Oh, I think that’s quite true. It is hard to adjust to the realization that retrenchment is necessary. When we had our struggles this year, I had to work pretty hard sometimes to suck it up and deal.
My brother just bought a house from a family where the dad lost his job about 10 months ago. They had overspent on furniture and so on, but they didn’t sell the stuff. They rented two storage units for all of it instead. My brother had offered them a couple of hundred bucks for a large mirror that had been specially mounted on the wall. But they had paid $500 for it and just couldn’t let it go, so they’re paying rent on it instead. :smack: These are people who are not adjusting their thinking to their situation! (Including the employment problem–Dad is still looking for the same work he used to have, and he’s not going to get it. He needs to readjust and look into other areas, but it’s not happening.)
That difficulty of adjustment under stress is why I think it’s important to learn skills before hardship shows up at the door; it’s much harder to learn new ways of surviving when everything is falling apart. We automatically stick to our habits when we’re unhappy or worried, and even something as simple as learning to cook beans and rice looks harder than it is.
The pumpkin muffins are good with spice cake mix, but like you said, it’s just as easy to make them from scratch.
I think a big part of it is that people get used doing things one way, and don’t think to try something else. The get used to using boxed cake mixes, and simply assume that if you can buy it in a box, making it from scratch must be hard, and take forever, so they don’t try.
People at work are always noticing that I have leftovers for lunch, and they seem to think I spend hours cooking - but I don’t. I like to cook, but I don’t typically make anything that takes longer than half an hour during the week (aside from crockpot stuff, which takes almost no work at all).
It makes me think of that Semi-Homemade show - so much of the stuff she makes would take as little time to make from scratch, and probably be better. But people love it because they think it’s more convenient.
I am much the same, most of my recipes take about half an hour of actual cooking time with about 10mins prep for vegetables. A lot of the recipes I’ve used from books are for four servings, there’s only two of us so instead of scaling down the recipe, I cook for four people. That gives me one meal for two, one lot of leftovers for the following day’s lunch, and a portion in the freezer. Eventually I have enough individual portions that I don’t need to buy meat or cook for a week!
That doesn’t always work so well for people who have trouble controlling portion sizes. If I make extra of a dish, I end up eating more of it at dinner. I don’t do so well at not overeating when there’s food ready and right there.
I don’t bake (except for bread) for the same reason. I’m fat enough without having tasty baked goods around the house to tempt me.
I scoffed when some Chinese friends expressed surprise that I didn’t have a rice cooker, even though rice represented a substantial portion of my diet. Hell, you just need a saucepan with a lid to make rice, right? Who needs a dedicated appliance?
Well, I ended up with a small, no frills rice cooker and would never go back.
Not only does it free up an element on the stovetop (and if dinner is, say, curried chicken, channa masalla, and aloo gobi, then at some point all four burners are going to be in use, leaving the rice aside,) but more importantly it frees you up to tend to things that require a little more attention.
I think that is very true - the “juice boxes for the neighborhood” in particular seems indicative of that ‘but I don’t want to change my lifestyle!’ behavior. Also a certain amount of “I don’t want the neighbors to know I have to change my lifestyle.”
They still want their Coach purse, “are the ones at the outlet store really as good as the ones retail? Will people be able to tell that I’m carrying an outlet store model?” Honey, your husband took a 30% paycut and was out of work for six months with no severance and you want to stay a stay at home mom, it might be time to either find your designer purses combing second hand stores, or start buying non-designer bags.
And I think that SOME of them shopped to relieve stress, were enabled in this by easy credit, and now don’t have the credit, have the bills, and are out their stress relief. But they also just lack the coping skills of being able to make black beans and rice (out of the cheap bag of rice and the dried beans) or mending a split seam or changing the oil in their car, or giving a six year old a “functional” haircut or any of the other skills that really aren’t overwhelmingly difficult and its nice if you can pay someone else for, but when you are trying to live off the unemployment check, your kid doesn’t need a $40 cut - or even $15 at Great Clips.
Another bonus of a rice cooker is that you can make rice in very large quantities. It’s fantastic if you’re having a bunch of people over for a stir fry. You can also make whole meals in there. I have a few recipes that just involve throwing in some chicken, curry powder, salt, onions, etc., then you just add some water, turn on the cooker and you’ve got this awesome rice dish in under 30 minutes.
Another thing about cookbooks today is how freaking much each recipe makes. Serving sizes have definitely increased everywhere, so much so that one serving is really about the equivalent of at least one and a half or two, which increases the overall cost of the dish when you eat one of today’s “single” servings. My rule of thumb is that if a cookbook says that it makes four servings, I can usually get 6-8 from it, sometimes more if it’s meant to be a side.
For example, over the weekend, I made homemade calzones from a Rachel Ray recipe. The thing called for two entire tubs of pizza dough, so I made a recipe I use that usually makes two pies because I didn’t want to go buy the dough. The recipe also called for four cups of ricotta, a full pound of spinach and 16 ounces of mozarella. These calzones were as large as Pizza Hut calzones, and were easily two servings each, even though I halved the amount of cheeses and made six of them instead of the four indicated. So I got twelve servings out of something that was supposed to be four.
Edited to add that, duh, ScareyFaerie beat me to the above comments. I usually helps when you read the whole thread.
On the rice cooker aside, I believe that rice cookers are a cool appliance - everyone who I know who has one loves it. But you don’t NEED a rice cooker to make rice, any more than you need to start with a fresh pumpkin to make pumpkin muffins. That’s part of the problem mindset…“I can’t feed my family real rice, I don’t have a rice cooker.” “I can’t bake bread, I don’t have a bread machine.”
