Take your quarter to Discomart: my first lesson in frugal cooking

When I was a college student I had one dish in my repertoire:eggplant parmesan, a time-consuming messy affair. Like most of my fellow students, I moved off campus after one year. Housing was unbelievably cheap in those days (I paid about 40/month) and we had a budget of about $5/week for food. We ate terribly! None of us knew how to cook, so we relied on eggs and hamburger. There was one fellow my year, who now is a famous cook and author, particularly noted for barbeque; even then his cooking was acclaimed…sadly, I didn’t know him well and so was never invited to dinner.

I well remember my first lesson in frugal cooking. My roommate Jennifer was invited to Peter’s house for dinner. I was invited to tag along. I didn’t know Peter, but he was a charming man, who had come over from England. One of my previous roommates, Jane, was a music major and had mentioned that Peter was an incredible composer. For dinner, he served a delicious chicken stew. We asked how he made it and he said, “Take your quarter to Discomart”—so we did. Chicken backs and necks were (get this!) 9 cents a lb. We bought 25 cents worth. Added some water. Cooked. AND then, in our student poverty, we carefully picked off all the meat we could from the necks and backs. Then we added carrots and celery and voila: dinner!

What a wonderful lesson.

Needless to say in the age of google I had to check out the current lives of the participants in this story: Roommate Jennifer (now a bigwig in biotech firm?); Peter (now composer at MIT!). I would guess that neither remembers that frugal dinner.

My Pantry: Commodities Trading with Andrew Tobias

My Pantry: Commodities Trading with Andrew Tobias

Whenever I look in my pantry, with its strange assortment of items—20 boxes of curried carrot soup, 14 cans of cranberry sauce, 11 cans of coconut milk, to name just a few—I think of my very first adult lesson in frugality, from the great Andrew Tobias, author of The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need.

Amazingly to me, this was 30 years ago, in the Bloomington IN Public Library, in the company of my first frugal friend, Diane. Though we were both graduate students, our financial situations were very different. Diane was married to a former professor of hers, 20 years her senior, who earned almost $20,000 a year. I was a single student living on my pay for teaching English composition: $3,000 plus a fee waiver.

Diane and I went to the library to see if we could find any information on whether or not she could afford a house, given that her husband had been through a costly divorce. There we found Tobias’s book. And even though I didn’t exactly have money to manage, I was thrilled to discover that there were books on managing money.

Tobias was a lucky find, for in an early chapter he outlines what he facetiously calls commodities trading. He points out that saving money on things you have to buy anyway—like canned tuna—can yield a good return that is tax-free (you don’t pay taxes on money you save). So, if you save 20% on tuna, you have a 20% tax-free return, magnified, I suppose, by the fact that you might eat your tuna in a month. He described stocking up on other commodities and storing them under the bed.

This was financial advice with immediate application. Not only was I able to do this on my tiny income, but I made so little that saving amounts that others would find trivial made a big difference.

And I still do it. Hence the carrot soup ($1 for 32 oz); the cranberries (33 cents a can), the coconut milk (80 cents a can). Years later, I came upon this idea once again in The Tightwad Gazette, where it is called “The Pantry Principle” and in the Grocery Game (the subscription grocery “listmakers”), where it is called “stockpiling.”

And what of Diane? Well, she and her husband did buy a house. It was near the “Opportunity Shop.” And then she taught me how to shop at thrift stores, another valuable skill I learned during graduate student days.

A frugal recipe, especially for poor students

Frugal eating!

Especially good for students with limited time, money, and equipment

Burritos with potatoes

I got the idea for this from a McDonald’s free offer a while back. McDonald’s offered a free breakfast burrito with purchase of a medium drink. So my dear husband and I stopped by en route to work and ordered a medium coffee. The woman in front of us ordered a medium drink and was offered the burrito by the nice cashier. The customer said no thanks…and I moved in for the kill. She was so happy to give me her burrito!

