I blow people like those mentioned in the OP out of the water when I relate the time I cooked a very nice cherry cobbler in a covered bucket in a campfire.
I was fortunate in that I learned cooking basics at an early age. I also learned to not depend on just one way of cooking something - I can use open fire, grill, gas stove, electric stove, microwave… While I do some things for convenience (I buy brownie mix rather than from scratch) I am capable of being quite flexible.
There are other issues as well - I can easily handle fractions, measurements of quantity, etc. Not everyone can, sad to say.
Even my husband, who is not a cook (he’s infamous for opening a can of peas and eating it at room temperature) is capable of following a recipe and obtaining satisfactory or even good results. He has made cornbread and his hummus is better than mine. He chooses not to cook because doesn’t have to, but he is capable of doing so.
It blows my mind that not only are there adults who really don’t know how to cook, they don’t seem capable of figuring out how to do so via either books or the internet.
Doesn’t make a lot of difference, around here a pie pumpkin is about $3. A can of packed pumpkin is a buck (and about to go on sale). I can get one pie out of a can of packed pumpkin - which is as much pumpkin pie as I want. There isn’t any way for me to use a pie pumpkin for less than I can make a pie with packed pumpkin - unless I grow my own pie pumpkins (in which case, you are getting cheap pumpkins AND a better pie).
Depending on how you like it, it’s about a cup of steel cut oats to a little less than four cups of water, plus whatever you like in it - I add raisins and dried cranberries and sometimes buttermilk powder and set it for half an hour before I expect to get up. It stays warm for me and my boyfriend no matter how far apart we wake up. Not as good as stovetop, but acceptable.
Here’s how I make rice - like pasta. Boil water, lots of water. Throw in rice. Let it boil for 17 minutes. Drain in colander.
Makes perfect rice every time, with easy to clean pots and no babysitting.
This doesn’t really make a lot of sense in the context of this conversation, which is about housewives. Apart from that, you don’t have to impress up me the trials of single parenthood. The last time I heard a rap like that was this week, and it was coming out of my mouth, as an attempt to encourage my wife, who was complaining about not having enough time for ourselves. I used a specific example – a co-worker of ours who recently lost her husband and is raising her three-year-old son by herself.
She works the same schedule as us, by the way, and we have had plenty of conversations about frugality. Her son is a picky eater, so she prepares two meals in parallel, grown-up food and toddler food.
The point still stands. Hell, it stands even more, if your trying to raise a kid on a single income. I’m not talking about having time to make a five course meal every night, I’m talking about putting adequate nutrition on the table without breaking your budget.
Most of the single moms that I’ve known have been dirt poor, and they know their way around the kitchen because they couldn’t afford not to.
So much “convenient” food isn’t significantly more convenient that starting from real ingredients. You pay a premium choosing for Kraft Dinner over making macaroni and cheese the “long” way - but how much time do you actually save? Five minutes? You pay between 4-8 dollars more for a pre-made curry, and how much time does it save you over starting from scratch? Less than a minute.
When my wife is on courses, I do do it all myself. I don’t order pizza and buy lunch the next day instead of making it ahead to save half an hour, because that would be stupid and lazy.
The things that seem like a good, frugal idea aren’t always the best way to actually save money. I always thought I wasn’t very frugal when I shop, because I don’t clip coupons and compare unit prices on brands. I don’t have the organizational skills for coupons, or the math-in-my-head skills or patience for doing unit prices. I pretty quickly get tired and irritable and get to the “let’s get out of here as quickly as possible” stage when grocery shopping. However, Henkel Consumer Goods did a study of different shopping styles, and people with my Carefree style actually tend to go to stores less than Shoptimizers who clip coupons, and as a result we Carefrees actually spend less on average. That’s a counterintuitive result, at least to me.
Shoptimizer, huh? Well, I guess that would be me, because I clip coupons, track sale prices, etc., and I go to the grocery store exactly one time per week. I spend significantly less money now than I did when I was a “Carefree” shopper. As a general trend, however, I could believe that the casual coupon clipper winds up spending more – especially if Captain Coupon is falling into the trap of buying everything with coupons, because a lot of coupons tend to be for newer items, or brand-name items that are more expensive. Using a $.25 coupon to get the brand-name when the store-brand is already $1.50 cheaper isn’t actually saving you that much money, ya know?
Yep, there are super coupon shoppers who do manage to optimize their shopping. But a lot of times coupons encourage you to buy crap you wouldn’t have bought without the coupon. And a lot of the coupon items are the highly processed convenience foods I’m bemoaning the dependence on. Coupons for milk and eggs are rare - but finding a coupon for Eggo waffles or Red Baron pizza is easy.
I also see alot of the “shoptimizing” trap over there are putting $5 in gas into the car in order to save $4.83. And then only having time to cook minute rice.
