Meals on a budget: Shopping around

One thing everyone thinks women are preprogrammed to do: shop.  I'm female, but the only shopping I was preprogrammed to do is shop for food.  Clothes and shoe shopping bore me to the point where I'm ready to gnaw my arm off at the shoulder to escape, but food shopping fires me up.

Now, "shopping" is not the same as "buying."  You can shop for many hours, days, even weeks without buying anything.  This is because when you "shop" you check out prices and quality of various items at various sellers and then decide what to actually buy and where you're going to buy it.

TIP:  Do a LOT of shopping before you buy anything.  When you move to a new area, you have no clue which stores are notoriously higher priced, which are notoriously lower priced, and which are right in the middle.  There are two approaches to shopping: (1) woman's intuition and (2) uber-organized.  If you're the woman's intuition type, you'll walk around a store, get a feel for it's pricing, and trust everything to memory and gut-feeling.  If you're the uber-organized type, you'll make a spreadsheet of all the things you want to cook this week, and you'll have columns to fill out for pricing of each item at the various stores you will visit.  I have to admit I'm somewhere between the two extremes.  Up North, at the Wall, with my husband, I know that the best deals on meat are at Lucky's, the best deals on produce are at Concord Produce, and the best deals on everything else are at Safeway.  I haven't shopped around enough here, but I do know that the best deals on produce that I've found so far are at the ethnic market on Lincoln just north of the 210, the best deals on "weird" foods and rice are at the Hawaiian in Eagle Rock, the best deals on most other things, including beer, are at Von's, and the best deal on a cheese platter are at Ralph's.

TIP:  Shop at a lot of places.  As I outlined above, sometimes your best bet in covering all your culinary conquests will be by having a gut feeling as to where to buy various groups of things.  The only way you can find out what places offer what goods at what quality is to actually go there and "shop."  You may drive by a cute little middle-eastern market every day on you way to your caffeine fix at Starbucks or 7-11, but you have to actually go inside that market to find out that they have the best deals on bulk herbs and spices that you've seen so far.  There may be a Hawaiian market in your mall, but unless you face the smell of fresh fish and dive in, you may never find out that they have the best deal on fresh tilapia and/or green beans around.

TIP:  Remember pricing is seasonal.  Different stores have different suppliers, and those suppliers bring food from various locations to your stores at different rates.  Remember that corn can go from $2 an ear to less than $0.10 an ear when corn is in season.  You will have to shop around throughout every season to make sure you get the best deals, especially on produce.  Even meat has a season.  On this one, check the news.  If they're publicizing an outbreak of something related to one type of meat, that meat will suddenly be very cheap, even if the "outbreak" was 5 cases in one state all related to the same restaurant.  All of a sudden no one will want to buy ground beef on the outside chance that they could get what those 5 people got from that one restaurant that used ground beef in one recipe...... so you can really stock up when hysteria hits the general population.  There are times when you shouldn't go against the tide, though, and that is any time that you're buying ground beef when bovine encephalitis has been reported.  You can't kill that stuff by cooking it, and it's not worth the risk.  A good steak is still safe, if you wash it really well. Follow Kosher law and your steak should  be fine. Other times to not risk it speak for themselves.  If you get a report that pathogenic E. coli is taking out your elderly or young neighbors, stay away from beef that is undercooked, and by all means pass on the carpaccio.  Otherwise, stop worrying!!  Humans have eaten animals without fire for quite some time, your one rare or even raw experience with meat most probably won't kill you.  If it does, well, you read the warning posted on the door how, "Things in this restaurant can kill you, known to the state of California!"

Now, I've been hearing multiple helicopters circle my apartment, and I'm going to go do the "stupid" thing and watch them from my outdoor patio.  I figure if a criminal is looking for a place to hide, all he has to do is break a window, and I've done that before, so why try to be safe?  I'm already unsafe by definition by having easily broken wicked old windows at eye level!

Stay hungry!

Train of thought - learning to fly

Today, I as I was walking out to the parking lot, I saw a bluebird sitting on the rail of the bridge I have to cross to get to my car.  It looked at me, and then jumped off, head down, wings tucked in tight for a freefall, and at the last second spread it's wings and soared down the little valley that has the creek at the bottom.

