Coupon surprises (or, how to make sure you actually make money with a moneymaker coupon)

Brian and I aren't regular couponers. We don't subscribe to a daily newspaper, so our only sources of coupons are the free "SmartSource" packets that come with our weekly grocery fliers and the load-to-card offers I get by e-mail from Stop&Shop, and most of these offers are for products we really have no use for. So it's fairly unusual for us to use any coupons at all on a shopping trip, and still more rare for us to score the kind of shopping coup that extreme couponers like to brag about, when the stars align and you can combine sales, coupons, and rebates to walk out with a whole cart full of groceries for five bucks.

Instead, Brian and I are what you might call couponers of opportunity. We don't use coupons regularly, but when a special deal falls into our laps, we don't hesitate to snap it up. The upside of this is, because we're not used to getting this sort of deal regularly, it always seems that much more magical when it happens. The downside is, since we're not in the habit of scoring these magical deals, we don't always know how to turn them to the best possible advantage.

To see what I mean, consider two recent trips Brian and I made to Stop&Shop. The first time, we went there to take advantage of a fantastic sale on brownie mix (which we use regularly to bake for the Minstrel concert series): $1 per box, with a $5 discount when you buy 10 boxes. While we were there, we decided to also cash in a coupon I had for a free box of Ronzoni "Thick and Hearty" pasta. And while we were picking this up, we noticed that Ronzoni was on sale for 69 cents a box, so we decided to grab a second box. Loading this all onto the checkout counter, we mentally calculating that our total bill should come to $5.69; $5 for all the brownie mix and $.69 for the one box of pasta that wasn't free. But to our surprise, the bill was actually just $5.13. What was going on?

After puzzling over the various prices and discount notations on the bill, I finally figured it out; the pasta was on sale for $.69 a box, so the two boxes we bought rang up at $1.38. But then, since we had a coupon entitling us to one free box, the register deducted the full price of the Ronzoni Thick and Hearty: $1.25. So this deal turned out to be what couponistas call a "moneymaker": the amount we got back on our $.69 box of pasta was more than we'd actually spent.

Well, needless to say, we were tickled pink with this deal. So the next time I got an offer for a freebie—this time, a free carton of walnut milk—we hastened to the store to snatch it up. While we were there, Brian debated also buying a pound of dry chick peas, but the price—$1.69—seemed a little high to him, so he decided to wait for a sale. We figured we'd just ring up our one item for free and walk out without paying anything.

However, when we got to the checkout, it proved to be not quite so simple. The checker was mystified to see that according to the machine, with our discount, the store actually owed us $1. She ended up having to call over her supervisor, who explained that we'd run up against another of those moneymaker deals: The walnut milk we had a freebie coupon for was currently on sale for $2.99, but the register was trying to deduct the regular price of $3.99.

The supervisor punched in some sort of code, and we finally managed to walk out of the store, plus one carton of walnut milk and minus no money. However, rather than being pleased with this bargain, Brian was kind of annoyed that he hadn't picked up that $1.69 bag of chick peas. If he had, we could have used up our extra $1 in store credit on that, rather than letting it go to waste, and paid only $.69 for the chick peas—a lower price than we're ever likely to find on sale. Plus, would it have made the checkout process a lot less complicated.

I guess the moral of this story is that in future, whenever we cash in one of these freebie coupons, we should always check the current price of the item. If it's on sale, we can guess that our coupon is likely to be a moneymaker and plan out the rest of our purchases to make sure we have something to spend that extra money on. And if that extra item happens to be on sale itself—like, say, a 50-cent box of brownie mix—so much the better.

Plant-based milk experiments: The conclusion

After about a month since my last post on our attempts to become a milk-free household, I figured it was time for an update. And I'll go ahead and lead with the fact that we seem at last to have found a (mostly) satisfactory solution.

The Wholesome Pantry coconut milk from Shop Rite, which I tried right after the Aldi almond milk, was not that solution. I liked it quite well to drink by itself, but it had a very pronounced coconut flavor—much stronger than the homemade coconut milk we tried—which wasn't ideal for all applications. The coconut flavor was reasonably compatible with breakfast cocoa, but it tasted a little off in an egg cream, and it would never work in, say, mushroom-barley soup.

So, on our next visit to Trader Joe's, I decided to check out their selections, hoping for something like oat or flax milk to try next. However, their only choices were soy, almond, and coconut (all available in sweetened and unsweetened, vanilla or plain). But the thought crossed my mind that maybe it would be worth trying the almond milk, even though I hadn't liked Aldi's. I figured there had to be some reason this particular "schmilk" was so popular, so maybe the off taste I'd detected in the Aldi milk was just a peculiarity of that particular brand.

