A birthday request

Many, if not most, of the best birthday and holiday gifts Brian has given me over the years are the ones he made himself. Indeed, the very first present he ever gave me was this picture he drew for my 27th birthday, before we were even officially dating. It hung in the bathroom at my old apartment in Princeton, moved to the hallway in our apartment in Highland Park, and now hangs downstairs in the game room over the "fireplace."

Since then, he's given me many more gifts of DIY items for the house and yard, such as a glassware rack to display a collection of stemware inherited from my Auntie Grace...

...a set of picture frames for my birthday five years back, to display a few ceramic tiles inherited from my grandmother and his...

...a custom made knife-block insert for our kitchen drawer three birthdays ago...

...the new rosebush he planted for me for Valentine's Day in 2016, and the patio extension he built to house it...

...and, biggest of all, the set of bifold doors he finished and installed as a birthday gift for me two years ago.

So this month, as my birthday was approaching again, Brian asked me if there was anything he could make for me as a present, since those gifts tend to work out better than anything from a store. And after some consideration, I said there was: a cover for the AC unit in the living room.

This is a room-sized air conditioner, similar to a portable window unit, except that it's permanently installed through the wall. We hardly ever use it—maybe once or twice a summer, if that—but we still have to look at it all summer long, and it isn't exactly pretty. In the winter, we cover it so it doesn't let in the cold outdoor air, draping a flexible plastic cover like this over the outside portion of the unit and a padded cloth one like this over the inside part. With the cloth on, the air conditioner isn't quite as obtrusive as it is in the summertime, but it still isn't exactly sightly. And since the cloth isn't sized exactly right to fit the unit, it doesn't do that great a job of insulating either. We've tried filling in the gaps with cotton batting, but it tends to droop and peep out around the edges of the fabric, which makes it look even sloppier.

We've looked for something more permanent to cover the air conditioner that would be both more practical and nicer-looking, but all we've ever been able to find online was quilted fabric covers like the one we have now. Brian has been talking for several years about building a permanent cover out of wood, but he's never gotten around to it, and I eventually realized that he probably never would get around to it unless something happened to push it to the top of his to-do list. So it seemed like the perfect request for my...ahem...(mumbling) 45th birthday.

Of course, like the bifold doors, this is a project that will take some time to complete, so I knew it wouldn't be done in time for my actual birthday. However, he did start drawing up some sketches for it during my birthday week, and that weekend we went out to Lowe's and bought some supplies for it. We bought one sheet of 4-foot-square birch plywood (which we had to cut into two pieces to get it into the car), two 3-foot hardwood dowels, and a box of wood screws, for a total of about $22.60. In addition to these, Brian plans to use a couple of longer wood pieces he already had around the shop to build a bracket to hang the thing on, and some small nails.

His design is basically a simple wooden box, slightly larger than the air conditioner itself. To hang it, he plans to secure a long piece of wood to the wall right over top of the AC unit and let the box hang from that. Eventually, he plans to buy a little corner molding to finish off the edges and make it look nicer, but we didn't get that on this trip because we weren't sure yet what we'd need (or whether it would all fit in the car). We're still discussing how we want to finish the outside of it. The options are:

1. Paint it the same color as the wall, so it will blend in and be unobtrusive. However, even if we disguise it in this way, it will still be noticeable, so it might not be much of an improvement over what we have.
2. Stain it and finish it to match the other wood pieces in the room. This might be a better option than trying to disguise it, but a solid block of dark-colored wood against that wall could look a bit incongruous.
3. Cover the front with something else that will look nice, like a patterned fabric. The difficulty with this option would be, first, choosing something that doesn't look too busy, and second, actually affixing it to the wood.

However, we should have plenty of time to figure out these details while Brian is busy building the box itself. Because you know how we are when it comes to DIY projects: we'd rather take our time to do a good job on a budget than either cut corners or spend a lot of money. If this project goes at our usual rate, we should have it done by the time summer rolls around...just in time to stow the box away and not actually install it until fall.

Money Crashers: 4 new articles

During the past week, while I was occupied with my Thrift Week entries, Money Crashers posted four more of my articles from the backlog that's built up over the past year. So, once again, I'm going to do a quick batch post here, with links and a brief description for each of these new articles. After this lot, I should have time to post any subsequent Money Crashers pieces one at a time with a bit more commentary, the way I usually do.

How to Deal With Sudden Wealth Syndrome and Manage Newfound Riches
Chances are, not many of you readers out there have recently come into a lot of money. But you never know; it could happen, and if it does, it's best to be aware that the blessing of sudden wealth often turns out to be a curse in disguise. In fact, therapists have coined a name, "sudden wealth syndrome," for the various emotional and social problems that often affect the newly rich. In addition, there's the problem that people who come into money without warning are often ill-prepared to handle it, and sometimes they end up worse off financially than they were before the windfall. In this article, I discuss the symptoms of sudden wealth syndrome and outline steps for protecting yourself, both financially and emotionally.

How to Be an Adult – 12 Life Skills You Need to Have as a Grown-Up
The word "adulting," which was one of the nominees for Oxford's Word of the Year in 2016, tends to get thrown around in a joking way on social media. Recent college grads tack on the hashtag "adulting" to posts about such mundane tasks as cooking a meal or doing laundry. But all joking aside, these are important skills to know if you're going to live on your own—and these days, they don't tend to get taught in school. In this article, I cover 12 skills that every full-fledged adult needs to know and offer advice on how to master them.

Urgent Care Clinic vs. Hospital Emergency Room – Costs & Comparison
This article opens with a true story about an incredibly frustrating visit Brian and I had to the emergency room a couple of years back. The problem was an infected cat bite (not the cat's fault, by the way; she was having a seizure) that wasn't an immediate threat to life or limb, but nonetheless couldn't wait until the doctor's office opened on Monday. We spent nearly five hours just to get a prescription for an antibiotic, which we then had to find an all-night pharmacy to fill. Worse still, Brian had a reaction to that antibiotic that led him to think he might be allergic—so we had to go through the whole thing all over again then next night.