Then I started letting my mind wander around starting with that topic the rest of the way to the car:

Wow, isn't it neat that birds just know how to fly?  I wish people just knew how to fly.  Well, I guess even birds have to learn.  That's why sometimes on the farm we'd get the treat of seeing a baby, well, maybe a teenager, get pushed out of the nest by its parents.  It'd hop along on the ground trying various wing-flapping options hoping to figure out how to fly before a coyote figured out how nice a dinner a teenage bird can be.  Apparently the parents had also considered the coyote issue, and they would scream at me and try to take my eyes out if I went to play with it.  If I just sat back and watched from a safe enough distance and stayed really still, one of the parents would circle overhead while the other would drop to the ground, usually with a snack, and do what looked for all the world to me like demonstrations of how to get started.

So birds to have to learn how to fly. Cows don't really have to learn how to walk, though.  When a calf is born he pretty much stands up on the first try.  Yeah, there's a lot of licking and prodding by mom, but a calf is born just knowing how to walk.  That's different from humans.  We might be born knowing how to walk, but have to wait several months before the bone and muscle has developed enough to actually pull it off.

Hmmm, that's interesting, actually.  Pretty much all prey species are basically born running.  Cows, deer, horses, giraffes, wildebeest, etc... they all have it figured out from the time they touchdown in our world.  Predator species, like dogs, cats, wolves, mountain lions, regular lions, oh my, etc... are born too early and can just barely wiggle to where they need to be to nurse.  They don't even have their eyes open yet!  

Does that mean that humans are more predator than prey?  Are gorillas predators?  Sometimes, I guess, but usually not.  Maybe people aren't necessarily predators, just different from other prey species.  Like birds aren't born being able to locomote, but that doesn't make them predators.  It just means they have a niche in the environment that enables them to have helpless young without having to immediately worry about them being eaten by a lion.  We apes have a niche like that, too, because we can carry our babies with us.  Cows and deer don't really have that option, so their babies have to be able to run from the second they are born.

Huh, where do marsupials fall, then?  Australia is SO WEIRD.  Man, if it's not poisonous it's trying to eat your face, tear your eyes out, or eviscerate you with a swift kick to the stomach.  I guess marsupials are born knowing what to do, I mean they have to crawl up mom's fur to get into the out-side pouch they'll finish gestating in.  That is really weird, to make a baby in an inside-pouch, push out a half-done baby, and then put it in an out-side pouch to finish off.  Actually, it'd be kind of nice if people were like that.  I'd be fine with having a half-done baby the side of a large lima bean the normal way and finish baking it in an outside pouch.  Well, actually, that's what we already do, it's just the outside pouch is called a "baby sling" or more commonly "momma or daddy's arms."

It must be really weird to have a nearly-ready baby jumping in and out of your pouch all day long.  Never mind.  I like our way better - we can take off the pouch and don't get permanent stretch marks from little Joey popping in and out after he already knows how to bounce around.  And eviscerate tourists that get too close with their cameras.  Australia is SO WEIRD.

What is the one thing that all mammals are already born knowing how to do?  I guess nurse.  That's the one survival skill that unites all mammals in a common, "we didn't have to learn that, we just knew from the the second we were born, darn it," bond.  

Well, that's not entirely true.  There were always a couple stupid calves every year that couldn't figure it out and had to be drug around to the momma cow's side, bringing Daddy or I way too close to momma cow's powerful hind legs, to try to force the calf to latch onto a teat.  Momma cow at this point is freaked out, especially if this was her first, because (a) something HUGE just popped out of her and she could've been eaten by a mountain lion while all that immobilized Lamaze breathing and pushing and pain was going on, (b) her placenta is out and there is the smell of blood and a new-born, slow, easy meal wafting around to all the local predator species, and (c) her calf is also freaked out that it's hungry and cold and way too bright and WTF is going on right now?!!  Add to the stress momma cow is feeling: two to four two-legged creatures that usually mean "good food is about to happen to her" but sometimes also mean shots or de-horning (which sucks for a cow) are manhandling her calf which is typically by this point uttering helpless, heart-wrenching little bleats of "This sucks, mom, can I go back in?  I don't like the real world, and these two-legged creatures are freaking me out!"  Anyway, when momma cow is in that state of mind, being within easy kicking distance is no good place to be.  What was the point of this?  Oh, yeah, sometimes babies don't even know how to nurse when born.

