I agree with what iamthewalrus(:3= posted, but I’ve also come across TONS of recipes that simply don’t work. It’s not at all uncommon for recipes in cookbooks to not be tested very well, and don’t even get me started on 90% of the recipes you find on the web.
I learned early on to only trust certain cookbook authors, and it’s true even now. I’ve also gotten MUCH better at looking at a recipe and being able to determine if it’s realistic or not. There’s many recipes out there that I wonder what they were thinking, or if the person who wrote them had a tastebud in his/her head.
At age 10, my parents split up. My sister is much older than I, it was basically Mom and me for 8 yrs. Mom was very capable at the frugal Mother. she cooked, she baked, she canned, she sewed, she gardened, she laundered. And she taught me how to do it too. Except ironing and sewing.
I am terrible at ironing. There has got to be a trick to it that i just don’t know about because it just can’t be as difficult as I make it to be. In fact, I have given up trying.
Sewing? Well i can manage to thread a needle and sew a button if I have too. I probably don’t do it correctly but they are functional. But fixing seams, and hems? No way I would even try.
But I do everything else around the house. I am a good cook, and I can bake too. And washing and drying clothes is a breeze. I could a garden too if I had to. I generally only grow tomatoes and I share those with neighbors and friends.
Even trusted authors sometimes go astray. I swear by my collection of America’s Test Kitchen cookbooks and use them daily. However, in the banana bread recipe in “The Best Recipe” cookbook, they call for you to take three overripe bananas and dice them. Yes, dice overripe bananas. Every time I read that part of the recipe, I envision some poor novice cook trying to carefully smush apart the soft banana to form little cubes out of it.
The nearest that I can come to reconciling this with my personal experience is speculating that these people all live prohibitively far from a market, and are forced to do massive shopping for things that will keep on the shelf. I might have a harder time making decent meals for my family every day if it wasn’t convenient to have fresh ingredients on hand.
We’re new parents and both work full time. I do most of the cooking, and I don’t think that it takes significantly much more time to prepare a real meal than it does to eat processed crap. I may cheat a little, because part of my time budgeting for “entertainment” goes toward meal planning. (The little bit of time I spend during the day web surfing will also include a little recipe hunt.) Who hasn’t got twenty minutes to spend in the kitchen? It doesn’t even have to be twenty consecutive minutes.
Hell, some frugalities actually save time, on balance. Since daycare costs took a 20% chunk out of our budget, I was looking for places to trim a bit of fat from, and realized that my daily Tim Hortons breakfast regimen was costing me $160/mo. Now, I make my breakfast sandwiches in the morning and bring coffee in a thermos, and this brings my cost for the same things down to well under $30. You’d think that this would be a trade-off on convenience, but now that it’s habit, it’s clear that it’s actually much more convenient to do this at home. The detour to Tim Hortons every morning added almost a half hour each day. Going over there, waiting in line, waiting for them to prepare my order, going back… This all takes much longer than the couple of minutes it takes me to do it myself. By making my own, I save $130 *and *ten hours per month.
I think that most of the time you hear people declare “I haven’t got time for that!” it’s because they either don’t have a clear idea of how little time it actually takes, or because they haven’t actually tried to find a way to fit it in before declaring that it’s impossible.
Ugh, I visit a message board like this and it burns me up. I remember clearly one conversation about saving money on snacks and one mom noting “I’ve decided that the only thing my kids are now allowed to eat after school is cereal. I figure even though they’re eating Froot Loops at least they’re getting some nutrition”.
I really believe this culture of convenience has created a generation of the world’s pickiest eaters imaginable. My next-door neighbors are the kindest, most big-hearted people I’ve ever known but have created this “monster” with their 3 kids. None of them will eat chicken that have bones in it. The only vegetable any of them will eat is corn. Most nights dinner is whatever the kids can scavenge, a bag of popcorn, a few brownies, some fast food that the oldest kid has picked up on the way home from practice or finally convincing a parent to order in food from the delivery place. If the parents eat something “exotic” like stir fry the kids get a separate meal of something pre-frozen and microwaved.
My own Hubby was raised by a single mom who I give silent thanks to everyday of my life, as she taught her son the life skills he needed to survive on his own - cooking, cleaning, paying bills, doing minor repairs, etc.
My mother was your typical frugal housewife of the 70’s and 80’s, however cleaning and cooking were left to me to learn on my own as we had a very tiny house and my “help” was more of me being in the way than anything. Now I’ve made these basic necessities the height of importance in my family life. We cook dinner at home at least 5 nights a week and nearly everything is from scratch. Leftovers are spread out among lunches or other weeknight meals, even sometimes breakfast. The Boy (age 5) eats what we eat, unless we eat something crazy spicy like curry in which I just set some chicken aside and make a dumbed-down version of it until he’s ready to try it again someday. No separate meals of mac & cheese, pizzas, grilled cheese, etc. Those are reserved for special occasions like a friend coming over or mommy has a girls night out so the boys eat whatever the heck they want. The Boy adores helping make chocolate chips cookies from scratch, stirring soup and stew for me, sorting the laundry by color (a GREAT activity when little ones are learning colors), and taking his dustrag around and “helping” me dust. I’m hoping any future daughter-in-laws are appreciative
This thread made me think of an relative in my grandmother’s generation. My grandmother told me that Auntie’s mother didn’t teach her how to cook or iron or scrub a floor because she expected Auntie to marry a rich man and not have to do that stuff herself.
