that, giving me just enough time to save up.    

When I moved to the UK,  my rent income was useful in helping to save for a deposit on a house here.  I lived in one room near work for 10 months, while saving and searching for another house.  I eventually paid off the SLC house in 8 years, not in the 15-year life of the mortgage (I saved $44,000 in interest by chosing a 15 rather than a 30 year mortgage).  In the UK I took a 30-year mortgage but paid off the house in 10.   Can you see why I like Amy's game? 

The game of frugality eventually allowed me to leave an increasingly stressful job and to retire at 51:  I had a paid-for home, some rental income, a sizeable savings account and zero debt.   Mind, I don't discount Bill's contribution to my retirement, providing a backdrop of added security in the event my resources failed (rent income/expenses are not entirely reliable).   Also, one of the best of Bill's many sterling qualities is that he understands and likes to play the game.

I'm now in a position where I need to re-evaluate my goals.  I have reached most of the ones I've had in the past.  I think I'm in a pretty secure position, but I want to check.   My finances are a bit scattered - chasing interest rates here in the UK could be a full-time job - and I need to pull myself together a bit.  Amy also wrote about reaching this point.  I want to go find that editorial and remind myself what she had to say.  Gretchen Rubin talks about 'spending out', something I have been trying to do a bit of lately.  In a conscious way.

In addition to doing this stock-taking, I have pulled out my dear old newsletters and re-organised them by month.   Instead of doing the chronological journey through Amy's publishing career, I have all of January's advice together.  There are many of her ideas I've yet to try. 

Some have to do with raising children, buying fuel for stoves or buying and maintaining cars.   These aren't for me (Bill has decided ideas about what car he wants to drive and I leave that entirely to him).  I've never much pursued the pie and cake ideas before, but Bill would enjoy eating these.   As the mother of six children, Amy's ideas about efficient organisation and use of time were always practical and why I still read some mommy-blogs these days.  I will look forward to re-reading her advice about tightwad decorating (start with cleaning and re-arrange what you already have).   I may not incorporate a great many new ideas into our routine, but I'm certain to come away with my frugal habits shined up and my happy resolve strengthened.

You see, it's not a game for me anymore, it's part of how I am.   And whatever words some people like to throw around like 'cheap' or 'dreary', today I have a relatively comfortable, low-stress, contented life in a place I love, with people I love.   I'm pretty certain I wouldn't have been able to do that without the tools Amy gave me.  Making careful, conscious choices about money made me focus on what was important to me.  Whatever unhappiness there was on the road to here, I'm very pleased and grateful to be in the position I am today. 

Thank you, so much, Amy.

Universal Pesto Sauce

I learned the idea of 'universal' recipes from The Tightwad Gazette and I'm certain that it's saved me a fortune (well, more or less).  From the time I read the idea that I didn't have to run out and buy celery, but could substitute another green crunchy substance, such as bell pepper for example, I've never again been very challenged by a recipe.  My favourite example of a 'universal' recipe is 'rice dish', but she also devised a universal seafood casserole, a bread recipe, and several others.

It has never honestly occurred to me to make pesto sauce at home, mainly because tomato or white sauce seemed sufficient for flavouring pasta, but since I've incorporated nuts into my cooking schedule, pesto has looked more and more attractive.

I don't know if it was An Oregon Cottage or The Simple Dollar that first awakened me to the possibility that pesto doesn't have to mean pine nuts and basil, but if I had any further doubts, Wikipedia convinced me and I've never looked back since!

It turns out that 'pesto' is anything made by pounding (ie with a 'pestle' in a mortar)  or in these modern times more likely with a blender.  We enjoyed sunflower seeds and fresh parsley one night.  Personally, I think anything with garlic and olive oil is going to turn out well; I may or may not add the Parmesan cheese.  I used the blender stick that I now don't know how we ever lived without to zap the parsley, but the seeds successfully evaded the blades.  No matter, it was just crunchy sauce and very nice all the same.  I've not mastered a specific recipe, but generally look at another pesto recipe to get a rough idea of proportions.   I've tended to cut the amounts right back, but hope next time to freeze the extra as recommended.

