Mapgirl’s Fiscal Challenge

Now that I’m keeping track of what I’m spending again, the lunch spending has gotten better. I’m definitely feeling lucky because work has provided some great free meals for me, but the caloric intake is kind of high. We’re having an end of summer BBQ next week, which is pretty cool.

Unfortunately, I still spent $45.75 last week. I ate dinner out last week with one of my girlfriends who is a former co-worker. She’s a big fan of beer and so am I. I was good because I only drank one, but we were at a popular Irish bar and the fish and chip dinner was beckoning me. If I had skipped out on seeing her, I would have spent a lot less for dinner that night, but I hadn’t seen her in a while and there was a lot to dish about in a career-impacting positive way. Can I consider it an investment in my job and networking instead of ‘Dining’ as a line item?

Let’s not even include what I ate for dinner on the weekend. I spent $30 on dinner for two, bringing the total for the week to $75.75. Times four, that’s over $300.00 for a month. Is that still too much for one+ persons? (Frequently I pick up the tab for me and boyfriend when we are out and he will pick up mine. It sort of evens out. And I tend to treat some of my younger colleagues and friends to lunch or beer because they are still struggling with student loans.)

Mind you, I don’t spend a lot on groceries either. At most, maybe $200 a month, but I doubt it’s that high. Quicken’s told me in the past that I’ve spent as little as $125 a month on groceries. Let’s say it’s $150 a month currently.

Consider these points:
1. I dine out in a lot of fast food, delis and fast casual places where there’s no need to tip.
2. I live in a high cost of living area. Tipping is best done at 17-20% vs the 15% norm.
3. I spend about 2 evenings a week at my own home for dinner. Either I am out with my friends or out with my boyfriend (meaning at his house for dinner or out out.)

So is $450 a month on groceries and dining out too much for a single person? Where do you live and how much do you estimate you spend monthly? Are you single and social, or do you stay home most nights?

Everyone needs to try! Tricia started and now she gets why it’s so good.

Here’s links to:
Johno’s amazing whole wheat recipe - I’m sold, even though it takes a while. It’s worth it to breakdown the whole wheat flour into amazing flavor. Some things are worth the wait

A post with some of my newbie bread baker lessons learned

Another post with more lessons learned and helpful advice from Johno

I am not counting groceries in this figure, but from Monday to Saturday last week, I spent about $70 on food. Since I decided to start writing stuff down again and getting back into calorie intake monitoring, it’s been pretty easy to figure out where the money goes. (The calories not so much though. But I digress.)

Since I had a free dinner last week, I think I spent very little overall. I suckered my boyfriend into buying drinks on Saturday night at Mate in Georgetown because I knew I had just enough cash in my pocket to buy dinner at Harmony Cafe. ($24 for two with tip, VERY CHEAP for a sit-down meal in Georgetown.) I didn’t think we’d stay long at Mate, but we ended up drinking longer than expected.(Please try the “French” martini, delicious!) The folks we were meeting turned out to be more fun than expected. (Co-worker’s 30th birthday and I didn’t know his friends.) I feel slightly guilty about the bar tab being high, but I made it up to boyfriend the next day by doing all of his laundry before a business trip.

I also bought some groceries for the office for breakfast and snacking. Instead of tossing a dollar into the coffee kitty, I bought coffee and sugar cubes. (Someone prefers cubes and they were running low.) It’s very informal and I’d say I spent about $11, but this means unlimited coffee and I don’t always have to make it myself. I also have a big bag of chips to eat with sandwiches I buy at a the local delis. Small things. Very small things add up. 99 cent bags of chips are either money you can save, or calories you don’t have to eat. I compromise by eating a small handful of chips from the big bag doled out into a dish so I can see them all at once and not over eat. A large bag should last me in the office till they go stale.

I may also go down the path of bread, peanut butter and jelly on my office shelf. There is nothing like protein to make you feel full. It’s a cheap and tasty snack. Way better than silly energy bars of dubious flavors and odd additives. I also miss juice. It’s time to start buying bottles of juice to drink at work. I find a 64 oz Ocean Spray bottle is fine to leave on the shelf at work for a week. Sure refrigeration after opening is recommended, but it’s so acidic, I think it’s safe to leave it. I get ice from the ice maker and that waters it down nicely for me.