If only we'd known at the time, we could have saved ourselves a lot of time and hassle by going to an urgent care center instead. This is exactly the kind of problem these facilities are designed to treat: emergencies that require immediate care, but aren't life-threatening. We could probably have gotten in and out of one, with our antibiotic in hand, in less than an hour.

To avoid getting stuck in this same situation, check out this article to learn about what urgent care centers do, how they can save you time and money, and when it makes sense to visit one.

9 Ways Microwave Cooking Can Save You Money
The most recent article to go up on the site is about one of my favorite topics: food. Specifically, it's about how your microwave can help you save money on it.

Most people probably think of the microwave as a time-saver but not a money-saver. And the way most people use it, that's true. I've argued on this very site about how many foods designed for the microwave, like microwave popcorn and TV dinners, are not only ridiculously expensive but also wasteful, with all their excess packaging.

But there are other, better ways to use your microwave. You can reheat leftovers in it for lunch, a much cheaper alternative than the cafeteria. You can use it to make homemade versions of snack foods like potato chips, convenience foods like breakfast sandwiches, and desserts like chocolate cake. And more! Read the article to learn about all nine ways your microwave can save you money in the kitchen.

Thrift Week 2018, Day Seven: Chocolate Pudding

In the first six days of Thrift Week, we've covered recipes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But what about dessert? Does eating frugally mean you have to go to bed with no dessert, even if you haven't done anything naughty?

Of course not! Frugality is all about getting the most possible joy out of the smallest expense, and there's little joy in a life without sweets. Brian and I have several dessert recipes we enjoy regularly, but our real go-to recipe is chocolate pudding. It's our number one choice for several reasons:

1. It's pretty easy to make, and much less time consuming than a pie or a cake.
2. It's healthier than most desserts. We make it with skim milk and just a tiny bit of oil or butter, so the only thing in it that's not so healthy is the sugar, and there isn't too much of that.
3. It's filling. One batch makes two good-sized bowls, so this dessert doesn't leave us hungry for more.
4. Most important of all, it calls for nothing we don't habitually have in the house. So any time we're in the mood for dessert, we know we can always make pudding, with no trip to the store required.

Brian's chocolate pudding recipe is a variant on the basic chocolate pudding recipe in the Betty Crocker Cookbook. (Actually, it's a vanilla pudding recipe, with variants for chocolate or butterscotch, but why make vanilla when you could make chocolate?) That recipe makes four small servings and calls for two egg yolks, no whites. When he first started making it, he used to halve the recipe and make one big bowlful, which we would share.

Now, that same cookbook also has a recipe for tapioca pudding, which calls for you to separate the eggs, beat the egg whites separately, and fold them into the pudding. Doing this allows you to get twice as many servings from the same volume of milk and eggs, with roughly half the calories per serving. So eventually, we came up with the idea of adapting this technique to the chocolate pudding recipe, and our basic recipe now makes a bowlful for each of us. The cost and the calorie count are pretty much the same, but we get nearly twice as much food—which means we're less likely to go hunting for something else (maybe something less healthy) to nosh on later.

Here's the recipe as Brian now makes it:

Brian's Healthi(er) Chocolate Pudding

1. Divide 1 large egg. Place the yolk in a cup or small bowl and the white in a larger bowl.  Set both aside.
2. Whisk together 3 Tbsp sugar, 4 Tbsp cocoa powder, 1 1/2 Tbsp cornstarch, dash salt, 1/2 Tbsp coconut oil (or butter), and 1 c. milk. (We use skim milk, which makes the recipe lighter, but you can use whatever you have.)
3. Heat in a saucepan on low heat, stirring constantly until the mixture thickens and begins to bubble.  Let it bubble for one minute (still stirring), then remove from heat.
4. Pour about 1/3 of the mixture into the cup or bowl containing the egg yolk and whisk to combine.  Add the combination back into the saucepan and stir to mix.
5. Return the saucepan to low heat and continue to heat, stirring, until the mixture begins to bubble again.  Remove from heat and add 1/2 tsp vanilla. Set mixture aside.
6. With an electric mixer or equivalent, beat the egg white, gradually adding 1 Tbsp sugar. Beat until medium-to-stiff peaks form.
7. Fold the chocolate mixture into the beaten egg whites and mix carefully.  Distribute into bowls. Pudding can be cooled in the refrigerator or served at room temperature.

This dish costs us $1.25 to make: 67 cents for the cocoa (organic and Fair Trade), 25 for the egg (organic and Certified Humane), 17 for the milk, and 8 each for the sugar and coconut oil (both organic). The cost of the salt and cornstarch is negligible. If you made this pudding with conventional cocoa, sugar, and egg, you could probably whip up a batch for around 81 cents.

Now, I must confess that when Brian and I have chocolate pudding for dessert, we tend to add to the cost by topping it lavishly with whipped cream. The cans of whipped cream we buy (having determined that whipping our own really isn't cost-effective, and having figured out that we can actually recycle the cans with a bit of work) are about $3 apiece and, according to the label, contain 61 servings. However, the label also claims that a serving is 2 tablespoons, which is simply to laugh. We like to have whipped cream in every spoonful, so we cover the surface of the pudding with it, then come back for more when we get down to the next layer. Altogether, we probably use at least a half-cup of whipped cream for every bowl of pudding, so that adds at least 20 cents per serving. But even so, the total cost of this dessert is only around 83 cents per serving, which is a small enough price for the sheer hedonic joy it brings us.

And with that, our Thrift Week of ecofrugal eating comes to a close. We now return to our regular weekly blog schedule, so I'll be back this weekend to talk about what Brian is building me for my birthday present.

