How to Eat on $65 a Week (and Not Develop Scurvy)

I keep running across all of these "how to save a bazillion bucks" blogs these days. 

We have a love-hate relationship. 

The blog's author always posts a picture of herself in a sidebar looking like the all-American girl. Their peaches and cream complexions are probably because, with all of the wholesome recipes and money saving tips they offer, they can go to the spa each morning, leaving the kids with nannies. And they can then hit the gym before lunch. I hate them all. 

happymoneysaver.com...this woman gave us our recipe
for homemade laundry soap at $.02 a load. And she
manages to look stunning while doing it. Damn her.

keephomesimple.blogspot.com...I love this woman's
one-hour French bread recipe. She raises kids, cooks
wholesome meals, and looks like June Cleaver. Every day.

fivehearthome.com...thanks to this woman we have
healthy, no-cook granola bars until the kids find them and eat
them all (their new record--three hours). In case you haven't
figured it out yet, her name is Samantha. Her life is perfect.

Their houses always abound with love. They describe their kids as "sweet, loving, energetic, beautiful," and their past-times usually include reading something (like home-making magazines, but never smutty novels), baking, church, and servicing her husband who is, invariably, her soul mate. *Retch*

And yet, for all of my animosity, I need to thank these blogging ladies because they are the reason we are not eating oatmeal every night for dinner. And they are also the reason, in part, that our grocery bill is so low.  They just have so many darn good ideas on saving a buck. Gotta pay for those facials somehow.

I was talking to my sister this week and she was so impressed at how cheaply we are eating but then, when I explained how we are eating so cheaply, she was repulsed which, of course, means that these tips must be blog-worthy.

How to Eat on $65 a Week (and not develop scurvy)

1. Eat cabbage...lots of cabbage.

. 

Cabbage is frickin' cheap. And you can turn it into cabbage soup, cabbage rolls, cabbage salad, cabbage fritters, cabbage meatballs, cabbage curry. The downside is that it is hard to disguise as anything but cabbage. 

The bite out of our budget: 85 cents apiece. 

Meal value: 3-5 meals can be squeezed from a single cabbage. 

Complaint level: 8/10 due to its gaseous qualities.

2. Use TVP as a filler anytime you serve ground meat.

I know, it looks like breakfast cereal...or cat vomit...depending on your age and level of tact. But it is in fact some kind of dried stuff that, when you add it to meat, makes your food budget go a long way. Like little dried flakes of magic. 

The bite out of our budget: Infinitesimal

Meal value: Seemingly infinite

Complaint level: 0/10 if they don't see it going into their food, 10/10 if they do. TVP gets an 11/10 if they fail to make the cat vomit connection.

3. Sop off the government.

I know, I know...the dole is naughty. But my kids eat a lot. So T and I sat down and calculated that we could save approximately $100 a week if we would just sign them up for government lunch at school. So we did. 

The bite out of our budget: There is free lunch. Thank you US taxpayers.

Meal value: 15/week

Complaint level: 0/10. They like free lunch because it guarantees pizza once a week. We will deal with the resulting obesity later.

4. Sop off the neighbors...then make stuff.

Man, everyone here has fruit trees that they don't pick. Right now, it is don't-pick-your-apples season with a few hangers-on from don't-pick-your-pears season. It looks like we will soon be heading into don't-pick-your-crab-apples season.

The fruits of our latest sopping.

Apple jelly made from the neighbor's apples

The bite out of our budget: Thanks to child labor, nada.

Meal value: 5/week...there's apple fritters, apple jam, apple sauce, apple pie, apple crisp, apple cake, apple slices for snack... 

Complaint level: 1/10. No one complains about dessert, but there have been some complaints about the occasional worm and the rot level encountered when picking. It will come out later in counselling.

5. Shop at Aldi and eschew organics

Not as good as Walmart for entertainment value, but
darn cheap so long as you keep your expectations low.

I know, you're going to say that we are probably setting ourselves up for chronic diseases later while simultaneously destroying the planet, but buying conventional saves in the short run, and right now we are all about the short run. On top of that, Aldi, according to a number of hardcore, money saving bloggers, is nothing less than the devil's work. 

But Aldi has my heart because, if you are not overly picky about labels, the mountains of pre-packaged foodstuffs that you have to navigate around to find the bargains, and the fact that you have to USE YOUR OWN BAGS **gasp** it is cheap.

Signing off from the world of "ain't got no money"...

Povertingly yours,

Rachel

Soccer Chicas

Last month, just before leaving Oman, I witnessed a group of girls discussing a bizarre phenomenon. It was odd really and the girls could not get their heads around it. They had observed that all of the non-Omani women they had met that summer were good at sports. The Omani women, in contrast, with the exception of a tiny handful, were just awful at anything having to do with a racket, a ball, or a bat of some sort. Even moving faster than a slow stroll was too much to ask for some. The girls were puzzled.

