In a previous post I claimed that we were “supermarket ninjas” and Mellopuffy asked how we managed on so little each week.

I’ve been thinking about this, and I think comes down to these things:

1. Kathy is a vegetarian, and I only eat meat dinners maybe half the week. When I look at our grocery bill, the priciest regular items are wine and meat. If we both ate meat in typical New Zealand portions every night, our grocery bill would be a lot larger.

2. We buy very little in the way of processed food. No biscuits, no cakes, no muesli bars, no pre-made sauce, no packet mixes or tinned soups. I make our bread from scratch, and usually our yoghurt. If I want baking to take somewhere, or for an occasion, I bake. I have a good repertoire of dinner dishes that don’t take much when I’m tired, so I don’t need sauce in a jar.

I think the bread in itself is good for about $10 in savings a week. We would normally go through three loaves and that would be over $12 at supermarket, whereas the ingredients for a home made loaf total less than a dollar.

Because of points 1 & 2, we incidentally have a pretty healthy diet, which is a happy bonus effect.

Of course cooking everything and avoiding treats is a lot easier when you don’t have children, and I know that plenty of grownups would balk at not having any snack food in the house. Well, tough. That’s how it’s done. My Mum always said if you weren’t hungry enough to eat an apple or make a cheese sandwich, then you weren’t hungry.

Cooking is like any other skill — if you do it every day, you can achieve a tolerable level of efficiency, whereas if you only do it when you have plenty of time, you will probably stay an inefficient bungler and packets really will always be easier.

Example super cheap, fast meal for low-energy  evenings:

Pasta with broccoli sauce. Chop broccoli into tiny pieces, mince a couple of cloves of garlic, saute in olive oil with pepper until broccoli is cooked (put a lid on the pan for the last couple of minutes and the broccoli will steam). Toss through rigatoni or similar with grated cheese on top and maybe some more oil. Should take 20 minutes or less, and is very tasty.

I find Italian cookbooks particularly inspirational because lots of country food from that region is cheap, fast, and based around seasonal vegetables, and tasty with a little sharp cheese, oil and pepper. An interesting thing I’ve found is that nice cheese and good oil seem like luxuries, but they’re actually condiments that you use in small amounts to make much bigger quantities of cheap stuff nicer. So I tend not to be so hard-arsed about olive oil and cheese.

3. I buy our fruit and veg at the market on a Sunday, and that’s about 30% cheaper than the cheapest supermarket I know of. It is another trip in my week, but on the other hand I enjoy the market as a social experience. I often spend some of the savings on a roti or a dim sum or something too…

4. We shop at the cheapest supermarket in the area. Last weekend I spent a New World gift voucher, and I noticed how much more expensive New World prices are compared to the Kilbirnie Pak’N'Save, confirming for me the claim that they are the cheapest supermarket in Wellington. I’m pretty sure I’d have to spend a significant amount in transport to go anywhere cheaper.

5. We are sensible buyers: we stockpile when staples are on special, diligently compare unit prices, and always use a shopping list.

6. We buy in bulk when we can. For example, I buy my bread flour in 5kg sacks. If I had suitable storage, I’d probably buy 10kg ones. Likewise I buy olive oil in 4l tins, onions in 5kg bags, and meat by the half carcass when the freezer has space. Moore Wilson wholesale is not as cheap as it used to be, I reckon, but still turns up some good prices on catering sized stuff. Basically, if it doesn’t go off before we can finish it, and we have room to store it, I’ll invest in any large portion.

In summary, I’d say it’s cooking our own semi-vegetarian diet that really makes the big difference. It’s the nice food from simple ingredients that backs my claim “we eat well.” But there are some other things that help too, allowing me to blow some money on wine and chocolate out of the surplus.

I originally bought this stool with a 70s ‘lazy-boy’ design, waaaay back when I came home from Melbourne. Since then I’ve constantly lambasted anyone who’ll listen with the tale of the one that got away, a matching armchair and stool. Now, this is mostly because it is extremely comfy, and only cost $15, an absolute steal.

Since that time, i’m come to regret it more. This is because this stool has become the most oft-used piece of furniture in the apartment. In addition to serving as a footstool, it has been:

• a seat for parents watching a wee man in the bath
• a seat for parents feeding a wee man at his high chair
• a spare chair at the dinner table when people come over

And, most importantly:

• A zimmer frame for a wee man learning to walk about the house.

