Odds and Ends

There was a trackback to Endless Simmer posted as a comment yesterday that I looked at and the person had visited my site at the recommendation of a friend and apparently thought this project was my permanent lifestyle.

He (?, not sure, I think it’s a he) thought it seemed like a lot of work, what with shopping every day and buying one can of tomato sauce at a time. Also not much food. And the food didn’t look all that good either.

Okay …. Thanks for your input.

I am working on the week of fabulous, low-cost nutrition and have a nutritionist friend lined up to go over the menu with me to make sure it’s solid.

However before I do that, I need to get some work done for a client who has been waiting patiently for me to finish being a celebrity so I can take care of the things we talked about in February. Which was a really long time ago.

Also I need to do my taxes. And help various friends with their taxes, because that’s one of my special talents in life.

So I’ll do my best to keep posting, but the next few weeks are going to be busy.

Site Note

I know it’s gotten sort of hard to find things and to navigate through the articles. I need to do some work to set up an index of articles that will let you find what you’re looking for more easily and jump directly to something, but I haven’t gotten to it yet and probably won’t for at least a few more days.

For now, the best way (or possibly the only way?) to get to older articles is to click on the Archives link in the sidebar, and then scroll to the bottom and click on the “older entries / newer entries” buttons at the bottom to move back and forth through all the entries.

If there are any WordPress experts out there who have suggestions for making it easier to navigate (using widgets or whatever) feel free to let me know. I have good computer skills, but I’m a newbie blogger so I’m just trying to figure things out as I go.

Two Good Projects

A week or two ago, my friend Claudia told me about a project her friend Kim O’Donnel at the Washington Post‘s Mighty Appetite blog was doing—Eating Down the Fridge.

I love this project! It’s over now (it was a week-long community project), but you can read about how it turned out for everyone.

I find it stressful to have too much food around, so I don’t tend to get a lot built up. Also I occasionally have what I think of as “weird meal night” where I eat whatever little bits of leftovers I have regardless of how well they go with each other—I might have a meal consisting of leftover pancakes and mashed potatoes and cottage cheese (or whatever).

So that project wouldn’t work all that well for me, but I know that a lot of people end up with all sorts of things in their pantry and freezer and fridge and then just kind of forget about them and keep buying new stuff. I think doing your own personal Eating Down the Fridge project every couple months is probably a good idea. (Unless you’re actually living an Eating Down the Fridge project, in which case you should just try to make the best of it. And maybe read How to Cook a Wolf for inspiration. I promise, it will make you feel better.)

Also when I got back last night from my trip to New York City (I was up there filming with Rachel Ray for her series on the Smartest $avers in America, and it’s airing TOMORROW — Friday 3/26, check your local listings) I got on the shuttle bus to get to the parking lot and I said hi to the driver as I got on, and there were no other passengers on the bus yet, so I moved toward the back and put my stuff down and he said, “What are you doing going all the way back there? Sit up here so you can talk to me.” And I laughed and thought, “I’m definitely not in New York City anymore.”

So I was talking to the driver and I told him about Rachel Ray and my project, and when I got off the bus, a couple with a sweet little baby who were also going back to their car asked what was the name of my blog and I told them and we started talking because he said he’s working on a book about wasted food and everything that gets thrown away.

I said that was so funny since my top tip for saving money that I gave to Rachel Ray was DON’T THROW FOOD AWAY. (Yes, I know, this is completely revolutionary—so revolutionary that I need to be put in front of a national television audience to say it.)

His name is Jonathan Bloom and his project looks great, check it out at WastedFood.com.

A Few Lessons

A friend told me last week that the California vegan folks posted a comment about me on their blog. I finally got a chance to look at it and was saddened to read that they said they didn’t learn anything from my project.

Since the main point of my project was to highlight some specific strategies I’ve found to work well in shopping and eating for less, it seems like I should talk about those things individually, in case there are others out there, like Christopher and Kerri, who might be reading this and not learning anything.

So here are some thoughts, with a few concrete lessons highlighted.

[1] I believe that you will spend less on food if you buy smaller quantities of food more frequently than if you spend larger amounts up front. (With the exception of certain staples—like rice, flour, and other grains—that you use frequently, that keep for extended periods of time, and that will have a substantially lower unit cost when purchased in larger quantities.)

There were a number of reasons I started with no food and a dollar each day with which to buy food. A few were related specifically to the project. For instance, it meant that there was no math involved—I didn’t have to weigh and measure food to determine unit cost. (This also eliminated the thorny question of “How much does one cup of rice cost?”—the cost will be quite different if you start with fifty pounds of rice than if you start with one or two pounds.)

