Pesah post-mortem

My friend Sallie W. points out that now is the time to go to the grocery store and stock up on all those Passover items that are now marked down - cake mixes, cans and jars, etc. The corrollary to the mark-ups in the prices of such items that take place leading up to the holiday is the markdowns that take place after it. Actually, here in Wichita I'll wait another week or two - I looked in on the section yesterday and most everything was only slightly marked down; in a little while longer, when Dillons really needs to free up the shelf space, discounts will be much more significant. Last year Passover gefilte fish was marked down about 75% about a month after the holiday, and you've never seen a happier man than I was that day, let me tell you.

I can also say that we did pretty well with keeping our Passover-related spending under control, and the basic reason for that was that we didn't worry too much about hekshers (kosher certification). I know this won't be very helpful to people who are more observant than I, but I've more or less decided that kosher certification is a rip-off, and I'll eyeball ingredients lists to make sure something doesn't have wheat etc in it, but after that I don't worry about it too much. And those little "made on the same equipment as wheat and nuts" legends that have appeared in the past couple of years are very helpful in this regard.

During the week of the holiday we ate a lot of leftovers from the seder, of course, but one night I made a matzo-meal polenta from the NY Times Passover cookbook, another night I made a matzo lasagna, and aside from a quick run for apples we didn't go back to the grocery store all week.

Yesterday was replenishment day, and for the first time I went to Aldi's, which is probably worth a post of its own but was a revelation, let me tell you. Last week on NPR's Talk of the Nation there was a discussion about Walmart moving toward local produce, and it was so convincing I brought it up to DW, who said that she would much rather me start by going to Aldi's than to Walmart, which we pretty much consider a source of pure evil.

Anyway, a shopping trip that would have cost nearly $200 at Dillons cost about $60 at Aldis. Comparing the brands that I got there with some of the stuff we still have in the cupboard, the things look very similar both nutritionally and in terms of ingredients, but it's cheaper, what can I say. They don't carry any organics or the fake meat products that we like, but for cereals, canned goods, pasta and some other staples, it looks like it will be a regular stop on my shopping circuit.

Well ok, but I wouldn't call it frugality

Here's kind of a weird one, from a recent issue of Newsweek: Julia Reed makes a bet with friends that she can eat for under $50 per week (apparently she has developed well-earned reputation for extravagance) which she wins by using up expensive ingredients she had bought on previous sprees and trips and had never eaten. Money quote:

The good news about being formerly extravagant is that you have some pretty swell stuff lurking around. There was pasta I'd toted from Italy three trips ago; ditto balsamic vinegar of every conceivable age. There were anchovies and capers, olives, and pickled figs, three colors of lentils, and four kinds of rice. Why, I wondered, had I bought two bottles of walnut oil and one of blood-orange vinegar? I don't know, but it turns out they work really well together on a salad of watercress and endive. Does pasta have a shelf life? Supposedly it's two years, but my four-year-old pappardelle was just fine. Is it too gross to make a meal of the runny Epoisses my mother left at Christmas? Yes, but I found an Epoisses soufflé recipe from Anne Willan that made an elegant supper with a salad.

Although the length of the wager is unclear from the piece, I would venture to guess that most people could probably get through a week or two spending $50 per week on food using just with the things in the cabinets, even if blood-orange vinegar isn't among them. It's probably not fancy enough for Julia Reed, but I know there's some Natureburger mix buried somewhere in our cabinets, waiting for a fallow time.

I would point out that the very fact that she bought and brought home all this fancy stuff and then didn't use it until she'd made a bet is actually a symptom, a symptom of the same disease that I am exhibiting when I buy a book and put it on the shelf without reading it. We don't even bother to get the full use or pleasure out of the things we buy. Buying, having, is more important than the thing itself. In this sense, actually eating the food is a drawback, because then you don't have it anymore. At least a book still exists once you've read it.

But ultimately, this kind of thing is not sustainable. Either she'll get tired of working so hard to put interesting food on the table, or she'll run out of esoteric ingredients. She may have eaten olive and cream cheese sandwiches in college, but I doubt she'd want to do so now. And anyway, a story entitled "Budget Gourmet" should have some hint of ways to actually eat on a budget, not just use up the product of previous extravagance. No?

PS: I won't be linking to Newsweek too much anymore; we're letting the subscription lapse. We've probably taken it for 10 years at least, but DW doesn't like the redesign.

Three things I probably shouldn't be buying

1 - Spectrum brand organic canola oil, $9.99 for a 32 oz bottle. Why I buy it - conventional canola oil is GMO. Alternatives - conventional Mazola, about half as expensive. Likelihood I'll change - 50-50. We basically only use it for stir frying and bread making, and a bottle will last usually a couple of months. On the other hand, such a small amount somewhat undermines the advantages of organic.

