November: In which the wolf taps politely at the door
And nobody
Knows —tiddely-pom,
How cold my
TOES—tiddely-pom
Are
Growing.
I start the month with an inspiration, a real grabber: Salvaged Pet Food Skillet Supper and Soup. No, no, bear with me, hear me out. Here’s the process:
Proceed to slightly dodgy supermarket, drawn by the loss-leader of frozen turkey legs at 69¢ a pound. Peer at shriveled bluish-red skittle shapes clumped in thick plastic and conclude 1. Middle Kingdom mummies are in better nick, and 2. What the cats don’t know won’t hurt them.
Go home and simmer surreal block of legs in cauldron until tender. Remove from stock, set aside, and absent-mindedly taste turkey. Add to stock a dash of salt and a handful of lentils; grate coarsely three small potatoes and huge brute of a carrot and stir in. Return to simmer, cover, and leave to its own devices for 40 mins. Stir and absent-mindedly taste again before recalling it’s pet food. Think—hang about, it’s not at all bad, and it doesn’t have to be pet food —not all of it —and tonight’s dinner option is Has-Beans with Re-Run Bun.
Accordingly, hive off 1/3 of glop in cauldron; set aside. Add to cauldron large handfuls of rye flakes and oats. Boil and stir until grains are cooked. Add broth from one can of tuna, and save tuna in jar in fridge.
Cool cauldron glop. Chop chickweed and add.
Abstract two turkey legs from heap, de-bone, remove skin, and set aside. Add skin to pet food. Chop remaining turkey meat and add to pet food. Feed beasts.
For dinner, finely chop a medium onion and sauté in 1 tsp. olive oil in large skillet until golden-brown. Add 2-3 cloves crushed garlic and sauté gently another minute. Add ¼ cup ketchup, ¼ cup water, 1 tsp. cider vinegar, 1 tsp. brown sugar, ½ tsp. chili powder, and ½ tsp. Worcestershire sauce. Mix thoroughly, cover, and simmer 10 mins.
Coarsely chop meat from one reserved leg, add to sauce, and simmer covered another 10 mins., adding a little water if necessary. Add ½ cup of frozen peas, a dash of salt, and a few tablespoons of water, and simmer covered until peas are cooked.
While the turkey mixture is cooking, boil 1 cup of macaroni in salted water. Drain; add ½ cup to turkey mixture and heat through. (Cool the remainder of the macaroni under cold water, toss with mayonnaise, and store in fridge. Next day, effect an introduction to saved tuna and some chopped green onion, celery, and dill. Object: tuna salad.)
There’s your dinner. It’s a tad Scout-Jamboree, but it could be served without embarrassment to someone who likes you. You will not, of course, call it Salvaged Pet Food Skillet Supper. May I suggest Turkey Bertolini, in honour of the Cockney signora in A Room With A View, who infamously served meat already boiled for stock.
The next day, add a little water to the hived-off glop, add crushed garlic, chopped onion, bay leaf, herbs, salt and pepper to taste, and simmer 30 mins., covered. Chop meat from remaining turkey leg and add to soup; simmer another 10 mins. There’s your lunch: Potage Charlotte, in honour of the character who decried meat boiled for stock.
I tot up the accounts, I discover I have $51 left in the food budget. For three weeks.
Now, unless you’re a right old glutton—not a good idea if you’re trying to save money—you’ll have some soup left over, so yard it out in a couple of days, simmer it 5 mins. with a couple of teaspoons of curry paste, and Baba’s your uncle. If you have some cooked chickpeas seeking meaning in life, so much the better.
Speaking of chickpeas, here’s an absurdly cheap and wonderful dish, open to infinite variation. Before your garden kale gets too moth-eaten and fibrous, or while it’s still cheap and plentiful at the store, wash and chop about 6 cups. Sauté a chopped onion in olive oil until golden, add quite a lot of minced garlic, and cook gently another minute. Add the kale and a cup of cooked chickpeas; cover and steam until the kale is as soft as you like. Stir in the juice of half a lemon, or to taste, and serve over bulgur or rice. Top with toasted almonds, walnuts, or sunflower seeds if you have them.
Variations:
Add finely chopped celery to onion.
Add orange sections at end and heat through.
Drizzle with a teaspoon of toasted sesame oil before serving.
Add 2 tsp. grated ginger to the garlic.
Or toss with the following sauce, which also works nicely as a salad dressing: Dissolve 2 tbsp. of miso in ½ cup hot green tea and blend with ¼ cup honey, 2 tbsp. lemon juice, 2 tbsp. soy sauce, 1/3 cup minced onion, 1-2 crushed cloves of garlic, 2 tsp. grated ginger, a dash of cayenne, and ½ cup olive oil.
