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| Vietnamese meal in Bisbee, Arizona |
We
don’t eat out on a regular basis, but when we do, I skip the salad bar. For me
the luxury of a restaurant meal is having other people do everything for me –
cooking, serving, and cleaning up afterward – while I sit at leisure, glass of
wine in hand, enjoying conversation and surroundings. I know couples who
consider restaurants a terrible waste of money, but they’re only comparing the
cost of the ingredients in their meal to what they could prepare the same meal
for at home. They put no value on service. I wonder if they’re lousy tippers,
too. I figure if I can’t afford to tip well, I can’t afford to eat out. And yet
frugality, of necessity has, always been a way of life for me.
There
are items I purchase at the store only when they’re on sale, including all
paper products and a wide range of canned goods. On the other hand, I don’t
think twice about paying more for top-quality organic milk, butter, flour,
grains, and fresh vegetables. I scrimp at one end to be able to splurge at the
other.
I’ve
been dwelling more than usual on the question of meals and how much they cost
while re-reading Jim Harrison’s old book of essays, The Raw and the Cooked:
Adventures of a Roving Gourmand. Oh, my! I have been repeating myself
terribly in the kitchen this winter, relying on tried-and-true successes rather
than taking chances with “adventures.” The African spicy green beans were an
exception, but already I’m planning to make them again, sometime this spring
when friends come for dinner, rather than moving on to another experiment. Am I
playing it too safe?
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| Fall-back, never-fail broccoli salad |
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| One-crust chicken pie |
As
for wine, what pikers we are! My uneducated palate distinguishes three basic
categories: undrinkable (and I mean, pour it down the sink drain!), drinkable, and “Hey, that’s good!” (There have been a
few notable, really memorable wine experiences in my life, but so few that I
collapse them into the third category, out of respect for sample size.)
Moreover, I am married to an artist (his chosen field, in autobiographical
terms, is surely relevant here) who delights in good cheap wine. We were on our
way to a friend’s house for pizza when we stopped to buy a bottle of wine and
found big bottles with this astounding price:
David
opened the bottle with some trepidation when we arrived at our friend’s house,
but it was better than drinkable, which prompted an immediate return trip to
the store to pick up another couple of bottles.
But
frugal doesn’t always have to mean cheap. I reach no further than last night’s
chicken soup supper (meal #3 from the latest chicken sequence) for an example of frugal luxury. I’ve always loved
cornbread, hot out of the oven, while David has always given it a lukewarm
reception. Well, at last I have turned him into a believer! “This is the best
cornbread I’ve ever had! In my whole life!” The key to the thrill is Bob’s Red
Mill corn grits instead of the more familiar packaged yellow sawdust. Try it!
You’ll think you’ve never tasted cornbread before! And as luxuries go, I’m
betting you’ll find this one quite a bargain.
I
grew up in a frugal household, but we ate well, too, when I was a child. My
mother was quite an adventurous cook for those times. During that postwar era
of packaged mixes, she taught herself how to make homemade pizza from scratch, before pizzerias became
ubiquitous across America, long before it was served in suburban school
cafeterias, and she wasn’t even Italian! (But I probably don’t have to say
that. I guess if she’d been Italian, her mother would have taught her how to
make pizza, right?) Besides homemade bread and cakes and jams and jellies, she
made absolutely heavenly cheese souffle, so light there was practically nothing
to it but the delicious taste, and we were probably the only family in the
neighborhood occasionally enjoying lamb chops for dinner. But when my mother
served “steak,” it was broiled round steak, and it took me years to learn about
better cuts of meat, let alone how to cook a steak.
So
let’s be honest with each other. One person’s “throwing money away” is another
person’s “money well spent.” Right? Don’t you skimp in places and splurge in
others? Years
ago – press me on this, and I’ll admit it was decades -- someone asked me, with
the scrinched-up face of negative judgment, “Why would you bother making coffee when you could
have instant?” I felt then as I feel today: Why would I ever settle for instant
coffee unless I were stationed in the Antarctic and nothing else was available?
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Café au lait chez moi
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