Another is that it saved me from having to plan out a month’s worth of meals in advance. I’m not good at advance planning.

But most importantly—and this is not necessarily just for this project, but applies to life in general—it allowed me to adjust as I went along and get what I felt like I needed that day. This turned out to be extremely important, as I had no way of predicting at the start of the project how I would feel after a day or a week or three weeks of it.

It turned out that I felt better than expected with smaller quantities of food, but the balance was precarious. On a couple of days when my schedule was disrupted or I exercised more than usual, I needed more food to make up for those changes, so I had to re-adjust. Because I was working day-to-day, I was able to see what I needed and to get it without too much trouble, and to get back on track within a meal or two.

I think this made a huge difference in the outcome of my project, and allowed me to stay on a pretty even keel, as opposed to Kerri and Christopher who really seemed to struggle throughout the month.

LESSON #1: If you’re looking to eat well for less, buy less at a time, work with what you have, and adjust as you go along to meet your body’s needs.

(2) If you have only small quantities of food, certain types of foods are going to work better than others.

For instance, whole grains are much more filling than refined products. This is why for breakfast, I went with steel-cut oats rather than the standard rolled oats (a.k.a oatmeal). They’re chewier and denser and more satisfying. They really stick with you. And I actually like them (though my friend AnneMarie at People magazine said they felt like a penance, so that may be a personal preference thing).

Beans and legumes are also good options, because they have fiber and you can get a large volume of them at very low cost. These were what I focused on in the first week when I had nothing else to work with.

And this is why the wheat berries and split peas worked so well the first week—whole grains and legumes. Even though it looked like only a small amount of food, it was quite filling. (My friend Juliet actually cooked up some wheat berries and split peas last week and said she thought they were great. I’m thinking of making them again soon.)

LESSON #2: Eat whole grains and foods with a high fiber content.

(3) There are also certain foods I would stay away from.

One thing to try to avoid is refined sugars and flours, because they tend to cause rapid rise in blood sugar and to make you hungrier than you would be otherwise.

The one thing that was unfortunate about the way I designed my project was that I couldn’t bake. Baking is an excellent way to get a large volume of food for very little money, and at first I was trying to figure out how to make it work, but ultimately I decided to just go with mixes because I couldn’t figure out how to get a cost-effective amount of flour and oil with such a short project time period.

I was actually a little jealous of Christopher and Kerri that they could make bread and pancakes, and I’m not sure why they didn’t do it more often (though perhaps the economics didn’t work out—I didn’t really do any math on that, so I don’t know).

I relied on Jiffy mix, which is very economical, but has more sugar and salt than I would normally use, and I would prefer to use some whole grain flour.

Other than the Jiffy mix, I didn’t really have any flour or sugar, and I think it’s one of the reasons I was less hungry than I expected, and maybe why Kerri and Christopher were, at times, completely ravenous. For instance, on Day Eight, Christopher wrote

Today I was fine until I got home, but upon entering the kitchen, it took everything I had to not tear open the closest container of food and pour it down my throat. I was not just ‘hungry,’ I was bordering on frantic.

That day, they had eaten pancakes with “donated” McDonald’s syrup for breakfast, and spaghetti with tomato sauce for lunch. High flour, high sugar, limited fat, no protein. Recipe for hunger.

LESSON #3: Avoid refined flours and sugars, especially those eaten without accompanying fats or protein.

Another thing to avoid—and this may seem counterintuitive if you’re trying to eat healthy food—is salads.

The main problem with salads is that they’re quite expensive and not very filling. You’re much better off focusing on heartier vegetables—something like cabbage, which is very cheap and filling and can be used in many different ways, or even frozen spinach, which is also inexpensive and quite versatile.

I lost several tufts of hair when reading Christopher and Kerri’s blog when they recounted their excitement over finding an exceptionally cheap bottle of salad dressing at the Dollar Store, and subsequent nightly salads with one-quarter of carrot, one-quarter of a tomato, and a small amount of romaine lettuce.

I’m not sure what kind of access they had to oils and fats or vinegar (the way I set up my project, it wasn’t cost-effective for me to get any sauces or vinegar, or any kind of oils or fats, except from the chicken I cooked) but if you do want to eat salads economically, you should definitely make your own dressing rather than buying bottled dressings.

The easiest to make are simply oil and vinegar or oil and lemon juice with salt, pepper, garlic and herbs and spices. (It’s pretty flexible, you can pretty much use what you like.) You should be able to find recipes in any basic cookbook or cooking website.