Consider that the vegetable/herb portion might be one or a combination of arugula, coriander, bell pepper, basil, parsley, tomato, mint, spinach, mushrooms or several other substitutions (maybe even home grown!); also that the nuts could be almonds, cashews, walnuts, pine nuts, or (the most frugal unless you have your own tree) sunflower seeds.  

I always feel rather confined by ordinary recipes whereas universal recipes really make me feel free to create!  Jami, over at An Oregon Cottage, also talks about adding pesto to a creamy white sauce, to further dilute the herbage flavour, which is another thing I'm looking forward to trying!

White August

One of the most salient lessons I learned about frugality from Amy Dacyczyn, in her Tightwad Gazette was to appreciate, and even enjoy, limitations.  I took this away from several of her articles and find I use the idea to make all sorts of strange entertainment for myself.

She pointed out that games are only fun because you have to obey the rules and still reach the goal. Another editorial talked about how, when framing a picture, matting is used to create the space that allows the eye to appreciate the art.  This was an analogy she used to remind us that the first piece of cherry pie is more enjoyed than the last, only for her it was that if her kids didn’t seem to enjoy their ice cream treats very much, she took that to mean they need to have less ice cream, not more.  Scarcity creates value and so a more occasional ice cream would be more thoroughly appreciated.


This of course goes completely against a lot of the thinking these days when we feel entitled to have all we want, whenever we want, no restrictions whatsoever.   I’m afraid that approach not only bores me rigid but also creates such a confusing level of greed that I begin to crave some sort of discipline. Children need boundaries to provide security and apparently I do too.

One of my games is to assign a colour for each month and to try to wear that colour every day if I can.  July’s colour was cream, but I needed to expand that a bit to include beige and taupe. I didn’t dress in beige from head to foot, not having things that coordinated that well, but wore a cream top and cardigan with brown slacks or a beige skirt and wedgies with an orange sweater, and so on. In August I will put the cream/beige/taupe items to one side and pull out everything I own that is white. I’m allowed to use the beige items in the unlikely event that I need them, but I will focus on wearing white. I anticipate teaming the white items with navy or other blues a lot, but I expect to find other combinations that work as well. 

For me, the way to not be dissatisfied with not buying many new clothes is not only to wear everything I already have, but to make myself think about wearing those items in new ways. This game helps me to do both. It’s also a game to pretend that August will be so warm here that white is the natural choice, but we might continue to be lucky with the weather. It has been quite warm, if not sunny, this last month.

I think this is a variation on the currently popular game “Shop Your Closet”. I sometimes think that is the grown up (I started to say adult, but sadly that word has been kidnapped by another connotation) version of “Playing Dress-Up”.  (And Polyvore is my 54-year-old version of paper dolls!  Talk about fun!  I just haven't figured out how to make it larger, not yet...  This is roughly what I wore into town yesterday).

Do you ever play these sorts of games with your clothes?

Playing with Percentages

I'm a complete idiot for playing around with spread sheets and numbers.  I acquired this addiction in my former occupation and I'm not likely to shake it.  I'm also a frugal fanatic (about some things) and always on the look out for motivational challenges as well as smarter spending information.  So, when I ran across this post at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, I saved it for play time.  Ages ago, I found some advice about suggested percentages for budgeting, from some American source, no idea where now.  At the time I was trying to figure out how much to spend on clothes (I don't think I ever managed to spend as much as 6% when I was working; much as I love clothes and shoes, I felt guilty when I spent very much on them).  