I love burritos with potatoes, preferably home-fry type. But there’s nothing more tedious than peeling potatoes (hate it!), cutting them (hate it!), and frying them (takes a long time). It’s even worse if you’re cooking in a tiny college cooking facility. The room gets smoky …etc.

You can buy a bag of home-fried potatoes in the frozen section at most grocery stores. I got mine at Dollar Tree (two pounds for $1) but they should be relatively cheap at any grocery chain. I also had a tube of frozen breakfast sausage (which I got for $1 on sale) and eggs.

This is a very high fat recipe—only suitable for active college students ON RARE occasions. It is a sub for fast food, not for vegetables!

There really aren’t any particular things you need to do; this recipe is nearly fool-proof! Throw the potatoes in a pan with some of the sausage. Break up the sausage into pieces and cook the two together. Once the potatoes and sausage are browned to your satisfaction, break the eggs into the pan and cook up with sausage fat. Lastly, wrap it in a flour tortilla (the Mi Casa brand tortillas at the dreaded Wal-Mart are actually quite good and cheap) and serve. Your portion size can vary: I’d probably only use one egg and a small bit of sausage but my hungry son can easily eat a two egg burrito. A general rule of thumb is that one egg makes enough filling for one tortilla.

This is really a no-stress recipe so have fun with it! Some variations you can try: throw in some beans, black, kidney, or pinto (if you use a can of beans, make sure to drain them). If you want to make the recipe a little healthier you could substitute mashed up beans for the sausage or for the eggs.

Oh! This is critical: don’t forget the salsa! Salsa is a rip-off, by the way. Try a can of diced tomatoes and chilies—the brand that’s cheapest in my area is Rotel but any generic equivalent will do—in lieu of salsa.

Even if you shop at the dreaded Wal-Mart at their regular prices, you can feed a bunch of people two burritos apiece for under $1 each. Maybe even three each if you’re the hungry college type like my dear son.

Bon appetit!

Why Me?: A Pathologically Frugal Professor Starts Her Blog

Why me indeed! Because I LOVE being frugal! Because I’ve always wanted to do this, first when I read The Tightwad Gazette and thought “I should do something like that!” Now when I read the zillions of personal finance/frugality blogs, I still think “I should do that!”

As my dear spouse says, quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson, “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." In other words, do it.

Still, why me. Well, I am a teacher, and teachers--in addition to their credentials--are bossy and advice-giving.

Sometimes, to see what’s been going on in my life, I read the letters my dear husband writes his father. In one he described how we ate dinner in the cafeteria with my son and his college friends, who seem to like our visits. He described me as “giving advice and powerful exhortations” to the students. Really? Is that me?

The great Emily Toth, a professor at LSU best known for her work on Kate Chopin who told me years ago that she was interested in women advice givers from Dear Abby, Ann Landers, to herself, writes the Ms. Mentor column for the Chronicle of Higher Education. I was lucky enough to encounter Ms. Mentor in person in my early years at my present job; because of her advice and powerful exhortations I am still here.

On the job, in addition to teaching the likes of Shakespeare and company, I find myself advising spendthrift/debt-ridden colleagues on the existence of flex plans and Roth IRAs. Sometimes my students lament their accumulating debt and I pass on tips to them too. I also am often called on to deliver frugal tips to my children’s friends, who seem amazingly interested in the topic.

So yes, I guess I am a scholar. But in addition to reading the latest thoughts of various theorists and to adding my own tiny contributions to the scholarship in my field, I enjoy reading—and re-reading—the great classics of frugality: Your Money or Your Life, The Millionaire Next Door, etc. I used to be embarrassed about this—that I was devoting a good bit of time to what seemed to me trivia in comparison to the great works of Homer. Then my dear spouse opined “Proust says that life is trivia.” I’m not sure where Proust said that, but since my dear spouse has read ALL of the master NUMEROUS times (en français as well as in translation), I must say that I believe it’s in there somewhere.

Therefore, onto some trivia. I am a great reader and know all sorts of things about, for instance, cooking and children’s books. What these (and other things) have to do with frugality, I hope to show….