Avivah Werner

Category: Intentional Spending

  • Canning jam and cherries

    Yesterday I did some canning.  We were getting low on the homemade jam we made back in January, and since I recently found frozen strawberries on sale for $1 lb, it was a good time to make a batch to replenish our jam supplies!

    We used ten pounds of strawberries and 2 cans of juice concentrate, which came out to 14 half pints and 4 pints of jam.  It looks a little runny, but last time I made it, it also looked like that and it then solidified over time.  Hopefully this will do the same – I’ve read that it takes about a week for jam to set.  If it doesn’t, we’ll use it as a thick syrup instead of a jam, and that will be fine, too.

    Then I canned cherries.  I bought 20 pounds on Friday when I saw the organic cherries were cheaper than non organic sale priced cherries, but we ate some and took some to our hosts for Shabbos, so we didn’t end up canning more than 12 pounds.  We were recently enjoying the cherries I canned last summer and now’s a perfect time to replenish the pantry so we can continue to enjoy cherries when fresh prices aren’t at the seasonal low we’re enjoying right now.  Dh has been having them fairly regularly for breakfast, and I figured we must be just about finished with the cherries I canned last summer.

    Today I was planning my next bulk order and in order to buy what I needed most, did an inventory of what I have on hand.  Usually I send the kids to the basement to bring up whatever I need, which is why I don’t have a good idea from seeing it regularly myself.   Imagine my surprise that we still have 14 quarts of canned cherries (plus one 1/2 pint)!  I don’t mind, it’s just that I would have expected that we finished them off!

    I also noticed we still have eight + quarts of the pears we picked for free last year.  That’s especially nice since we’ve been keeping an eye on the same neighbor’s pear trees and there’s no sign of any fruit this year.  It just illustrates that you can’t assume what you have one year is what you will have another, and there’s a value in setting aside or preserving during the abundant times so it will tide you over during the lean times!

    Avivah

  • Sample meal costs for today

    >>Can you give a sample of your meals for a day and what it costs?<<

    Well, since the request came today I guess today is as good a day as any to use as an example. This wasn’t an especially cheap day, but the very cheap days balance out the more expensive days so it doesn’t really matter.  You’ll notice that my buying habits are reflected in the prices I pay.  Please don’t post comments about how lucky I am that I can get things so cheaply and where you live it’s not possible – this gets really tiresome for me to hear because it’s just not true.  Most of the women in my community would tell you it’s not possible for a family our size to have this kind of budget with food costs being what they are.

    Breakfast was supposed to be Yorkshire pudding, but dd made pancakes instead.  That was a very cheap breakfast – it’s basically just flour and some eggs, fried in coconut oil.  We buy 50 lb sacks of wheat and grind the flour; a sack that size is about $35. That makes it .70 lb for a pound of wheat berries, and a pound of wheat comes out to a pound and a half of flour. Let’s round the flour costs up to .50 lb.   The eggs were regular grocery eggs at 1.29 a dozen (I save the pastured eggs for smoothies when I want to use them raw) and she used half a dozen.  So about  $1 for the pancakes, since we used water instead of milk.  They had a pound of organic cherries, too – that was another dollar.  I have kefir in the fridge but no one felt like having it today.  This was a smaller amount than we usually make; usually it would be 50% more.  Breakfast total – $2.

    Lunch – was supposed to be cream cheese roll ups, but kids decided they’d rather have it for lunch tomorrow.  Instead they had leftover baked potatoes and lentil pecan burgers.  But for the sake of showing something more easily documented (though more expensive), I’ll use the roll ups for my example and figure the amounts we’d usually use.  Spinach tortillas – .89 package, 2 packages – purchased at discount store six weeks ago and taken from freezer – $1.78.  Romaine lettuce – got a package of romaine hearts for 1.99 from the ethnic grocery where prices on vegetables are better than local supermarkets, but only need half a package – $1.  Cream cheese – just bought some at a newly discovered discount store for .50 for 8 oz., half of what I usually get it for.  Misc. vegetables and lacto fermented veggies to put in roll up – I buy many vegetables from the discounted section of the store, which works well when you plan to use them quickly.  I didn’t pay more than .50 lb for any of those, figure up to 3 lb. of vegetables total – $1.50.  Lunch total – $4.78.

