September: In which I take stock, wonder what all the fuss was about, and weary of ratatouille.
I assembled the border collie and the nine cats and – Yes, nine. It’s a long story. Several long stories, of little interest to anyone, including me. As Hemingway observed, one cat just leads to another.
Which reminds me – how is it that Ernest Hemingway got to have 23 cats or whatever it was (and even left them money in his will) and everyone smiles knowingly and says, Ah yes, he loved to commune with other roguish free spirits, he admired their lethal feral grace and insouciant independence yammer yammer yammer, whereas if a woman d’un certain âge – okay, a bit over un certain âge – cohabits with a trifling nine cats (honest, you’d never know they were there), everyone smiles knowingly and says, Crazy cat lady.They know she is a loony old loser who names her precious pussies Michael and Ambrose and Madeline for the children she never had, knits them tiny bedsocks, and croons to them on her lap in the wing chair, lavishing upon them a love rejected by the laughing world of men, while her pale mad eyes stare into the dead past, the flowers faded, the guests departed, the wedding-cake uneaten . . . .
Hah!
Am I not she who walked by her wild lone among the moonlit pyramids after twelve hours on camelback, having spurned with her foot the guide demanding more money to complete the return journey to Giza (or, in lieu of payment, my virtue or my hiking boots)? Did I not climb Mt Snowdon alone in a sodden fog and Mt Sinai in 40° heat, pursued by a proselytizing Austrian evangelical? Was it not I who dispatched a gang of Arab creeps with a well-aimed fist to their leader’s solar plexus? Did I not face down a starving leopard at midnight on the shores of the Dead Sea? (Oh, all right, I lay rigid in my sleeping-bag while my sort-of boyfriend roused himself to yell “Sod off!” into the snarling blackness, but I got no sleep at all and I looked terrible the next day.)
Just asking.
Anyway, I assembled the border collie and the nine cats. Skirmish stood to attention; the cats lolled about, idly punching each other. Ambrose washed his bottom.
“You’re probably wondering why I asked you all here today. Management is introducing some new policies. We’re all going to have to tighten our belts” –And I explained the scheme. They stared, and eight of them wandered away. Michael washed his bottom. Skirmish laid her head on my knee. “Whither thou goest, I will follow,” she said. “You can have my food if you like.”
The cupboards are half-full, the freezer is half-full, the garden is rampant with edibles.
The cupboards are half-full, the freezer is half-full, the garden is rampant with edibles. Potatoes fatten in the earth, blackberries roister along the fence, and portly squashes bumble among the sunflowers. The tomatoes haven’t really put their backs into it, and the beets are struggling beetfully in less than nourishing surroundings. The mustard greens have colonized the entire north-west corner and are massing for an assault on the irises. Not a good year for apples, only a couple of dozen russets sunning themselves in the airy blue, and the pear tree is sulking again: five scabby no-hopers.
“Oh do buck up,” I tell it in my best headmistress voice. “Another year like this, my girl, and you’re for the chop.”
It’s the only way with pears. Apples respond better to wheedling, and of course, you need never say a word to blackberries, which would strangle you in your bed as soon as look at you.
As usual, slugs have scoffed all but a handful of my pea, bean, and lettuce plants, and although I’ve squashed thousands of the slimy little hoovers, it’s no contest. As one First Nations warrior is supposed to have said of the Europeans, there are a great many of them.
However, the kale is bearing up, I’ve had strawberry fields forever, and the tubs on the deck are boiling over with nasturtiums. All in all, despite a few backyard footdraggers and lollygaggers, there’s a lot of nosh out there.
Shopping, of course, fulfils the hunter-gatherer instinct.
I’m uneasy, though. This abundance won’t last. I know that Time will take me to the empty larder by the shadow of my hand, in the house that is always darkening . . . . So I dig and pick and cut, I sauté and purée and simmer and freeze. And, because woman does not live by four fruits and eight veggies alone, I nick flyers from my neighbours’ blue boxes and make shrewd lists of bargains.
Shopping, of course, fulfils the hunter-gatherer instinct. Scoring five pounds of half-price chickpeas may lack the pizzazz of schlepping a kudu back to the campfire, but the “Hah!” satisfaction-reflex is identical. Starvation is postponed; the people thrive. Laugh and sing and dance around the fire, or kitchen, or anything you’ve got.