Thrift Week 2018, Day Six: Stir-Fry

Our dinner for Day Six of Thrift Week is stir-fry, which is not so much a recipe as a method of turning whatever odds and ends we happen to have in the fridge into dinner. We make it whenever we have an assortment of veggies left over that don't fit into any other recipe: a half a green pepper left over from a pizza, a portion of an onion, a quarter of a head of cabbage that isn't enough for cabbage pasta or Rumbledethumps. Brian disposes of all these veggies by simply cutting them into smallish pieces, throwing them into a hot pan, cooking them until they're tender, and serving them over hot rice.

However, while there isn't exactly a recipe for stir-fry—and in fact, its very versatility is what makes it so useful—there is, nonetheless, a protocol for making it properly. Mollie Katzen, in The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, recommends sorting vegetables into three groups, from toughest to tenderest, and adding them to the pan in order so everything cooks up to tender-crispness at the same time. The "Group 1" veggies—celery, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, eggplant, winter squash, thick chunks of asparagus, and even thinly sliced potatoes—go in first and get cooked until partly done. Then the "Group 2" veggies—mushrooms, peppers, summer squash, zucchini, and thin pieces of asparagus"—get added to the skillet and cooked until everything is nearly done, and finally the "Group 3" veggies—tender greens, scallions, and bean sprouts—go in for just a few seconds before you turn off the heat. She also recommends using very high heat and keeping the veggies moving constantly so they don't burn.

In addition to the veggies, Brian likes to throw in some cubed, fried tofu to give the stir-fry more substance, and a savory sauce of his own invention to give it more flavor. So his stir-fry protocol, from start to finish, goes like this:

1. Cook 1 cup white rice in the pressure cooker.
2. Cut up all the veggies. For this particular stir-fry he used 6 oz. broccoli, cut into florets; 3 oz. organic mushrooms, chopped; 8 oz. cabbage, shredded; and 2 scallions, diced.
3. Prepare tofu cubes. Briefly press 8 oz. firm tofu to remove excess water, then cut into small cubes. Toss gently with 1 Tbsp soy sauce. Heat 2 Tbsp canola oil on high heat in a large skillet. Add tofu and fry until browned, turning cubes often. Remove from skillet and set aside.
4. Prepare stir fry sauce. Crush 4 cloves garlic, then combine together with 1/2 Tbsp sesame oil, 2 Tbsp sugar, 3 Tbsp soy sauce, and 1/2 Tbsp corn starch. Whisk well to combine and set aside.
5. Heat the same oil used for the tofu back up to high heat to cook the veggies. Add the toughest veggies first and work your way up. (In this case, Brian cooked the broccoli for 2 minutes, then added the mushrooms and cooked them until they started to lose water, and finally threw in the cabbage for another 5 minutes.)
6. Add cubed tofu to veggie mixture. Remove from heat, add sauce, and sprinkle on scallions. Mix and serve with rice.

The cost for this exact version of the stir fry, by my calculations, is about $2.74, including the rice. The priciest ingredients are the broccoli (75 cents), mushrooms (47 cents), tofu (44 cents), and cabbage (34 cents). It should provide us with a dinner for us both and two lunches, so that's about 69 cents a serving.

However, the whole point of this recipe is that you don't actually have to go out and buy a specific ingredients for it: you can make it with whatever you have on hand. So it would be quite easy to make this dish for even less, using whatever veggies you were able to pick up on sale. In the past, we've found broccoli for $1 a pound, mushrooms for $1.60 a pound, and cabbage for as little as 15 cents a pound; if we were ever able to score all these deals in one week, we could make a stir-fry identical to this one for $1.93, less than 50 cents per serving. And if we only found one good deal, we could just substitute more of whatever happened to be cheap that week and leave out the other stuff.

Better still, this recipe is useful for using up leftover food that you have no other use for—food that would just moulder away in your fridge if you didn't have this dish to use it up. If you make the recipe in this way, you can argue, the veggies cost nothing at all; you're merely reclaiming food that would otherwise go to waste. And a recipe that turns waste into healthy, tasty food is about as ecofrugal as you can get.

Thrift Week 2018, Day Five: Cheesy Rice Casserole

On the fifth day of Thrift Week, my husband made for me...a casserole that's been a staple meal of ours since we discovered it in the pages of Peg Bracken's iconic I Hate to Cook Book. This book is over 50 years old, and it's consequently somewhat dated in both its social and culinary mores; nonetheless, it's the only cookbook I regularly reread for sheer entertainment. Peg Bracken's approach to cooking is to get it over with as painlessly as possible, and she intersperses the recipes with lots of amusing little tips and anecdotes about how to do it. For instance, in the "Last-Minute Suppers" section, she features a recipe she calls "Ragtime Tuna" (which is nothing but layers of canned tuna and canned mac-and-cheese, topped with extra cheese and baked) with the note: "You won't believe this, but I first tasted this dish at an extremely fancy buffet, knee deep in baby brown orchids. This dish is probably why they could afford the baby brown orchids. Anyway, the hostess told me how she did it, and to keep it to myself, which proves you can't trust anybody these days."

This particular casserole comes from the last chapter, "Good Cooksmanship," in which Bracken notes the importance of having a Specialty. In the event that you someday "wake up and find yourself a celebrity," she assures readers, your Kitchen Specialty will be the second thing the reporters ask you for. (The first, apparently, is your measurements. I told you the book was dated.) For those who don't happen to have a specialty already, Bracken offers up several ready-made recipes that are suitable for the purpose. The last of these, which she calls "Hellzapoppin' Cheese Rice," is a favorite with us because it's easy to make and doesn't call for anything we don't habitually have in the house. Bracken says it's "good by itself and tremendous with barbecued steak, chicken, or chops," but we've never seen any need to add anything to it; with protein, veggies, and grain all in one dish, it makes a perfectly good stand-alone meal.