    Snack – blueberry scones.  Someone gave us a box of scone mix yesterday, and ds10 asked if he could prepare it, so I agreed.  He added half of a 12 oz package of frozen blueberries, bought at a discount grocery for 1.49 (instead of $4 in the regular supermarket), so .75.

    Dinner – macaroni and cheese with summer squash and green beans.  The organic flax rice spiral pasta was .99 for 12 oz, and we used 3 boxes – purchased at a salvage store six weeks ago – $2.97.  For the cheese sauce, since I’m out of milk (because I’m delaying my monthly shopping trip by three weeks) I used something I virtually never use because it’s so unhealthy- powdered milk.  Don’t do this at home!  🙂  Anyway, it was organic and at least hormone, antibiotic, and pesticide free, and given to me months ago by a friend who bought it and wasn’t using it  – free.  Used 1 lb butter (discount grocery) – 1.39, a cup of whole grain flour – .25,  1 1/2 lb chalav yisroel mozzarella – 4.69 lb – get discounted price for buying a five pound brick – 7.04.  I also threw in a handful of dehydrated mushrooms (bought fresh, on sale for .99 lb) and a handful of dehydrated onion (bought fresh from seconds section – .29 lb) – another $1.  Summer squash and fresh green beans – from our garden – free.  I have  enough macaroni and cheese for tomorrow lunch, too, so really this dinner wasn’t as expensive as it seems.  But I’m going to figure the costs as if we had actually eaten it all tonight – I prefer to overestimate my costs than to underestimate.

    Total for the day for our family – $20.19 (b – $2, l – 4.78, sn – .75, d – 12.66).    (I’m really tired tonight so it’s possible I made a mistake in the calculations, but this should be very close.)

     To do, this, I used a variety of strategies – cooking from scratch, bulk buying, monthly shopping, stocking up when I see great deals, dehydrating/preserving foods that are on sale (in this case, vegetables), using vegetables close to the end of their shelf life that are significantly discounted, accepting groceries that are passed on to us, getting the cheapest items at different stores (every item above from a discount grocery was from a different store), and gardening. Those were strategies used just for today’s meals.  The more strategies I learn about and use, the easier it is to stay within my budget.  I’ve written about all of these in the past, but I know that there are always new visitors to the blog who haven’t seen what I’ve written on the topic of cutting down your food budget. 

    Some days I use a lot more beans and grains, which are much less expensive, and sometimes long periods can go by when I don’t use anything that I’ve gotten for free from a friend (today was unusual in that regard).  You may see what seems like incredibly cheap prices, but what you don’t see is the time I’ve spent learning different ways to cut costs, my willingness to learn new things and experiment, the hours spent investigating different stores over the years, the managers of stores I’ve spoken to, and the commitment I make to stay within my budget no matter what.  I constantly stay open to finding new sources of good deals; I never assume I’ve found the best or cheapest places for anything.  Because of all these strategies, I feel like it keeps getting easier and easier to stay within my monthly budget, even with the rising food costs. I feel very expansive in my grocery shopping, and I don’t find it hard to limit myself to $600 monthly –  $450 would be a challenge – doable, but we’d be eating a lot more beans and a lot less cheese and chicken.  

    Avivah

  • Washing dishes – save time or money?

    >>hi avivah! i am assuming that you probably have dealt with this question before, but i have a question about frugality of time. since reading your blog, i have become more aware of being frugal with all of my resources- space, energy, money, and time. so, the most recent question has to do with being frugal with time- how do you balance buying disposables- if you do at all- with choosing carefully how to spend your time? i have a few children of dishwashing age, but not enough to deal with the overwhelming amount of things that need to be washed. also, having constant piles in my kitchen stresses me out and limits my workspace in a room that is already hot and crowded. so, i am trying to weigh spending money on disposable cups, plates, etc. with making better choices about how we spend our money. any advice?? <<

    I’m going to first link some of my past posts on related topics that I think will be helpful.  My kids do the dishes – here is our chore schedule from this past year (it’s time to make a new one for the coming year).  Two of the four oldest really don’t like this part of the schedule, and can’t wait for me to change the chore chart for this year.  But even when they weren’t doing dishes, I hardly used disposables at all.