Or toss with this peanut sauce: Blend the following ingredients: 3 large cloves of garlic, ¼ cup fresh cilantro leaves, 2 tbsp. grated ginger, 2 tbsp. toasted sesame oil (can omit and use olive oil; add some toasted sesame seeds instead if you have them), 1 tbsp. olive oil, ½ cup peanut butter, ¼ cup soy sauce, 2-3 tbsp. brown sugar, dash of cayenne, 2 tbsp. rice vinegar or apple cider vinegar, and hot water to achieve desired consistency.
Both these sauces are stellar with crisply-fried tofu cubes and broccoli.
Seven weeks before Christmas: fruitcake zero-hour. Four fruitcakes fiends clamour yearly for my rich brandied beauties, made to an old family recipe I’ve adapted to purge the poisonous maraschinos and sinister mixed peel. I can’t disappoint them, thrift or no thrift.
“Make them smaller,” whispers St. Frügl, his mousy breath frosting my ear. “In fact, how about a mince tart? A small one. Mostly pastry.”
“They don’t need anything,” hisses the pinch-faced goddess Fruga, gnawing my other ear. “Greedy beasts.”
“FAUGH!” roars the Ghost of Christmas Present, bellying in stage left and booting the unsavoury pair into the orchestra pit. “It’s Christmas! Bounty and benevolence!”
I haven’t set foot inside a boozery since August, and I whimper. Bottles of Bombay Sapphire and Beaujolais, pale ale and Tokay and Glenlegless wink and leer.
“And brandy?” I ask feebly, gazing dismayed at the plundered stocks.
“Don’t mind if I do,” he chuckles, draining the bottle. “Now bugger off and replenish. Replenish!”
And I do. I buy the ingredients. Eggs aren’t too dear—my wine-pouring friends pick me up free-rangers for $3/dozen. But butter isn’t to be had for less than $4/lb (why didn’t I buy some when it was on special and freeze it? Twit), and organic dried fruit is a hideous price. The only Christmas-cake ingredients on special are predictably the poisonous maraschinos, sinister mixed peel, and slabs of almond paste preserved with half the periodic table. I bus around town saving a dollar on organic raisins here and 50¢ on organic walnuts there, and swooning away at the price of the only organic currants to be had in the city.
“Currantly, I’m broke!” I jest wretchedly to the serving-maid at the till, but she doesn’t get it.
I pack up my sticky treasures and find myself in the lethal embrace of the liquor store. I haven’t set foot inside a boozery since August, and I whimper. Bottles of Bombay Sapphire and Beaujolais, pale ale and Tokay and Glenlegless wink and leer. Get thee hence, Satan, I think, and head for the cheaper brandies. I haven’t bought brandy since the last Christmas-cake orgy, and it’s gone up again. Can I get away with a mickey? The Ghost of Christmas Present bowls past me and there I am, holding a full 26-er of St. Rémy. And paying for it. At the till, he’s nowhere to be seen. In the wings, St. Frügl and the pinch-faced goddess Fruga shriek like Nazgûl.
As well they might. When I get home and tot up the accounts, I discover I have $51 left in the food budget. For three weeks. I comfort myself with that bit from “The Gift of the Magi”—“repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love.” And then I make the cakes, and the Ghost and I clink glasses.
Making Do has its perks, I soon realize — for example, running out of milk and whizzing up hazelnuts and water in the blender as a substitute for milk in the pancakes.
Later, I take stock. The freezer is depleted and there’s a lot of white space in the fridge, but the cupboards aren’t hubbarding just yet. I beam at a drawerful of pulses and grains. Our Friend the Lentil. I can do this. I will Make Do. Undreamed-of ingredient marriages begin to suggest themselves. Ave Necessitas. Creativity needs merely the pressure of —
“Desperation,” whispers St. Frügl.
“No, no,” I amend; “not the pressure, the encouragement to be realized. Wonderful new dishes —”
“—their hour come round at last,” hisses Fruga, “slouch towards Bethlehem to be born.” The Ghost smacks them upside the head, and they clatter through the cat-door in a crackle of skin and bone.
Before I resort to Plan B (Housemining), I play a game—hours of fun for all the family! I shut my eyes, paw around in the cupboards, and select each time four ingredients that might, with some veggies, become tasty meals. #1: Barley, linguine, honey, and dill. Maybe not. #2: Cumin seeds, canned tomatoes, raisins, and rice. Yes—a sort of tagine. Substitute cous-cous for rice? #3: Split peas, cinnamon, tuna and blackstrap molasses. Mm. Perhaps when the Mongol hordes have besieged us for six months, not before.