You can make a little bit at a time and use just what you need rather than filling your refrigerator with all kinds of bottles with all kinds of different dressings.

LESSON #4: Favor long-lasting, nutrient-dense produce over herbs, salad greens, or other more ephemeral and low-calorie items.

LESSON #4.5: If you do choose to eat salads, make your own dressings from on-hand ingredients rather than purchasing specialty products.

(4) Again, with small quantities of food, certain preparation strategies are going to work better than others.

One of the things that started me pulling my hair out in the first place with Kerri and Christopher’s blog was at the start of the project when they made refried beans.

When you make refried beans, you take cooked beans and mash them up and mix them with a few other ingredients (oil, spices, onion, garlic), which has the primary effect of taking one cup of food and turning it into a half cup of food. With approximately the same number of calories. So I would recommend leaving the beans whole rather than mashing them up, because it will look and feel like more food.

Also if you have a cup of rice and a carrot, I would recommend chopping up your carrot and mixing it with your rice and cooking them together rather than eating a half a carrot by itself and a cup of rice by itself. It’s the same amount of food, but both the rice and the carrot will taste better, and together they’ll feel like more food.

Along the same lines, soups and stir-frys are great ways to make a little of this and a little of that feel like much more than it would be if you ate the individual items on their own. (Casseroles are also a great option, if you can make some kind of sauce to hold them together. Because I didn’t have dairy, I wasn’t able to do anything with casseroles during the project.)

Kerri and Christopher ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch almost every day, until Day 20, when they discovered the beauty of soup.

I think they would have been much happier had they started out the week with a big pot of soup to take in for lunch. And even dinner. Soup is easy to make, keeps well (can also be frozen for longer storage), is eminently flexible, and very tasty. If you’re trying to stretch your dollar, definitely eat soup.

Had I not been pretty satisfied with the amount of food I was eating, I would have had more soups and stews. But I felt pretty good, so I ramped things up quicker than I expected to more “normal” meals (e.g., pasta, scrambled eggs, etc.).

LESSON #5: Maximize the volume of food you have available to you, focusing especially on soups, stews, and pilafs.

I may be able to come up with more lessons as I think about it more, but I think those are the most important ones for now. And , like I said, I’m sorry Kerri and Christopher didn’t learn anything, but maybe these ideas will help some others.

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Free Food

As some of you may know, I’ve had sort of a bizarre month.

I did this weird project that somehow landed me in People magazine—wearing makeup, no less. (More than one person has looked at the picture and commented on my fabulous new figure-skater look.)

A friend I don’t talk to very often left a message last week asking about the name of a book I had loaned her a few months ago. Took a few days for me to get back to her. I called and gave her the name of the book and apologized for taking so long to return the call. Then I said, “I’m a celebrity. Did you know that?” She said, “You’re a celebrity?” I said, “Yeah.” And then I couldn’t remember if I’d told her about the project. I said, “I sent you the message about my blog, didn’t I?” She said, “Uh… yeah. I thought that was just some weird thing you were doing.” I said, “Yeah, it was. And last week I was on Good Morning America.”

Totally weird.

So one of the weird things I’ve had to do over the past few weeks has been to pretend I’m shopping for a dollar while being photographed or filmed. (When I was pretend-shopping last week for Good Morning America I saw my across-the-street neighbor, who was passing through the bulk aisle. She was like, “Hey… how’s it going?” I said,”Hey! Good to see you, what’s up with you?” She said, “Not much. You?” “Oh, not much here either, just doing a little shopping … with a Good Morning America film crew. The usual.”)

Totally weird.

So anyway…

With most of the pretend shopping, you can put back the stuff you’re pretending to buy when you’re done, you don’t have to actually buy it, but with bulk foods, once you’ve poured it out of the bin, you have to buy it otherwise it will go to waste. You can’t put it back.

So I ended up with a whole bunch of small bags of cornmeal and steel-cut oats and sunflower seeds and split peas, and I finally got everything organized and together to figure out what I had. Which turned out do be almost two cups of split peas, about two-and-a-half cups of cornmeal, about a cup of steel-cut oats, and probably a quarter cup of sunflower seeds. That’s like half a month’s worth of food for me at this point.

My mom is in town for a few days so I needed to actually cook something (I’ve been enjoying my culinary freedom since last Thursday, eating bagels and cream cheese and various other things that no one would be very impressed by if I put a picture of it up on a website) and decided to work through some of the media-provided food items.