    Here is how I generally organize our house cleaning. This was written two years ago so some of the specifics are different now since we shifted chores around and took into account the kids’ requests for how they wanted to do things, but you’ll get the basic idea.

    But in the end, you have to decide what your priorities are.

    Practically speaking, remember that you can gradually cut back on your use of disposables – you don’t have to go cold turkey!  It might be too much to totally stop using disposables right away, so try it for your smallest meal of the day.  Or you can use paper plates for meals but use regular cups (or vice versa), or use disposables during the week and dishes on Shabbos (or vice versa).  Start to cut back on your use of disposables gradually.  It’s about progress – slow and steady wins the race.  Start small, and when that has become natural and part of your routine, you can add something else small.

    It’s really how you want to spend your time that you have to determine.  Don’t mentally overwhelm yourself before you even start by piling on the work!  You know yourself.  If you can’t stand a mess and you don’t think you can give your kids at least part of the responsibility for dishwashing, then maybe you should focus your money saving efforts somewhere else. (I’m sure your kids will be happy if you ignore my suggestion to get them more involved in cleaning.  My kids came home this past year from their friends’ home – the ones they always told me did much fewer chores than they did – and announced that because the mother spoke to me, now the kids are washing the dishes.  It’s amazing that her kids still smile at me when they see me! :lol:)   There are lots of areas you can save money in and it’s overwhelming to try to work on them all at once.  It’s definitely true that the more you do for yourself, the more you save, but we all have limitations of time and energy.

    Avivah

  • Kefir soda

    >>What do you guys drink? Just water, or do you make other drinks? What drinks do you make, and how? <<

    This was a very timely question, since I was planning to post about our newest adventure in culturing. 🙂 

    Generally, we drink only water.  That doesn’t include milk or kefir for breakfast, and we have herbal teas in the winter, but basically that’s it.  I very rarely buy juice – maybe twice a year at the most.  I never buy soda – never.  This past winter, I got some juice concentrate, thinking it would be the most efficient way to mix the vitamin C powder the kids take when they’re starting to feel under the weather; rather than buying and wasting a large prepared container of juice, I could just take out a spoonful at a time.  But BH, it was a healthy winter and we didn’t need to take vitamin C often so the concentrate has stayed in the freezer and I was wondering what to do with it, except use it to make juice sweetened jam.

    It occurred to me that I could transform a very low quality food (the juice concentrate) into something of nutritional value if I cultured it.  Before Pesach, a friend offered me water kefir grains but it wasn’t until a few days ago that I got them.  Water grains are used for culturing juices or a water/sweetener/fruit mix.  I mixed up the grains with a can of concentrate and a quart or so of water, and let it sit on the counter for a day.  As it cultures, the sugar is ‘eaten’ by the kefir bacteria. Then we strained out the grains and drank it – couldn’t be easier!

    This is a new project so I can’t give you lots of different recipes I’ve tried.  So far I’ve made it three times with orange juice concentrate, and the kids really like the results.  It becomes fizzy and less sweet as it cultures and turns into kefir soda (though you don’t want to leave it too long because it can become alcoholic).  How long you culture it will depend on the temperature in your home –  our house is pretty warm in the summer since we don’t use air conditioning so it cultures very quickly.  

     When I run out of concentrate, I’ll use the following recipe: 

  • 1-2 tablespoons water kefir grains
  • Filtered water (I didn’t use filtered water but it doesn’t seem like I killed my kefir grains; I’ll try to remember to next time)
  • 1/4 cup sucanat or sugar
  • 1 teaspoon molasses (only if you’re using white sugar)
  • Piece of an egg shell, rinsed (half of the egg shell will do)
  • 1/4 c. fresh or frozen fruit, whatever flavor or combination you like – there are lots of possibilities

    • There are a couple of ways to do this:  1) Some people like to mix all of the ingredients at once and do a one time ferment.  This means putting everything together in a glass jar and leaving it on your counter until it tastes ready to you.