The game is actually a blindfold take on the one I played as an eight-year-old with my friend Irene. Irene’s mother was Rosicrucian and napped in the afternoon. I don’t mean that the two practices are related, but at the time I assumed they were because I didn’t know any other Rosicrucians or mothers who napped in the afternoon. My own ex-WAAF Anglican mother deplored napping: hardly the Dunkirk spirit.
Anyway, while Irene’s mother slept, we played a game called “You Have to Drink It.” One of us sat in the living-room while the other concocted a foul brew of anything we could find in the fridge and cupboards. Then the victim returned and had to swallow one mouthful. I recall to this day my masterpiece: Worcestershire sauce, pickled cabbage juice, mustard, cocoa powder, and a packet of ancient Eno salts I discovered by standing tiptoe on the counter and groping in the back of the top cupboard. Irene vomited somewhat, so we made a gentlewoman’s agreement that henceforth mustard and Eno salts were out of bounds. As far as I know, we weren’t harmed by this youthful Dr. Jekylling, though neither of us grew very tall.
Making Do has its perks, I soon realize — for example, running out of milk and whizzing up hazelnuts and water in the blender as a substitute for milk in the pancakes. Scraps and spoonfuls of luxury foodstuffs remain, and I feel like a post-revolutionary aristo, licking up the last teaspoon of caviar, then gnawing a raw turnip. So here’s what you do with a tablespoon of marmalade, a tablespoon of honey, and a few walnuts: Poor Woman’s Baklava. Take the heel of a frozen white loaf you were keeping for breadcrumbs, saw off four very thin slices, remove crusts, and cut the slices in half. Chop two or three walnuts fine and pan-roast. Spread each slice with a scrape of butter as thin as Bilbo on his eleventy-first birthday and a slightly fatter scrape of forceful marmalade. Dust each slice very lightly with cinnamon and powdered cloves, sprinkle with walnuts, and assemble as a sandwich. Add a little more cinnamon to the honey, and mix with enough water or O.J. to make a thin syrup. Pour over the sandwich in a small bowl and squash it about a bit. When the bread has absorbed the syrup, eat the sandwich, keeping your mind’s eye fixed on the blue Aegean. Or— now this is good—if you can run to half an egg and a splash of milk, take the unsyruped sandwich, make French toast, serve with the honey-syrup, and Zorba’s your uncle.
But I try an experiment-within-an-experiment: Buy Nothing Week. We’ll all have to get by on what we’ve already got.
Poor Woman’s Baklava is still, let’s face it, a bit of a luxury. What I’m practising is nowhere near extreme thrift. It’s not poverty, the reality of cultures we are pleased to call “the third world,” as in “third place,” bronze medal in consumerism. Even if I existed on a handful of beans and rice a day, I’d still be living in Oak Bay, poster-child for first-world affluence.
But I try an experiment-within-an-experiment: Buy Nothing Week. We’ll all have to get by on what we’ve already got. I decide to eat less, and instantly memories of the frooging seventies volunteer their help. (Not for the first time, I reflect that the most important lessons are the ones we have to re-learn.) Here’s what I learned then and forgot:
1. Don’t let yourself get too hungry because you’ll eat too fast and too much. Make pre-emptive strikes by having a nibble an hour before a meal and a glass of water half an hour before.
2. Eat very slowly. You might find that you’re full half-way through the meal; then you can stow the leftovers for the next meal.
3. Eat your big meal mid-day, when you still need lots of energy. In the evening, have a bowl of soup or a salad about three hours before bedtime. By the time you get hungry, you’ll be almost asleep; unless you’re absolutely miserably starving, sleep-appetite will win over food-appetite every time. (Hint for young travellers: When I was hostelling, I evolved a Whizzo Scheme that saved money, kept me nourished, and got me up early. If the hostel provided meals, I signed up for a cheap breakfast and pigged out. If it didn’t, I bought food from the hostel shop or cooked up the Scott’s Porage Oats I always packed with me. For lunch I bought bread, cheese, and fruit and repaired to a park, churchyard, or other al fresco venue. At the next hostel I curbed the pangs at five with a cup of tea and a morsel of leftover whatever, then drank a pint of milk at eight and went to bed at ten. The pint made its presence felt at about five-thirty, and once I was up I felt lean and light and sparkly. I’d take a short walk around the hostel environs in the calm and fragrant morning, then write my journal in the quiet common-room, eat breakfast, and be off. Of course, these days, if I drank a pint of anything before bed I’d be up at two, four, and six.)