Sure enough, the TJ's almond milk tasted much better than Aldi's. Sweet, creamy, and fairly neutral in its flavor, with little to no almond taste, it worked fine in every application we tried: straight up, on cereal, in cocoa, and in egg creams. Brian also tried using some to make his favorite chocolate pudding and found it actually worked better than the skim milk we've been using, giving it a lighter, silkier texture that melted in the mouth. It's a little more expensive than the Aldi almond milk, at $2.69 per half gallon, and the nearest Trader Joe's store isn't quite as close to us as the nearest Aldi, but then again, we pass right by it our regular route to Princeton on Thursdays, so it should be easy to work it into our routine.

However, finding one alternative we liked didn't stop us from trying a couple of others when the opportunity presented itself. For example, last weekend we happened to be low on almond milk at around the same time we were making a run to Shop Rite, so rather than go out of our way to hit the Trader Joe's as well, we decided to pick up a carton of Wholesome Pantry almond milk and see how we liked that. It turned out to have a mild, sweet flavor with a more noticeable almond taste than the TJ's brand, but not enough to make it incompatible with chocolate. So we now have that available as a backup option (that's only a tiny bit pricier) for any time we can't easily make it to Trader Joe's.

Then yesterday, Stop & Shop sent me a coupon for a free half-gallon of Mariani walnut milk, so we gave that a try as well. The only variety they had at our local store was plain and unsweetened, which tasted noticeably different from the almond milks, with no sweetness whatsoever and just the faintest hint of walnut flavor. However, it was pretty neutral-tasting, and we thought it would work fine for both sweet and savory dishes, as long as we adjusted the amount of sugar to compensate. We did discover one odd thing about it, though; when Brian used some in a bread pudding, it took much longer to bake than usual and still never got completely firm. This made us wonder if maybe it was some special property of cow's milk that gave bread pudding its texture, and we might run into the same problem if we made it with almond milk. However, when I checked bread pudding recipes online, I found several that used almond milk, soy milk, or even plain water, so clearly it's not impossible to make a bread pudding that's dairy-free; we'll just have to experiment a bit more.

I should also mention that, the last time we were at Aldi, we decided to grab one more carton of their almond milk just to make 100 percent sure it wouldn't work for us. I thought it was possible that I'd just happened to get a bad batch the first time I tried it, and Brian thought maybe now that my palate had adjusted to almond milk, the Aldi stuff wouldn't taste so odd. But the second carton merely confirmed our results; when we tasted it side-by-side with the Trader Joe's brand, we could both detect a faint but distinct difference. So, while it would have been nice to go with the cheapest almond milk, we're willing to pay an extra 80 cents a carton for the quality we like.

Or perhaps, to be more accurate, I should say the quality I like. Because Brian, it turns out, has found a way to manage his morning breakfast cereal without using any milk—or any kind of packaged "schmilk"—at all.

Now, Brian grew up drinking 2 percent milk, and that's what he used on his cereal before moving in with me. However, he found that he was able to adapt to using skim milk—even powdered milk, when we were using that—without too much difficulty, even though he found the flavor vastly different for drinking. So he reasoned that for his cereal, flavor wasn't a big concern; all he really needed to do was moisten it. So, as an experiment, he decided to try it with plain water instead of milk. This, he found, had a slightly harsh flavor, so he tried "softening" it by adding a bit of salt and sugar. He used about 1/2 teaspoon of salt and 1 tablespoon of sugar to a quart of water, mixing it up in one of our milk bottles and storing it in the fridge.

When he tried this softened water on his cereal, it actually tasted fine, but it looked a little odd. He was used to having a white liquid in the bowl, and the clear liquid was off-putting. So he hit on the idea of taking the walnuts that he normally crumbles onto his morning cereal—about three tablespoons' worth—and soaking them overnight in a little over a cup of the softened water, then grinding up the mixture in the Magic Bullet in the morning. Then he dumps the contents, solids and liquids together, onto his cereal. So, in effect, he's making a homemade walnut milk, except the walnuts aren't costing him anything extra, since he was using them on the cereal anyway. Thus, the only extra expense is the sugar and salt he's adding to the water. It does mean a little bit of extra prep time in the morning, but then again, it saves him the effort of crushing up the walnuts by hand, so it comes out about even.

In conclusion, it looks like we have both managed to find acceptable alternatives to milk for use at home. This does not mean we'll be giving up milk completely; I have no plans to become one of those annoying people who holds up the line at the coffee shop asking what kinds of milk alternatives they have, nor do we want to put friends and family to the trouble of getting special schmilk for us when we come to visit. We're really trying to avoid the stereotype of the obnoxious vegan by practicing our carbon-light diet in a way that doesn't inconvenience anyone else. We're not trying to achieve total ideological purity here, just to shrink our carbon footprint as much as we can reasonably manage.