    2) Others prefer to do two separate ferments.  That means first culturing all the ingredients except the fruit, straining out the grains and then using the fermented water together with the fruit for a second ferment.  Supposedly this keeps the kefir grains pure. 

    After the kefir soda is ready, I put it into a glass jar in the fridge.  If you want to be fancy you can get glass bottles that you can fill individually.  This is a good juice or soda substitute because it’s filled with good probiotics, so not only does it taste great but it’s good for you!  And it’s very inexpensive, too!

    Avivah 

  • Is it more important to be frugal or healthy?

    >>Also, I notice that a lot of the food you eat is healthy, but not necessarily the most frugal. Like, mac and cheese would probably be cheaper to make than stuff with nuts, etc. And that soy bean oil is cheaper than coconut oil. But, for the healthy food you buy, you make sure to buy it in the cheapest way possible. So my question is this:
    Are you frugal because a healthy lifestyle is important to you, and this is how you make it affordable? Or would you be just as frugal if healthy food wasnt as important to you? If you had to make a choice between frugality and health, health would come first, correct?<<

    This is a hard question to answer directly, maybe because I don’t understand it very well.

    I often hear people complain that it’s so expensive to eat a healthy diet.  While healthy food can be more expensive, I don’t think that a limited food budget should equate with low quality food.   Right now I’m spending about $600 on food monthly for a family of 11, but that’s a pretty generous amount and it allows me to buy more than a month’s worth of food.  Since my monthly food budget is lower than most people, even those who don’t keep kosher or eat healthily, it would seem even if I wasn’t particularly concerned about health I’d have to be frugal to eat well on this amount.

    My food budget is what it is because that’s what I have.  I can spend it any way I want and on whatever foods I want, but in the end, that’s the limitation.  I choose to buy foods that nourish us because I think health is important.  But staying within my financial constraints is primary to me – I believe in living well with whatever you have, so having limitations doesn’t denote deprivation to me.

    I’m frugal for two reasons – 1) my financial resources aren’t unlimited; 2) I believe our resources are sent to us by H-shem (G-d) and it’s our responsibility to use them well.  There’s no joy for me in spending more than I need to just because I have it.  My dh once asked me if we were millionaires if I’d shop the same way, and I told him there’s very little I would change.

    By being careful I have fewer choices to make between health and frugality in regards to the foods I buy.  But if I didn’t have as much money to spend as I do – if the choice was between going hungry and having healthy foods – rather than let my family starve I’d feed them cheaper and less healthy foods.  (But as I said above, I don’t think this is usually the choice.)  I already make this choice to a degree – my strong  preference is to eat only grass fed meats, pastured eggs, and raw milk from grass fed cows.  Also, I’d like to only use organic produce from local farmers.  If I had the money, I’d gladly spend more for all of these choices, but I won’t financially overextend myself for them.  I do the best I can and I’m okay with that.

    Avivah

  • How to dry clothes on clothesline

    I don’t know why, but every time I feel inspired to write about hanging laundry outside there’s something to keep me from doing it.  At the beginning of the summer it was thunderstorms every night.  We haven’t had any rain for a couple of weeks, but now I have a huge mound of dirt covering my yard right under my clothesline from the excavation of our new patio area, so for the last few days (and presumably more than just another few to come), I’ll be using my dryer.

    But times like these are actually exceptions for us once the weather is warm.  I used to hang laundry outside year round when living overseas – I didn’t have a dryer until right before my fifth child was born.  In the winter I was very aware of the weather – when the sun shone, my priority was getting my laundry out right away to take advantage of it.  When it was rainy for a few days, I’d hang the clothes inside.  

    Then I moved back to the States where our rental home had a dryer but no clothesline.  While I appreciated the convenience of a dryer, I missed hanging the clothes outside and finally asked dh last year to put up a clothesline for me. I’d tried two or three different drying racks over the years but found them flimsy and their holding capacity was so small that when I used them I wasn’t sure if they were a  help or hindrance.  I hung some things on hangers indoors, and while it lessened my dryer usage, it wasn’t very practical for small items. (I found a solution to this several months ago, though – you can clip small items onto hangers with clothespins and it uses the space very efficiently.)