What are you doing lately to spend less on food?

There’s still no cost tally on baking bread. I just don’t feel like tallying up grocery receipts and then tracking how many loaves of bread I got out of the last 5lb bag of flour. It’s not worth it to me since boyfriend also uses flour for recipes too. I’m sure it’s one of those things, like knitting and spinning, that will make me cry if I start adding in labor cost anyway. The reason is that I asked Minister of Baking and Fancy Prancing, Johno, of the Ministry of Minor Perfidy for some assistance and he gave me a crazy recipe with 4 rises. (How’s that for a new ministry title, sir? This is how I exact my revenge and offer thanks at the same time. muhahaha)

Johno actually was a fantastic resource for me. He read my post on bread baking and assuaged some of my concerns.

1. Overkneading will not happen with hand-kneading. That’s a caveat for machine mixing.
2. “It’s hard to kill yeast.” A verbatim quote from his email to me.

The other thing is my handy baker friend gave me some scientific explanations with his whole wheat recipe.

-He told me that honey is hydrophilic and so adding it will make a moister bread than adding sugar.

-Longer rises make for better flavor because the enzymes in the food have more time to break down the carbohydrates and make deeper, richer taste in the bread.

-Wetter is better for dough. Don’t add too much flour while kneading. This one has been really hard for me. The dough makes a huge mess. But on the other hand, I get much loftier rises out of the bread as well. We’re talking a SERIOUSLY light bread here. Before I was getting denser sandwich bread, now I’m getting bread that’s like a cloud. (I’m also allowing longer rises and not refrigerating the second loaf of dough. I am baking the second loaf and giving it away lately.)

It’s really shocking how little experimentation I’ve done and still gotten extremely good bread. I’ve made 4 batches now, 2 white, 2 whole wheat. I have gotten excellent reviews on the whole wheat. I took some to an ailing friend (recovering from major surgery) and she loved it with fresh butter in thin slices. The taste was really delicious and didn’t need much but the butter itself. Another loaf of whole wheat went to a crunchy-granola girlfriend of mine over the weekend because I am still quilting at her place. Again, rave reviews. This friend told me that growing up, she rarely had store-bought bread. They always had homemade bread at home. Hard for me to believe, but I think that’s pretty awesome.

I’ve found lots of things to do with bread which I’ll post up in the coming weeks. (I hope.)

And I’ll try to post the recipe later this week. Johno’s recipe is an original and yes, there really are 4 rises in the recipe. It’s quite a freakin’ commitment but he has offered a timeline for baking it too. The results are worth it.

As I expected, I’ve been shopping for lunch at the supermarket near work. I think I’ve figured out a good pattern.

For about $11-13 I can get a bowl of chili, a .6-.75 lb package of chicken salad, 1-3 whole wheat bakery rolls, a 6 pack of 20 oz Diet Cokes. For about $4 more, I can get a big box of roasted nuts. Cashews are my favorite.

I do this all in one single lunch hour trip. That’s important because part of the reason I’ve been doing this is to cut down on car trips during the week.

I eat the chili the first day with a roll. For lunch the next day, I eat half the chicken salad on another roll, or else bring some of that yummy homemade bread I’ve been baking. The third day is the rest of the chicken salad with homebread or a roll.

However, I think I need to add some bag salad to this so that I can get a few more veggies in the mix. And the downside risk is that a bad brownie might eat my lunch, but so far, there are better things to steal like the team statistician’s homemade pork and spinach dumplings. (OMG with handmade skins and homegrown chives. Delicious!)

The only downside to this is that I don’t get away from my desk on Day 2 and Day 3. That’s part of why I buy lunch every day. There’s no place outside to eat in my industrial park, besides, it’s disgusting out there now that summer is here. (It hit 100 on Saturday, therefore it’s summer.) Also, there something pathetic about the brightly painted cafeteria set in the middle of the industrial work area at my work site. It’s windowless and depressing in its false cheeriness. Plus the vending machine tempts me with candy treats and overpriced soda.

