Frugality 101: Keep your Eyes Open

This afternoon, Mr. FS and I took our dear daughter to a fried chicken place for a parking lot rendezvous. She met up with a friend for a ride back to college.

Moments before we left, Mr. FS noticed that he had left his cell phone in his cycling gear, which was floating in a bucket awaiting a wash. OOPS!!!

Since the fried chicken place was across the street from Wal-mart, we decided to get a replacement cell phone there. And pick up some tortillas.

I am usually not allowed to go to Wal-mart, since my trips there used to be followed by a lengthy comatose state and depression. No kidding. But we decided to take the chance. Of course, the cheap cell phone we wanted was out of stock. On to the tortillas.

To get to the bread area, we passed through produce. I stopped short: sweet potatoes at 15 cents/pound! I assigned Mr. FS the task of picking out some sweet potatoes. Then, after picking up the tortillas, I remembered another rule of Frugality 101: if one thing is marked down, so is another. Hence we discovered celery, string beans, and broccoli crowns, all for ridiculously low prices.

Total price for two packs of tortillas and assorted vegetables: $5.00. Mostly for the tortillas.

I asked Mr. FS if he would have noticed the sweet potatoes, since he goes to Wal-mart solo, on rare occasions. He said that he didn't bother looking when I was around, since he knew I would notice anything of interest.

So the third rule of Frugality 101: let the experts be experts.

That's the report on my post-Thanksgiving shopping. What could be better than vegetables?

Ghosts of Black Fridays Past

I just finished consuming my traditional post-Thanksgiving breakfast: mashed potatoes and gravy. Sheer bliss. I added some braised greens to the bowl also. These were from the garden. More bliss.

Miss Em was lamenting that this was her very first Thanksgiving without her older brother, aka Frugal Son. I said, "For me too." To which she replied: "You had 34 Thanksgivings without him." So true.

To distract her from her sorrow, I said, "Remember our after-Thanksgiving tradition? When we went to the toy sale at the Junior League Thrift Store in New Orleans followed by a trip to the zoo?"

She drew a blank at first, but then she remembered. "They always had Santa and big cookies."

Right. What I remember: Whizzing by Lakeside Shopping Mall, with its full parking lot. Then, on to Freret Street for the thrift store, which opened a small annex full of toys just for the season. It was always packed, and probably as competitive as any Black Friday sale at a big box store.

I was serene and guilt-free. I was looking for wood toys and art supplies; these were usually kind of beat-up looking and the art materials were not complete sets. Since I was not going for the most-desired new-in-box items, I did not feel that I was stealing from the poor, who were there for gifts for their little ones. Meanwhile, the kids were talking to Santa and eating cookies. Mr. FS was--as is his wont--standing in a corner looking bored or irritated.

Then on to the wonderful Audubon Zoo, where we had a membership for many, many years. On the biggest shopping day of the year, the parking lot was usually almost empty. Since the weather was usually nice, we would have a picnic lunch. Then home.

And now I will commence my favorite part of Thanksgiving: turning my turkey carcass into stock!

What's cooking at your house?

More College Cooking in Nantes

And more mooching from Frugal Son's writing. It's good, non?


Anyway, the 28th was going to be the grand opening of a three-day convention and the main thing of the night was going to be the premier of a stage production of Jules Verne’s, Nantes’ most famous native son, “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” I told Baptiste I would love to go and, since I had a wealth of ingredients from the market, I invited him over for dinner.

On the menu that night was a starter of pasta with a tomato and vegetable sauce, boiled and butter-grilled salsify, and seared bavette de boeuf. I discovered salsify, as I have already mentioned, in the Restau. U one day when I mistook it for potatoes. It is a long white cylindrically shaped vegetable that comes from the root of a plant, which, I believe, is in the thistle family. The flavor of the salsify itself is mild and the texture is a cross between boiled potatoes and asparagus. I happened to find some at Talensac for 3.90€ / kilo so I bought some and was going to attempt to make it for the first time.

Bavette is a cut of beef that is known in English as the “flank steak.” I wish I knew more about meat so I could tell you where it is from but, alas, all I can say is that it is a relatively unknown cut in America but in Europe it is prized for its flavor and tenderness. Actually, there are three cuts of beef that I’ve heard many culinary figures I respect talk about but that are hard to find in the USA. They are the bavette, flank steak, onglet, hanger steak, and hampe, skirt steak. All are supposed to be very flavorful (especially the onglet, which is a piece of muscle from the diaphragm, near the kidneys) and very tender provided you cook them quickly.