    So here are some tips for how to hang your clothes on the clothesline.  They may be obvious to many of you, but they weren’t all obvious to me and they sure aren’t obvious to my kids! 

    – To start with, elevate your basket of wet laundry so that you’re not unnecessarily bending repeatedly and wasting energy – I put mine on the Little Tikes kiddie picnic table we have in the yard.

    – Make sure you have lots more clothespins than you think you’ll need.  They disappear quickly.

    – Sharply shake your clothes made of a material that holds wrinkles before hanging them so that they dry wrinkle-free – like denim skirts. 

    – Hang clothing so that when it’s dry the mark of the clothespins were isn’t visible: hang shirts upside down or on hangers, skirts at waist, pants at the cuff.  If you’re using a dryer rack, place items so that the dryer line isn’t in the middle of them. 

    – To avoid fading, turn dark clothing inside out.  I learned about the bleaching power of the sun the hard way when I did my first load of laundry in Israel as a seminary student.  I hung my dark cotton tops on the clothing rack, and when I went out to bring them in, I found the sun had bleached the half facing it lighter than the side not facing it.  Also, hang the item so that it’s evenly exposed to the sun, not like what I did. 

    – On the positive flip side, the sun is a wonderful whitener!  I schedule my laundry washing so that we hang the light loads first, when the sun is strongest.   If I get busy or go out for hours, it doesn’t matter if they end up hanging for hours.  Then I hang the darks in the later part of the day, when the sun isn’t shining directly on my clothesline for hours.  If something has a stain, hang it so that it’s facing the sun.

    – If your neighbors will see your hanging laundry, for privacy’s sake hang undergarments on an inner line, and large things like sheets and towels on the external lines.  Try to be sensitive to what they’ll see from their window when you decide where to hang your clothesline – we put ours to that it runs parallel to the fence between us and our immediate neighbor.  Other neighbors don’t have to look at it, and because of the positioning of our neighbor’s windows, it’s not something that ruins their view of the outdoors, either.

    – Here’s a tip I recently learned about but haven’t yet had a chance to try because of the patio preparations.  Before you hang up your clothes, see if you can tell what direction the wind is blowing in.  When you identify that, hang your clothing so that you’re only pinning one side to the line, and the air will blow through the clothes and dry them superfast.  (To clarify, imagine you’re hanging a pillowcase: instead of clamping both parts of the opening together so that it’s hanging closed, put a clothespin on each end but not on both layers –  does that make sense?)

    – Some things will dry kind of crunchy, like towels.  You can run clothes after they are mostly dry through the dryer for 5 – 10 minutes to remove that, if it bothers you.  I don’t care about towels but I do care about scratchy cloth diapers on my little ones’ bottoms, so usually cloth diapers go in the dryer. 

    Why bother with the effort of hanging your clothes?  Well, using free solar energy to dry your clothing instead of paying the power company for the same result is a frugal thing to do!  I suppose you’re getting some exercise, too.  But for me, it’s more than that.  I really enjoy hanging clothes outside.  It may seem that I’m spending time on something that I could do more quickly with the help of an appliance, but while I’m hanging the laundry, I’m enjoying the air, the sun, the sounds of the birds….It’s a time that I can combine doing what I need to do while being able to relax and be more mindful, to think instead of rushing from one thing that needs to be done to the next.  Time to breathe deeply and enjoy the world around us, to slow down without feeling guilty, is something every busy mom can benefit from on a regular basis!

    Avivah

  • Modest bathing suits

    >>Would you mind sharing what you did for bathing suits? I’ve been looking at various patterns.<<

    A couple of years ago I bought patterns in the girls and ladies sizes from the following company – http://www.modestswimwearsolutions.com/.  I looked at several different patterns but liked this one best, because they looked nice and for the ease of sewing.  It’s basically a dress made of swimming suit material with leggings underneath.  I made three suits for the girls and one for myself (though I was 6 months pregnant at the time so I adapted it accordingly).   I also liked that the patterns were made with the option of several sleeve lengths and several legging lengths  – I made 3/4 length sleeves with leggings that just covered the knee but didn’t stick out under the dress.

