Thursday, March 26, 2009 by Hodding.

I really want to write about Caswell’s,” I told Lisa a little while ago. “I get so excited talking about it and shopping there.”

“Don’t you have to write about more than shopping?” she responded, while shaking a pair of damp jeans in the air. Flap, flap, snap. I’ve become so used to the sound of her doing the laundry, the loud snapping noise it makes with each pair of wet jeans or shirt being popped into going straight, that it has become part of our home’s everyday sounds. Flap, flap, snap. “Don’t you have to write about cooking?”

I was methodically putting together the kids’ lunches: toasting the bialys I’d bought at Caswell’s (six frozen bialys for 90 cents), pouring juice into containers, and scrounging up leftovers. It takes me about 45 minutes every morning. It shouldn’t, but it does. Meanwhile, in the same amount of time, Lisa routinely hangs 15 pairs of pants, three dozen shirts, countless pairs of underwear, and an endless assortment of mismatched socks all over the house; puts away the dry clothes; and adds finishing touches to legal documents.

“It doesn’t always have to be about food. It’s really about how we save money,” I countered. “Caswell’s is a big part of that, right?” I had her there. Ever since my friend Mike took me shopping at Caswell’s last October, I’ve been making the two-hour round trip to Waterville one to two times a month to save 50 to 75 percent on fresh, frozen, canned, and dry goods. With the words “Liquidation Center” boldly stamped right over the doorway and a fluorescent-lighting seediness waiting inside, Caswell’s is a no-frills, take-what-you-get grocery in a reclaimed warehouse, where rows and rows of discounted name-brand items are casually stacked on the shelves. One day you might see a thousand cases of Life cereal at $1.50 a box; the next, hundreds of cans of Hunt’s organic crushed tomatoes for 60 cents and not a single box of cereal in sight. I once made off with two dozen Odwalla Mango Tangos at 40 cents each.

As you can see, I can’t help loving Caswell’s, and this week I was planning to hold forth at length—until I noticed Lisa flapping those jeans. I suddenly realized I’m always writing about what our family does to save money or what I do all by myself. I’ve even written about the kids’ dutiful penny-pinching, but I’ve never pointed out Lisa’s backbreaking labors.

“You’re the sizzle and pop,” she has said on many occasions. “I’m just the low simmer. The back burner that steadily gets the job done.” Okay, that last sentence was mine. She wouldn’t ever brag. But, truthfully, her efforts alone with the laundry have saved us at least $50 a month because she hangs up every single piece of clothing instead of using the dryer. Aside from the extra money we have as a result of her efforts, she cleans the house, carries the wood, clears the land for our garden, helps with the shopping, and hunts for clothes, toys, and books at our local swap shop—all before and after her own professional work.

Show me a man who does nearly as much and I’ll show you an imposter.

Loads of laundry washed since December: 188
Loads of laundry dried in dryer: 5
Amount spent on my recent four-day work trip to Ft. Lauderdale: $18.45*
Amount I would have spent pre-frugality: $318.45–$688.45*

* I’ll explain in the “Comments” section later this week.

Photograph by W. Hodding Carter

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Thursday, March 19, 2009 by Hodding.

I once took great enjoyment from poring over cookbooks and shopping for a wide array of spices, meats, and necessary delectables. Some days it provided me with a purpose. Other days, it teased my palate just enough to squash career-induced anxieties (What’s my Amazon rating now? Is the Times really going to run that rev … oh, look at all those fresh artichokes). Always, it breathed life into the nightly, desultory job of serving dinner to a mostly appreciative family. If I had to be the cook, then at least I was going to have a James Beard time of doing it. So what if it meant driving all over town to three or four purveyors and sometimes paying exorbitant prices?

I shopped and shopped, and the multiplying interest on our loans grew and grew. Pricey food was not the only place I wasted money, but when people ask what is the biggest or most important change we’ve made, I always answer, “food.” It was the one category in which I allowed myself and my family to consume with abandon, and the one thing I believed you would have to pry out of my cold, dead fingers before I gave it up. We spent a hell of a lot of money on eating, either at home or out on the town. A head-shaking, what-was-I-thinking amount of money.

Now the six of us are down to about $350 to $400 a month, and we’re expecting that to go well below $200 come late summer and the bounty of our garden. Obviously, as I’ve said before, we don’t eat out. Two or three dinners at a decent restaurant would blow right through that monthly tab. Most importantly, though, I almost never shop for ingredients for a specific recipe. In fact, I often have no idea what I’m going to buy when I step through those comforting pneumatic doors. What do I do, you ask? I buy what’s on sale or else I just don’t buy. It’s that simple. The idea of shopping without a list flies in the face of the normal way of doing things, and considering the mess many of us are currently in, that alone ought to tell you I’m on to something good.

This is how it works: Today, asparagus, which often goes for $3 or $4 a pound, was on sale for $1.50. In the past, if I’d been planning on making slippery chicken with garlic green beans, I would have zipped right by the asparagus, bought two pounds of the full-price beans at $3.95 a pound, and been out $5. Replay that same experience while shopping for 10 to 15 more items, and we’re talking a significant amount of money. Hundreds of dollars a month, thousands of dollars a year.