So for dinner for my mom, I made split pea soup and cornbread and coleslaw. (The People shoot required a cabbage, in addition to the bulk-food purchases, so that was sitting in the fridge waiting to be used too.)

It wasn’t as cheap as I expected because I bought ham hocks, which seem like they should be cheap but the ones I got weren’t that cheap. (And you’d think I’d know where all the cheap stuff is but I wasn’t in the market for ham hocks last month so I don’t know who has the cheapest ham hocks in town, and didn’t have time to go more than one place.) But they had a lot of meat on them.

And I didn’t get a picture, but I thought you might like the recipe, which is very simple, and comes from Marion Cunningham’s The Supper Book.

~~~

Split Pea Soup

1 pound (2 cups) green split peas
1-1/2 pounds ham hocks, or a leftover ham bone with a little meat attached
2 medium onions, chopped
3 stalks celery with leaves, chopped
8 cups water
salt and pepper to taste

Put the split peas, ham hocks, onions, and celery in a soup pot, add the water, and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to medium, and lightly salt and pepper. Cook, stirring occationally, for 1 to 1-1/2 hours. The soup is done with the peas are soft. Taste, add more salt, if needed, and a generous amount of pepper. Remove the bones and any skin from the ham hocks, and shred the meat if the chunks are too large. If smooth soup is desired, remove the meat and puree the soup.

~~~

I pureed a few cups to make it a little bit thicker.  The ham I used was pretty salty so I probably would have been better off using less salt (the lesson being, if you use ham, be sure to taste before adding salt). But overall it was good.

And I just wanted everyone to know that the things the media bought for me won’t go to waste.

I know you’re all relieved.

You Don’t Need That Much

My Aunt Blanche was born in Lima, Montana in 1905 and lived there until 1912 when she moved with her family to Pocatello, Idaho; she spent her whole life out West, mostly in Pocatello and other parts of Idaho. She died in 1996, a few months shy of her 91st birthday.

My cousin Charles was interested in history and wondered what things were like when she was growing up and asked her to write her autobiography. It took her a few years, but she managed to get it done. This is how she started it

A promise made is a promise kept so on this winter day of January 18, 1982, I will begin to do my life story which I am sure will not be of interest to anyone but the one I made the promise to. By the time he is through reading it, he will wish he had kept his mouth shut.

That probably gives you some sense of what my Aunt Blanche was like.

I was looking through her autobiography to see if I could find the story about my grandfather and the potatoes and came across this story, which seems to go well with the theme here. (This was written regarding her time in Wendell, Idaho, where she lived and taught school from 1933 to 1935.)

There are many people whom I haven’t mentioned and many whom I will never forget. I must tell you about Mrs. Parr. She was the butcher’s wife. She was always in his Butcher Shop to wait on people. She was a large woman and wore a big white apron over her dress. Very seldom did you see her with a smile on her face.

When you went in for meat, it didn’t make any difference what kind you wanted, she would always ask if you were having company. If you said, “No,” she would say, “You don’t need that much,” and give you what she thought you needed and it was always enough.

Less is Enough Hero #2

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berner-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.

I’ve admired Tim Berners-Lee for many years, and loved this quote when I first read it, and am putting him up here in my Hall of Fame to make myself feel better about the fact that I managed to come up with a project that was hugely disruptive to my life, enormously useful to other people, and garnered great deal of publicity and public interest while generating virtually no income for me. (Some of which is my own fault because I’m philosopically opposed to pervasive advertising … that’s what I get for sticking to my values and not plastering my blog with ads.)

Emphasis (italicized text) in the quote is mine.

“People have sometimes asked me whether I am upset that I have not made a lot of money from the Web. In fact, I made some quite conscious decisions about which way to take my life. These I would not change—though I am making no comment on what I might do in the future.

What does distress me, though, is how important a question it seems to be to some. This happens mostly in America, not Europe.

What is maddening is the terrible notion that a person’s value depends on how important and financially successful they are, and that that is measured in terms of money. That suggests disrespect for the researchers across the globe developing ideas for the next leaps in science and technology. Core in my upbringing was a value system that put monetary gain well in its place, behind things like doing what I really want to do.

To use net worth as a criterion by which to judge people is to set our children’s sights on cash rather than on things that will actually make them happy.”

Amen.

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Next Project

Okay, here’s what I’ve come up with for my next project.

I’m going to try for a week with the highest level of nutrition I can do—3 meals, all food groups, best nutrient profile I can come up with—using the most affordable ingredients I can figure out. So basically the best combination of nutrition and economy that I can think of.