I wonder if that is always true?  I know human babies sometimes have trouble figuring it out, or maybe their mommas have trouble, and that there are nurses whose entire jobs are teaching mommas and babies to nurse.  Maybe that's where the word nurse comes from?  Probably not.  Maybe the occasional lack-of-nursing-instinct only happens to animals where someone can intervene and teach.  Natural selection should've already taken care of that one, for sure.

I got to my apartment at around:

I wonder about bears.  Are they born just as helpless as cats, dogs, and humans?  Or are they born just as ready-to-run as deer and giraffes?  I'll have to look that up.  Now, turtles, man, that's an odd species.  They're born not only knowing how to walk, but sometimes how to swim and which direction to waddle in until they can start swimming.  Breathing!  Maybe that's what really unites us all in the one thing we figured out from the second we left our placental sack.

So that was my train of thought this afternoon, all inspired by one bird diving off a bridge.  And now I'm thinking about trains.  Comment if you got that reference!

Meals on a budget: Buying in bulk

Buying in Bulk

Obviously you can save money by taking advantage of bulk discounts.  You also cut down in the time required for people to repackage bulk items into smaller bags, and you can cut down on the amount of waste.  

When to ALWAYS buy bulk

Your staples, if living on a really strict budget, will be rice and beans.  Let's face it.  It's not a stereotype, it's a reality, for multiple good reasons.  You need protein to survive, and beans are a cheap item that is pretty high in protein.  You need carbohydrates and calories to survive, and rice supplies plenty of both while beans also do their share.  You need "complete" proteins, meaning you need the full spectrum of amino acids that make up proteins.  While beans alone lack some things you need, rice also lacks some things you need.  Together, they comprise a "complete protein" source.  Also, dry beans and dry rice can be stored for years at a time.  This means you can buy these in the same bulk quantities that a Jamaican restaurant would where beans and rice is the specialty entree.  Even if you're only cooking for two!

Most other grains fall under the category of "always buy bulk," as do many other legumes.  Notable exceptions are ground grains (like flour) and peanuts.  Ground grains go bad much more quickly than whole grains, that are protected by their outer coating.  Most dry legumes are fine in long-term storage, but peanuts behave more like a nut than a legume, because they are so high in fat.  While nuts store quite well, over time and especially with exposure to heat their fats start to oxidize or, well, go rancid.  You'll know rancid fat when you taste it or smell it.  It's not bad for you, just bad for your appetite.

When to SOMETIMES buy bulk

If you can find a market that sells ground grains (like flour), dried fruit, nuts, etc.. in bulk at good prices, take advantage of it.  Just remember that flour isn't good on the shelf at room temperature forever, so if you buy a 20 lb sack and only make something with flour in it once a week, put the bag in your freezer.  Same goes for other items of this category you might be tempted to stock up on when there's a good bulk sale.

The golden rule of buying bulk:  make sure you can use up what you buy before it goes bad given your storage methods.

Anything you don't use goes into the trash, and that's wasted money and time.

When to NEVER buy bulk

In general, you should never buy fresh fruits, vegetables, or meat (including fish) in bulk.  These things all have a limited shelf-life independent of storage, and therefore not worth buying in bulk unless you are feeding a church group of a couple hundred.  Typically you pay an overhead for keeping those items fresh during transport, and would do better to buy in season or frozen than in bulk.  However, there are exceptions.  When corn suddenly hits the market for about 2 months of the year and it's prices even at mainstream grocery stores drops to below $0.05 an ear, that's the time to stock up and freeze or can corn.  Fruits and other non-government-subsidized veggies typically never hit this boon.  However, there are even exceptions to this rule.

If you happen to live in Boston, you're familiar with Haymarket at least via it's stop on the Gold Line.  While touted as a "Farmer's market," Haymarket is actually where shippers go to unload surplus produce that grocers didn't want or couldn't take.  At least, that's my impression, given that there were bananas and okra there.  Boston?  Really not the right climate to grow either.