Of course she told me that while she was teaching me how to cook (not focused on frugality, but she wasn’t very spendy)
I don’t bake bread from scratch, but we rarely eat out and we never have takeout for dinner. My mind boggles at the Applebee’s “curbside to go” line I pass most evenings. Other local restaurants (chain and otherwise) seem to be instituting the same sort of set up. Even if money were no object and I had enough cash to spend $30+ on a regular weeknight dinner for us, I’d choose not to.
My husband has elevated coupon clipping to an art form. Armed with circulars and “dollar doublers” from the paper he can get a cart full of groceries that would cost $140 for about $60. And he tries to beat his own percentage each week.
What is odd to me is when I go to the library to take out books on living on a budget, making your dollar stretch, etc. - they are all from the -1970’s or earlier. And the libraries do have more current books on other topics. You’d have to think there’s a huge market for this, but for whatever reason it’s not happening.
On the topic of coupons, I wish grocery stores in the Chicago area would do double coupon days; Jewel Osco and Dominick’s do not have those offers, and I haven’t heard of any others (those are the big two supermarkets) that offer double coupon days. It might make buying brand names worthwhile more often if I had a doubled coupon for them.
That’s how I learned as well. And as others have said, I didn’t really appreciate it until I was out on my own and knew how to put dinner on the table. At first (senior year of college in an apartment), dinner tended to include Hamburger Helper or a can of some kind of Campbell’s soup, but I was still making dinner. I think the years of practice between then and now are what made me a really good cook (who no longer uses Hamburger Helper!).
People should know that it’s ok if you don’t make a gourmet dinner. Just start somewhere. I loved the recipes from kraftfoods dot com for the first few years. I rarely use them now, but they’re easy and make decent food and are a good way to get started. And then the key to getting better, as in anything, is practice. I’ve got 10 years of cooking dinner ~6 nights a week under my belt. Not all of them have turned out well, but the majority have, and I’ve learned from the things that didn’t. And now I have instincts about cooking that you just can’t get without having seen things before. Does it look right? Does it smell right? When it tastes “off” what will help?
But it all did start with Mom letting me stir things, even when it probably was inconvenient for her to take the time to do so.
And actually, I learned to bake bread through a 4H class that I took with Dad. Dad is not a cook at all so I don’t know why he took me to that instead of Mom, but I appreciate that he did. We have homemade bread at our house pretty regularly. I love kneading the dough (no bread machine here… I want to know if it feels right) and smelling it as it rises and then bakes.
Our local school district eliminated Home Ec from the junior high and senior high curriculum. When I was in jr high (same district), Home Ec was mandatory for ALL, sewing or shop was also mandatory–Cheryl Somebody and I were the first girls to take shop in our school district.
Well, they kept shop (down to a 4 week course along with Art class, and Computers), but they eliminated any domestic anything-even ripped out the kitchens. In HS, Art class is only available to those students who test into it (can you imagine), and AFAIK, there is no Home Ec/Sewing available. There is some kind of shop class, though.
It’s no wonder noone can sew on a button or fix a rip in a hem or put together a grocery list that feeds a family of 4 for one week.
Last thing: I don’t consider myself frugal; I consider myself cheap. I cannot imagine living on (or eating) all those ready-made snacks etc-- no wonder there’s an obesity epidemic (and a financial crisis). We stopped buying pop at all about 2 years ago (now it’s a rare treat) and have felt the lack, but did notice the grocery bill go down.
I have had almost no luck with recipes online–either my taste buds are far different or most recipes have the proportions/ingredients incorrect.
It’s not you - I was looking for muffin recipes today and the top rated pumpkin muffin on Recipezaar was “Take a yellow cake mix, and add a can of pumpkin.” It’s a Weight Watchers stunt to get low points per muffin/cupcake. No egg or oil, just chemical-y cake mix and canned pumpkin. It has 120 reviews and 4.5/5 stars. People are idiots with no tastebuds.
I made 12 mini-loaves of pumpkin bread Sunday, using my grandmother’s recipe (using real pumpkin, no canned pumpkin!), and had my 13-year-old son help me. He had a ball, measuring and adding ingredients. I even let him test them with a toothpick to see if they were done.
Now see, I don’t mind using canned pure pumpkin; I think even Cook’s Illustrated recommends it as a perfectly serviceable replacement. However, cake mix + canned pumpkin is really… lame. It’s a step on the road to making better recipes, perhaps, but it’s not the height of awesomeness.
I just thought of another good book, this one for cooking. It’s maybe not the most basic of books, but it’s excellent for people who want to start getting away from being tied down to recipes. It’s Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking.
He gives very simple ratios for basic recipes, like Bread = 5 parts flour : 3 parts water (plus a little yeast and salt), or Roux = 3 parts flour : 2 parts fat. The ratios that he has cover only two pages; the rest of the book is describing the idea of understanding how cooking like this works, and how to develop these simple ratios into good food without a lot of effort. To help you along, he does describe how to do this and provides some simple recipes and ideas for others. Using this, the other night I made a nice sauce to go into a homemade chicken pot pie; I made a roux using flour and butter, then developed that into a bechamel sauce by adding milk and some seasonings.
Michael Ruhlman is a great author. I got his previous book, The Elements of Cooking, and his chapter on why veal stock is the most amazing thing ever almost deconverted me from being a vegetarian - and veal is even one of the things my very omnivorous husband dislikes eating on a cruelty basis (definitely not because of flavor). Ruhlman has a serious passion for making delicious food accessible.