2 - X brand bread flour (I forgot to write it down, and I can't find it on line. It's not a famous brand. I'll let you know when I find it). About $8 for 5 pounds. Why I buy it - it's good! It's got all sorts of nuts and seeds in it, and it's organic and whole grain. Alternative - regular bread flour, not as crunchy but less than half the price. Likelihood I'll change - pretty high. I bought the store brand this week, I'll try it out and see if it works. If it does, I might still buy the expensive kind once in a while, but it's probably not worth the expense of having it in the house all the time.

3 - Kroger 100% pure maple syrup, about $8 for a 12 oz bottle. Why I buy it - the other brands all have high fructose corn syrup as the first or second ingredient, and that's a deal breaker for us. A bottle lasts a month or two, depending on how often DW makes pancakes. Likelihood I'll change - not very high.

And for a bonus -

4 - The Sunday New York Times - approx. $30 a month. Why I buy it - The Wichita Eagle sucks. Plus, Frank Rich rocks! (Give 'em hell, Frankie.) When I called the last time to cancel, they gave me the intro price for another 16 weeks, which has now run out. Likelihood I'll stop - it remains to be seen. It's tough to imagine living without it, but considering I have trouble paying my bills, this has to be considered a luxury item. And besides, it's cheaper to go to the store to buy it.

Breakfast: The most expensive meal of the day

Here's a post from Dollar Stretcher about breakfast, the most important - and in our house the most expensive - meal of the day.

I purchase most of our cereal from the health-food section of the supermarket, in an effort to avoid HFCS and GMOs - although of course, unless one buys organic, anything you buy from the supermarket is likely to contain GMOs. I only buy the cereals that are on sale, but that's still $3.50 / box, and we go through at least 3 or 4 boxes a week. Oy!

One way we tried to stretch it was by buying a generic honey-nut-o's substitute from the regular aisle and mixing it in, but it hasn't been overly popular. (Although DK2 eats it every day, with a couple hunks of cojack cheese and some raisins.) I also buy bulk granola from the health food store and eat that with yogurt once or twice a week, and DK1 likes that, but it's not much of a money saver, since I buy the expensive yogurt also! We also do homemade bread with cheese sometimes too, and once in a while DW makes homemade bars, and they always get scarfed right away. Nobody will eat oatmeal but me.

I assume that the rising price of grains will lead to higher prices on high-end cereals, and that will make it harder for me to justify buying them. We may be forced to move to more homemade options. I believe that if we made this granola recipe in the form of a bar, it would get eaten. And as with the breadmachine bread, my guess is that when the more attractive options disappear for a long enough period of time, the less attractive options will begin to look a whole lot better.

The end of the month

This is the time of month when all spending basically stops - 2 days before payday, at the end of the month. Even since the tax refund came through, we have been bouncing at $1000 rather than at 0, but the principle is the same - no extra money!

Summers are tough because income is lower - we don't teach Hebrew School over the summer, so no extra income there, and DW is the low man on the totem pole at her tutoring job, which means if things are slow there over the summer she doesn't get called in to work. And expenses that we don't usually see come in over the summer as well, camps and lessons for the kids particularly. And the electricity bill is high because of AC. So we were out-of-balance for June.

As far as the food budget goes - I've managed to get the main shopping down to about $150/week, give or take (I have seen some increase in some of the things I buy), but if I go to farmer's market and buy meat or dairy from the farm that can put it over. But I'm pretty clear that I'm trying to balance food activism with frugality, so I'm pretty comfortable with where we are with that right now. I had to skip both of them this week because I was determined to spend no more money until payday, and that's okay too. If I could get the supermarket back down in the $100-110 range it would be better, so that's my goal right now. I sort of have to do that so that we can make it to the end of the summer when the extra income things kick in again. And when J.D. at Get Rich Slowly said that he had gone out to eat 40 times already this year I felt much better, because my number is, oh, 3 maybe.

The major thing that makes our financial situation challenging is debt service. I spend $600/month on credit card payments, $450/month on student loan payments, and $340/month on the car payment. That's more than one-quarter of our monthly net income! If I didn't have all that, opening Quicken would be a lot less nerve-wracking! It seems to me that my life has always been like this. But at least now, I'm not adding more to the credit cards debt, and though it might make today more comfortable to pay less on the cards, I'm determined to keep it where it is so that we can get closer to a tomorrow that's free from all this debt. (This is leaving aside the 400-pound gorilla which is the house in IL - I also have utilities on it that I'm basically ignoring right now but which will have to be paid eventually. )

I had sort-of-ambitious vacation plans that I think I'm going to have to let go, so that it doesn't cost us our entire buffer. So I think we're going to stay close to home this summer - a couple of nights in KC, a couple of nights in Lawrence, maybe we'll go see the farm.