Anyway, it is the best place to find deals on fresh produce if you show up after noon in the summer when everyone who works there is getting tired of sitting in the heat with no breeze and just wants to sell out of all their stock so they can go back to air conditioning, which as an aside was not a luxury I had while I lived there.  I always say it's particularly stupid to buy fresh berries in bulk, but one time I got a good deal on 20 lbs of strawberries for $8.  That was the one time it made sense, so I did it.  We had strawberries in the beer, falling out of the freezer, and more than we could ever eat fresh despite trying really hard.  There are times when buying fresh (even berries) in bulk makes sense.  You just have to make sure you have a plan of action to turn all that produce into food.

Another fresh produce windfall happened to me while picking blackberries on the side of the road in Martinez, CA.  I had loaded up my backpack with enough tupperware to hold all the berries I would get on my 3 mile trek around "wild urban blackberry" country.  An old white pickup with an old, white-haired man in it pulled up next to me and said he could see I really cared about fruit, and so I should go take all the nectarines and wild plums off his property so he wouldn't have to clean the place up after they dropped.  I obliged, and I brought a gift of homemade cheese and an herbed vinegar.  I spent the next two days processing that surplus.

Morales of this story?  Know your environment, adjust accordingly, and be okay with accepting good food that someone else doesn't want and wants you to have.  You watch those blackberries one year, and you'll see that the bulk goes to the birds or is wasted entirely.  Blackberries are an invasive species, and harvesting their seed pods (berries) is doing a community service.  My Dad has battled the blackberry bushes intensively, and I have to say you can't hardly kill them...  but you can definitely profit from them!

Stay hungry!

Meals on a Budget: A few of my tricks

I'm in no way saying I wrote the book on planning meals on a budget.  Remember the budget we're talking about here, less than $1.09 per meal per person.  Jack in the Box sells 2 tacos for $0.99 and Taco Bell sells better tacos for $0.60 each, and they're making a profit off that, so maybe Jack in the Box and Taco Bell should get together and write the book on meals on a budget.

Here I thought I'd compile some of my thoughts, tips, and tricks for how to cut costs without cutting flavor if you're a normal person (like me!) and not a mega-corporation.  I'll do more complete follow-up posts going into the details of each of these items and how to use them to your full advantage in future posts.

1. Buy in bulk.  ...when you should.  This is tricky, because it is rarely good to buy fresh strawberries on 25 lb scales, while it is nearly always good to buy rice in this manner.  There are exceptions, and I'll go through that in the post on "Buying in Bulk."
2. Shop around.  This is probably the best advice I could give you, if you take it to heart and do it correctly.  More info on "how to do it right" will follow.
3. Waste not, want not.  To really pull off the low-cost, high-flavor meal plan, you will want to rethink what is "waste" and what is food.  So you've just roasted a whole chicken and all that is left after you've picked over it for all the meat, the bones are trash, right?  WRONG!  They're the base for an excellent chicken broth that will have a depth of flavor you can't get out of a can or a box and will have a wonderfully satisfying thick mouthfeel to it.  I'll share more on this topic in the post on this.
4. Buy in season.  This pertains to anything with a growing season and limited shelf life, therefore fresh produce.  Some things in the produce isle keep so well they almost don't qualify for this, like onions, Russet potatoes, garlic, etc..  Other things have a "boom" season where they suddenly are really cheap for a few weeks, like corn.  The only way you'll be able to work very many fresh fruits and vegetables into this budget is to keep an eye on the season and associated deals.  Some things are never in season where you are, and these things are probably best avoided except for special occasions.  More details in the post on this.
5. Learn new skills.  If you've never grown a windowsill or backyard garden, canned surplus garden produce, made your own bread, beer, or cheese, you'll find that these skills can provide some R&R while also contributing great flavor without costing you much in terms of dollars.  Of course, if you're a total novice in the kitchen, just learning to butcher your own whole chicken or cook dry beans will save you tons of money, so realistically evaluate where you are in your development and please try not to go from barely being able to boil an egg to trying to make cheese in one day.  A large portion of this blog is dedicated to learning new skills, so I'm not going to do a single post on how valuable this can be.
6. Improvise.  You probably already know how to do this outside the kitchen....  but do you know how to do it within the confines of your kitchen?  There are many little substitutions and short-cuts you can take to make your life easier.  Let's say a recipe calls for 2 Tbsp of milk, but you have none on hand.  Did you know you can buy powdered milk that sits on a shelf for a year or more and reconstitute whenever you need milk?  It doesn't taste that good to drink, but it works just the same in recipes.  If it calls for honey, you can substitute 1:1 with brown sugar if you don't mind the change in flavor.  It asks for buttermilk?  You can coagulate normal milk with some lemon or lime juice, or even white vinegar.  Cream?  You can sometimes get away with skim milk and butter.  I don't know if I'll do an entire post on this, it's kind of something that I wouldn't think of unless I'd been in the, "Oh no, the recipe needs this right now and I don't have it, what do I do?!" situation.  I'll probably work this in with recipes as I go.
7. Take advantage of "free" food.  Like wild dandelion greens in your yard, wild berries, a friend's uber-productive grapefruit tree or pepper plants, a relative's sudden boon year of pecans, etc..  (If you plant a garden, you'll also find one thing you planted is producing so much that you can't keep up with the harvest, so do, please, return the favor.)  I don't mean root through your neighbor's garbage.  I have a multitude of stories on this, but unless I remember something particularly memorable, I'll probably incorporate those stories into other posts.
8. HAVE FUN!!  Let your kitchen be the one place in your house where no one ever argues.  Let it be a place where once you step across the threshold, you leave everything else behind and only have fun and food.  If you go to an ethnic market and see some odd fruit or vegetable on sale for less than a dollar a pound (and it looks like most of that weight is not rind or seed) that you've never seen before, BUY IT.  Take it home, look it up on the internet, find out how to prepare it, and enjoy the adventure.  Celebrate in how hard-core you are, and celebrate how you made something so excellent that your entire family is asking for seconds out of kitchen scraps a dollar's worth of dry ingredients.  Be proud of yourself, and for the first few weeks of this experiment put two slices of regular, store-bought toast next to every person, and monitor the ratio of toast-to-meal eaten.  When you get two full slices of toast and an empty plate back, that's when you know you're doing it right.