Equally important, this new way of shopping is the poor man’s answer to the chef only buying the produce or meat of the day at his local farmers market: Shop with the slash mark and cook with your heart. Take that asparagus, for instance. I also got cheap scallions (half off) and even more of the Maine shrimp I bought in a few weeks ago (they’re down to 75 cents a pound). There was some kind of fire sale on cream last week so we already have practically a gallon of heavy cream. So, while I had been thinking about making pasta with meat sauce, now it looks like we’re going to have creamy asparagus and shrimp spiced up with red peppers from the sale rack and topped off with quick-fried scallions served over a mound of jasmine rice from a 20-pound bag I bought for $9.

What would you have made?

Typical price of green cabbage: 79 cents per lb

Cabbage on sale: 25 cents

Typical cost of Roma tomatoes: $1.99

Roma tomatoes on sale: 99 cents

Average number of eggs produced daily by the Carters’ 19 five-month-old hens: 4

Estimated total cost of the 49 eggs laid so far: $277

Price paid for store-bought eggs on sale on 3/18/09: $1.45 a dozen

Photograph by W. Hodding Carter

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Thursday, March 12, 2009 by Hodding.

My grandfather once wrote, supposedly paraphrasing a good friend of his, “There are two lasting bequests we can give our children: one of these is roots, the other is wings.”* It’s solid advice, simultaneously enshrining the nuclear family, while challenging us to remain open to change—if not for our sake, then for our children’s. Strong words to live by, and all that.

You’ve probably seen the quotation on a greeting card or two, or on quite a few website homepages. Maybe some of you figured out my kinship to the author (same name) and were wondering how I could be so income-challenged, for some reason discounting my public mea culpa. Now, if my grandfather or his children had only copyrighted the phrase, I might not have had to recently pay for dog food by trading in three trash cans of returnables. But we never cashed in. My dad says it simply didn’t occur to him until he suddenly saw the quotation everywhere he looked.

Despite its popularity, most people haven’t followed its fairly simple advice. Lately, it seems we’ve been getting and using our wings just fine. We flit from place to place and person to person like some rabid combination of Tinkerbell, Cupid, and Daffy Duck. But how about those roots? We’re unable to withstand the slightest breeze, as witnessed by our country’s skyrocketing divorce rate, legal suits, and, now, foreclosures. We more closely resemble the unanchored white spruce trees that topple down day after day, year after year all over Maine’s rocky islands than the deeply rooted oaks and pecan trees that my grandfather imagined. Is it TV? The on-the-go consumption of fast food? Parasitic companies jumping from one state’s expired no-tax offer to another’s, scattering legions of rootless workers behind them?

I don’t know.

I do know there’s something about this frugal living that’s re-forming my children, driving their roots deep into our literal and figurative surroundings, at a pace that all my indulgent spending never accomplished. If roots mean a mindfulness of disparities in wealth, a concern for the entire family’s well-being, nascent compassion, a willingness to pitch in, a growing desire to help change our ways, and a clear understanding of who we are as opposed to who we project ourselves to be; if having roots means possessing and cherishing these qualities, then I’d say we are finally heeding my grandfather’s advice.

Last October, as I frantically stomped through the boggy woods behind our house searching for standing dead wood that I could cut and chop for our woodstove, I suddenly remembered there was a better way to get around shelling out $20 for a quart of maple syrup every month (it’s getting even more expensive). We had dozens of maples, mostly scrub, but maples nevertheless. This realization was one of the first in an ever-increasing succession of positive realizations that things were going to be more than okay—they were going to be a damn sight better. As I ambled around the woods marking maples, I stopped panicking, but it was when I started listening to my children that I had something even better: hope.

Yesterday, when I picked the kids up from school, I knew they were developing the kind of roots Big (my grandfather’s nickname—really) was talking about. Thirteen-year-old Anabel climbed into the back of the minivan, not with the ever-present teenage scowl but with a teasing smile as she asked, “Dad, I think you’ve forgotten about something.” Nothing unusual there, I thought—it’s a breakthrough day when I remember to put my pants on before heading out the door. “All those maples you painted blue? It’s time to tap them. Can we do it tomorrow?” Anabel is the same daughter who recently offered to buy the party favors for her own birthday celebration. The same girl who, back in October, angrily stated she wasn’t going to live frugally with the rest of us.

Eliza, Anabel’s twin, who once only wanted the most popular brands of ice cream and clothing, now runs through the store looking for generic or reduced-for-quick-sale items. She doesn’t let me buy name-brand anything and recently scolded me as I absentmindedly picked up a liter of bottled juice: “Put that back. It’s much cheaper to make our own. Mom said so.”

And then there’s Helen, the one who nearly cried when Lisa and I said we had to cut back our spending. She has lived for fine dining most of her 11 years, but not anymore. “We get to make lots more good stuff and it tastes better,” she claimed, and then she added, almost making me wreck the car, “I don’t ever want to eat out again.”