4. Never waste anything. Stick notes on your fridge reminding you of its contents. Recycle meals into other meals. As a last resort, feed dodgy leftovers to the dog or the strawberry plants.
5. Every couple of weeks, ignore Steps 1 and 2, and make a beast of yourself. Get resentful, and you’ll give up.
As Buy Nothing Week progresses, food becomes again what it should be: respected, precious, not to be squandered. And I experience an apocalyptic moment. In ten or fifteen years, will I and my descendants gratefully, raptly eat every last mouthful? Will we have sunk, or risen, to bronze-medal status?
I’m almost out of toothpaste. My favourite hippie brand costs too much, I don’t like mainstream corporate toothpaste, and anyway my Saltspring friend says the hippie brand was just sold to a corporation notorious for animal testing and environmental sketchiness. Is nothing sacred?
Such philosophical niceties are lost on the cats, and I take a long, detached look at them. There just aren’t enough fishbones and liver slabs and what-haven’t-you to feed them for a full week. I’ve been giving them a teaspoon less, and you’d think I was forcibly converting them to breatharianism. Their customary frenzy of breakfast-lust has become a hellish hullaballoo, and dinner is Serengeti North. And yet not one of them is thin. The alley-point Siamese Teazel is a massive tank of a cat, a hulking chocolate-coated thug, and his pretty silver sister Moth is not the sylph she once was. Cordelia and Miranda, the Coal-Dust Twins, are tiny but plump. Madeline, matriarch and senior statescat, is a portly tortie; her sister Araminta is a wobbling blob of flab. Madeline’s son Michael, having somehow convinced at least two other families that he’s a needy stray, recalls an Edwardian clubman in girth and smugness. Only Octavius and Michael’s brother Ambrose have respectable BMIs. Octavius the neurotic, the criminal genius, would never do anything so pedestrian as gain weight, and Ambrose burns off the fat in freakish sprints, extreme washing, and vigorous campaigns against the hall rug, his insubordinate tail, and Octavius. But neither is a toast-rack among cats.
So why am I spending good money keeping them fat, sassy, and pre-diabetic? I actually used to fast them once a week, on the principle that cats evolved to gorge and starve. Why did I stop? I harden my heart.
“Listen up, lumps,” I tell them. “It’s autumn and you want to fatten up. Instinct tells you the outlook is grim and you’ll be digging voles out of snowbanks. But when has any of you had to dig voles out of snowbanks? For that matter, when did you last see a snowbank?”
Madeline does her impression of Mehitabel digging a frozen lamb chop out of a snowdrift and dancing around on her three unfrozen feet. The others roll about and laugh like drains. They’re such sucks.
“As I was saying. Instinct is wrong. You have evolved to become leeches on the bloated body of the military-industrial infrastructure. That will change. Dismissed.”
Never did cats diet less graciously. Octavius and Ambrose get a smidgin less, and the others are apportioned food on a sliding scale, according to adiposity, with Araminta the tortie football getting a spa portion of about a tablespoonful. She’s appalled. She grieves and yowls, but she lacks credibility. She’s practically spherical.
“Plenty of rats out there,” I say, and indeed they ratchet up the ratting a notch or two. Some of them, anyway. Others, like Araminta, hear the call of prey only in the snip of scissors, the rustle of butcher’s paper, and the merry rip of plastic pot-lid parting from plastic pot.
We see out the week. I lose weight. The cats don’t. The medievals were right: cats are in league with the devil. I wonder how much less I can feed them before SPCA operatives surround the house or the cats eat me in my bed.
Food isn’t the only problem. I’m almost out of toothpaste. My favourite hippie brand costs too much, I don’t like mainstream corporate toothpaste, and anyway my Saltspring friend says the hippie brand was just sold to a corporation notorious for animal testing and environmental sketchiness. Is nothing sacred? (Rhetorical question.)
For a week I adopt the expedient suggested by the thrifty Dutch couple in the PBS documentary Escape from Affluenza: halve the amount you normally use (of toothpaste, shampoo, and so on) and see if it still works. Keep halving until the amount is simply insufficient. They’re onto a good thing here, of course: use the amount of shampoo favoured by TV commercials and you’ll look like a victim of the Texas Fire-Extinguisher Massacre; use a full brushload of toothpaste as they do on TV and you’ll look like Old Yeller before they shoot him. A little dab’ll do ya. Eventually, however, I refute Xeno’s Racecourse Paradox. I cut open the tube and grub around with my brush, but a day later that’s it, that’s all, there ain’t no more.
Shampoo is running out, too, so I dig out two hotel soaplets left by an Austrian visitor and blend them with water.