Well, that's all the "majors" I can think of tonight.  There are a ton of subtleties, but it's hard to do a good post on "here are the main things to do" that also includes when buying 25 lbs of fresh strawberries actually makes sense.

Stay hungry, my friends!

Meals on a Budget

After we first got married, we were really concerned about finances.  I'd say we were probably correctly concerned about them, but maybe 2 orders of magnitude more concerned than the typical newlywed couple in grad school, and about an order of magnitude more than if we wanted something approaching marital bliss.

Just to put it in context, it's easy to find "meals for 4 under $10" online when you google "meals on a budget."  That's $2.50 per person per meal.  Sounds wicked cheap, right?  We originally budgeted $100 a month for two.  That's about $0.50 per person per meal.  We quickly upped that to $200 per month, or $1.09 per person per meal.  Our budget for meals included wine, which we purchased in boxes, which left well under $1.00 per person per meal of actual food.  We made it work, even though I was (relatively) new in the kitchen and knew only a couple tricks to cut cost-corners.

That experiment fell apart for the obvious reasons, the most obvious of them being that newly-weds trying to live off less than $1.00 per person per meal have trouble coming to a consensus about whether a $10 grill falls under a  "food" expense or a "household goods and tools" expense.  At least, they have trouble doing so rationally and without emotionally-charged outbursts in the middle of WalMart, in front of strangers and little children.  This is especially true when the trip was specifically to pick up a grill, the grill is already in the shopping cart, and one person has her heart set on grilling the food that is also in the cart, and there's no room in the budget for both the grilling food and the grill if the grill is put under a "food" expense.  It was not a pleasant conversation.

FYI, in my experience, newly-weds have some trouble figuring out how to come to a consensus on something as mundane as to what to have for dinner that night without having budgetary issues to contend with as well.  "Whatever you want, honey."  "How about chinese?"  "I'm not really in the mood for chinese."  "Okay, so what are you in the mood for?"  "Whatever you feel like."  "Okay, Italian."  "I don't usually like Italian.  How about Thai?"  "Ugh, I'm tired of Thai.  Indian?"  "I don't really care, but not Indian."  "I don't really care either.  Mexican?"  "Oh, no, not Mexican, not tonight, how about....."

After a year it becomes, "Hun, we have chicken in the freezer and radish greens from the garden in here.  Sound good to you?"  "Yeah."