The nosh-quest is always an expedition. Like the Beach Boys, I get around, but I do it without a car. The Victoria transit system is not a triumph of the urban planner’s art (more of which later), but daytime connections to the local grub emporia are adequate. I check my lists – three super-markets, a health-food store, and an ill-run hole-in-the-wall which can’t, I persuade myself, contaminate canned goods. The comparison-pricing has been done, but I note the prices by each item in case I find cheaper serendipitously in Chinatown stores or other unadvertised shops. Coupons are matched with specials and tucked in the wallet. (Buttermilk for $1.49 minus a 50-cent coupon, bran cereal at $3.19 minus a dollar coupon, and organic raisins at half price add up to 24 fine fat muffins in the freezer, plus leftover buttermilk for a cool glass with a moong-dal pancake on eat-Indian days.) Finally, I stuff my backpack with extra shopping bags and a few empty cans and bottles. I’ve rarely consumed the contents of these drinks containers: almost all the booze I drink these days has been poured by the hands of friends, and I’ve drunk about two liters of pop since adolescence (the appeal of the “athletic drink” – some day-glo weirdness in a toxic nipple-bottle – eludes me), but I scoop bottles and cans from the parks, beach, and boulevards and return them, thus tidying the town and eking out the budget. There exists in our midst a species of young male, spiritual heir to the Beach Boys, whose mission and delight it is to drive around aimlessly and at speed, and always in like-minded company, hurling glass, metal, and plastic about; I figure I’m guaranteed this largesse at least until the oil runs out.
A really good, crusty, chewy, organic loaf from an artisan baker is about $4 or $5, an acceptable supermarket loaf $3. I can do it for $1.50.
On this first expedition of the month I’m especially seeking flour, oats, tea, onions, alfalfa seeds, lentils, and cornmeal. Everything except the alfalfa seeds and tea is on special, and I have a master meal plan. I’ve withdrawn $200 from the bank; the remaining $122 ought to cover the utilities. Except for the shopping, I carry no more than $10, on Samuel Pepys’s principle that, if you haven’t got it, you can’t spend it. His diary entry for February 16th, 1660, reads, “I by having but threepence in my pocket made shift to spend no more, whereas if I had had more I had spent more as the rest did, so that I see it is an advantage to a man to carry little in his pocket.” (The credit card companies pursue me with ever more cunning blandishments, to no avail. I stuff their wheedlings into their post-paid envelopes, along with other junk mail – the heavier the better – and an assortment of organic offerings such as dried used tea leaves and cat fur; then I flip it back to them. I don’t suppose it does any good, but it’s fun and it’s free. As for debit cards, I’ve got one and I’ll use it in an emergency, but the bank’s rapacious “service” charges have so annoyed me that the iron has entered my soul and the card is enjoying little congress with the ATM.)
Even when shopping, I restrict myself to $50 and keep a running ballpark tally. Advantage: I avoid impulse, I stick to my shrewd list, and I save money. Disadvantage: I can’t afford to buy serendipitous bargains, and therefore I ultimately lose money. At this point I can choose to use the debit card (DING!), buy fewer of the listed items or less of one or two to free up some cash, or note the items and location and return before the special packs its bags. In practice I almost invariably choose the last option because I can’t carry twenty pounds of onions along with the milk and bulk beans and canned tomatoes. What profiteth it a woman to save $8 on onions and spend $800 at the chiropractor having her sacroiliac restored to its rightful place? And speak not to me of deliveries. Most supermarkets now charge $5 for delivery ($5! That’s almost two kilos of organic oats!) and can’t even predict when they’ll get there, so you come home to discover the bags in tatters, the cheese abstracted, and a few blobs of offal drying on the steps. Like the Rum Tum Tugger, my cats prefer what they find for themselves.
I know of no problem – a hangnail, a tax audit, an imminent super-nova of our sun – that doesn’t seem less daunting when one is spooning up a bowlful of porridge moated with cream, scattered with brown sugar, and graced with a few flakes of cold butter.