At any rate, going to the supermarket for lunch is helping conserve money. I’ve found that out in suburban industrial park hell, lunch usually runs me $8+, even on the Korean-owned lunch buffet. (Where I get my fix of Korean food the other 2 days of the week.) I rarely go to Chicken Out with the guys from the office since it’s really far away and what I want usually runs about $9. That’s been more of a monthly treat instead.

So what about you? Is this a viable strategy to change the ways of a chronic lunch purchaser? I know it’s been working for me for the last two weeks and I hope to keep it going for the rest of the summer. Are you a chronic lunch buyer and willing to try this strategy out?

Frankly, it’s a lot easier than you think it is and it kind of makes me wonder why I pay $5 at the farmer’s market for a 1lb loaf of bread. Since I haven’t bought a loaf from Grace’s Bakery at the farmer’s market in almost a year, it was time to give it a try. (Plus the yeast sock puppets on Alton Brown’s Good Eats show make me laugh.)

I’ve made one batch of About.com’s Master Bread Dough recipe. It’s nothing to be afraid of.

The top 3 things that scare me about baking bread:
1. Killing the yeast so the bread doesn’t rise.
2. Overkneading.
3. Impatience.

I’ve had some bad experience in Home EC as a kid so I always thought yeast bread was hard to make. But one of my close friends made yeast bread in the dorm kitchen all the time for awesome late-night bread and honey snacks. All of these fears can be overcome fairly easily.

1. Killing the yeast so the bread doesn’t rise: The recipe I used says heat the milk, water and butter till there are bubbles around the edges, which is how people did it before they had home thermometers. But don’t be stupid like me, just BUY AND USE a thermometer and don’t add the yeast if it’s more than 130 degrees F. Trust the recipe. I heated the mixture till there were little bubbles on the edges and it worked just fine.

2. Overkneading: If the recipe says knead it 20 times, or 10 times or 5 times, do just that. If it says knead for 8-10 minutes, do it just for 8. If you want to knead bread for therapy, make a separate batch or divide your recipe in half since many recipes are for 4+ loaves. (NO KIDDING! I read like 10 recipes before I found one for just two loaves, i.e. the recipe above.)

3. Impatience: Ah Grasshopper. This is what timers and internet surfing is for. Give it at least an hour to rise on the second rising, but the dough is forgiving here. Often recipes say to let the dough rise till it’s doubled. But I’ve found it’s actually up to me. I can put the bread on the counter and run a few errands. I can put it on the fridge and get slightly shorter rising time. Or I can put it on the front porch in Sunday afternoon heat and get an even shorter rising time (like 30-45 minutes).

Some other notes:
1. I used Silk Vanilla Soy Milk because we ran out of regular cow’s milk. This is premium soy milk that we usually don’t have at the house. We usually buy Rice or Soy Dream. But the enriched soy milk and extra vanilla flavor was alright. There was no gross vanilla flavor on the bread, just a hint of sweetness that was good for sandwiches and for French toast. (yum!)

2. Time is your most expensive ingredient. I made the recipe knowing I would only make 1 loaf and freeze the other half. That was fine for me. I had a bad headache last week and came home early in the afternoon. It was enough time to make a loaf of bread for dinner. I had no idea when I’d bake the second loaf. I thawed it out in the fridge on Saturday night into Sunday morning. I thought I’d wake up early and have fresh bread for Sunday brunch. But I didn’t wake till after noon and we left the house to hit the farmer’s market. Instead I shaped the dough and put it ON the fridge before we left. When we returned, the dough was still cold and hadn’t risen. I put it outside with a tea towel on top. In the heat of the day, it rose 75% in 30 minutes. Because I was pressed for time to complete another errand before dark, I baked it without the full doubling, but the texture of the bread was equal to that of the first loaf.

How cheap was it? Honestly, I couldn’t tell you. But if Sistah Ant’s statistic of $3.30 a loaf is any indicator, then it was damned cheaper to make my own. Everyone keeps flour, sugar, and salt around. I’m sure it’s not hard to have some milk and eggs either unless you’re vegan. (eew.). If you make a grocery list, getting some yeast at the supermarket can’t be too hard. Remember, a lot of recipes are also for multiple loaves, not just one. So even if I spent the equivalent of $3.30 on ingredients for this recipe, I got two loaves at $1.65 each which were tasty and delicious. (As of this week, Hodgson’s Mill yeast was 52 cents a packet or 3 for a dollar at their website. But I have a preference for Fleischmann’s. I feel like the packets have a longer shelf life.)