So why is this on Frugal Me you ask?

Because today I saw a walking-toy for boddlers (babies who aren’t quite toddlers), for a whooping $120!! And I asked myself, why in the hell spend that money when you have the superfootstool hanging about the place?

Again – the best damn investment I ever made.

Following hard on the heels of Stephen’s now-famous yoghurt-making antics, I thought I’d try out making cottage cheese, and see if the savings were enough to get me into the paper as well. I didn’t think that one would work twice, and thought I’d make do with the kind of crazy google hits were going to get off the frequent use of the word cottage.

If there is anything that makes me think of the 1970s it is cottage cheese. That and bean sprouts. But because around here we mostly stick to seasonal vegetables, getting greens for sandwiches is tricky, so sprouts it is. Likewise, with cheese being at times unreasonably expensive, cottage cheese is a good fat-and-protein addition to liven up lunches.

So how to make it? Easy. Put a litre of milk into a pot and apply heat, when it’s tipping 80-odd degrees, put one 1/4 cup of white vinegar into the mix and stir gently. The milk will curdle, and you strain the hot mixture through a muslin. And…. voila. Cottage cheese, or paneer, depending on your background.

I keep the whey and continually try to find uses for it, but let the curds cool in the fridge, mash it with a fork, and moisten it with some of that home-made yoghurt (you can’t use the whey, doesn’t work well). This makes it, to coin a phrase, just like the bought one.

And the savings. Well, I bought a litre of milk for this costing $2.09, and made 250g of cheese. 250g at the supermarket cost $2.35 the last time I checked. We’ll call that one “not a substantial saving”.

However, there are some key differences. My cottage cheese is incredibly simple to make, and is not time consuming. It is also without unnecessary packaging, and hasn’t been transported half-way across the country or world to my fridge (ignoring the packaging/transport of the milk, which I buy in bulk). Also, I know exactly what’s in it, something the me who has worked in food manufacturing knows is very, very important.

All in all you’d need decent access to a ready supply of cheap or free milk to make this one work well. But, there is satisfaction in making your own food, and in knowing that it has a low carbon-cost. Plus, you get to try celery sticks stuffed with raisins, and topped with cottage cheese! 1978 par excellence.

Part of buying a house is getting a mortgage; part of getting a mortgage is figuring out what repayments you can afford; figuring out what repayments you can afford requires budgeting; and to make a budget, you need to figure out what you spend already.

I use a program called Gnucash to track our spending. I export statements from internet banking, and Gnucash sucks the data in and categorises it.

Now I often run reports on a monthly basis in Gnucash, but there’s an obvious thing I should have been doing but only just thought about now.

Obviously, there are a lot of expenses that only happen once a year, like paying our insurance premium. And there are other expenses that are irregular, even though they’re certain, like holiday spending, or going to the doctor. So the right way to work them out for a monthly budget — we both get paid monthly, so that’s the best way to work it out for us — is to total expenses over a whole year, and then divide by 12. Or maybe even over two years, and divide by 24.

And what a sickening revelation that was. It turns out that there are things that I think of as “one-off” that really are recurring expenses, just not frequent or regular ones. For example, we spend quite a bit flying around the place visiting friends and relatives. I drink a lot. I buy $40 of books every month, on average. And so on.

The only comfort is that our grocery bill tells me that I am a supermarket ninja. We eat well on only $125 per week, and that includes a fair amount of wine and a teenage girl 12 weeks of the year. But apparently I have a long way to go in other departments.

I do sort of have a system for irregular stuff. I have an account called “bills” and put a fixed amount in it every month, and pay all the bills out of it, so if some months we spend less, there’s a buffer building up for the months when we spend more. But maybe it’s time to actually do a real business-style budget, with a forecast for the coming year, and a monthly update to track actual spending against the forecast.

As always, your suggestions on budgeting for irregular, infrequent things are welcome.

The instigation

Frugal reader Mel wrote to us the other day about home coffee roasting. As it happens, this something I am totally into. I only buy commercially roasted coffee when the weather has prevented me from roasting on the weekend (it’s an outdoor activity using my technique) and the occasional bag to calibrate my taste and see what’s out there.

The maths

The economics are compelling. Green coffee beans of the highest quality can be had for about $14 a kilo, and acceptable ones for less. Compare this with roasted coffee which is usually at least $30 a kilo and often more than $40.