So I didn't go to the farmer's market this week. I made mushroom lasagna last night and it was good! We're not overdrawn this month. I'm broke today but for once in my life I have money put away if something goes wrong. I guess I'm on the good side of the knife's edge right now. And I get paid Monday.

This week's meals

I haven't posted my meal plans for a couple of weeks, so here's what's on the menu this week:

Sunday night for father's day we had kind of an expensive meal, my favorite fake-shrimp-and-tofu in black bean sauce recipe, veggie dumplings and rice. Total cost, probably around $12 or so. A lot for an at-home meal, but nothing compared to eating out! (Which we rarely do.)

Monday night DW made peanut noodles, also with tofu, and we used up some mung bean sprouts that were starting to darken.

Tuesday night I made tempeh jambalaya - tempeh, a can of tomatoes, spices and a cup of rice, simmered, green salad on the side.

During this week's shopping I bought 2 mangos, I don't know why, so Wednesday night was tofu with a mango-teriyaki sauce and rice noodles, frozen green beans on the side. I'm going to make mango salsa with the other one and eat it with drinks Saturday afternoon!

Tonight I think we're going out for a kid's musical performance, so we're having "Linda McCartney stew," which is rice and TVP and tomatoes baked. Very simple. We call it that because the recipe came out of LMcC's cookbook. (A household staple for us for many years, and available used for $1.98!)

I didn't make it to the farmer's market this week, mostly because I didn't really need anything, and also I'm trying to stay away from the salsa lady's table - her stuff is just too good!

MP x 2 - Menu Plan and Michael Pollan

Didn't go to the farmers market last week, so that final tally from last week's shopping was: $138.

Meal plan for this week:
Brooklyn Pad Thai
Some sort of fried rice
Spanish Potato Pepper Frittata - from the Veg Times cookbook, to use up some of the potatoes that are in their drawer sprouting even as we speak.
DW and D1 are going away overnight on Thursday, so that means it's not worth cooking anything substantial, so I'll probably have one of my rare meat meals that night and give the little ones pasta.

Total from last night's food shopping: $106. Leaving room, as usual, for the tofu and milk run later in the week.

I've been reading Michael Pollan's new book, In Defense of Food. It's very good, as one would expect from this excellent writer, writing about a very important topic. He says at one point that Americans spend a lesser percentage of their gross income on food than any other developed country, and that when you look at the cost of industrialized cheap food - in terms of biodiversity, soil health, welfare of food animals, but primarily in terms of increased health risks like obesity, diabetes, cancer and heart disease, all outcomes of the Western (read: American diet) - "you may want to find other areas to economize."

I've noticed as I've written this blog and followed other people writing on similar topics that, while I am obviously very conscious of trying to beat our family's food budget into some kind of shape, there are choices that we make that are not the most frugal choices. I buy high-end cold cereal, for instance. (Whole grains, no HFCS.) I shop at the farmer's market (most weeks, in season). There are some things I buy organic - milk and potatoes, for instance. We buy much of our (limited) meat from a local farmer who grazes them on grass. I make these choices because I think they are better, either for our health or, because of the way they're produced or transported, for the health of the planet. The price might be higher but the quality is far superior, and I fell like I'm having my spending supporting my values.

To some extent I'm trying to suppress my food spending in other areas so that I can support making the non-frugal choice in these. But the reason I write about simplicity and not simply frugality is that there are sometimes other values that have to be compared with, and may take precedence over, simply suppressing the food bill. And the advice in Pollan's book is certainly a good place to start.

More posts about food

Let's see, last time I posted on my food shopping we were at $138 for the week. We went to KC over the weekend and probably spent another $30 on food to bring to DW's folk's house. So that brings the total to $168, which is $18 over.

KC has a supermarket with a pretty large kosher meat section, so we stopped there on Monday morning before driving back. I really went in to get this fake shrimp that we like, we have a recipe for fake-shrimp and tofu in ginger and black bean sauce, but the stuff costs like $9 here so we never by it. In KC it cost $7, which is still ridiculous but better by comparison. So I bought 3 of those, that should keep us for a while.

I also bought some hotdogs, some sausage, some cold cuts and a sandwich for the ride. I made a special effort to avoid Rubaskin's, which I'll explain in another post. Total - about $58. This is obviously not all for this week, so let's amortize it for the month. $58 / 4 = $14.5. That means my food budget for the next four weeks is 150 - 14.5 = 135.5.

Then the meal planning: we didn't make the garbanzo/shroom curry or the abba mac'n'cheese, so they went back on the schedule; then I found a veggie burger goulash recipe in the Linda McCartney book that looks reasonable, and a portabello mushroom and polenta with red pepper relish thing that I found in veggie cookbook that looks really good.