Strictly speaking, percentages are very misleading, but they can be useful for comparisons such as this.  The comparison is a rough one as well, as this lady's budget categories are different to the ones in the advice list; I may or may not have fitted those in correctly.  Also, this is just for how my money - with Bill's contribution to living expenses - is spent, where her budget is for both partners and for a total amount of nearly 5 times my income.  My 'family necessities' (? cleaning supplies and toilet paper?) are less than 1%, but not zero (we do still buy TP ;-).   My only 0% was for installment debt.  They are paying off their car this year, so that figure is exaggerated.  Oh yeah, and they live in the US, while I'm in England.  I was interested not just in comparing my percentages with hers, but to see how we're doing for the first 6 months of this year compared with last year.

Category	2009	2010	BiFS
Housing  (30-40%)	12	8	22
Utilities  (4-7%)	12	11	3
Food (15-30%)	9	6	8
Family necessities (2-4%)	0	0	3
Medical (2-8%)	1	1	2
Clothing (3-10%)	1	1	4
Transportation (6%)	5	6	10
Entertainment / Fun (2-6%)	13	10	9
Retirement/Investment (5-9%)	24	30	20
Outlays for Fixed Assets(2-8%)	2	16	4
Mad Money (1-4%)	21	11	5
Total Installment Debt (< 20%)	0	0	12
Total	100	100	100

So, what did I learn from this, if anything?  We pay a lot for utilities, not just in percentages, but in real terms, though I can't see a way at this point to reduce that expense.   Since the house is paid off, our housing expenses are limited to property tax and insurance, but I put repairs and renovations into 'Outlay for Fixed Assets' as I had no idea what else that might refer to.  I suspect the advice amount for retirement is out of date.  Some of my figures for 2010 will 'smooth out' over the rest of the year; neither of us can face any more re-decorating in the immediate future.


I wouldn't say we were necessarily having more fun, only that it represents a higher percentage of my income spent for travel, but I'm definitely 'madder' than she is, in that a lot of those totals in my columns is 'miscellaneous' which means either very small (postage stamps) items or that I've no idea where that money went...  Definite room for improvement there.


Hers is a planned buget, mind.  Mine is just what happens.  I've only ever budgeted, as in making a list of categories and assigning an amount each month, when I thought I was in danger of not having enough to meet my responsibilities.  Any other time, which is pretty much ever since I began following the principles in the Tightwad Gazette, I've just squeezed the things that matter least as hard as I could in order to make more funds available for what is more important.


How do you do your budgeting?

The Lost Art of Popping

I can’t remember not knowing how to pop popcorn.  We had it as snacks occasionally at home and Mom always brought a big paper bag full with us when we went to the drive in movie as a family.  Between the popcorn and her fried chicken, I used to feel sorry for the people who bought food from the concession stand.

Popping corn is actually a bit difficult to find here in Britain; everyone seems to use microwave popcorn, which is massively more expensive.   In browsing through my Tightwad Gazette newsletters, the very first issue she published had a cover story about popcorn.  She had a race with her husband to see whether the microwave popcorn was really any quicker; of course it wasn’t.  I developed a trick to make even bigger bunches of popcorn, which I’m about to share with you.

Take a pan with a handle and a lid that fits securely even when shaken.  If you have to hold the lid on when shaking, it’s a bit trickier.  Put just enough oil in to cover the bottom of the pan.  Pour in enough kernels to cover the oil with about two or three layers of corn.  Judging the amount of corn is the toughest part, better to err on the lesser side if in doubt.  I shake it just a bit to coat the kernels with oil and then leave it to heat up.  Once it starts popping, I shake it occasionally, but not constantly.  I’m guessing the purpose of shaking is to help the un-popped kernels get down into the oil so they can cook.   I shake the pan more frequently as the popping gets faster.  If I’ve done my usual trick of putting too much popcorn in (usually on purpose), the popped corn will begin to push the lid off.  I have a big bowl handy and whip the lid off and pour off the top half of popped kernels into it.  It has to be done very quickly to avoid popcorn going everywhere, mind!  That’s half the fun, though, I think.    When it all slows to only the occasional pop, turn off the heat and remove the pan from the hot burner.  I only put salt (and too much, at that) on my popped corn; the oil is enough flavouring for me, though I used to add melted butter years and years ago.  In my opinion, popcorn is a perfect frugal snack, though I do try not to have it too often, given the number of calories it has.