The flour I buy is mostly bulk bread flour. At various times in my life I’ve made my own bread because I like everything about home-made bread – mixing, kneading, baking, eating, and the smells, Esmeralda, the smells! – but now I’ve got to bake my own. A really good, crusty, chewy, organic loaf from an artisan baker is about $4 or $5, an acceptable supermarket loaf $3. I can do it for $1.50. It doesn’t take long, and I don’t muck about shaping the perfectly folded and seamed loaves that my home ec. teacher demanded. Three of the four loaves are just rough balls of dough plopped into small cast-iron frying pans; the fourth I braid and lay on a tray. Four loaves last me two weeks, through I sometimes trot a hot loaf around to the kindly friends who pour me beakers of the true, the blushful. Very sacramental.
The bulk oats (77¢ per kilo cheaper than packaged, at regular price) are destined mainly for porridge. I grew up on porridge, and, when I was assistant breakfast cook at my university residence, I had intimate dealings with it. (Hieronymous Bosch had no idea of Hell. He should have stared, hung over on pop wine at 5:30 a.m., into a thousand-servings vat of porridge.) Despite my university kitchen traumas, I love the stuff, highland-plain or heaving with chopped apples, raisins, and sunflower seeds. I know of no problem – a hangnail, a tax audit, an imminent super-nova of our sun – that doesn’t seem less daunting when one is spooning up a bowlful of porridge moated with cream, scattered with brown sugar, and graced with a few flakes of cold butter. If I’ve started the day with a big veggie scramble, I’ll often end it with porridge – the joys of living alone and cooking only for oneself.
I dig out an old hippie cookbook and revive my alfalfa-sprouting skills. I’m not crazy about sprouts, but as the year gets old and grumpy and lettuces go for $2.69 a droopy head, a handful of sprouts will set you back a nickel. Also, you can leave them to drain without cats trying to eat them, though they don’t have much choice when the sprouts are chopped up in their food.
Ah, yes. Pet food. Despite the claims of some doubtlessly well-meaning activists, cats do not flourish on a vegetarian diet. Dogs aren’t happy, either. (Remember Shirley Valentine and the bloodhound?) Sure, they like eggs and milk and whatever cheese they can filch, but those teeth did not evolve to pierce and shear a wheel of brie. Over the years, I have stepped – usually with bare feet, at night –on a distressing number of mouse haunches and rat heads, and worse, various cuts of rodent on the comeback trail. But, barring this fast food and the occasional hapless sparrow, pet food is expensive. I’ve made the cats’ wet food for years, buying beef heart, marked-down liver and kidney, lamb breast, ground chicken and what-have-you, and mixing it with porridge, stale bread, and veggies raw and cooked. (Fishbones are cheap – though they’re sold as bones, they’ve actually got a lot of flesh on them – but removing the flesh after simmering them is a finicky, time-consuming pain.) Skirmish gets the same concoction with extra grain and veggies and sometimes pulses. Nevertheless, even remaindered meat is pricey, and I could see no way around this one except to add more vegetable protein to the cat food and feed them less.
Then a friend reminds me of something I once knew but had forgotten: that fishbones and chicken bones soften and crumble when pressure-cooked. No more boning, and extra calcium to boot. I phone my bargooning friend Pete (one-half of the kindly wine-pouring friends) and ask him to keep a beady open for a second-hand pressure cooker. By Gar, if he doesn’t return from a thrift store that very day bearing in triumph the Holy Grail of pet food makers! There’s an orange price tag on the lid: $6.29. I dig out the money. No, no, he says, it’s half-price day. $3.15.
Pressure-cookers terrified me until I used one in England. I cringed behind a kitchen chair, expecting a domestic Chernobyl or, at least, messy death by pot-shrapnel. And then nothing happened and nothing continued to happen except that the beans cooked quickly. I was thrilled. Then, back in Canada, my pressure-cooker died, and for some reason I never replaced it.
Chickweed, as promised, is everywhere. My book tells me it’s high in potassium and vitamin C.
Okay, so the house smells like Billingsgate at the end of a hot day in August, but now I can get a pot of pet food (typically salmon, liver, raw beef heart, oats, potatoes, carrots, zucchini, and alfalfa sprouts), the equivalent volume of about 15 cans, for about $5.