    I bought a the swimsuit material on ebay, and including the cost of the materials and patterns, it was under $20 per suit.  (And I still have enough material left to make a couple more suits, which will essentially be free.)

    Though everyone said how easy this was to sew, there was one part of it that I found challenging – there’s a V where the top part of the dress and bottom part connect, and I had trouble getting it to lay smoothly.  I’m far from a professional seamstress but can handle basic stuff without too much trouble and kept wondering as I was making these how so many people who said they didn’t know how to sew could do this while I was struggling with it.  I took it apart several times and redid it, and then changed the design for later suits so I wouldn’t have the problem.  I still wonder if it was something obvious that I did wrong to cause that difficulty.

    Our family likes to do outings and activities together, but as the kids get older, modesty between parents and siblings becomes an issue.  So if we found a private part of a beach or secluded lake, the girls would wear long t-shirts over their bathing suits, which I didn’t find a good solution. Wet t-shirts get heavy and I don’t think they’re safe to swim in.   Enter the solution – modest bathing suits.

    We used these on our yearly camping trip right after I made them, and they were wonderful!  We went tubing at a private swimming hole in West Virginia, and went swimming at a thermal lake where there were others except for our family.  They were comfortable, modest, and very convenient, since we could wear them on a hike, jump into the water, and keep them on for the hike back.

    For the younger boys, I bought wetsuit style bathing suits from cwdkids.com when they were half price (I just bought three more since I was missing the sizes I need for ds3 and ds22 months).  They are comfortable and now the little ones have been running around in them all day long – ds22 months in particular loves his – he brings it to me every time he needs to get dressed and keeps it on.  This is a big deal since he’s been going through a stage of pulling all his clothes off!

    I need to make some more suits for the girls since I discovered this year that they’ve outgrown the ones I made.  Dd8 can fit into the suit I made for dd12 and I’ll just have to shorten it, but the older two girls need new ones altogether.  I took apart my maternity suit so I can use the material to make a new suit, I’m going to take apart dd14’s suit and I have extra material from the original batch that I bought, so I should have enough to make three new suits.  I’m thinking of changing the pattern and making a top with a skirt/legging one piece combo, because it will be more flattering than dresses and then I can avoid that problem that I had last time.

    Avivah

  • Getting free bricks for patio

    It’s not unusual for me to be tired at the end of the day, but for all of my kids to be so worn out they can hardly walk, is!  Since my six week old baby has been crying for over 5 hours, periodically stopping long enough to fall asleep for several minutes before waking up to cry again, I’m not feeling like sharing any meaningful thoughts 🙂 (he’s in the wrap while I write), so I’ll share what we’ve been doing today to wear us all out.

    Today we lucked into a large number of free bricks from someone who took down a brick wall.  It’s amazing how many bricks it takes to make a patio the size we want (about 350 sf)- we hauled one load, got home and realized we needed more.  We took out the second bench seat of the van, so we’d have room to bring even more bricks home with us.  We now have over 1000 very large bricks (not the standard size) – there’s now a huge pile in my yard –  and ds16 has informed me after doing the math that we need another 700.  Do you have any idea how many bricks this is, and how much work it is?   You’d probably have to spend an hour loading bricks to appreciate how much energy is involved. 🙂

    The downside of the free bricks is that many of them have mortar on them that will have to be chipped off, but it’s pretty soft.  So while it’s a big job because of the number of bricks, it’s not laborious like chipping off hard cement.  While making a patio isn’t complicated, there are a several aspects to the job and it’s been hard to decide where to start first (dh doesn’t think it’s hard to decide – he’s very clear that I shouldn’t do it at all!).