Anyway, I started cooking a bit before Baptiste and I were supposed to eat because I was making a rather complicated meal, i.e. something that involves more than one pot or pan, which is always a juggling act. First I boiled some water for the pasta and chopped up bell peppers, onions, garlic, and mushrooms for the sauce. I began to sauté them in the pan and while they were cooking, I began to prepare the salsify. Salsify is a root so you have to peel it before you can use it. Since I didn’t have a peeler, I borrowed a sharp knife from Jessica W., who was cooking alongside me that night, and got to work. It actually wasn’t that hard, though I did worry about peeling off too much of the flesh along with the skin, and there is something satisfying about seeing a smooth white stalk emerge from what was once a knobby and dirt encrusted black tuber. As soon as I peeled the salsify, I washed it, cut it into pieces about five or six centimeters long and then placed them in a bowl of water so that it wouldn’t start to discolor. An interesting thing about salsify is that when it is raw, the juice has a very dry and sticky feel on your hands; almost like how your hands feel after you’ve touched sap or resin. By the time I finished with the salsify, I only peeled two stalks out of about twelve, the pasta water was boiling and my veggies were properly cooked. I added pasta to the pot and poured tomato sauce into the pan along with some herbes de provence. A few minutes later, when the pasta was cooked, I scooped out the pasta using a slotted spoon and placed it onto a plate. Using the reserved, and still hot, pasta water, I cooked the salsify. The pasta sauce was finished by this point as well so I poured it into the little plastic container that my pork cheeks had been in (washed of course), which serves as my only “Tupperware.” I quickly rinsed out the pan and put it back on a hot burner to heat up for the next part of the meal.

Baptiste had arrived and had brought a bottle of Breizh-Cola (Bretagne Cola) and half a loaf of bread. Jessica W., Baptiste and I chatted while I finished up the first part of the meal. In the hot pan, I put a few chunks of butter and let it foam and subside. The salsify had been boiling for quite a while now so I drained them, rinsed them and then immediately transferred them to the pan with butter. To this, I added a clove of roughly chopped garlic and then let everything cook unmolested for a few minutes. Once the salsify began to char and pick up some nice black grill marks, I rotated them and let them cook some more. Meanwhile, I plated the pasta with some sauce and as soon as the salsify was finished, I put it directly on the plate next to the pasta. This was our first course and it was very good. I may have cooked the salsify a bit too long; it had lost some of the firmness that gives it such a great texture, but it was still very good and the garlic and butter really went well with the delicate sweetness of the root. The pasta was, of course, good and by now I’ve pretty much perfected my sauce.

After we finished the first part of the meal, I hopped up to prepare the “main course:” the bavette. I had started marinating the bavette a few hours before I started cooking in a mixture of red wine, soy sauce, and one clove of chopped garlic. I had read that bavette requires either really fast cooking or really slow cooking to keep it from being tough so I decided to go with a sort of “sear,” which is hard to do when using the anemic electric burners at the dorm. I turned the knob all the way up the fearsome power of six and let the dry pan sit on the burner for five or so minutes before adding the meat.

That morning at the market, the butcher asked me if I wanted a piece for one person and, even though I said yes, he gave me a giant piece of probably about 250g (about 9oz). Fortunately, Baptiste was eating with me so I cut the steak in half to make the portion a more reasonable size. Baptiste taught me the varying levels of doneness, of which there are only three in French: saignant (lit. bleeding but equivalent to rare), mi-cuit (lit. semi-cooked = medium), and cuit (cooked = well-done). Jokingly he added that you could also order it carbonizer, which basically means burnt. I explained to him that in English, there are five levels of doneness: rare, medium rare, medium, medium well-done, and well-done. He told me that he likes his steaks mi-cuit and I, of course, like any real food aficionado, like my steaks rare. I joke a little, but Anthony Bourdain emphatically insists that rare is the only way to order a steak and that chefs save the worst pieces of meat for people who order steaks well-done since cooking it that much destroys most of the flavor anyway. Anyway, with the pan hot, I plopped the two pieces of meat down onto the pan and let them cook away. After a few minutes on one side, I poured some of the remaining marinating juices (though minus the garlic because I didn’t want it to burn and contaminate the flavor) over the steak and then flipped them. A few more minutes on the other side and I poured the rest of the juice over the steaks and then removed mine to rest before eating. I cooked Baptiste’s for a little bit longer since he wanted his mi-cuit.

I brought the steaks to the table and, before they got cold, we ate. The steak was AMAZING. Tender, juicy, and the marinating flavors weren’t so powerful and salty that they overwhelmed the meat. My steak was cooked to perfection, or should I say not cooked to perfection since the center was a beautiful crimson red fading to a rosy grey until reaching the seared-brown outside. Baptiste’s, being the thicker of the steak halves, was at the same level of doneness as mine even though I had let it sit on the stove for a few extra minutes; however, he didn’t complain and said that because my cooking was so good he actually liked it rare.