The other thing is that I’m much more inclined to eat the whole loaf if I make the bread myself. Often in the summer heat, cheap bread goes moldy on me before I can eat it all. I can assure you that every crumb of my two loaves was eaten and never had a chance to grow mold.

My next experiment in bread baking will be with whole wheat.

Hi!

I’m mapgirl! I’m about 10-15 lbs over my ideal weight. I’m too cheap to buy new clothes. I’d rather diet to fit back into what I own.

To help me track my calories and my spending, I found a Calorie-Counter Database at About.com. I use that with the online grocery shopping site for my local grocer and calculate what I ate and what I spent.

I don’t plan on doing this everyday, but I did try it out for Monday’s intake and it was mighty interesting.

For Breakfast I went with a co-worker to Au Bon Pain.
Spinach and Cheese croissant = 250 calories
Coffee with 2 Splenda packets = 10 calories
Spent ~ $5.00

For Lunch I went with co-workers for a sandwich
Turkey sandwich with lettuce, tomato, mustard and pickles
Used Subway equivalent with honey mustard (*yuck*) = 310 calories
Spent $2.74

Dinner on the way home
Quarter Pounder with Cheese at McDonald’s = 500 calories
Spent $3.26

Snacks after dinner (the oranges were basically dessert with dinner)
Dole Mandarin Oranges in syrup = 80 calories
Special K Vanilla Almond cereal 1.5 cups (2 servings) 220 calories
Generic Vanilla Rice Milk 1 cup = 120 calories
Spent ~$1.62

Total calories 1500
Total spent ~$12.61

Kind of dumb, but every once in a while, I like to keep track of what I ate and what it cost me so I get a grip on the cost of things. I was restrained on Monday.

I was going to eat Thai food for dinner, but I thought better of doing that since I had an appointment later in the evening and I was running some errands. Mickey D’s was fast, cheap, and easy. Yes, it’s terrible for me, but the alternative was to eat nothing since I had no food in the house.

After my appointment, I bought some groceries on the way home. I bought some breakfast food (rice milk, OJ, bread, and bagels and cream cheese) and some dinner foods that can turn into lunch food (Bertolli Frozen dinners for two in a new flavor). Nearly everything was on sale. I spent $33.45, but I could have spent $7.50 more if everything hadn’t been on sale.

I might go back today to buy more Bertolli frozen dinners and some frozen pizzas since the former is still on sale and I like the meatball and sausage varieties best. The latter is on BOGO sale for Super Bowl parties this week.

At any rate, the kids at work like going to get $2.50 6 inch sub sandwiches for lunch. Buy 15 of them and you get one free. I dislike cold sandwiches for lunch and frequently wish to add some soup to my sandwich, but I often dislike the soup selection so I will wait for Campbell’s Soup To Go in Creamy Tomato to go on sale. If I could buy it buy the case, I would, but I also like to buy it on sale for a dollar a can at Target instead of the regular grocery store which never sells it for quite that cheap. (But it does go down to $1.25 a can.)

Like I said, don’t expect me to do this sort of meal breakdown a lot. It just happened to be an easy thing to do on Monday once I decided I was going to do it. (I measured out my cereal and rice milk to exact amounts.) I think it’s worth taking a close look at your diet every once in a while and figuring out what you are eating and why. Honestly, I hadn’t had an ABP croissant in a long time. I knew it was bad and oily for me, but tasty. Now I will assuage my guilt with lower calorie bagels and cream cheese for the rest of the week.

Who knew that coffee was only 10 calories? Sure beats drinking a can of soda for my morning caffeine. (And I drank water all the rest of the day in an insulated mug vs styrofoam cup.)

Two weeks ago I did some shopping at my local grocery store and Target.

I noticed that Target is a lot cheaper on a great many things again. Not everything, but a lot.