    I need to take apart the platform deck since it’s covering the area where the patio will be. But because the chain link fencing that has yet to be put up is taking up all the extra space in the garage, I don’t have anywhere to keep the deck boards we remove.  (I have a neighbor directly across the alley who is hyper vigilant about piles of wood and calls the zoning/environmental office to report people which results in fines, or I’d leave it neatly stacked against the back part of the yard for a couple of weeks.)  Without digging, there’s nowhere to put the gravel, and eventually, the bricks.

    You might now be thinking, didn’t I say that I brought home gravel yesterday and bricks today?  Yes, and I’d have liked to have prepared the ground before bringing anything home, but didn’t know how long it would take until I found the supplies I wanted for free and didn’t want to dig up my yard and leave an ugly hole for an openended period of time.  I’m doing everything opposite how I think it would be most efficient to do it, but that’s the reality of working within the time frame of when the free supplies you want to get actualize.

    I’m amazed by what hard workers my kids are – loading and then unloading the bricks is a hugely exhausting job.  But they just keep going and going and going, without complaining even a tiny bit.  They’ve actually been enjoying all of this work, and told me a few times we should do this kind of thing every day!  But that was before they finally ran down tonight, and were all happy to drag themselves into bed.

    I was also really tired, so dinner was watermelon served in the back yard.  The littles played in their wading pool in the new swim suits that arrived today, and then ran over to the pea plants and helped themselves to fresh organic snow peas and garden peas.  Some of the older kids have complained about this practice, saying that the littles are snacking away our harvest. But I’m happy to have it and it’s a pleasure to watch them happily picking them.

    Tomorrow afternoon dh wants to take the van to the mechanic for a check up and oil change, so whatever bricks or gravel I want to get will have to be gotten in the early afternoon. I need to summon up some enough energy to get more bricks, since I won’t be able to match them with what’s being sold at Home Depot if I need more, and if I don’t get these, then the patio will be smaller than planned.  Hopefully tonight I’ll get to bed before midnight so I have the necessary enthusiasm when I wake up! 🙂

    Avivah

  • Manual food processor

    A few weeks ago my fairly new (bought on Thanksgiving) food processor broke.  Often I think it must be because I use things more than average that they break, but lately I’ve thinking more and more often that it’s because things aren’t made to last.  It bothers me that things are made so cheaply nowadays, and that it’s expected that you’ll just throw the old thing away and buy a new one – they call it ‘planned obsolescence’.  My last food processor lasted for 9 years, and was just an average model; this latest one was supposedly a much better one with more bells and whistles, but never worked as well as the old one.  And to top off not working well by breaking when never mishandled is really annoying. 

    I use a food processor alot since it makes chopping or grating all the veggies we use for a meal a breeze – if I had to do it all by hand, we’d just eat veggie sticks.  I considered getting a food processor that wouldn’t need electricity, remembering I had seen something in the Lehman’s catalog.  I pulled out the catalog and when I saw the price (something like $189) I decided being power free wasn’t that important to me!  But it got me to thinking and researching, trying to find something else. 

    I found remarkably little available, but I did find this.  I did some research on it and found it for a cheaper price, and decided to get two – one for dairy (so I can make shakes with milk or kefir) and one for meat.  Since I never did get my Bosch mixer repaired after my ds broke it when making a mega sized batch of chocolate chip cookie dough for his cookie business, I’ve been managing without it.  Surprisingly to me, it hasn’t been much of a loss – it’s not a big deal to mix bread dough in a large bowl by hand, we don’t make many cakes, and basically, I really don’t need it.  But the one thing it did that I sometimes miss having the capacity for is beating egg whites.  This little hand powered mixer does that, which is why I got a second one for non-dairy dishes.

    It is a simple device, but works remarkably well.  The only down side I’ve so far experienced is it doesn’t beat things for a shake as smoothly as a blender would, and it doesn’t have a shredding capacity (which I knew when I bought it) – just chops- but it is easy to use, easy to clean up, and even the younger kids can use it by themselves.  A couple of days ago ds15 used it to chop four heads of cabbage and 15 large carrots, and he said it was great.  Not as fast as an electric model, but that’s okay with me; it’s still a LOT faster than chopping by hand.