Since we first tried it, we've made a couple of changes to Bracken's original recipe. The first was the cutesy name, which we shortened to "Cheesy Rice Casserole" because it sounds less, well, cheesy. The second was the proportions. Brian's version makes a slightly smaller batch than Bracken's original—about 3/4 of the recipe, which is enough for a dinner and a couple of lunches—and he has cut down both the butter and the cheese to make it lighter. So our version, which I deem different enough from the original to publish here, looks like this:

Cheesy Rice Casserole 

Beat 3 eggs until light, then add 3/4 c. milk, 1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce, 1 tsp. salt, 1 pinch dried thyme, 1 pinch dried marjoram, and 1/2 onion, chopped fine. Fold in 1/2 pound chopped, cooked frozen spinach, 1/3 pound grated sharp cheddar, and 3 cups cooked rice, and pour it all into a greased casserole dish. Melt 2 Tbsp. butter and pour over top. Bake at 375°F for about half an hour.

We made this dish on the first day of our Reverse SNAP Challenge in 2014, and at that time I calculated its cost at $3.30. Checking over my price book now, I find this is still about accurate. The priciest ingredients are the cheese (about $3 a pound on sale), spinach ($1.99 a pound for the organic stuff from Trader Joe's) and eggs (we last paid $3 a dozen for organic, Certified Humane eggs at H-Mart). If you made do with conventional spinach and eggs, it would shave about a dollar from the price.

Tonight, we ate about half this casserole, leaving the rest for lunches, so I'm estimating we get about 4 servings out of it. That makes the cost per serving about 83 cents, which is more than the other recipes we've featured during Thrift Week, but still thrifty by any reasonable standard.

Thrift Week 2018, Day Four: Brian's Basic Brown Bread

So far, my food-based Thrift Week celebration has focused strictly on dinner recipes—which also provide leftovers that double as lunches. But if we're really going to cover a full week of frugal eating, we also need to talk about breakfast. What does a frugal morning meal look like?

In my case, it's almost always the same thing: a cup of cocoa and a couple of pieces of toast. The easiest way to make this breakfast would be to grab a loaf of bread from the store, which has around 20 slices, for about $2.50. That comes to a quarter for two slices; a bit of margarine or butter adds another penny or two. Add a packet of Swiss Miss, and the total comes to around 37 cents, which is not bad at all for a whole meal.

However, at our house, we prefer to cook from scratch, which is usually tastier as well as cheaper. We used to make all our bread in a bread machine, until it died a tragic death back in 2013. Rather than replace it, Brian decided to try making our bread the old-fashioned way, actually kneading it by hand. This requires a little more planning, since it takes the better part of a day to get from flour to finished loaf, but most of that is just rising time; the only hands-on part is the kneading, and Brian actually seems to find that a soothing activity.

So Brian now makes all our bread, using a variety of recipes—some from books, others of his own invention, such as Granola Bread and Mega-Fiber Health Bread. He'll whip up one of these special breads if I request it, but his default loaf is an unadorned whole-wheat bread that I've dubbed

Brian's Basic Brown Bread 

1. Dissolve 4 tsp. yeast in 1 3/4 c. warm (not hot) water.
2. Combine this in a large bowl with 3 1/2 c. whole-wheat flour, 1/4 c. honey (or brown sugar), 2 tsp. salt, 3 Tbsp. unsalted butter (or other oil), 1/2 c. wheat bran, and 2 Tbsp. wheat gluten. (You can leave out this ingredient, but the bread will rise much better with it.)
3. Knead the dough for 10 minutes.
4. Cover and allow to rise in a warm, moist environment for about an hour, or until the dough has roughly doubled in size. Brian usually puts it in the oven (switched off) with a damp cloth over top of the bowl and a pan of hot water underneath.
5. Punch down the dough, knead it again briefly, and divide it up into two loaf pans.
6. Return the pans to the warm, moist area and let the dough rise again until it puffs over the top of the pans.
7. Bake at 375°F for half an hour.

The ingredients for this bread cost us $1.92. We get three of the ingredients from the bulk bins at the Whole Earth Center: wheat bran ($1.28 per pound), wheat gluten ($5.46 per pound), and yeast ($4.59 per pound). We most recently bought whole-wheat flour and butter at the Shop-Rite: $2.99 for a 5-pound bag of flour, $1.99 for a pound of butter. The honey came from Costco, at an impressive price of $11.99 for a massive 5-pound jar, and the salt probably cost a penny or less. That $1.92 makes two loaves, and we probably get 15 slices from each loaf, so my two daily slices cost around 13 cents.

For my morning cocoa, however, we actually pay more by cooking from scratch. That's because sugar and cocoa are two of the ingredients I always insist on buying organic, since conventional methods of growing them are so damaging to the environment. Fortunately, we have currently found sources for both that, while still pricier than their conventional equivalents, are quite a bit cheaper than what we've paid in the past. First, we got a 10-pound sack of organic sugar at Costco for just $7.99, or around 80 cents a pound—less than half what we used to pay at Trader Joe's. And then we discovered a half-pound bag of organic, Fair Trade "cacao powder" at Trader Joe's for $3.99, which is noticeably less than the $10.65 per pound we used to pay (including shipping) to buy our cocoa by the pound from Dean's Beans. (Yes, I'm aware that raw cacao powder is not the same thing as cocoa powder, which is heated to high temperatures to soften its bitter flavor, but the stuff from TJ's isn't labeled as raw cacao. As far as I can tell, it's just cocoa that hasn't been Dutch-processed, which is fine by me, since I think that process just emasculates the flavor.)