Green beans lose 10-20% of their weight when you roast them, but you’re still well ahead of roasted coffee for price, and better than a lot of commercial roasted coffee on quality. I’m afraid I have quite a bad coffee habit, more than 250g a week, so both the expense and the subsequent savings of home roasting definitely mount up over the year.

The results

I wouldn’t want to say that you can achieve the same consistent, refined results as a commercial blender without a lot of practice and some investment in kit. But you can definitely get something better than stale beans from the bulk bin at the supermarket or over-roasted grounds in a vacuum brick. If you do it every week, like I do, you can pretty soon achieve something that you like reliably. And that’s good enough, isn’t it?

(There’s also a lot of pottering fun to be had, but I realise this isn’t for everyone.)

My technique

I have blogged extensively about home roasting on my personal blog a while ago, before Frugal Me. Here’s how I do it.

I have a heat gun which I bought for $20 from Mitre 10. It is mounted on a drillpress ($12 from Trademe) with duct tape ($2 from $2 shop). The heat gun is aimed directly over one corner of the breadmachine mixing bowl. Conveniently, the bread machine lid is removable. Roasting coffee comprises a few simple steps:

1. Set rig up on back step so that chaff and smoke will be blown away by the wind.
2. Tip several hundred grams of green beans into bread maker pan.
3. Put bread maker on “knead” cycle.
4. Turn on heat gun.
5. When beans reach desired roast level, turn off appliances.
6. Remove pan, tip out beans, and cool (I put them in a metal pan in the freezer for 5 mins).

I drilled a hole in the bread machine pan and mounted a temperature probe ($15 from Trademe including digital multimeter readout) and I use this to gauge the progress of the roast.

So, for a total of $50 I have rigged up something that produces similar results to a much more expensive appliance, with far more possibilities for tweaking.

The whole thing takes about 20 minutes from the whim taking me to having beans cooling.

Other people use different methods: air popcorn poppers, an oven tray with the odd stir from a wooden spoon, or even a cast iron pan on the stove top.

The important thing is that you understand the coffee roasting process:

1. Beans should be heated evenly somehow.
2. Beans should be heated so that they get hotter and hotter.
3. The beans will get darker and darker, until they start making sharp cracking noises and giving off a little smoke. This is called “First Crack”, and happens at somewhere between 180 and 200 degrees. Don’t stop here unless you like very acid coffee. The papery coating or chaff will start coming off the beans too. It makes a mess. Blow it off before you store the beans.
4. The beans get darker yet. The sharp cracks stop, but after a few minutes a second, more gentle crackling starts — “Second Crack”. This happens somewhere after 220 degrees. Somewhere between this point and first crack is good for plunger and filter methods, somewhere close after this point they are ideal for espresso.
5. French Roast or Starbucks level — almost black, not much of the bean variety’s characteristic flavour is left.
6. Your beans are on fire.
7. If you rescued your beans before stage 6, cool them with a fan or on a perforated metal sheet or however your ingenuity suggests. They will improve in the days after roasting, until a week or so, after which they get worse.

There are numerous online retailers for green beans these days. You can also try your luck at your local roastery — in Wellington, People’s Coffee and Havana have both been quite happy to sell me green beans at a reasonable price.

There’s a ton of information out there if you search for “roasting coffee at home”. However, I’ve found that some of it is pretty US-centric, and the Aussie Coffee Snobs site is a more reliable source for us.

Caveats

If you live in one of the larger NZ cities with good local roasters, the claims of marvellous quality that you read on the internet aren’t really true. Those people claiming home roasted is vastly better are usually Americans who live a deprived life, coffee-wise. On the other hand, if you live in the more rural parts of NZ, roasting your own from green is almost certainly better.

If you use a popcorn maker, or one of the other faster techniques, you end up with a brighter, more acid result that is usually too acid for espresso but delightful in plunger. Espresso roasts take longer, and need something like the breadmaker-based roaster.

Different brewing techniques suit different kinds of beans. Espresso in particular is often better with a blend, or at least a more “all-round” variety. For example, Ethiopian beans are aromatic and bright and acid and make for a potentially unpleasantly sharp shot on their own, but are nice mixed with Indonesian Mandheling beans. On the upside, you can make your own custom blend easily once you’ve experimented, which is an enjoyable process too.

You can burn yourself or electrocute yourself or set your house on fire once you start fooling round with roasters. Use your common sense.

I’m taking some time off with the offspring for the next couple of weeks, so perhaps I’ll get my frugality blogging mojo back.