And then there’s Angus, 6, keeping things real. He recently announced we could sell his toys. When Lisa congratulated him, however, he quickly made a clarification: “I meant the broken ones!”

Hope that brings a tear of joy to all those “Go out and shop!” economists.

Amount spent yearly on maple syrup: $200

Money saved if we make all our own syrup: $188
Cost of metal tap to collect maple sap: $2.97
Number of taps bought: 4

Number of taps we desire: 12

Time it takes to collect 1 gallon of sap from Carter family midsized maples: 3 days
Cost of heat to boil sap: Free (outdoor wood fire)
Number of prime sap-collecting days during an average Maine spring: 2 weeks
Number of Carters who like maple syrup: 4

[1] *Most people attribute the advice to him, although some suggest Henry Ward Beecher said it first, and still others quote a similar bit of wisdom uttered by Jonas Salk—after my grandfather’s book Where Main Street Meets the River, which contains the quotation, was published. Here’s the remainder of the quotation (I like it as much as the over-used part): “And they can only be grown, these roots and these wings, in the home. We want our sons’ roots to go deep into the soil beneath them and into the past, not in arrogance but in confidence.”

Photograph by W. Hodding Carter

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Thursday, March 5, 2009 by Hodding.

In an above-average house in an upscale neighborhood of a decidedly well-to-do area, the wine flows, the laughter cascades, and the canapés are politely declined.” This is the lead to a BBC News piece that aired yesterday. It’s about how even the wealthy have resorted to selling gold—jewelry, coins, and, yes, even teeth—and are throwing “gold parties” run much like the classic Tupperware parties of the 1950s. While I love that first sentence and even get some guilty pleasure out of seeing decadent people being humbled, I’m disturbed by the stated reason for these gold sales. These people aren’t parting with cherished treasures, unwanted mementos, and unneeded presents to clean house or to make ends meet but simply to have a little more spending money. In other words, they’re mostly doing it so they can continue to live it up like they did last year. This drives me batty. I can handle someone selling Aunt Stella’s gold tooth to pay a grocery bill or, even more so, to put into savings. But selling it so they can afford a fancy meal (one reason given) or throw a lavish party (another) just seems wrong. There’s no lesson being learned. Or maybe I’ve become a prude. I don’t like their priorities and I don’t like that they can afford to serve wine and canapés.

My sister Finn (pictured above), who is visiting, certainly thinks so. “Y’all have made it a sin if somebody goes out and buys a loaf of bread,” she said a few days ago. “I’m afraid to buy groceries in fear of you grilling me. ‘Why’d you buy that? Did we need it? How much did it cost?’” She’s right, though. Every time Lisa or I walk in with a plastic shopping bag, the other one asks, “What’s that? How’d you get it? Who bought it?” I did that to Lisa yesterday, and it turned out the plastic bag was filled with droppings from our dog, Ginger. Perhaps it serves me right.

I’m not against people having fun, though. I haven’t turned down the salmon pâté and duck mousse that Finn bought once she realized it wasn’t against our rules for her to spend money. (I probably shouldn’t have opened that door. Now she’s telling us we’re cheating because we’ve used the dryer twice in the last two days—somehow, in her mind, this negates the 117 days out of 120 that we haven’t used it.) I even splurged recently by buying duck, lamb, and garlic sausage from our butcher so I could enter our friends’ cassoulet contest. It was their fourth annual cook-off, and since I wimped out last year, there was no way I was going to miss it. Also, I had that mad-hatter Fearnley-Whittingstall’s recipe. Winning was a sure thing, and it would light a spark of cheer in this long, relentless winter we’re having. Maybe my family couldn’t sell my gold molar, but we could still have as much fun as some rabid spendthrift.

I’m not going to go into minute detail about how for two days I dutifully massaged the duck with an invigorating rub of fresh thyme, crushed bay leaves, mashed garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper, and then after a quick browning, lovingly bathed it at 300 degrees for a few hours in a cauldron of rendered duck and pig fat to make mouthwatering confit. I’ll skip over the steps that followed so I can land us at the cassoulet party itself, where we drank and talked and nervously eyed the 60 or so guests tasting the nine entries. (I love going to parties now: free wine.)

The two men who, in most of the previous years, had taken first place (a chef and friend of the host) and second (the host) had matching pans to level the field between them. Their dishes looked meaty and moist. One used pheasant; the other, sausage made by an artisan. But somehow, the frugal dark horse won the day.

Yes, it might have been because I had the votes of my six family members (Finn came along). But at least six people who were not family members followed suit, and I didn’t vote for myself. I would have the trophy, a statue of a Gallic-looking chef, to prove my victory, except that the host’s mom suddenly realized she’d misspelled the word cassoulet when making it. So instead, all we have is a small gold-painted head of garlic, marked with a black “1,” that had been sitting beside the statue. I wonder how much we’d get for it at a gold party?

Amount Finn spent on food and gifts while here for two weeks: $700

Amount we spent during this period on food, gas, medicine, misc.: $130

Estimated amount we could make selling gold items, including my gold cap: $6,585

Amount we sold: $0

Eggs laid to date: 26

Photograph by W. Hodding Carter

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