Another idea strikes. I’d heard that chickweed is good for creatures other than chickens, so I hie me to a counter-culture guidebook that assures me I can find most of my veggie requirements peeping shyly from hedges and gate-crashing gardens. In a word, weeds. Chickweed, as promised, is everywhere. My book tells me it’s high in potassium and vitamin C and thus sovereign against scurvy, not a notable problem among my beasts, but a fact worth knowing. I chop it up in their dinner, and they like it. I try a few leaves myself: earthy, but mild and pleasant, and at least as palatable as alfalfa sprouts. Chickweed will still be around in late fall and winter (it’s tough as boots) when other greens are scarce, so I’ll put this idea in the back crisper.
By the way, if your vets tut-tut about home-made pet food, remember that they make a tidy sum flogging high-end critter-nosh, and ask them what their doctors would say if they confessed that their entire diet came out of cans and packets. You might also inquire how they think dogs and cats contrived to thrive before the advent of the pet food industry. (My dad’s grocery warehouse cat made it to 18 on a diet of mice, milk, tinned fish, scraps and grass.)
I buy the tea loose, in green, brick-like packets, $6 a pound from the supermarket.
Tea, bee-ootiful tea. I never did buy much coffee for home consumption, preferring to indulge in a weekly cappuccino at an indie coffee-house, but I can’t do without tea, and lots of it. Britain won the war on tea – not your designer blends or niminy-piminy herbal teas, but bracing working-class char, strong enough to trot a mouse. ‘Ave anuvver cuppa, dearie, and up yours, Adolf. So my cherished weekly cappuccino is now a not-so-weakly cuppatino from a thermos on the beach. It’s brilliant. Skirmish and I get up early and she potters after sticks while I sit on a log, watching the sun come up and drinking four cups of scalding tea. (Just out of interest, when did you last see an adult use a thermos? Or a kid, for that matter?)
I buy the tea loose, in green, brick-like packets, $6 a pound from the supermarket. It’s never on special. You have to open the packet carefully because the brittle glue shatters into the tea-caddy, and the packers often include extras such as blue nylon threads and small chunks of cement, but it’s massively cheaper than tea-bags (which a friend assures me are full of floor-sweepings), and you’re spared the little dose of dioxin from the bleached bags. The used leaves settle down happily in the compost or find their way to credit card usurers.
On this expedition I luck out on cheap B.C. eggplants, so when I get home I potter around the garden, dispatching zukes, gathering a half-colander of tomatoes, and snipping herbs, oregano, thyme, and parsley. (Oh Lord, the parsley. Last year I let three parsley plants go to seed and they blew up, firing eager parsley wannabes all over the north-east corner. The pathways are a parsley carpet. I’ve eaten parsley frittata and parsley vinaigrette and chopped it into soups, stews, and pet food, but it keeps coming. It’s creeping up to my bedroom window; if I weren’t trying to save electricity, I’d sleep with the lights on.) I make a vat of ratatouille and freeze half of it. The first day I eat it hot with crusty bread; on the second I know I’m going to need help, so I invite some friends for lunch and we eat it at room temperature with a little vinegar, a few olives and capers, and some shavings of Parmesan. We mop it up with home-made French bread and wash it down with a savage little red, courtesy of my guests. On the third day it rises again and I glare at it, slop it into the blender and beat it up until you’d never know it had been ratatouille in a previous life. I thin it with a little stock, re-heat it with some cooked navy beans, sprinkle it with @#*! chopped parsley, and stare at it in deep gloom. I’m on the verge of cooling it and freezing it when I recall the finger of red wine fighting off fruit flies in a glass I forgot to wash up. I strain out a few flies – the alcohol must surely have sterilized them – and stir it into the soup. Better. Inspired, I grub around in my laughably named drinks cabinet and find a butt-end of brandy I’m reserving for the Christmas fruitcakes. What they don’t know won’t hurt them, I think, and hive off a couple of thimblefuls for the soup. Hah! Brandy makes all the difference in a creamy tomato-and-dill soup, but it comes up trumps here, too. But I feel guilty about the fruitcakes.
One can have too much of a good thing, but this meal-morphing lark saves electricity and lots of time. Take kusherie, for example, the good old rice-and-lentil standby of my Egyptian travels. The first day you eat it as is; then you make patties of it and fry them; then you reduce it to soup, freeze it, and yard it out when you can stand the sight of it again.