After a couple years, it becomes, "Hun, all we have left are chicken and radish greens.  Oh, and a bunch of radishes that I can fry into a hash.  That okay?"  "Yeah."

After a few years, it becomes, "Hun, all we have left are chicken and radish greens.  I think I will hurt someone or something if I have to eat radish greens again.  What do you say we run over to that ethnic market on the corner of X and Y, pick out some things we've never even seen before, and cook them?!"  "YAY!  Let me get my shoes!"

After a few more years, it becomes, "Oh, no, honey, we've tried everything!  What do we do to break the monotony?!"  "I dunno.  Maybe we could try that thing again where you feed us on less than $2 a meal?"  "Wow, you're right, that was, actually, perversely fun."

After pulling out the calculators, we figured out that we can definitely get the calories and protein we need using rice and beans for less than half the budgeted price in our area shopping only at mainstream grocery stores.  Now let's see if we can make it palatable!  Some future posts will be about trials, tribulations, and successes of this second attempt....

Disclaimer:  I already have a stocked pantry with the essentials: flour, sugar, butter, cornstarch, baking powder, baking soda, etc... and am more-than-well-stocked in cooking implement supplies, even the $10 grill this time, and will not be counting that in the prices.  I also have gardener friends who occasionally give me their surplus, and a small container garden with two new tomato plants and several herbs.  I also have a spice rack (actually, entire two-door cabinet so over-brimming that it cascades down on me in a waterfall of plastic and glass herb jars when I open one of the doors) that would make me the wealthiest girl in mideval Europe, so...  this isn't a fair comparison to folks living on government assistance programs in the inner-city by any means.  Some of the tricks I'll teach you rely on you owning or being able to borrow the correct equipment that would significantly bite into your food budget if you had to buy new.  Some things would seem trivial to a country girl used to making do with what's around, but hey, we have a poly-city-country-readership around here, and I don't want to jyp anyone out of what could be useful information.

Have a great night everyone, and stay hungry!  The next post will probably be on how to cook dry beans and store them until you're ready to use them....  It's really easy, and unless you have a 6-7 figure income, it's something probably actually worth your time to do rather than purchased canned.  I'll run the cost-analysis in the post on beans - I may be surprised.  ...mmm, aren't surprises fun?

Chemistry Degree

For a year now I've had a leak under the kitchen sink, and I had called out the management company on it twice with no fix and therefore assumed they didn't really care about their apartment, and neither should I.  I put a bunch of pans under the sink, empty them regularly, and otherwise stopped caring about it.

My husband just moved in with me, and he cares a little more about these things, so we put in another service request together.  Well, with Dear Husband (DH) in the apartment looking over the guy's shoulder, offering advice and help and most of all just being present and giving him a hard time if he did it wrong, it got fixed.  Finally.  For real.

Which means we had some pans with about a year or more worth of hard-water build-up on them that needed to be cleaned.  The deal is that I do all the food prep from meal planning to shopping to cooking, but DH does all the dishes.  He had to do those dishes as well.  He soaked one pan in soap and water for a few days, but that didn't work.  He asked me, "Hey, do we have hard water here?"  I laughed and said, "Oh, heck yes."  He said, "Huh, this would be a lot easier then if I had a dilute acid solution."

I laughed, thinking he was being all tongue-in-cheek about the old standby of vinegar to remove hard water stains, and said, "It's behind you on the top shelf."  He turned to me with his mouth open, "WHAT?!"

It turns out that his chemistry education was leading him down the logical path of "acid dissolves most inorganic carbonates, what I need therefore is 1M HCl."  When I said, "It's behind you on the top shelf," I was thinking vinegar, a dilute solution of acetic acid, but he was thinking glacial HCl....  Finally we realized the correct language to communicate in, and he cracked up, "Yeah, I guess vinegar is a dilute acid solution!!"  We both found it particularly amusing that 4 years of undergrad and 6 years of graduate school winds up with the same conclusion many a female is taught early on while cleaning house:  a dilute acid solution can clear away hard water stains, and vinegar is just the dilute acid solution for the job.

He then poured vinegar into the pan, and marveled for the next few hours how the hard water stains just melted off the pan.  It was a great validation of both science and home-lore that I can't even describe.