I make my cocoa with 1 teaspoon of organic, Fair Trade cocoa powder (4 cents), 1 teaspoon of organic sugar (1 cent), half a packet of artificial sweetener just to cut the sugar content a bit (less than 1 cent), a cup of skim milk (14 cents, since we got a really good deal on that at Costco as well), and a few drops of our homemade vanilla extract (about 1 cent, as I've estimated it costs about 50 cents per ounce to make). That's 21 cents per cup, while Swiss Miss packets bought in bulk cost only around 10 cents apiece. But my homemade stuff is lower in sugar, richer in nutrients, and, if I do say so myself, a lot tastier. I consider the extra 11 cents per cup to be money well spent.

So, all told, my morning breakfast costs around 35 cents: 13 for the bread, 11 for the cocoa, and 1 for a teaspoon or so of Blue Bonnet spread, our preferred margarine. And with all that nice, healthy fiber in the homemade bread, it's satisfying enough to keep me going until lunchtime. But if you can't be bothered to make your own bread and cocoa, you can make this same breakfast with store-bought ingredients, and the cost will be about the same.

By the way, the crossword puzzle shown at left in the photo is also part of my complete breakfast. It's the daily cryptic crossword from Best For Puzzles, which you can pick up here. Be warned that this is a British-style puzzle, so the clues are very different from what Americans are used to. If you've never solved a cryptic crossword before, check out this tutorial first. And be aware that you may encounter answers, like British TV shows or cities, that aren't familiar to most Yanks.

Thrift Week 2018, Day Three: Skillet Kugel

For Day Three of our Thrift Week menu, Brian prepared a recipe of his own invention: Skillet Kugel, which appeared as my Recipe of the Month in September 2014. He created this dish a few years back, adapting the potato kugel recipe from The Clueless Vegetarian to make it both lighter and quicker to prepare. Since then, it's become one of our go-to-recipes because, first of all, we both like it, and second, it's easy to make with ingredients we always have on hand: potatoes, onions (or leeks if we happen to have any), eggs, oil, flour, and salt. So if we're ever stumped for a dinner recipe, we can always trot out this old standby.

We generally serve this dish accompanied by frozen peas and applesauce, which Brian has become adept at making in the pressure cooker. The recipe for this is so simple it hardly deserves the name, but if you want to try it, here's how:

1. Peel and core 2 large apples and cut them into small pieces. (We do this with an old-fashioned apple peeling machine like this.)
2. Load the pieces in the pressure cooker with a tablespoon or two of water.
3. Cook for 6 minutes at full pressure.

So, for this complete meal, the ingredients and their costs were:

• 3 potatoes (about 1 pound): about 25 cents. Our most recent purchases of potatoes were 5 pounds for $1.50 and 10 pounds for $2, so it works out to 25 cents a pound on average.
• 1/3 onion: about 3 cents, from the bag we bought at the H-Mart.
• 2 Tbsp. cooking oil: about 6 cents. We generally pay either $1.80 per quart for canola oil at Aldi, or $2 per quart at Shop-Rite.
• 2 Tbsp. flour: about 2 cents. (We last paid $1.81 for a 5-pound bag at Aldi.)
• 2 large eggs: 50 cents. This is the priciest ingredient, since we only buy organic, Certified Humane eggs. We last bought these for $3 a dozen at H-Mart. If you made it with conventional eggs, you could cut the cost by around 34 cents.
• 1 tsp. salt: less than a penny.
• 2 apples (12 ounces): about 25 cents. We got a ridiculously good deal on apples at Aldi recently: 99 cents for 3 lbs. Normally we pay more like a dollar a pound, which would triple the price of this ingredient.
• 3 ounces frozen peas: about 37 cents. We buy the organic frozen peas from Trader Joe's for $1.99 a pound, so once again, you could cut this price nearly in half by buying conventional, store-brand peas.

That comes to $1.48 total for roughly four meals: one dinner for the two of us, and leftovers for two lunches. That's just 37 cents for each meal. However, we usually don't have any peas left over, so we end up having to supplement the lunch a little bit - maybe with another piece of fruit. So, factoring that in, it might average out to as much as 50 cents a meal, which is still pretty darn good. And pretty darn tasty, too.

Thrift Week 2018, Day Two: Pasta Fagioli

One of the biggest problems with being born in January is that you're always celebrating your birthday in freezing cold weather. This kind of limits the options for entertainment, and even food. Cake is all right in any weather, but ice cream is a lot less appealing when the temperature is below 30 degrees.

However, there is one food that's always welcome in winter: hot soup. So for Day Two of my edible Thrift Week, Brian is cooking up another of our favorite ecofrugal soups, Pasta Fagioli. This is sometimes spelled as "Pasta e Fagioli," which is Italian for "pasta and beans"; since the recipe comes from the south of Italy, it's pronounced with a slight slur, making it more like "Pasta Fazool."

There are lots of versions of this dish, using different types of pasta, beans, and veggies, but our favorite recipe comes from The Clueless Vegetarian, one of our go-to vegetarian cookbooks (which was featured in my 2014 Thrift Week celebration). This version uses two types of beans: white kidney beans, which are mashed up with a fork—liquid and all—to thicken the broth into something with more the consistency of a sauce, and red kidney beans, which are drained and left whole. The cookbook calls the result "A cross between a soup and a pasta. Let's not nitpick. Whatever it is, it's good." And it is: rich and savory, with the thick broth/sauce and the chewy chunks of bean, veggie, and pasta making a pleasing combination of textures.