What sort of snacks do you have around your house?

Weird Fabric

The Tightwad Gazette once featured an article about how to furnish your first home for practically free:  ask people for the stuff they have that they don't want.  The main principle was that you turned down nothing, lest you put people off offering things to you.  I've adopted this principle myself concerning fabric.

But what do you do when someone gives you a piece of fabric that, interesting though it is, you'd never in a million years make something to wear from it?

Wrap a gift

or cover a waste paper basket

to coordinate with the new green bathroom.

Autobiographical Food

Reading the Settlers’ Cookbook got me to thinking about what recipes I might include in an autobiographical work (not that I’m planning to write one, mind). If you love food, and I don’t know many who don’t, it’s rather a fun exercise to think about how your eating habits have changed over your lifetime. Assuming, of course, that they have changed, with new technology, products, learning and maybe even dare one hope… a healthier lifestyle? This is also yet another way to indulge in a bit of nostalgia, remembering what foods have figured large in your life.

As with everyone else, my initial meals were influenced by the culture and creativity of the women who raised me. In my youth cooking was women’s work; it has changed to some extent here, but I’m guessing mothers are still the primary feeders of small children.

Then came the period when I worked full time and attended university classes four nights a week; food was fast and fattening. I can tell you it is possible to become thoroughly ‘fed-up’ with greasy, spicy on-the-run junk.

Then I decided I would learn to cook and entertain. Those meals were straight out of a cookbook, one my Grandmother (a non-cook) gave me as a wedding present, and presented proudly. My second marriage found me feeding a bottomless pit and a small child. This necessitated grabbing the life-raft of frugality. I learned to plan meals around carbohydrates, how to make casseroles and other ‘universal’ dishes to stretch what meat and poultry I bought, also things like white sauce and pancakes from scratch. This was also a time of being introduced to the wonders of tortillas and chili made with spaghetti. This was when I feel I actually learned how to cook, though as many mistakes as I still make, this obviously remains a work in progress.

After my second divorce, as with the first, I had far more money than I needed, but continued in my frugal habits with a view to early retirement through Financial Independence. My move to England was exciting but very stressful and I resorted to comfort food. I discovered salt and vinegar crisps, prawn crackers and Muller’s fruit yogurts (full fat). I even briefly sampled pork pies and corned beef pasties. (That’s not a typo; in the US pAsties – are what strippers put on their nipples. One doesn’t hear about them here in the UK, maybe they don’t bother here or perhaps this is a relic of a quainter(?) time.)

Then I bought a house and had my own kitchen again and I got a grip. Being obsessed with running further and faster made me eat much better again. Whilst today I could still do with better portion control, the vitamin and fibre content of our meals is very good.

So, here are the items I might list in the various chapters of my Autobiographical Cookbook. (Recipes available upon request)

Grandma

• Beef and potato hash in the grinder (which I have)
• Meatloaf Pressure cooker stew
• Door stop Christmas fruitcake (no recipe, sorry, non replicable if we’re lucky)

Grandmother

• Cherry pie
• Boiled chicken and ground beef (for the dogs)
• TV dinners
• The full whack at Thanksgiving, but as Mom helped cook it may have been more her doing than Grandmother’s…

