Last year you might remember I decided to do a "month of Martha," where I pretended to be Martha Stewart except without the staff & the money. The idea behind my experiments is generally to learn something, but mostly what I learned that month is that it stinks to be Martha without the staff and the money. I still have a few aspirations, so I get Martha's email newsletters for organizational tips, crafting tips, and seasonal tips, though I have to admit I still don't know if I really like Martha Stewart.
On the one hand, I can truly admire the woman's business sense. She started out as a caterer, and has now built an empire. That's impressive.
The thing that makes it difficult (besides her insistence on the "perfect" way to do everything) is that Martha and I do not live in the same universe. Four years ago when I was planning our wedding, I actually borrowed a Martha wedding DVD from the library. In it, Martha explained how to make a great centerpiece out of a $5000 wheel of cheese.
First, THERE IS SUCH A THING AS A FIVE THOUSAND DOLLAR WHEEL OF CHEESE. Now I'm sure that it was fabulous cheese, but I was stunned nevertheless. Then Martha used it as a decoration.
In my universe, if $5000 is involved with cheese in any way, it's because I have decided to buy some cows for the back yard and milk them myself. Not that I'm saying buying a $5000 wheel of cheese is wrong--I'm just not in that sort of world. I mean, if I found an extra $5000 laying around cheese just isn't going to be my first thought. Of course in my world, if I found an extra $5000 I'd have to call the bank and ask whose money they had mistakenly deposited in our account. But I digress.
In our universe, money is a real consideration. In doing some research for this year, I've located several books from different decades--some cookbooks, some household management--and so far I've noticed that having to survive on a budget and admitting that one needed to live within that budget seems to have been pretty common during much of our history. I think we're getting better, but during the 1990s especially it seemed like admitting that one couldn't afford something was to be some sort of failure. I know I certainly went out with friends for more than one or two meals which I seriously couldn't afford (well, without surviving on cup-a-soup for the next month) because EVERYBODY could afford such things. Of course, now it turns out that EVERYBODY was racking up debt. It turns out, we were just pretending that money & budgets didn't matter.
When I first lost my job & decided to not look for a new one immediately, I decided I had to get serious about budgets & meal planning and discovered that even as careful as I thought I was about money, I had no idea what I was doing. I'd buy groceries that we ended up not using, I didn't always think about ways to use leftovers or overlapping ingredients, and I was buying more than we needed for the week. I checked out articles online that promised a week's worth of inexpensive dinners, and the menus for one week would have blown our food budget for the entire month. Or the money saving articles were all centered around us living in the mountains, building our home from old soda cans and tires that we collected along the roadside, somehow locating free solar panels, and living somewhere that there wasn't a ban on wood-burning stoves in the winter. So my question is, what about the rest of us?
I am certainly getting better by now, and I have learned a lot about meal planning and shopping, but what about people who DON'T want to put themselves through some sort of cooking boot camp? I'm spending a lot of time at the library lately looking for cookbooks that feature healthy and reasonably inexpensive foods WITHOUT a bunch of processed foods, and so far I'm not finding much. There are budget-conscious cookbooks, but so far all the ones I've seen are spectacularly unhealthy and the healthy cookbooks all call for ingredients we can't have (besides the fact that I'm no longer convinced that the "low-cal," low-fat," or "lite" foods are a good idea) or the meals are pretty spendy. So far, I don't think this is a category that exists. Why is that?
And have I just found next year's project.......?
3 comments:
Yeah, most cookbooks are useless. I rely heavily on "Whole Foods for the Whole Family" (La Leche League put this out), "The Student's Vegetarian Cookbook" (almost all single or double serving recipes), and good old Betty Crocker, believe it or not. So, are you going to write a cookbook? Maybe one with knitting asides? I'd be interested!
Go to antique shops and hunt the book sections. Cookbooks from my childhood are much less likely to have packaged foods and preservatives. Hunt for early 60s or older. WWII cookbooks would be the best because so many things were rationed.
I agree with Jillsknit – I’d shoot for older cookbooks. I “borrowed” my mother’s Better Homes and Gardens cookbook © 1965 and she’s now stopped asking for it, which is good, cause I ain’t givin’ it back (it’s also a good thing she doesn’t own a computer, and if you see her don’t tell her I said that). :-) I also found a replica of the same book © 1953 in a magazine once. Both books you can purchase used on Amazon. The recipes are pretty basic, and use things I keep in my kitchen, which is why I like them. They also discuss cooking fundamentals, like cuts of meat and different cooking methods like braise and sauté. And whether I cook for me (1 person) or when I cook for the camp (60+ people), the starting point for the menu is the food pyramid, starting with meat, then side dishes (fruits and veggies), then breads and grains, and finally milk. Needless to say – using leftovers is something I think I got from my mom. Overlapping ingredients is something I learned cooking at the camp… if you make a turkey on Thursday save the bones for stock for turkey noodle soup, with homemade noodles, on Sunday.
The budget thing drives me nuts too, and not just for food budgets… in 2007 (or was it 2008?) when the national rate of savings in this country was NEGATIVE, all I could do was shake my head and sigh. So, a couple of plugs – please check out the following sites developed by/with the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants: www.feedthepig.org and www.360financialliteracy.org
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