I fall back on that staple of seventies frooging: baking soda. I’ve been using it as deodorant, anyway. Just nano-pennies a day, and there’s no aluminum to give nuzzling lovers Alzheimer’s. (This last consideration is now purely theoretical, but I pass along the recommendation to younger and friskier sisters.) As toothpaste it’s salty, but you get used to it, and it’s a great success. My gums are pinker, my gnashers are whiter, and my whole mouth hints springtime and happiness. The dingy of tooth actually ask me my secret. “Clean living,” I say, and then I lower my voice. “And mayonnaise.” I hope they don’t believe me.
Shampoo is running out, too, so I dig out two hotel soaplets left by an Austrian visitor and blend them with water. My Grade 9 guidance teacher, in the “Hygiene and Grooming” component of the course (which for girls in 1968 dominated the year—the rest was devoted to Saying No), advised firmly against using bar soap on the hair. However, she also insisted that girdles were good for you and that we pack spray-cans of oven cleaner on a date (the ultimate deterrent), so I give it a literal whirl. The mixture foams furiously from the blender. It reeks of cheap perfume, and it’s slimy in a weird sci-fi way, but I try it. Pshaw—the old bat was right. My hair is dull and grubby and it stinks like a tart’s boudoir. I use the last of the real shampoo to get rid of the experiment. There’s a cup of the sci-fi stuff left, and I briefly consider using it on Skirmish (why are dog shampoos three times the price of the human sort?), but I can’t do it to her. I don’t even want to use it as hand soap. I pour it down the drain. Somewhere, a fish is saying, “Hello, sailor.”
I console myself that I now have $51 left for two weeks, but I’ve run out of something else: therms. It’s freezing. Bloody freezing. I get up one morning and cold tears me down the middle like a paper bookmark. Sneezin’ Jesus, I think. It’s not as if I didn’t predict this situation, but hypothetical cold, contemplated in August, seems eminently manageable. The real thing is nasty. I dash downstairs, billowing steam, and fire up Edsel and Fanny. Edsel, like his namesake, obligingly trundles around on four wheels, so I move him as close to the table as I can without setting it alight. I sit there drinking a cavernous mug of scalding tea—the last of the real tea, wouldn’t you know it—and feeling sorry for myself. But as the tea enters my gullet, the iron enters my soul. For God’s sake, woman, I think crossly, this isn’t Brandon, Manitoba. It’s Victoria, non-starter in the winter stakes. Useless to whine that it’s a wet cold, a raw cold—it just isn’t that cold. I will NOT flick on the furnace. Anyway, I’m genetically British, constitutionally evolved to withstand raw cold, rising damp, and Adolf Hitler (though not the absence of real tea).
I may have my menopause to keep me warm, but the hot flashes peter out around the waist, so the nether garments remain, and my feet are icy.
So it’s on with the layers: undershirt, short-sleeved tee, long-sleeved tee, wool shirt, bulky wool sweater, knickers, wool tights, thick cords, hippie socks, woolly slippers. I sit there like Michelin Woman, wondering if I’ve over-reacted, and then I get a hot flash. Very funny, I tell the heavens—you really are a guy, aren’t you. Now I’m like the kid in the snowsuit who needs to pee. I send Edsel packing, and it’s off with the bulky wool sweater, the wool shirt, the long-sleeved tee, and the short-sleeved tee.
I may have my menopause to keep me warm, but the hot flashes peter out around the waist, so the nether garments remain, and my feet are icy. If, by dint of clean living and strenuous meditation, I can devise a way of directing this furnace to the lowest extremities, women everywhere will rise up and call me blessed. At the very least, it’s worth a statue. Until then, more vulgar means must suffice. I eat breakfast in deshabille above and Everest gear below, with my feet wobbling on a pungent hot water bottle.
The tea is gone. I pillage motley jars of chamomile, mint, and odd herbal mixtures bought in fits of reformist zeal, but it won’t do. It is tea, Jim, but not as we know it.
I spend six of my precious $51 and hug my solid green brick all the way home. Forty-five bucks for two weeks. Probably doable, I think, cheered by the tea; then I discover to my horror that I’ve forgotten (HOW?) to pay the cable bill. I pay it ($34) and limp to the end of the month on porridge, rice, potatoes, lentils, four tubs of applesauce, and chickweed, which still thrives in rude health all over Oak Bay. The brute creation subsist on two slabs of ground chicken I had mistaken for ice packs, eked out with fishbones, porridge, rice, potatoes, lentils, chickweed, and some senile beets I grub up from the garden. I get my own back on the cable company by watching insane amounts of television.
I am thirty-two cents to the good and really, really sick of chickweed.
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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