So, having successfully solved the milk problem, our next challenge is going to be cheese—and this, I suspect, is going to be a lot tougher. After all, making an acceptable milk alternative really isn't that hard; as I noted when I first started experimenting with schmilks back in August, almond milk has been around for centuries. But these plant milks simply don't curdle like cheese. Making a vegan substitute for Parmesan isn't too hard, since it's the flavor and not the texture you need; I've seen lots of recipes for homemade versions made from nutritional yeast with ground nuts, bread crumbs, or straight out of the bottle, all of which would probably serve the purpose. But for something like cheddar or mozzarella, it's much harder to find a substitute. Yes, there are vegan cheese alternatives on the market, but the ones we've seen are either very expensive, not very good, or both. For instance, when we needed to serve a pizza to a vegan friend, we tried Daiya, which is cited on many lists (like  Huffington Post Australia and Spruce Eats) as the best mozzarella alternative out there, and we found it was merely okay. The taste wasn't bad, but it didn't really melt and stretch like the real thing.

Right now, we're thinking our best approach might be just to cut down on cheese, rather than trying to find a substitute for it. We can make recipes that rely on cheese less often, and when we make them, reduce the amount we use. Tonight, for example, Brian whipped up a batch of quesadillas that had maybe a quarter to a third of a pound of shredded Monterey Jack, rather than the half-pound he's been using, spread out across the usual volume of black beans and spinach, and while the texture was certainly different, it wasn't unsatisfying. Since we're not trying to go full vegan, simply cutting back on cheese will allow us to shrink our food footprint while still enjoying a cheesy dish once in a while. And, as a bonus, it will make those cheese-based dishes cheaper, too—which is what ecofrugality is all about.

Recipe of the Month: Brown Butter Butternut Squash Rigatoni

Around the end of October, I finally got around to picking up and going through that month's edition of Savory, the free magazine from Stop & Shop. The last few issues haven't held anything of interest, so my hopes weren't high, but this time I found two recipes that looked worth trying: a mushroom soup and a butternut squash pasta. And since we just happened to have about half a squash in the fridge left over from the pizza we made to celebrate Late Harvest, Brian decided a half recipe of the pasta would be the perfect way to use it up.

Although it sounds fancy, Brown Butter Butternut Squash Rigatoni isn't really hard to make. (Actually, we used penne instead of rigatoni, because that's what we had, but it didn't seem to suffer any from the substitution.) The recipe calls for pre-cut chunks of butternut squash, but using whole, fresh butternut squash isn't that much more work, especially since you have to cut the big chunks into smaller chunks anyway. Nearly much any other kind of winter squash would be a big hassle to peel, but butternut is actually pretty easy, and in this particular case, our squash was already peeled and sliced from the earlier recipe. So it was just a matter of cutting it into cubes and sautéing it in a pan with olive oil and garlic. The most intimidating-sounding part of the recipe, making the brown butter, turned out to be quite simple: just add the butter to the pan with the squash for the last several minutes of cooking. Once everything is tender, pull it off the heat, toss it with the pasta, and top it with salt, pepper and Parmesan.

But although the dish wasn't at all complicated, it definitely wasn't lacking in the flavor department. I'd had all the ingredients in this dish before—pasta, butternut squash, garlic, butter, fresh sage—but putting them all together in this way gave it some kind of indefinable extra flavor that didn't seem to come from any of them. I'd never had anything made with brown butter before, and I'm not sure whether that was what made the taste so subtle and complex, but it definitely seemed to be much more than the sum of the parts.

The other really nice thing about this recipe is that it doesn't call for any ingredients we don't normally have on hand. Pasta, olive oil, garlic, butter, and grated Parmesan are all staples in our house, and fresh sage grows right outside the door year-round (as long as it's not buried under a foot of snow). So this will make a nice, hassle-free addition to our regular repertoire of butternut squash recipes (butternut squash lasagna, pizza, and soufflé). And since it's easy to scale the recipe, we can rely on it any time we need to use up some extra butternut left over from any of those other dishes. It's definitely a keeper.

Money Crashers: How Much Does Your Job Really Pay?