The cookbook goes on to say this soup is "perfect accompanied by Parmesan Onion Bread," but we find it makes a perfectly satisfying meal all on its own. The recipe makes a nice, big potful—enough for a dinner and two lunches for the two of us. And, according to my calculations, it costs us only $2.33:

• 2 Tbsp olive oil: 15 cents (using olive oil from Costco, which is only $4.73 per quart)
• 1 carrot (organic): about 15 cents ($1.75 per pound at the Whole Earth Center)
• 1 stalk celery (conventional): maybe 5 cents? It's so cheap I've never bothered to price it out.
• 1 onion: about 10 cents ($1.49 for a 2-pound bag at H-Mart)
• 2 garlic cloves: about 4 cents ($1.29 for a sleeve of 5 heads at H-Mart)
• 5 cups vegetable broth: about 40 cents. This would be cheaper if we used our homemade stock, but we prefer to prepare it with our favorite Vegetable Soup Base from Penzey's, which gives the soup tons of flavor. Brian uses about 1 1/2 teaspoons of the soup base to 5 cups of water, and that's plenty.
• 1 can each red and white kidney beans: $1.00. We got these on sale at Shop-Rite during their recent "Can-Can Sale"; if we made the dish with cooked dry beans, it would be even cheaper.
• 1 cup small pasta: about 44 cents. We usually make it with orzo, which is about 2 1/4 cups to the pound; we can get it for about $1 a pound on sale.
• Salt and pepper to taste: With the Penzey's stock, we don't really need to add any other seasoning.

So that's $2.33 for six servings, or less than 40 cents per serving, making this even cheaper than the mushroom barley soup. And on a cold night like this, it's certainly a meal you'll have no complaints about.

Thrift Week 2018: The Edible Edition

Over the years, I've covered a variety of different topics for Thrift Week. I've looked at the seven top items in a typical household budget; explored seven different things you can do to help the environment; discussed seven essential websites and seven essential books for the ecofrugal; and taken a tour of my area thrift shops. And as 2017 was drawing to a close and I was casting about for an idea for this year's Thrift Week, I started worrying that maybe I'd just run out of ideas.

However, it eventually occurred to me that there's one perennial topic I never grow tired of discussing in this blog's pages: food. I've got far more articles devoted to food than any other subject, currently numbering 219 out of the nearly 1,000 articles on the site. Over the years, I've shared (virtually, at least) hundreds of meals with you guys, including all my Fruit and Veggie of the Month picks from the past five years and numerous recipes of Brian's own invention, from his hearty bluefish chowder to his granola bread and butternut squash pizza.

So I decided maybe the appropriate way to handle Thrift Week this year would be to cover seven of our favorite ecofrugal recipes. Brian has agreed to make a different dish each night, as needed, so I can get photos of them, and I'll present you with the actual recipes if I can.

As it happens, however, he didn't need to do anything special tonight, because one of our ecofrugal staples was already sitting in the fridge. Last weekend, he'd whipped up a big batch of our favorite Mushroom-Barley Soup, and we still had some left over. So I ate a bowlful of this for lunch, marking the start of my Week of Ecofrugal Eating.

Those of you who were around when I did the One Harvest challenge back in 2013 have heard me mention this recipe before. It was one of the ecofrugal homemade meals I matched up against the food packages offered by One Harvest to see which was more cost-effective, and it helped contribute to our ecofrugal menu's triumph in the challenge. (The prices for the two were essentially identical, but that's because ours was made largely with organic ingredients; if you bought everything as cheaply as possible, our menu would have been the clear winner.)

You can find a recipe for mushroom-barley soup in just about any vegetarian cookbook, but the one we use comes from Vegetariana by Nava Atlas—a whimsical collection in which recipes are interspersed with drawings, quotations, and interesting facts about food. In a comment on the 2013 post, I was asked for the recipe, so at the risk of copyright infringement, I'll repeat it here:

Chop 1 large onion and 2 large celery stalks, and slice 1 large carrot. Put into a large soup pot with 3/4 c. raw barley, 2 bay leaves, 2 Tbsp. margarine, 1 tsp. dried dill, 1 tsp. seasoned salt, 1/2 tsp. dried summer savory, salt and pepper to taste, and 6 c. vegetable stock or water. Bring to a boil and simmer, covered, over moderately low heat for 30 minutes. Coarsely chop 10-12 oz. white mushrooms and add to pot. Simmer 20 minutes more, or until veggies are tender. Stir in enough low-fat milk or soy milk (or use skim milk, as we do) to achieve a slightly thick consistency. Let stand 30 minutes off the heat before serving. Serves 6 to 8. This soup will thicken quite a bit if refrigerated; when reheating, add more milk or stock as needed and adjust the seasoning.

The soup is hearty, nourishing, and tasty, packed with veggies and whole grains—all the stuff doctors (well, most of them, anyway) want you to eat more of. And, using the ingredients from our local stores, it only costs $2.71 per pot:

• 10 oz. organic mushrooms: $1.56 ($2.49 per pound at the Whole Earth Center)
• 3/4 c. barley: $.50 ($1 per bag at Stop & Shop)
• 2 onions: about $.20 ($1.49 for a 2-pound bag at H-Mart)
• 1 organic carrot: about $.15 ($1.75 per pound at the Whole Earth Center)
• celery, garlic, and spices: roughly $.30
• veggie stock: free, because we make our own from vegetable scraps we store in the freezer

We usually serve this with homemade biscuits, which add another 75 cents or so for flour, milk, butter, baking powder, and salt. That brings the total cost of the meal to $3.46, and it provides at least six meals' worth of food: one dinner and two lunches for each of us. That comes to about 58 cents per serving—a price that's pretty hard to beat for a satisfying meal.

However, in the week to come, I will try, and we'll see if some of our other ecofrugal favorites can top this recipe for value, or at least come close. Stay tuned for the next day's menu.

Money Crashers: 5 new articles

After a long hiatus—nearly three months—Money Crashers has worked its way through a backlog and started getting some of my articles up on the site again. In the past week, five of my articles have gone live.

Unfortunately, I didn't find out about any of them until today, since the site doesn't have any way of notifying me when an article is published. And since Thrift Week starts today, and I'll be busy all week posting on that topic, I can't take the time to put up a post for each of these articles individually, the way I usually like to.

So I'm just going to make one quick post here covering all these new articles in a bunch, with just a little short blurb for each one. Perhaps later, when Thrift Week is over, I can take the time to talk about some of these topics in more detail, since I think some of them are particularly germane to the blog's ecofrugal focus.