Mom

• Gerber’s Baby cereal (I loved this pablum stuff long after I could chew. Weird, I know)
• Fried chicken that Colonel Sanders could envy
• Bell pepper & cherry tomato flowers – a fancy garnish she made for fun
• Rotisserie chicken on the BBQ with potato salad most Sundays with Grandma & Grandpa over and with Chris, our next door neighbour
• Beans and ham – only for herself at first, but I learned to like it eventually
• Steak and salad – my Dad’s favourite
• Fish sticks and fries
• Chinese food from/at House of China – eaten with chopsticks
• Steak dinners at Sirloin Stockade – she didn’t like the pictures of cows on the walls
• Fruit salad
• Corned beef hash
• Chipped beef on bread (AKA S.O.S. – S**t on a Shingle, but not in our house)
• Bread and gravy (for seconds when there wasn’t much else)
• Garlic frittered chicken, chicken chow main, sweet and sour pork, rice, noodles (an all day cooking project)
• Chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes with gravy
• Horse Dovers (my Dad’s humour) and shrimp cocktail for New Years Eve
• Black-eyed peas on New Years Day for good luck
• Cornbread stuffing
• Hush puppies (fried cornmeal)

First Marriage
Hardees, McDonalds, Del Rancho, every drive-in joint on Broadway in Edmond, OK where I got my undergrad degree: for Quarter Pounders with Cheese, Footlong hotdogs with chili, Chicken fried steak, Hot Ham and Cheese, fries, onion rings…and (of course) Diet Coke

Starting to Cook

• Canned biscuits with Vienna sausage and cheese
• Beef stroganoff
• Chicken & dumplings (made with canned biscuits)
• Hollandaise sauce (easy version)
• Chicken Cordon Bleu (once)
• Roast chicken
• Fried chicken almost as good as Mom’s, but not quite

Second Marriage

• Hamburger Helper (pre-Tightwad Gazette)
• Chili with kidney beans, minced beef and spaghetti
• Roast chicken pieces with different sauces
• Fried eggs and rice
• Universal Rice dish
• Universal Muffins
• Universal Casseroles
• Leftovers wrapped in tortillas
• Pancakes
• Popcorn by the bucket (popped in a roasting tin until I learned to over fill a sauce pan and empty it half way)
• Tuna and pasta in white sauce
• Learned to do Mom and Grandmother's Thanksgiving meal

Single Again

• Crackers with cheese and a tin of tuna
• Tortilla chips (low fat) and salsa (most of the bag and all of the jar)

Life in England

Beans

• Hummus with veggie and toast sticks
• African (stir-fry with vegetables and garlic)
• Soup in crockpot with bacon or ham, tomato and onion
• Cold pasta or rice salad
• Vegetarian cassoulet
• Pease pudding (lentils, actually)
• Hash (with potato and onion)
• Tinned beans on toast
• Refried Mexican style, etc.
• Fruit salads with low fat yogurt
• Vegetables : steamed, stir-fried or roasted
• Crust-less quiche and mini-quiches (in muffin tin)
• Savory muffins

Salmon: 

• steaks
• smoked salmon with crackers
• salmon puff (tinned)
• fish patties (tinned)

White Fish:

• Sweet and sour sauce
• Kedgeree
• Fish patties

Other:

• Lettuce-less salads (sometimes with spinach)
• Fruit salad with low-fat yoghurt
• Veggie omelettes
• Homemade pizza, usually with chorizo or salami
• Tuna and veg with ketchup sauce (sounds crazy but it’s good)
• Rice dishes (with veg only, with beans and veg, added chicken bits or other meats)
• Spice cake
• Beef bourguignon (Bill’s speciality)

So, that's mine. What would be in your Autobiographical Food story?

Food Wealth

We recently emptied the fridge in the garage and turned it off, as we did last year about this time. This required de-frosting and re-organising the contents of the one in the kitchen. In the process I became aware of how much frozen protein – particularly turkey – we actually have. Everything from egg yolks to slabs of beef – and a lot of turkey – not to mention prawns, grated cheese, sausages, frozen yogurt. Not the ice cream-like stuff you can get in the US, but actual yogurt I wasn’t going to use before it went off so I froze it in muffin sized rocks portions.

The egg yolks are from my days of making angel food cake and I tried, but didn’t much care for the complexity or calories involved in, egg yolk-containing sauces. I decided I would add them to rice dish meals a few at a time, for a vaguely Chinese effect.