I expect I’ll also be bleating about the house-buying process soon too — we got pre-approval for a mortgage last week, so the search has begun.

Our housing choices presented as a Venn diagram

In the meanwhile, frugal reader Heather sends us this link to some sound if US-centric advice on saving money on food.  I think my biggest beef with this analysis is the assumption that organic food is necessarily better for you, which is a contentious assertion in my book, but I’m right behind the idea that you can eat better and more cheaply by making stuff instead of buying prepared food.

Sorry things have been a bit quiet in the last couple of weeks. I have a big show to rehearse for so my evenings have been chewed up by practising instead of blogging. And Che has a baby. (That gets him out of everything).

In lieu of a proper new post, how about a one year retrospective?

Last year I was noticing that a lot of the posts on my personal blog about food and money were getting many comments (by the pathetic standards of low traffic personal blogs) and I wondered:

I feel that in these anxious times there might be scope for a specialist blog aimed at the frugal bourgeois, perhaps even a Wellington one that points out local deals. What do you reckon?

And then Che set up frugalme.wordpress.com and the rest is history.

Since then, we’ve published 120 posts, sparked 779 comments, been featured in the Dominion Post and made a lot of yoghurt and bread.

Here are some favourites (many have better comments than the main post):

We look at clothes and mention Vimes’ boots for the first (but not the last) time

Che does the maths on chickpeas.

Meat.

Cheap weddings.

Cheap books.

The start of the yoghurt mania.

The start of cycling mania.

The marvellous pram.

Musing on the dollar-to-jollies ratio.

Plans for the next 12 months? I dunno. We’ll keep blogging. We invite our readers to compose posts themselves which we will happily run. There may or may not be some sort of crowdsourced grocery pricing database — I need to think about how that would really work before I commit to bodging up the infrastructure.

Anyway thank you all for your comments and feedback, which have proved that the main goal of Frugal Me as far as I’m concerned is to provoke people into telling me useful things. Cheers.

Yesterday I picked up my shoes from the cobbler.

The shoes in question were Hush Puppies with lovely bouncy rubber soles, but the lovely bouncy soles had worn down over the years to the point where they let the water in. The uppers on the other hand have been lovingly polished so that in many ways they look better than when they were new.

I took them to the chap on Victoria St just down from the Post Office and Manners Mall. He charged me $85 and did what appears to be a pretty decent job. I now have new hard rubber soles which appear to be attached neatly and soundly. My feeling is that these shoes have way more life left in them than a new $85 pair, so: win.

I also learned that it would cost $45 to get protective rubber soles put on leather-soled shoes.

I’m happy, but shoe repair is not something I do that often, so I don’t know whether these rates are reasonable or not. Thoughts?

Bonus fun fact! Cobblers, as an expression meaning testicles or nonsense, is Cockney rhyming slang. “Cobblers’ awls” me old chinas.

Picked some more silverbeet today. Cost for seedlings, $3. Labour input: minimal, and gratifying.

Silverbeet is hard to kill, easy to grow, free of most pests and diseases, and can be picked without killing the plant. I know vegetable gardening isn’t for everyone, and you need some basic kit which costs a bit, but certainly if you’re getting into it silverbeet must qualify as one of the best possible plants to grow.

As long as you like silverbeet. Which I do. Just don’t boil the crap out of it as we did in the 70s. Wash it and shred it, and sweat it in olive oil with a little garlic and salt and pepper until it’s well wilted but still green. Nom.

My Dad is a terrific fruit and vegetable gardener. He always reckons that he won’t grow things that he can buy really cheaply, unless the home-grown version is obviously superior. So Dad doesn’t do onions, but he does do tomatoes. That makes sense to me. There’s an economics of home vegetable gardening, and there’s no sense in investing a lot of effort and resources unless we know it’s worth it.

Soon I’m going to plant beans. Fresh beans are always expensive, the plants fix nitrogen in the soil for your next crop, and if you save a few pods the seeds are free. What a winner. I’d plan even more except that we’re probably moving soon…

Nominations for the frugal vege patch, anyone?

Read another interesting article today about the relationship between spending money and happiness.

Yet again, the bullet point summary is:

• spending on other people is more rewarding than spending on yourself
• spending on experiences is more rewarding than spending on things
• more money does bring more happiness, but only up to a point.

All of which things ring true in my experience. And it accords with the article I blogged about a couple of weeks ago.