Recently I watched a videotape on how to “shoptimize” (although they didn’t call it that) that, based on the hair styles and godawful clothes, was made around 1975-1980. The basis of the video is that
You should shop to stock your pantry by buying stuff on sale. Then make meals from stuff in your pantry.
You should read the weekly grocery store ad.s and make your list by planning to cook things that were on special plus going to 2-4 stores to buy on sale items at each one.
The woman in the video mentioned that going to 4 stores to pick up 10 items in each one used up a lot more gas than going to 1 store for 40 items. However, she said, studies have shown that gasoline would have to cost at least $2.50 a gallon before it no longer became cost effective. And she sure couldn’t see gas getting THAT expensive ever.
About that chicken: I’m single, so I just can’t deal with a whole chicken fast enough, but I hardly ever use buy chicken fillets. Unless you’re making pan fried chicken breast, boned & skinned chicken tastes better. For day-to-day cooking I get a huge bag of unseasoned chicken wings (cheaper, pound-for-pound than whole chicken), portion them into bags and freeze them. I can fry them as a side dish (maybe do a few extra that can be de-boned after cooking, store in the fridge to use later in salads or wraps), stick them in the oven, or cook them in curries and paella.
I don’t cut things that finely - I figure if I’m buying almost all of our food at Safeway (including sandwich fixings for work lunches), we’re still coming out ahead of people who eat out six times a week (in both money and better quality food).
And, dammit, I meant to get a spice cake and pumpkin pie mix at Safeway this afternoon, but I forgot! (I usually walk over with my old granny grocery cart - good exercise, and costs us nothing for transportation.)
Let me be the first. we baked the pumpkin and peeled it and used the food mill on our kithenaid to separate the pulp and juice, and the flavor is so much better! The smell of canned pumpkin makes me gag. We freeze the results and then make pies, bread and best of all pumpkin bars with cream cheese icing. Canned is ok, but homemade is better, probably because most canned pumpkin is butternut squash.
What do I do with the juice besides pumpkin juice punch? I did not expect it to be so sweet. I had though I would use it in soups, but it seems too sweet for that.
I weigh it to match the can size, which is a pound IIRC. I don’t eat pumpkin pie, but I love pumpkin bars. We had a freaking huge pumpkin and did not carve it as we expected and got 5.5 lbs of pulp and two gallons of juice and a pint of seeds. The pulp seems as nice and the juice as sweet as the smaller pumpkin we had earlier this year, but the seeds are not as nice, though still snackworthy.
The reason I bought my friend a used rice cooker was because I knew she would never give up the Minute Rice if the new method wasn’t easier and less thought-involved. I measured out her first recipe’s worth, carefully wrote down instructions (rinse rice, dump in, add water, push button), and nagged her until she finally made it 3 days later. Success! Next, I’m trying to get her to buy a rotisserie chicken and use it with a can of refried beans and salsa to make burritos, instead of buying the frozen ones. Baby steps before walking.
I got my rice cooker as a wedding present 28 years ago, and I’m still using the same one; not nonstick, but it soaks clean overnight. I thought it was the most ridiculous idea ever, but of course, I’ll never go back.
And now, thanks to zSophia, we’re having rice cooker Malt-O-Meal for breakfast! Where has this been all my life?
P.S. Best pumpkin pie I ever had - don’t use evaporated milk; use 1/2 & 1/2 or cream. What a difference! C’mon, it’s only a cup and a half for a whole pie, and you’re going to use whipped cream anyways, aren’t you?
Ah, the pantry. As a dedicated room, it seemed to be an “in” thing for those suburban homes with cathedral ceilings and “great rooms” and a bathroom for every bedroom - the sort of homes bought by people who don’t strike me as exceptionally frugal, quite frankly - but what do people do with them, I wonder?
Pantries, not necessarily in the sense of dedicated rooms or even cabinets but in the sense of stocks of things the household uses often, are another one of those ideas that can be money savers or not. It isn’t one of the first things I’d suggest setting up if you’re just learning to run your own household, or if you’re suddenly finding yourself to be compelled to be more frugal. But once you’ve got a sense of what you use often and how fast you use it up, you can start buying things on sale. Not just staple food products, but toilet paper and laundry detergent and such too. If you’re really good you can have a stash of emergency meals that can be whipped up in case of illness or weather emergency or just plain running out of money before you run out of month, something that you wouldn’t normally eat perhaps but that can be made out of things found in your cupboards and freezer when you really need it.
But then you have pantries like my mom’s. You’ve seen these before, right? The result of the dangerous combination of being old enough to remember the Depression, and having membership cards to warehouse clubs. Tons of stuff, bought “because it was such a good deal”, that will never be used. Some of it is already well past its code date. That’s a good example of something that sounds frugal, because after all she stocked up! when it was on sale!, but it’s really a waste of money and storage space.