    I would have liked to have gotten two different colors so the meat and dairy mixers could be easily distinguished, but it only comes in red.  Not a big deal, we just marked one with nail polish.  I’d also like if it had a suction on the bottom to hold it down on the counter better. 

    Now if the cap and trade bill passes (I think it’s a disaster and am perturbed that our government leaders think it’s a good idea to do this at a time of national financial distress; the president himself said, “”Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”), lots of people are going to be looking for ways to cut power costs.  This is a simple little solution for one appliance and I’m glad to have it!

    Avivah

  • Are kids embarrassed by frugality?

    >>Also, something else I was wondering… My son right now is only 2 years old, but I know I grew up with a frugal family and I was embarassed of it.  Do your kids have a similar mindset to you in terms of natural stuff and frugality, or do they get embarrassed about it? How do you keep your kids proud of what you’re doing and not embarrassed that their mom is one of ‘those moms’ :roll:; like I felt when I was a kid?  Is living your kind of lifestyle a little more accepted (where you live) than it was (where I grew up), apparently?<<

    I grew up without much money and I always felt less than, so I know what you mean.  When I was younger I planned to make sure my kids had everything that everyone else (plus!) so that they wouldn’t feel bad to be different or have less.  I attributed my negative feelings as a kid to being poor.  But that’s not actually the root of the feeling – it’s an insecurity about who you are and what you do that you convey to your child that they pick up on, not if you are just like everyone else.  If you are confident about what you do and present your choices to your family (or anyone else) matter of factly, it makes a huge difference in how you and what you do are perceived.

    I’m sure you’ve noticed that even those who do things just like everyone else also have kids who are embarrassed by them.  So being ultra conservative and conformist isn’t the answer to having kids who are embarrassed by you.  Actually, I think it’s when parents put a high value on being like everyone else that it becomes a lot more important to the kids, and those kids are much more likely to be embarrassed by any perceived differences than kids raised with the idea that it’s a value to live with integrity.

    I don’t label myself as a ‘natural’ or ‘attachment parenting’ person.  The things I do are part of who I am, but they aren’t my identity.  I’m a middle of the road person, and if you were to look at me you wouldn’t see visible differences between me and anyone else.  (Anyone who knows me in person is welcome to disagree in the comments section :)).   Why would anyone look at me and know I spent 1/4 – 1/2 of what the same size family spends on food?  People don’t know by looking where you buy your clothes, if it’s at the super duper sales, at a thrift store, or at the beginning of the season in overpriced stores.  And if they learn that you have a great quality life for a lot less than what they think it’s necessary to spend, most people would be interested and positive about that, not hostile.

    I’ve said before that frugality isn’t about doing without, but about living within your means while making choices about how you spend your money that are valuable to you.  We make choices and that’s how I explain things to my kids.  I don’t feel apologetic that there are many people in the world that have a lot more money than we do.  We have a great quality life and I constantly communicate my feeling to my kids that we’re so blessed to have all that we have (not just material things, but quality of life things).

    Kids tend to have a lot of social insecurity since they are in the process of figuring out who they are and where they fit in. I think it helps a lot that I homeschool, so my kids aren’t constantly exposed to the judgments and assessments of immature peers – it’s that ongoing exposure that creates a lot of insecurity.  My kids haven’t internalized the belief that if you do anything different from everyone else, that something is wrong or shameful about you.

    My kids aren’t embarrassed by me, but not because I made it my goal to keep them from feeling that way.  We spend a lot of time together and they respect who I am and what I do; I think the feeling of respect is the core of why I don’t have this issue.  They like me (well, most of the time – less when I’m reminding them to wash the dishes!), and I like them.

    As far as if my lifestyle is perceived more positively here than somewhere else – I can’t say.  Maybe.  In my opinion, it’s not so much about how people view your lifestyle as how they view you.  As I said, I don’t wear the different choices I make on my sleeve, and I generally find people to be quite positive when I do discuss choices that I’ve made that are outside of the norm (eg homeschooling).   While I think it’s less about the choice and more about the individual, if I were in a community that was rigid and judgmental, I’d undoubtedly have a different experience.  So I’m grateful to live in the community I do, which is wonderful!

    Avivah