What is Hygge? 12 Ways to Embrace this Frugal Danish Lifestyle
The first to be published is one that I wrote last August and has been waiting until now to be published. That's okay, though, because winter is actually a more appropriate time for it. It's about the Danish concept of hygge, which, as you may know, is a hot trend right now in the English-speaking world. (Well, at least it was last year. The topic may have peaked by now.) The word hygge has no exact English translation; the closest word would be "coziness," but it actually means a lot more than that, embodying the ideas of companionship, comfort, simplicity, relaxation, and harmony with nature, all in one. In other words, it's the perfect ecofrugal lifestyle. In fact, when I first read about this "trendy" topic last year, I was amazed to discover that for once in my life, I was actually ahead of the curve. I've been doing this all my life, only I never knew there was a name for it.

To learn more about what hygge means, what makes it ecofrugal, and how to jump on the hygge bandwagon, check out the article.

Are Monthly Subscription Boxes Worth It? Costs, Pros & Cons
Article #2 deals with another hot and growing trend: monthly subscription boxes. These days, it seems, you can have nearly anything—clothing, makeup, food, books, games, pet toys—delivered to your door in a box every month. But does shopping this way really make sense? In the article, I explore the ins and outs of subscription boxes: what kinds are available, what they cost, their pros and cons, and how to decide whether they're a good deal for you.

Home Security Scams – How to Protect Yourself From Fake Services
Article #3 is about home security scams—something I only learned existed while working on another scam-related article. Apparently, there are shady home security companies out there that will come to your door and try to trick you into buying security products and services that are overpriced at best, completely useless at worst. In this article, I explain how to spot these home security scams and what you can do to protect yourself. Then, for those who still feel the need of some protection, I finish with some pointers on choosing a legitimate security company.

How Does Advertising Influence People’s Purchases?
Here's one I was rather proud of. It explores some of the most common techniques advertisers use to lure you into buying their products, complete with some highly successful examples of each one—such as the "I'm a Pepper" ads for the bandwagon technique, or the "Be Like Mike" campaign for Gatorade. (Don't worry, I also covered other examples that don't involve beverages.) I analyze six advertising strategies (fear, bandwagon, sex appeal, values, celebrity endorsements, and humor), explain why they work on us, and offer tips on inoculating yourself against their insidious messages.

12 Cheap Luxuries to Help Avoid Frugal Fatigue
Finally, another topic that's particularly important for us ecofrugal folks: frugal fatigue. For those not familiar with the term, this is what happens when you've been on a tight budget so long that eventually you crack under the strain and start spending willy-nilly, like a celery-maddened dieter scarfing down a whole box of chocolates.

In the piece, I first discuss the causes of frugal fatigue and how to recognize the symptoms. Then I offer my formula for heading off this ailment: treating yourself regularly to small luxuries that fit into your budget, so you never feel deprived. The bulk of the article covers ideas for treats it's possible to enjoy on a tight budget, such as good coffee, fresh flowers, and fancy toiletries.


That's it for the five new articles. I hope, if all goes well, that from here on out my pieces will be published on a somewhat more regular schedule, and I'll be able to post about them here as they pop up, rather than having to cover them in a clump like this.

Recipe of the Month: Veggie Macaroni and Cheese

It's become a yearly tradition for me and Brian, when we go out to visit his folks for Christmas, to make a trip to the local Half Price Books. This is a chain we don't have out here in Jersey, which is a pity, because it carries books on all manner of topics, along with some new and used CDs and DVDs, at prices well below Barnes and Noble's. Sometimes we come home with an armful of new books, other times we just browse, but it's always an enjoyable outing.

On this occasion, we picked up only one new book for ourselves: the Fix-It and Forget-It Vegetarian Cookbook. Unlike most cookbooks in the Fix-It and Forget-It series, this one isn't limited to recipes for the slow cooker; instead, it boasts "565 Delicious Slow-Cooker, Stove-Top, Oven, and Salad Recipes, plus 50 Suggested Menus"—all of them meatless. And since it includes one whole section devoted solely to vegetables and fruits, I thought it would offer a fertile field of possible Recipes of the Month for 2018.

We decided to start off with a simple one: Veggie Macaroni and Cheese, listed in the pasta section. It's pretty much just a basic baked mac-and-cheese recipe, but with lightly cooked broccoli and cauliflower florets and sliced carrots and celery added to the macaroni before baking. There's also a sautéed onion and a spoonful of Dijon mustard added to the cheese sauce, as well as a sprinkling of paprika on top, which I thought would give the dish a bit more interest than the Kraft packaged variety I grew up with. And since we didn't happen to have any macaroni on hand, we decided to make the dish with penne, which we figured would make it a bit more sophisticated.

When the dish came out of the oven, it certainly looked a lot more appealing than basic macaroni and cheese: a mass of pasta swimming in rich, golden cheese sauce, dotted with colorful veggies, and dusted with russet-brown paprika. Unfortunately, its flavor wasn't quite as impressive. I like pasta with veggies, and I like pasta with cheese sauce, but these two great tastes just didn't taste great together. It seemed like the veggies, which would probably have tasted just fine with the pasta in a simple garlic-and-oil sauce, didn't really harmonize with the mustard-laced cheese sauce. It was perfectly edible, but it just wasn't inspiring. And since fresh cauliflower turns out to be quite expensive to buy in January, it wasn't really the most frugal choice to start off the year, either.