I wouldn’t go through the effort of roasting/pulping a pumpkin for bread or muffins, but I think there’s a very real difference when it comes to pies (and maybe soup? I don’t know, I never tried canned pumpkin for soup). I don’t think I’ll ever make another pumpkin pie with canned pumpkin unless I absolutely have to.
In my experience, canned pumpkin is WAY CHEAPER than working with a real pumpkin. The pie is better, but from a frugal standpoint, you are better off going with canned pumpkin. At the point you are working with a whole pumpkin, you probably should - from a frugality standpoint - be buying the Mrs. Smith’s pie.
I’m very much in the “you don’t have to re-invent the wheel to feed yourselves better” camp. As someone here pointed out a couple of months ago, cake mixes have been refined down to a science; my time (that I bill out at $35 per hour) is worth enough to me that I will buy a Betty Crocker cake mix (on sale - I buy a couple at a time) instead of making one right from scratch. Spice cake mix and canned pumpkin? You bet! I might even throw some raisins or something in. We eat a lot of bagged salads, because in my experience of keeping house for 25 years, if I buy unwashed heads of lettuce, they’ll end up in the compost heap. I figure a $4 salad that we actually eat is better than a $2 head of lettuce in the garbage. I buy a huge pack of boneless, skinless chicken breasts and portion them out into baggies and freeze them for zero waste (skinned and boned chickens are cheaper, but you have huge waste with them).
I think you guys are right about the disconnects people are having, though. Some people see things as all or nothing (I have to do EVERYTHING from scratch or nothing), and others don’t want to bow to the reality of their situations.
My aunt knows a lady who lives with her husband and five cats and a houseful of furniture in a small apartment.
Several of the cats are fifteen weeks old-- formerly stray kittens who were rescued young (probably bottle-feeding age) and now are still cute kittens but not such babies anymore.
Apartment complex allows 2 cats per apartment.
Furniture is excessive because they lost the house and refused to give any of it up, so it’s all in the apartment.
I’m sympathetic to the overstuffing the apartment with furniture, it’s just that doing so makes having 5 cats that much more absurd. And when you think about a lifetime of food bills and vet bills . . .
Look, I don’t know your employment situation or your income. But if you’d give those cute little kitties a chance to find new homes while the are still KITTENS, it will make your life a lot easier. And probably improve their quality of life too.
Note: there is no indication that any effort has been exerted to find alternate homes for the kittens–the lady who has them is too attached to them. But if she’d started when they were four or six weeks old, and kept the cats till six or eight weeks old, she’d have a less cluttered apartment.
Cooking isn’t an all or nothing thing. I got started cooking by adding stuff to boxed pasta mixes. I think the “semi-homemade” types of shows are good because they encourage people to try something that’s a good first step into cooking. They also discourage the all-or-nothing mentality, which is good too. I have to laugh at any show that includes “tablescapes”, though- if I want to get really fancy, I clear the unread mail off the dining room table. Maybe I could think of some way to call the junk on the table a “tablescape” and not have to clean it up… hmmm…
There’s still stuff I can’t or won’t do in cooking (like dicing onions). If a recipe requires something you can’t or won’t do, you can modify the recipe (I often use onions chopped in the food processor instead of diced ones) or just avoid recipes that require that particular technique. Whatever the technique you can’t do is, you can still cook- there are lots of recipes out there that don’t use that technique.
And that is smart frugal housewifery. Knowing that the $2 head of lettuce goes to waste but the $4 bag gets eaten is probably a good investment in the $2. I agree on the chicken as well…deboning chickens does not end up being cheaper per pound for me (and is a huge pain it the ass) - it has all the disadvantages of starting with whole pumpkin to make pie - and none of the advantages because it doesn’t taste any better in the end.
Cakes are a great example. A cake mix is a wonderful frugal investment - even the “isn’t very good” can of frosting is cheap. When compared to the foodservice cake you pick up at the grocery store bakery, you’ve spent half the money and gotten pretty much equivalent quality (although maybe lacking the nice decorations) - and its easy to do (again, decorations are a practiced skill). I can bake some wonderous cakes from scratch, but by the time I invest in cake flour, baking powder, cocoa powder etc. - plus butter for the buttercream, its not really an exercise in household frugality - it will very likely taste better than the box cake or the foodservice cake, but I’ll have spent more than I would on either. If I compare that cake to a high end bakery cake, I get my money’s worth for my time.
The ones I’ve had from similar recipes have been easily as good as any homemade muffin I’ve ever had, so I have no problem believing it. And I say this as someone who does a LOT of scratch baking. If two recipes come out tasting equally good but one is much easier and produces fewer dishes to wash, I’m going to rank the easier one higher and make it more often. I mean, come on, who wouldn’t?
And I really do think the attitude that something must automatically be inferior because it uses processed stuff is harmful and counterproductive to getting people who don’t already cook to give it a go. People who don’t cook don’t because they think it’s too time-consuming, or they’re scared of screwing up, or they’re intimidated by having to buy a big lot of stuff they don’t already have. Recipes like the cake mix pumpkin muffins are a great solution to all of those issues–looking down on them as merely all right if it’s the best you can do makes the whole prospect of cooking look more elitist, less newbie-friendly, and altogether a more daunting thing to take on. That’s not the way to get people back into the kitchen.
I wouldn’t even know how to estimate how much usable pulp would come out of a pumpkin if I wanted to do the whole “from scratch” thing. I just have no idea if they’re consistent.