My latest Money Crashers article was inspired largely by two pieces out of Amy Dacyczyn's Complete Tightwad Gazette (all hail the Frugal Zealot!). In the first piece, called "The Time and Money Chart," she talks about how to figure out which money-saving tasks are most worth the effort, based on how much money they save you (and how much satisfaction they provide in other ways) for each hour you spend on them. For instance, she calculates that making two homemade pizzas takes 20 minutes and costs about $2, while having two similar pizzas delivered would cost about $18 (remember, this was nearly 30 years ago). That's a savings of $16 for 20 minutes of work, or $48 per hour, making this a task that's definitely worth the time. Canning pears, by contrast, is a labor-intensive task that saves only $1 per hour of work compared to buying canned pears at the store.

One of the most interesting items in this chart appears at the bottom, where she claims that going back to work as a graphic designer would yield only $3.33 per hour. She reaches this figure by calculating that, while she could nominally earn $15 per hour, after taxes and expenses for child care, wardrobe, and transportation, her pay would be "whittled down to $5 per hour." Moreover, her nominal 40-hour week would really require 60 hours of effort counting "additional dressing and grooming time, dropping kids at a sitter's, the lost lunch hour, commuting and after-work-crash-from-exhaustion time," bringing the actual hourly wage to a mere $3.33, far below many of the other frugal tasks she does every day.

She makes the same point again in the second article, "Trend Reversal," talking about the "nationwide trend" of women dropping out of the work force to stay home with their kids. She cites a study saying that the "percentage of women under age 30 in the workforce peaked in 1989 at 75 percent" and had fallen by 3 to 4 percent by the early nineties, and speculates that this is partly because many mothers don't find it worth their while financially to work. She points to a Labor Department study showing that "about 80 percent of working mothers' incomes is absorbed by job-related expenses such as child care, clothing, transportation, and meals away from home." She also makes a point of noting that this same strategy could work for stay-at-home dads as well, but she couldn't find any data on whether their numbers were increasing.

Putting these two ideas together, I wrote a piece for Money Crashers called "How Much Does Your Job Really Pay? – Calculating Your Hourly Wage," which replaced an older article called "Quit Your Job to Save Money" (which I thought was a bit of an overstatement). The main point of the new article is that, if you're staying at a job you don't like much because you need the money, it's worth calculating how much you actually make for each hour you devote to the job, and how much you could potentially make doing something else you might like more—whether that's a different job, freelance work, or staying home with kids. For anyone who's ever wished they could afford to quit their job, it's worth a read.

Gardeners' Holidays: Late Harvest

Well, production in the garden is slowing down. The tomatoes have tapered off, although we're still getting an occasional pepper (particularly off our new Carmen plant, which has proved to be tremendously productive). We've harvested four butternut squash so far (three Waltham and one Ponca Baby), and there are four more out there left to pick. We still have lima beans to harvest, though not an impressive amount of them. And since there's been no frost yet, all the herbs in our herb bed are still in good shape. In fact, the plants are so big that I've taken to harvesting them for flower arrangements.

The big surprise, for this time of year, is that we're still getting green beans. Normally, the harvest has completely dried up by this time of year—and indeed, the green bean variety we actually bought (Provider) has stopped producing. But somehow, in amongst the Provider beans in the packet, there must have been one rogue bean of another variety. While the Provider is a bush bean that produces compact, clumpy plants, this mystery bean sent out a long tendril that snaked its way right up the trellis where the snow peas used to be, and spread until it covered half the trellis.

Brian didn't know what to make of it, but he let it be, and about a month later—right as the Provider beans were ending—it suddenly started to produce beans. These looked nothing like the beans we'd been getting off the Provider plant, which were long and round in shape; these were much shorter and flatter, and they cooked up nice and tender. And they just kept coming, all throughout the fall: over two pounds of them so far, from just one plant. The last few Brian picked were a little tougher than the rest, so it looks like these mystery beans may be coming to an end, but that's still a pretty impressive harvest for something we never actually intended to plant.

This bean's production and flavor were so impressive, and having fresh green beans all autumn long was such a treat, that we'd like to plant some more of them next year (on purpose this time). The only difficulty is that, since this bean just kind of showed up in our garden, we're not sure what variety it is. We know it's a pole bean, and it produces purplish blossoms and flat, tender, string-free beans that keep coming well into autumn. Based on an article in The Spruce, we guessed it might be a "Climbing French" bean, and the picture on the Seed Savers site looks right, so our best bet would be to buy a packet of these, plant some along with the Provider beans, and hope for the best. Unfortunately, Fedco doesn't carry them, so we'll have to try to pick them up somewhere else, or else move our entire seed order for the year to another company.


For now, we enjoyed what may be the last of these beans for this year on Halloween night, along with a butternut squash pizza with sage and some apple crisp for dessert. The pizza recipe only uses a little bit of squash, so we've got some left over to try a recipe out of the October edition of Savory, which you'll probably be seeing soon as our Recipe of the Month for November.