One of the things that I love about The Complete Tightwad Gazette
On a recent Thursday, I was a little too brain-dead to do actual cooking. I try to avoid ordering out, so I have a few fall-back easy dinners. That evening, I made spaghetti and sauce. I only buy boxes of pasta when they are $1.00 or less and jars of sauce at $2.00 or less, so dinner was $3.00 for three people, one of whom is a growing teenage boy. We also had enough left over for two lunches. (Yes, I know, I could make a healthier sauce for less money, but the problem is the brain-deadedness.)
On Friday, my husband took one of the lunch leftovers to work. As the afternoon wore on, I hit a different type of brain-deadedness: I was done with work for the day and ready to put on pajamas and watch TV, but I still had family obligations for the evening. I turned to one of my productive hobbies, cooking, and made up some homemade marmalade. The batch used one large organic orange bought for this purpose as well as two lemons and an orange in the back of the refrigerator that were nearing the end of their useful life. Between the fruit and two cups of sugar, the cost was somewhere around $3.00, probably less.
A productive hobby is an enjoyable way to kill time that also produces something of value. The idea isn’t so much that your time pays for itself but rather that you practice a skill that could save serious money or generate income for you if necessary. For me, that’s cooking. Homemade marmalade is cheaper than store-bought marmalade (the amount made that Friday would cost about $6.00 in the store), but not THAT cheap. Still, it was a decent way to kill time.
On Saturday, we had to leave the house early for a high-school sporting event, so I made a favorite quick, easy breakfast: canned biscuits, the better to eat with homemade marmalade. I set the oven to preheat, took a shower, and then set the biscuits to bake when I got out. I made four biscuits for our breakfast and then rolled out the other four to make simple empanadas for lunch. I filled them with the remaining leftover pasta (an idea from some delicious spaghetti calzones we had in Phoenix on one vacation); that was a big part of lunch for three people. Biscuits are less than a buck a can, bought on sale with a coupon.
So here’s the total: three dinners, one lunch, three breakfasts, three lunches, and a whole bunch of marmalade for a total of about $7.00.
That’s how being cheap works in my family.
(This is cross-posted on my other blog, Chicago on the Cheap.)