However, trying this dish wasn't a complete waste of time. As it happens, we already have a recipe for a healthier version of macaroni and cheese that we quite like: it also contains cauliflower, but pureed and mixed in with the cheese sauce. This doesn't noticeably affect the flavor, but it makes the sauce extra thick and creamy, as well as giving it a nice nutritional boost. The only problem with the dish is that it's a trifle bland. We usually sprinkle it with a little Penzey's Mural of Flavor to kick the flavor up a notch, but after trying this new recipe, I'm inclined to think that maybe what it really needs is a little mustard stirred into the sauce—and perhaps a dash of paprika on top to give it color and zest. So we'll probably add those modifications the next time we make our usual mac-and-cheese dish, and see if they take it from good to great.

In the meantime, we've already picked out another recipe to try from our new cookbook: Quinoa with Broccoli and Hoisin Sauce. This one looks a lot lighter and healthier, since it has protein-packed quinoa instead of pasta and isn't loaded with cheese. We picked up the ingredients for this today, and if it turns out well, we'll have a new recipe to add to our repertoire of dishes we can serve to gluten-free guests.

Household Hacks: How we're keeping (somewhat) warm

Here on the East Coast—and in many other parts of the country as well—we are now about two weeks into a deep and prolonged cold snap. Ever since Christmas, we have not seen outdoor temperatures over 20 degrees, either here in Jersey or back at my in-laws' place in Indiana. Every day the news reports new record low temperatures somewhere in the country. Meteorologists are amusing themselves by making up new and terrifying terms, like "bomb cyclone," to describe the brutal weather conditions.

In the face of the bitter cold outside, our little boiler is struggling to keep up. Ever since we got home, the thermostat has been set to 68 degrees 24/7 (rather than our usual regimen of 67 by day and 56 by night), and we're still lucky if the indoor temperature ever creeps above 65. So we've been using a variety of tricks to keep ourselves warm. If you're also stuck shivering at home, perhaps some of them will help you as well.

Winter Warmer #1: Layers—lots of layers.

As I type this, I am wearing a total of four layers of clothing: a turtleneck, a pullover, a fleece zip-up that I picked up at Goodwill over Christmas vacation, and my wearable blanket over that. I also have fleece-lined leggings on under my trousers, two pairs of socks under my fuzzy slippers, and a hat. The only part of me I don't have under wraps is my hands, since I can't manage to type with gloves on. (Look, I['ll show you. See what; I[ mean>?")

Winter Warmer #2: Baking.

In the summertime, we tend to choose meals that we can prepare without heating up the kitchen too much. We grill, eat cold salads, or use the Crock-Pot and the pressure cooker, and avoid running the oven as much as possible. During this cold snap, we've switched to the opposite strategy, running the oven as much as possible. In the past week, Brian has baked bread, apple crisp, cookies, and lasagna, and after each recipe he leaves the oven door open to spill as much of that heat into the kitchen as possible.

Winter Warmer #3: The pressure space-heater.

An old trick for warming up the house is to heat up a pot of water on the stove. As it slowly cools, its stored heat will transfer to the air (along with moisture, which will make it feel warmer). The problem is, if the pot stays on the stove, only the kitchen will get noticeably warmer. Brian had the thought that if he could heat a pot and then move it into whichever room we happened to be using, it would serve as a little space heater, radiating warmth in our immediate surroundings. However, he was reluctant to try this with our big stock pot for fear of spilling the water.

The solution he hit on was to use the pressure cooker instead. Every day this week, he has put the pressure cooker on to boil with nothing in it but water. Once it comes up to full pressure, he lets it vent, then moves it to a hot pad atop my desk, where it gently radiates heat as I work. I have to be careful not to touch the hot pot early in the day, but by evening it's completely cool to the touch (although even then, we've found the water inside is still slightly warm). He's also tried setting the hot pot on the coffee table as we watch TV in the evenings, where we can put up our feet next to it.

Winter Warmer #4: Hot tea.

While the pressure-cooker heater is helping to heat my outside, I also warm myself from the inside out by sipping hot tea throughout the day. This may sound confusing if you've heard that sipping hot drinks in hot weather is actually cooling, but as this article from the Guardian explains, that's because their heat stimulates increased sweating (which is why this trick doesn't really work in humid climates). On a day like this, there's no way a cup of tea will be enough to cause sweating, so its warmth will instead stay in your tummy and help you keep your core temperature up. Plus, holding the hot cup helps keep my exposed hands warm.

Winter Warmer #5: Heavy-duty bedding.

Even with all these warm-up tricks, it's a struggle to keep warm during the day. But at night, we have no problems at all. We stay toasty warm with a combination of fleece sheets and a lightweight comforter from IKEA. When we bought this comforter, we hesitated between two different weights; this one, which was labeled as a "cooler" comforter suitable for warm weather, and a mid-weight one that was slightly pricier. We settled on the cheaper one, figuring that we could keep it on the bed year-round without overheating, and in the winter we could always add another blanket to keep warm.

To our surprise, this "cooler" comforter turned out to be very warm indeed—so warm that we have to remove it entirely in summertime, leaving only the empty duvet cover. Maybe in Sweden it would be comfortable all summer long, but definitely not in New Jersey. And even in winter, it's so warm that we haven't needed to put a blanket on the bed since we bought it. If this is IKEA's idea of a warm-weather comforter, I can hardly imagine how warm their cold-weather ones must be.

We'd probably stay warm enough under this comforter even with plain cotton sheets, but there would still be those few minutes of unpleasant chill upon first sliding between them. Even flannel ones have a fairly smooth surface that feels cold to the touch at first. By contrast, our fleece sheets, with their high, fluffy loft, feel as warm as blankets against our skin. Tucked in between these, with our warm sweat pants on and our plush comforter over top, we stay snug as the proverbial bug all night long. The only difficult part is getting out of bed when the alarm goes off.


Fortunately, the cold spell is scheduled to break at last on Tuesday, with temperatures soaring up to a balmy 40 degrees. At that point, we'll be able to venture outside again during the daytime and finally give our boiler a break at night. But I'll be filing away these frugal winter-warmth tricks for future reference, since both extreme lows and extreme highs seem to be part of the new normal.