Kusherie, Day 1
Heat 3 tbsp. butter in a large, heavy saucepan, add 1 ¼ c. washed green lentils and 1 ½ c. brown rice, and stir over medium heat until the rice and lentils begin to get toasty. Add 4 c. salted vegetable stock, ½ tsp. salt, and ¼ tsp. black pepper. Cover and simmer for 35-40 mins. (depends on the lentils – they’re individualists) or until both rice and lentils are tender. Add more stock if they’re getting dry.
In the meantime, sauté 1 finely chopped large onion and 1 finely chopped green or red pepper in a couple of tbsp. olive oil, and stir until onions become a bit brown. Add 3 or 4 cloves of minced garlic and gently sauté another 3 mins. Mix in 1 small can of tomato paste, 3 cups of chopped fresh or canned tomatoes, a handful of chopped celery leaves, 1 tbsp. sugar, 1 tsp. ground cumin, and salt and cayenne pepper to taste. (I use about ½ tsp. of cayenne –the Egyptians go berserk with it.) Simmer uncovered ½ hour, stirring occasionally. (You might need a spatter-screen.)
Serve the sauce atop the lentils and rice, with extra browned onions, if you like, and hot sauce.
Kusherie, Day 2
Lightly mash a couple of cupfuls of rice and lentils, add a beaten egg and enough breadcrumbs to make the mixture cohere, salt and pepper, and any herbs you fancy (parsley is good. . . ). Make patties, press them into breadcrumbs to coat, and fry in hot olive oil until crispy. Serve with sauce as above or with yoghurt into which you have squashed a clove or two of garlic. In the latter case, greens and/or yams are a good match.
Kusherie, Day 3
Take half of the remaining lentils and rice, purée them with half the remaining sauce, and thin with a little stock. Mix in the rest of the two components, and freeze. (If you have a boiled egg looking for work, chop it, toss it with some chopped green onion, and use it as a garnish. Yoghurt is good, too.)
Potatoes recycle splendidly as well. You can add a spoonful of mashed potatoes to lentil or bean patties or to soups, or make it the major player in its very own soup, something I call Half-Assed Vichyssoise: Chop a large onion fine and sauté it gently in a heavy saucepan in 2-3 tbsp. butter (more if you can afford it). Add 2 or 3 large unpeeled cloves of garlic, cover, and steam gently until the garlic is very soft. Pop the garlic out of its skins and bung it in the blender with the onions, one cup of strong chicken or vegetable stock, 2 cups of mashed potatoes, salt and pepper, and one cup of milk or cream. Serve piping hot. (Yes, I know. Call me old-fashioned, call me British, but I take the view that cold soup is an offense against nature, and no good at all when you need cheering up.) You can also omit the garlic and substitute any amount of nutmeg, in which case I seriously advocate using cream instead of milk if you’ve got a coupon. (The local dairies seem to dish out cream coupons at Christmas, so keep this in mind.) Or keep the garlic, add ½ cup or so of grated cheddar, and top with (scream) chopped parsley.
Now, latkes. Cheap and delicious. Use your favourite recipe (adding a little minced onion, if you like), fry them crisp, and serve them on a bed of greens with applesauce and yoghurt. Try a combination of kale, mustard greens, and dandelion leaves, sautéed in a wee bit of butter, steamed, and perked up with a squeeze of lemon. Even if you haven’t got all the veggies in your garden, they’re dead cheap in September, and dandelions are free for the plucking. (I notice California dandelion greens in the supermarket, offered at $1.69 a bunch. Words fail me.) Just make sure they’re nowhere that’s been sprayed with narsties or irrigated unduly by dogs. Also, like many of us, dandelions grow bitter with age, so pounce on the young ones as they spring up. Not that a little bitterness in your food will hurt you. Bitter greens are said to spruce up the liver and are no doubt sovereign against scurvy.
Bread, of course, is the single most adaptable staple: toasted, fried, grated into crumbs for filler, cubed into croutons, and transformed into sweet and savoury puddings.