Above all, I was proud of the efficiency with which I cooked and the fact that in spite of limited utensils (one small pot, one skillet, one bowl, one plate, and one Tupperware tub) I was able to assemble everything and get it onto the plate in good time and before it got cold. I think the key was that I never let the skillet get cold. I didn’t really ever wash it in between uses, just wiped it with a nearly dry sponge until it was clean and then put it straight back onto the hot burner. With Baptiste’s help, I did the dishes and brought everything back up to my room and then we headed out to go to Utopiales.

Pork Cheeks in Nantes

In a recent internet chat, Frugal Son averred that he liked the Korean custom, whereby each child gives a certain percentage of income to support aging parents! So to mooch off my child in advance, here is another installment of his adventures cooking in France.

****Note: Will be "Gone Fishing" for a few days. Back Monday.




Outside the skating rink, Farah and I agreed to meet back up at her house to cook dinner. I had bought joue de porc (pork cheeks) and I was itching to make an apple-pork stew. At Farah’s house, I started off by searing and browning the cheeks in a dry pot, removing the cheeks, and then adding some onion and garlic to the pot. Once the onions had gently browned, I put the cheeks back in the pot and added enough chicken broth—reconstituted from bouillon cubes of course—to nearly cover the cheeks. I added some cidre doux, which is only 2.5% alcohol by volume, a few pinches from my bag of ever-useful herbes de provence, and a sliced carrot. The rest of the cooking was just letting the mixture simmer and occasionally adding a little more cidre doux to keep the cheeks mostly under-liquid.

I don’t know if I ever wrote about my first oyster mushroom experience but in any case, while the soup was simmering away, I cooked up the remaining half of the oyster mushrooms. Raw, they have a mild mushroom taste differentiated from your typical white button mushroom only by a slight, peppery aftertaste. Quickly and lightly sautéed in a pan, however, with some salt and butter until they soften just a little bit and the flesh begins to glisten, they transmogrify (thank you “Calvin & Hobbes" for teaching me that word) into something completely different. Suddenly, they are bursting with a flavor at once meaty and buttery but also with an intensely concentrated earthiness that other mushrooms can only dream of achieving. One mustn’t cook them too long—lest they turn into slimy, flaccid, and pathetic slivers of mush—because the texture is one of the key parts of the experience. In spite of their name, oyster mushrooms, called pleurotes in French (something to do with tear-drop shaped?), taste nothing like their namesake shellfish to my palate. The pleurotes, which take only five minutes to cook and only slightly longer to devour, were a nice distraction from one of the hardest things about cooking: waiting.

And wait we did. Pork cheeks are a tough piece of meat and to ensure that the hog cheeks wouldn’t damage ours, you have to cook them for a long time to tenderize them. While we waited, Farah made some pomme de terres à la vapeur, that is to say, she chopped them and then microwaved them in a bowl with some water. After about an hour, I sliced open a pork cheek and took a sample bite. The meat was tender, but not mushy, so, to finish off the dish, I added two cubed apples to the broth and let the whole thing rest for a few minutes so that the apples would soften.

We brought everything to the table, nothing more than a coffee table, and began our meal. The pork cheeks were really good: succulent, flavorful and tender, but with enough integrity left in them that they didn’t just fall to shreds. The cheeks don’t have your typical bold porky flavor; I’m having trouble finding the words to explain it, but rather than having just the intense “pork” flavor on the tongue, which crescendos intensely and then quickly dissipates, the cheeks had a muted and more rounded flavor that lingered longer. The broth had thickened significantly and the savory sauce, with just a tinge of sweetness from the apples, was good when mixed with the potatoes. The richness of the pork was complemented so well by the sweetness of the apples, though I do wish there would have been a bit more acidity to add some depth to the flavor. Also, the texture of the apples was not great; they had been a bit mealy when raw and cooking did little to improve them. On the whole, however, the meal was very good and the flavors of the various components—meaty pork, light vegetables, and sweet apples—made each bite interesting.

To finish off the meal, I made a very simple dessert using two leftover apples, which I had sliced thinly. First, I put some butter in a pan and let it foam and subside before liberally tossing in sugar. I spread the sugar around, trying to distribute it evenly, and then immediately added the apple slices. I let them cook until they had browned and then flipped them. Once finished, they were a pale golden-brown and covered in a sticky caramel like sauce. Absolutely heavenly! Warm and soft, the slices were rich and sweet with a ring of chewy amber colored sugar around the edges. These were so easy and satisfying that I think they’re going to become my go-to dessert!

The Wet Suit: The Ultimate in Prophylactic Shopping

Both Duchesse and Funny have questioned the purchase of a men's large brand new wet suit. Only $3.49, minus my senior discount of 15%.