Items that were cheaper at Target:
Tide HE in 100 oz bottles. About $12.50 each, where my grocery store had them for more like $15.00.

Pantene shampoo. For $3.79 vs $4.49 a bottle

Campbell’s Soup to Go. $1.20 vs non-sale prices. I only buy these at the regular grocery store if I can get them for less than $1.50.

Tylenol EZ tabs 100 count. $8.xx vs $8.xx. I forget exactly the prices, but the grocery store was very slightly cheaper. However, generic acetaminophen was still cheapest over all. But this time I had a coupon for Target and Tylenol-brand and so I got the bottle for less than $8 bucks.

*********************

Some grocery saving websites tell you to keep a price book. I’m not that diligent. I’m rather lazy, but doing a side-by-side comparison every once in a while on your staple items will give you a good idea of where to buy what things cheapest.

I still get my OJ from the supermarket and my Ocean Spray Cranberry Juice from Target.

Laddie noticed that the cereal at Target was cheaper, but the selection was small. But the Target we went to carries Goya products! Woo! Usually I get my beans and lentils from Goya, however, Target did not have those items, just the Adobe seasoning, processed foods and juices. (I point this out because the Target near my office serves a different demographic, therefore, no Goya there, more frozen pizzas.)

I think being on the list not to get junk mail means I don’t get spiffy Target coupons. I see them on his coffee table and make him take me shopping there. Added bonus, he carries the heavy stuff!

How much did I save? A little over 10% of the bill. I ended up returning the Pantene shampoo because I did not need it and the coupon was not deducted as advertised. I complained to the customer service desk and told her either to take off the $1.00 for the two bottles or just return them. She just returned them. I was stockpiling so it wasn’t a big deal, just annoying to run back into the store to make the return. (It bothers me not to read the receipt when I leave and we had to fish it out of the trunk to make me feel better.)

Added note about the coupon and the Pantene. I did not buy the largest bottles of shampoo that I could. I noticed that I would save more percentage-wise if I chose the middle size of shampoo instead of the biggest size. Please read this article by Dawn at Frugal for Life under the Buy Small section. Sometimes getting your best deal is not from using the coupon to buy the biggest size available. Often getting the middle-sized package with a doubled coupon gets you the best deal. I had this problem at Target since they didn’t have 64oz Tide HE Free (unscented) available. They only had original scent, which forced me into the 100oz bottles of Tide HE Free. Bummer. (I have yet to get into ‘rainchecks’ from the grocery store.)

I had a really fancy dinner on Saturday night, but on Sunday, I holed up in my apartment and ate frozen dinners for lunch and dinner. I just couldn’t get motivated to step out and go skating. I didn’t want to deal with the little kids and the chaos that is ice skating during a weekend public session.

I sold a pair of hockey tickets last week for $30, so I have a little cash in my pocket this week, but I’m going to try and pack my lunch. As the weather gets colder, I think soup and sandwich is best. I realize that last week I hardly ate my sandwich stuff at work because it was cold food and I was stressed out and would leave a half eaten sandwich on my plate for 3 hours. Hopefully it remains safe to eat this week.

I have also gifted out a pair of hockey tickets to a friend and sold yet another pair. I talked to the gentleman with the seats next to me and it looks like I will be able to sell another pair off in December. (Woo!)

I get paid this Friday. I’m doing badly on my paycheck challenge. Very badly. Ugh. Focus right now is to simply get the dental bill paid off and out of my hair. Next, I am thinking of stopping my FSA contribution next year to focus on debt repayment, but that will depend on open enrollment and the insurance plans available. I will put back my 401k contribution as well, but I haven’t yet decided what level.

I bought another soda today because I left my Pepsi at home. It was $1.46 at the cafe near my office for a Cherry Coke.

The vending machine on my floor is $1.25, but has only regular and Diet Coke.

Of course, Pepsi on sale at the supermarket is cheapest at $2.00 for a case of twelve on sale. But that was neither here nor there.

Now I know. Unless I really want a Cherry Coke, buy from the vending machine. Never buy a soda at the cafe. Now the Vitamin water on the day I was hungover was worth it for the B12.