As they sat and conversed about how strange this was and pondered how this could be, they asked one another, “What strange forces are at work?” (Okay, they didn’t say exactly that, but you get the idea).

“I have heard,” one of the girls suggested, “That Omani women are just more delicate.”

All of the girls nodded their heads. “It is the heat,” another replied.

And then they all sat and nodded their heads some more. End of conversation. Yes. It is the heat and the delicacy of that nationality. That was their end conclusion.

I watched them and was also completely flabbergasted. But I was thinking about how strange this conversation was and, further, that they had drawn upon this conclusion so automatically and without any sort of apparent demonstration of critical thought upon the matter.

In spite of images like this--

Thanks to www.sail-world.com for the image of the
Oman Sails All Women Team at work.

And this from the 2014 Olympics

Shinoonah Salah Al Habsi (in the middle) in the Summer Olympics, rockin'
the Daily Mail. I hope Reuters doesn't mind that I borrowed the image.

And the others you get to see if you do a search on "Omani women sport image", the girls (or at least the ones I talked to) don't see themselves as people who need to be or even can be physically active.

Fast forward a month and here I am in the good ol' US of A. Tian must have been feeling lonely for some mom time as now I see her for all of two hours each day. She invited me to come to one of her soccer games. Wow. I must be the coolest mom in the world if my teenager wants me to come watch her do anything.

Because I was totally flattered to be invited to a middle school sporting event and because I am only minimally employed (okay, I am pretty much totally unemployed), I said that I would come and watch her team play. 

It was amazing.

This is what girls look like in America when they grow up with the expectation that they will move their bodies.

Look! There is Tian at the end of the bench! Go Tian!

They end up taking it for granted that they are supposed to move their bodies, and they just do it. They play like little soccer demons every day of the week and go to bed wondering what they will do with themselves after soccer season is over at the end of September because they love playing the sport so much. And then they hear that there is an indoor winter soccer league and subsequently quit whining at their mothers all the time.

After my month-ago-conversation, I am eternally grateful for the belief that girls can and should play sports here.

And so is Tehva.

Perhaps You Are Gobsmacked...Or Perhaps You Saw This Coming

We are back in the USA and things are going well for all of us. But one of us is confused.

If you had to choose one of these two to be confused, which would you choose?
I know, it's a tough call. 

If you guessed Tehva, then you win the million dollar prize. As if I had a million dollars. Let's not go there.

Tehva is in a constant state of confusion but the girl is doing her darndest to catch up with everyone around her. Her greatest struggle seems to be that she lacks a common language with her classmates and with the schooling institution in general.

Period or Full Stop?

“Mom…every time my teacher says, ‘Period’ I just crack up.”

“Does she say it a lot?”

“All the time! It’s so funny!”

I appreciate that this particular visual is bilingual.
Tehva would appreciate that, too, if she could
stop laughing about the period thing.

In Tehva’s mind the woman is menstruating excessively, but I am sure that in Mrs. H’s mind, nothing of the sort is transpiring. “What would you have her say instead?”

“I don’t know. Not that.”

Tian, who is decidedly and very intentionally NOT having any communication issues with ANYONE in this tiny hamlet breaks in to lay down the law. “Tehva, you can’t think of it as a full stop anymore. It is a period.”

“I like full stop. And period sounds dumb. It sounds like someone is bleeding.”

“Well they’re not. So get over it. Speak American.”

We are trying hard to get Tehva to simply understand that speaking American and, well, speaking hybrid-been-overseas-in-a-British-dominant-expat-culture-for-my-early-formative-language-years-English are two different things. It is rough going, though.

Dress like this...

What Are the USA's Colors Again?

To make things even harder, yesterday was Patriot Day, meaning the kids were asked to wear red, white and blue to school in memory of 9/11, but I am not sure that anyone actually said that in Tehva's class. It might have been implicitly understood by everyone. Except for Tehva. 

Tehva came downstairs wearing yellow, black and orange. “Where is your red, white and blue? You look like you are dressed for Patriot Day in…maybe…Germany?” (is there a country whose national colors and yellow, black and orange?)

“Huh?”

“It’s Patriot Day. Red, white and blue.”

“Huh?”

“Nevermind.”

Football or Football?

“Mom, one of my teachers is selling tickets for something. Can we go?”

“What is the event?”

“Ummm, they keep saying it is football. But I think it is something else. Is it soccer?”

Silas, who is also, aside from the fact that he uses vocabulary better suited to a college professor and adamantly insisting that he does not follow sports, fitting in quite nicely here, breaks in to clarify things. “No, Tehva, it is called football but it is the one with the funny ball. American football. No one here would buy tickets to soccer.”

“Oh, you mean the one with the ball that kind of looks like a rugby ball?”

Tian then entertains everyone with a tale of watching boys run up and down the field with their football pads bouncing around their ears because the boys are so short. Everyone laughs, but I can see Tehva thinking, “Does this have anything to do with a period?”