What can I say? Well, prophylactic shopping is partly psychological: OMG! I am succumbing to the onslaught of tempting ads that come in my mailbox, both actual and virtual. We never watch television, so those ads don't come my way.

Or even, I'm so depressed. I need a retail pick-me-up.

But prophylactic shopping (should I copyright or trademark that term? I wonder....) is also totally pragmatic. It involves getting something that would cost a lot of money or bother ONE DAY if you will need it.

That's why I picked up copies of books like A Separate Peace, figuring that my children would need to read this high school classic.

That's why I bought not one but two tuxedoes for under $5.00 each, figuring that Frugal Son would need one for a prom. The back-up was for just in case, plus it was a lot better quality than the first I got.

The upshot of these ventures? Neither of my children needed A Separate Peace, but I gave a copy or two to other teens who needed it. Eventually, these wended their way to the used bookstore or paperbackswap.com. My 20 cent investment was no biggie, anyway.

As for the tuxedoes. Frugal Son got two uses out of one of them. He lent the other to his friend Michael. So my $10.00 investment saved Frugal Son about $100.00 and his friend $50.00. Lending to a friend releases frugal karma into the atmosphere and benefits the universe, as far as I'm concerned.

Lest this sounds as though I have an unerring sense of what to purchase in my shopping ventures, let me assure you, I do not. Many of my just-in-case items have languished unused. Eventually, these go to Goodwill. But that releases some karma too. If I buy something for $3.00 and don't use it, it can then sell again for $3.00. So my $3.00 investment yields $6.00 for a charity. 100% appreciation. There must be something wrong with my math here.

OK. Back to the wet suit. It is a size that would fit the two men in my life. We did go to Hawaii once, where the brother of Mr. FS indeed wore a wet suit for snorkeling. We snorkeled sans wet suit.

We also go to Florida each winter. So we are around the water now and again.

If we ever want a wet suit, it would take time and money to get one. This one was acquired for little time and the investment was not much. It is now in the box where we store our snorkeling equipment, which we purchased for our trip to Hawaii because it was as cheap to buy as to rent. We've used it several times since.

That explains my wet suit logic. The down side of buying it is less than the down side of NOT buying it in the event we need one.

And perhaps I can take it to Buffalo Exchange as a Halloween costume.

Need for Prophylactic Shopping: ALERT and RESULTS

Even though i unsubscribed to email announcements, I continue to get offers. 20-30% off at Bnana Republic, Lands End, Gap, Chicos, and so on.

At school on Friday, two students handed me Banana Republic Friends and Family coupons. These used to be hard to come by. A few years ago, I was offered one by a student, and my Department Head said that it could be perceived as a bribe, so I couldn't use it. But I guess with business so bad, shops need all the friends they can get. So I got one of my very own in my inbox.

My mantra ("it will be more on sale in 6 short weeks--40 days") wasn't working too well. So on to my next step, writing down all my desired items. The list was short(comforter set, 2 pairs of pants, all from Lands End, my new favorite store now that they are offering free shipping), the total was about $140.00 (not that bad) and I started to succumb.

I know! On to Goodwill for some prophylactic shopping (shopping to prevent shopping, naturally). What should I find?

A Peacock Alley comforter with mtching shams.
A Garnet Hill colorful quilt.
A couple of books.

Then universe has spoken! But then I added some questionable items.

A new with tags wetsuit in a size that would fit Mr. FS and Frugal Son.
A new underarmour underarmour.

Total: about $18.00.

Weighing need, desire, danger, finances, clutter: I'm not sure if the trip was a victory or a defeat.

What do you think?

What do you think?

Moments of Panic: Budget Shortfalls for Education

I had a day of panic on Friday. Mr. FS and I have been cruising through the recession, secure in our tenured--albeit low-paying--positions. Then I woke out of my stupor. My state is facing a continued budget shortfall, and since the only areas not protected are (you guessed it) education and health, well.....

So, of course, I jumped to the worst case scenario: what if they close our school? Our students are the lowest "completers." What if--at age 56 and 58--we are cast to the wind, with our still-decimated retirement accounts.

Well, Mr. FS said, "It's too much trouble to shut down a school. This is a short-term problem. BlahBlahBlah."


My mind started racing nonetheless. Can't be an on-line bookseller, because there are at least 20 in my area. The other day, I saw a guy with one of those phone pricers that TALKED. He must have had it set to a floor price, because the gadget said, "No." No. No."

So we decided that we could rent out our house and stay in the little back house behind my father-in-law's house in beautiful Northern California. We could-probably for a low rent-help in his care. OR we could go to Costa Rica or Mexico for a while, as per my previous fantasy.

As Funny About Money--who has been living a real-life version of this scenario--has shown in her blog, planning ahead of the dire event helps reduce stress. DOESN'T IT????"