I’ll give the total amount of money spent up front, and also calculate the unit costs based on how much I used. (For instance if I pay $3 for 5 pounds of flour and use 1 cup in a recipe, I’ll charge that as $0.15, for the 4 ounces I used.)

Also I’ll calculate the total cost of each recipe and then calculate a per-serving cost. So if I make a large batch of soup and eat two bowls then freeze the rest, I’ll only charge for the portion I ate that week, not what’s been saved to be eaten later.

This will give us some idea of how much it actually costs to eat well, based on conditions that are much closer to how things work in the real world than what I was working with on the Thirty Days for Thirty Dollars project.

I’ll buy the sizes I normally buy (no 50lb bags of rice in an effort to lower unit costs), and if I have a lot of something in my pantry already, I’ll probably just check the current price and report it, but not actually purchase any.

Haven’t decided yet if I should go to different stores in an effort to get the absolute lowest prices, or to shop like I usually do, going for a combination of price, quality, and convenience. I’m going to keep thinking about that.

Also not exactly sure when I’m going to start. I need to do some research and thinking to figure out what to make and to get everything ready.

If you don’t want to keep checking back to see if I’ve started, feel free to subscribe using the “Subscribe to Less Is Enough” link over in the sidebar.

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Some Notes for New Readers

For people who’ve heard about my project in the mainstream media and are visiting my site for the first time, I’d like to make a few comments.

The first is that the point of the project was not to suggest that anyone could do this, or that anyone should even try to do it, but to show the types of things that are available at very low cost (so low cost that I could get them with only a dollar) and to demonstrate strategies for low-cost shopping and eating that are different from what is usually suggested.

Ironically, one of my “tips” to Good Morning America turned into exactly the opposite of what I’ve been trying to say. When I talked about buying “bulk,” I was standing in front of bulk bins in the Whole Foods and I was talking about buying “bulk food”—i.e., buying from bulk bins where you can get a little or a lot for the same unit price—but they translated that into buying “in bulk,” meaning buying large quantities. Which is an approach that everyone else touts that I don’t support at all. In order to buy in bulk, you need a vehicle to get things, you need space to store it, and you need large amounts of money up front that not everyone has and that also reduces the money available for buying things like fruits and vegetables that you should get every day. I’m a proponent of shopping frequently and buying just what you need to get you through the next few days, while keeping your pantry and freezer stocked with things you use all the time so when you shop you can just get a few things (i.e., meat or other protein source, produce, dairy) and make complete, nutritious meals out of them.

Also I can’t emphasize enough that this project was not designed as the “Rebecca Currie Lifetime Diet and Fitlness Plan.”

It was a self-contained, thirty day project where I attempted to eat for a dollar a day, starting with no food (I couldn’t use any food from my pantry or freezer) and the first day having two dollars available for buying food, and each day after that getting another dollar. Any money I didn’t spend rolled over and could be used on future days. I only ate what I was able to buy—no homegrown, foraged, or donated food. (And no dumpster diving!)

Because of the extreme (and extremely artificial) conditions of the project, there was only so much I could do in terms of my food options, and I wasn’t trying to say that you could be perfectly healthy on a dollar a day (especially when you start with no food and have only a dollar each day, that’s just ridiculous).

I chose to eat a more limited amount of food in an effort to eat more “normal” meals (i.e., things other people might actually want to eat), because I felt fine physically with less food than I expected, and after starting, I decided that was the direction I wanted the project to go in.

The quantities of food I ate were very limited, and therefore the quantities of fruits and vegetables I ate were limited. I wouldn’t want to try to live long-term on a diet like that, and I wouldn’t suggest that other people live on a diet like that even short-term. But I think overall the types of food and proportions I ate were not bad (though not the portion sizes, which were quite small).

Another thing I’d like to make perfectly clear is that I was not trying to tell people specifically what they should do to save money on groceries—it was not designed as a “how-to” in the sense of “you should do A, B, C, and everything will be fine.”

I’m glad that so many people have found it useful, and I did hope that it would give people ideas, but I didn’t intend it as a straight “how-to” and you shouldn’t try to read it as that.

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I Heard There’s a Party…

Once when I was in high school, my friends and I planned a party at my house when my parents were out for the night. It was supposed to be a small party, just us and a few other people we invited, but once the party started some kind of Bat Signal went out and half the school heard about it and ended up at my house. Including other people’s parties that never got off the ground, they just brought their whole party—people, beer, music—over to my place.

There were a gazillion people there, half of them I didn’t even know who they were. It was crazy.

Something made me think of that story the other day. Not sure what.