I’ve not figured out yet what to do with the yogurt when it’s thawed, beyond mixing it with mayonnaise and lemon juice for a delicious vegetable salad dressing, as long as the texture is OK after it's thawed. We don’t really do many salads in winter here, though, so that will have to wait. I might try thawing a portion and mixing it with honey to put over fruit salad, our usual dessert. I don’t really like unsweetened yogurt much, finding it a bit tart, but it is so good for you, I persist in buying it. How stubborn is that?

The wealth of food in the freezer (Did you know they sell insurance cover here, to insure against the failure of your freezer? Nope, I'm not covered.) made me think that with just a little discipline our grocery bills could continue to be quite low. We spent all of £3 in January. At this writing I don’t know how much we spent in February, but I’m betting it’s less than £60. Vegetables, fruit and milk will be our largest expenses for a while.

This all reminded me of an article in the Tightwad Gazette (Issue 49, page 6, if you have her newsletters) where she compared her food budget with that of a USDA report on the cost of food at home. She was quite depressed that she didn’t quite match their figures; she only fit into the 'low cost plan', not the 'thrifty plan'. Then she realized she was comparing their costs by week with hers by month!

This led me to look up the current figures. You can find them here. As you can see, on the Thrifty Plan the monthly cost for two people between 51 and 70 years of age in December 2009 was $327.80, about £201.96. Last year we averaged £104 per month ($168.80) on groceries. I can't tell you what we spent on eating out, because Bill generally pays for this and I don't make him account for where he spends his money unless it is for groceries we eat at home, which I nearly always buy. I'm certain, however, that we don't spend £100 eating out in any month unless perhaps when we are on holiday. Given that last year our two main vacations were spent visiting family, I doubt we spent even this but I'll not go making claims I can't substantiate.

These figures are both an estimate of what it would cost to eat food that met recommended nutritional requirements and of what low-income people, those within 130% of the poverty line, will have spent. I think they did some pretty fancy mathematical modelling to bring those two data sources into line. The costs appear to have increased about 55% since Amy used these USDA figures. Back in 1994 she concluded that either the government was inept or that people were clueless in the supermarket, or perhaps both. Before you decide I'm completely crackers, looking at all these numbers, I do have good reason to be interested in the cost of living in the US as we plan to move there sometime in the next few years. I found the USDA figures both alarming and reassuring.

When I looked up these figures, I was thinking about aiming to see if we could squeeze into the weekly category for the Thrifty Food Plan the way Amy did (that would give us £46.96 per month, given their $75.70 per week), but then it dawned on me to look at the Liberal Food Plan just for fun.

It's too boring (even to me) to compare the lists line for line, but what I did notice about the 2nd report was that a) the Liberal Food Plan includes more fruit, vegetables and dairy products, but not more sweets, oils or sweets, than in the thrifty plan; also that b) food wastage was factored into each plan: 10% of thrifty, 20% of low and moderate-cost and 30% for the liberal food plan. So, I take it that we could join the liberal plan, spend $628.10 per month on food and throw $207.23 of it away. Sounds awful, doesn't it?

That said, I have to confess to having ditched two of the three turkey carcasses we pulled out of the garage. I'm very sad about that, but I wasn't prepared to run the garage freezer to keep them any longer, they wouldn't fit in the kitchen fridge and one huge pot of turkey stock was all I could cope with given that Bill doesn't much like turkey soup.

The Kitchen Witch just published this incredible recipe that I'm looking forward to using. Given that it is made with beans, it can't cost much. I’m tempted to try it with different kinds of beans, of which we have plenty, both tinned and dried. We have almost as many beans as we do packets of frozen turkey.

My bread maker cookbook has a recipe for pita bread dough which I need to try anyhow, as homemade tortillas prove to be still difficult and that is our staple food for running club nights. I haven’t given up, but fresh pita bread sounds wonderful, too. I’ll let you know how it all goes.

In the meantime, any suggestions for using thawed out yogurt?