Thrift Week 2024: Purchases that have paid for themselves

Since last year's abbreviated Thrift Week celebration focused on the least ecofrugal products money can buy, I thought it would be only fair for this year's to go the other way and look at some of the most ecofrugal products. Each day, I'll be looking at one specific purchase Brian and I have made that has paid for itself many times over. And I'm starting it off with one of the first purchases I ever discussed here on the blog: our pressure cooker.

When we bought this back in late 2011, it was kind of an impulse purchase. While visiting Brian's folks for Christmas, we saw an ad in the paper for a 5-quart pressure cooker on sale for $20 at J.C. Penney. On top of that, there was a $10-off coupon that reduced the net price to just $10. Even then, we came very close to passing it up, since we didn't "need" it, but we decided $10 wasn't too much to risk on a gadget that might be able to help us with a wide variety of cooking tasks.

Well, in the 12 years since, we have used this little pressure cooker countless times and gotten far more than our $10 worth out of it. In 2017, I was even inspired to write an article for Money Crashers about all the ways it has saved us money. For instance:

• It saves energy on cooking. It can make all kinds of things—rice, potatoes, barley, quinoa—much faster than a regular pot on the stove, reducing the amount of gas we need to burn for cooking. And the faster cooking time also means we heat up the kitchen less in the summertime.
• It helps us use dry beans. We used to use a lot of canned beans because dry beans, though cheaper, were too much hassle. In addition to requiring an overnight soaking, they needed over an hour of cooking to get them tender enough to eat—far more time than we could spare most nights. Now, we can soak the beans right in the pressure cooker in the morning, turn it on in the evening, and have them ready to use in as little as half an hour. Besides being cheaper, the dry beans produce far less packaging waste, and they take up a lot less room in the pantry.
• It makes homemade applesauce. Another product we used to buy fairly regularly was applesauce to go with potato kugel and other potato-based dishes. Not only did this produce a lot of packaging waste, but often the applesauce itself would start to grow fuzzy before we'd finished the jar. Now, with the help of our trusty pressure cooker, we just whip up a fresh batch of applesauce to go with every kugel. Pound for pound, this homemade stuff isn't necessarily cheaper than the kind in a jar, but it's definitely cheaper than buying a whole jar and having to discard half of it. And it tastes much, much better, even when it's made with the cheapest apples the store has to offer.
• 
  It doubles as a space heater. On cold winter days, Brian often fills up the pressure cooker with plain water in the morning and lets it come to a boil. Then he moves it to the office, where it sits on a trivet atop my desk and radiates heat throughout the day. It takes all day to cool off fully and allows me to stay comfortable without turning up the heat.
  

I'm so attached to this kitchen gadget that if we ever replace our gas stove with an induction model, we'll have to buy an adapter plate so we can keep using it. We could find ways to replace or get along without most of our non-ferrous cookware—our aluminum saucepans, our double boiler, even our big stock pot—but giving up the pressure cooker would be a deal-breaker.