So today I did the main shopping at Dillon's. I bought a box of boca burgers to replenish the pantry for what I'm using in the goulash ($3.50 per box of 4 on sale). I bought the stuff for the portabello thing but then realized that maybe I shouldn't have - the ingrediants for the relish (tomatoes and peppers) is out of season and expensive. If I buy fresh tomatoes at this time of year (I usually only use canned) I'll only buy organic because conventional tastes like cardboard, so you see the thing added up.

So what do you do when you bought stuff for a meal that's too fancy? That's right - Shabbat! So that's our special Friday night meal for the week. But I'll have to make the relish in advance so the tomatoes don't go soft.

The total for the shopping trip was $101. Add $14.5 = $115.5. I still need some tofu and yogurt which is a health food store purchase, and I also reckon I'll spend may $15 or so at the farmer's market tomorrow. So I'm more or less on target, but do have to come up with one more meal for the week that basically only uses things we have in the house. We do have some potatoes that have started to sprout...

Shopping challenge update

2nd food run of week made. List: 3 kinds of milk: organic 2% for me and the girls, skim for DW, soy for DS (lactose intolerant). 3 kinds of fruit: grapes at 99cents/lb, apples and bananas. Total: $28. Returned the chickpeas and some rice that DW thought wouldn't be good, for a return of $6.75. Total for week thus far: $138.

I read an excellent post at antithete where she details how she spends $250 per month (month!) on food. A big part of it is that they plan their meals by the month. I don't think I'm up to that yet. I'm still trying to prove that I can plan for a week and get in at under $600 for the month! Once I establish those things reliably, we'll see where we can go from there.

Menu plan

I'm taking this $150 a week thing as a personal challenge. For the second week in a row I planned out 4 meals, but this time I didn't go shopping until after I did so. This week's meals:

chickpea and mushroom curry (Veg Times cookbook p. 269), probably over rice
tofu lo mein (VT p. 347)
"Abba mac and cheese" which is with red sauce rather than milk
"Amy Dacyzyn pilaf" - basically tuna, rice and veg, from Tightwad Gazette 3 p. 247

Then to Dillons, big sale on frozen veg, 10 for $10 for 8 oz. bags, so I bought a bunch. The menu plan helped me not buy things that will eventually be a good meal but aren't on sale, like tortillas, which I know we don't have but don't need this week. I did buy 2 cans of chickpeas without remembering that DW has about 4 baggies of pre-cooked in the freezer, so I may take those back. Esoteric ingredient of the week: teriyaki sauce for the lo mein. Total damage: $117. That leaves appoximately $30 for a later in the week milk, apple and tofu run. We won't even have to worry about Shabbat next week, because we're going to KC to visit her folks.

Shavuah tov! A good week!

Food, glorious food

One area of our budget that we continue to struggle with is the food bill. I've been saying for years that we should not be spending more than $150 a week on food, but DW thinks I'm living on the moon. I recently started to take over the shopping and have been able to hold the line a little better and yet still buy some "frivilous" (spices and sauces and whatnot) things but we still are overshooting the mark. This week: Friday I spent about $80 at Dillons, DW spent about $35 at Walgreens and $50 at the health food store on Sunday, then today (I couldn't get there) she spent another $72. I usually try to make a stop at the farmer's market on Wednesday but obviously we're over $150.

One thing we're trying to do is menu plan a little more. This weekend I went through the cookbooks and came up with 4 meals: a rice, TVP and tomato sauce casserole and a lentil cheese loaf, both from the Linda McCartney book; a broccoli and mushroom manicotti; a seat of the pants pad thai from Vegan with a Vengence. The first two didn't need any ingredients we didn't already have, the second two needed a few, but I think it's okay to buy a couple of special ingredients as long as we're not picking out recipes with all the most esoteric ingredients. (Which is a habit I can get into. ) I made the pad thai with spaghetti instead of the rice noodles the recipe called for. It still came out good.

We're also trying to rely on a pantry system somewhat more. There are a few things we basically have to buy every time we go: pasta, dry cereal (this is a major hit as we only like the kind in the health food section - whole grain, low in added sugar, organic if possible; I buy what's on sale but it can still be $3 a box, and we go through probably 4-5 boxes a week); milk and eggs of course, apples. Now I've been focusing on keeping tuna, canned tomato products and beans, a variety of veggie convenience foods like Boca burgers, and a variety of frozen veggies in the house. Rice, tuna and veggies is a workable meal on a weeknight.

I've been trying to keep track of specials and coupons, particularly on-line offers. Coupons don't really work that well for us because they're usually for name brands and we don't really buy those.

The short version of it is that we really can't afford to spend $600 in a month on food. If we're over $50 every week, that really adds up. I feel like this is the area where we could really see s0me of the most impact in our financial lives.