Try to keep a few latkes back. The next day, dice them in ½” squares, re-fry them crisp (you won’t need much oil because they’ve got oil clinging to them and indeed sogging them dismally) and use them as croutons on a creamy onion soup or bean soup. Or – I love this – add a little ground cumin, coriander, ginger, salt, and garam masala to a little oil, cook very gently for a minute, add a pressed clove of garlic, cook a bit longer, then add the re-fried ½”-squared latkes and fry gently another minute. Serve as an appetizer with chopped cilantro or a snack with sweet chai. Or you can dice the latkes into larger pieces, re-fry crisp, top with cheddar, and grill until the cheese is bubbly and beginning to brown. Just the ticket with broccoli.
Bread, of course, is the single most adaptable staple: toasted, fried, grated into crumbs for filler, cubed into croutons, and transformed into sweet and savoury puddings. The Italians even make soup (Pappa al Pomodoro) and salad (Panzanella) from bread. One of my great joys is French toast, made with thick doorsteps of home-made bread. (I’ve let everyone know I want maple syrup for Christmas.) This breakfast food, distressingly called “eggy bread” in Britain, originated as a way to make a cheap dessert from stale bread. In Britain it used to be called “Poor Knights of Windsor,” after royal hangers-on who weren’t so impoverished they couldn’t rustle up a few eggs and a cup of milk, “rustle” being the operative word.
Here’s the bread recipe I’m using this month. You can substitute canola oil for the butter, adding an extra pinch of salt, and water or vegetable stock for the milk. If the stock is salty, omit the salt entirely (the yeast will sulk).
Whole Wheat Bread
Scald 1 ½ cups of milk, and pour over ½ cup of brown sugar, 2 tbsp. salt, and ½ cup butter in a large bowl. Stir to melt the butter. Add 2 ¼ cups of vegetable water (potatoes and/or carrots are best; do not use brassica water unless you like bread that smells of sewage) and cool the mixture to lukewarm.
Dissolve 2 tsp. brown sugar and a pinch of ginger in 1 cup of lukewarm water, and mix in 2 tbsp. (2 envelopes) of dry yeast. (I know you can use that rapid-mix stuff, but where’s the fun in that? Rapid yeast is vapid yeast.) Keep in a warm place 10 mins. until foamy, then mix it into the liquids.
Beat in 7 cups of whole-wheat flour until your arm gets tired, then gradually beat in 5 cups of unbleached white flour. You’ll have to use your hands for the last 2 cups. Knead on a floured surface about 5 mins or until the dough is springy and fighting you every step of the way. Shape it into a ball, place in an oiled bowl, oil the top of the bread lightly, cover, and keep in a warm place until the dough has doubled in size. (Unless the kitchen is really hot, I give the oven a small shot of heat, then keep the dough in the oven.)
Punch it down, divide into four, and place in pans. (See my earlier comments about shaping loaves.) Let rise again until doubled, and bake at 400º 30-35 mins. Remove from pans and cool on racks.
I end September with my $1000 tucked up and comfy. I’ve underspent the food budget by $80, and I’m gloating over a full freezer, smug cupboards, and a plumpish fridge. I’ve bought no clothes, the toiletries are holding up, and books and friends supply most of my entertainment.
The utilities are another story. $122, indeed –what was I thinking? The gas bill is negligible (the furnace hasn’t seen action since early April, and I’m not an obsessive bather), and electricity is surprisingly low, given the kitchen frenzies. The basic cable fee is a set rate; there’s nothing I can do about it except cancel, and life without Knowledge Network seems bleak and chill. The phone bill is frightful. Could I really have talked that much? What about? Must my godmother live in Oxfordshire? Did the FW have to move to Montreal? Also, I’ve been inundated with a water bill for $74. All right, that covers four months, and it was summer, but that’s a hell of a bar tab for a few thirsty tubers and what-not, and I did schlep a few hundred buckets of greywater to meet their demands, and I did let the so-called front lawn frizzle and crisp. (Eco-conscience prickles me as I write: $74 is little enough for four months of precious water. I mustn’t complain. I must try harder.) Then again, the garden will be going part-time soon before it quits altogether. But there’s the rub: it will peter out just as heat and lighting demands ratchet up. But that’s a long way off – isn’t it?
What’s that shadow – there –just around the corner . . . .
Hilary Knight lives in Oak Bay, Victoria, B.C. and tries to teach English at the University of Victoria. Her blog recounts a year of living thriftily, September 2007 through August 2008.
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