My wife is frugal when she has to be, she more or less doesn't care about money. She likes it when she has it and she copes when she doesn't.
When my wife and I were first dating, I was just finishing my MBA I was living in a friends spare room, my car was intermittently quitting. I had just gone through the last of my student loan money, my credit card was maxed out, and my paid assistantship was over. I was broke during 1994, right before the tech bubble really got started, I was stuck in Terre Haute, Indiana a place that has historically high unemployment. Clinton had just won the presidency on the slogan, "It's the economy, stupid."
Anyway, I just finished my MBA, I was deathly ill, it was Christmas Eve and everyone I knew had gone home. I didn't have the money, or the reliable means of transportation to travel the 100 miles or so to my home. I heard a knock on the door at 1:00 AM it was the police, they said that my car's window had just been smashed (why I still don't know.) I had no food, no medicine, no money, and now because it was zero degrees outside, no car. I sounded so bad my mother tried to drive to my rescue, but couldn't because of a massive winter storm that made the roads impassible. I had what the alcoholics called "hit bottom", without even taking a drink.
Anyway, I called Ellen, whom I had been seeing for a few months. I just wanted some sympathy, an ear to listen to me whine. She cut her family vacation short, got behind a snow plow, and drove 10 hours from Kansas City to rescue me...
I knew then, that she wasn't after my money....
She has been my wife now for 14 years. She is still my best friend, and the love of my life. I have the luxury of knowing that if she could love me when I was down, she would love me forever. So, like Carl, in the movie Caddyshack.... I got that going for me....
Anyway, I told you that story to tell you this story.
My wife, has the remarkable ability to salvage any meal. Burnt meat, cut off the carbon, make a sauce from the drippings, coat meat. Cries of joy at the beautifully prepared meal. Over salt something, it gets turned into soup. Got a can of peas, some chicken and a bag of egg noodles, suddenly a feast appears.
My wife bakes bread from scratch like a high end bakery, she makes her own croissants, a three day process using only butter, flour, yeast and salt. Jesus, I couldn't make library paste with those ingredients, much less flaky croissants. Right now, I am enjoying some home made pancakes. What Ellen and I have discovered through the years, is that the cheapest foods, when prepared right, are the best foods in the world. You listen to the French speak honestly about the food, and they always said, well we stewed this because we couldn't sell this bit of the cow. Or, we just waited until everything else sold at the market, and offered a tiny amount for what was left over, which generally tended to be what was in season, what was abundant and healthy and what was abundantly grown and raised in that area. Well, like I said, when we were first married we lived on about 15,000 per year for two people. Which was more money than I had ever seen before, and was still technically teetering on the edge of the poverty line.
How well did we eat...we ate great! We had home made pizzas, spaghetti with every kind of sauce, roasts, turkey on Thanksgiving, and Ham at Christmas. We always had nutritious filling food, that was also cheap. We were living on $100/month for food, and I was getting fat. In fact, the kroger that we frequented had a program that if you spent $25.00 per week for 12 weeks you got a free turkey at Thanksgiving, and a Ham at Christmas.... so we scrupulously worked that promo, to make sure we had a main meal. Our bible was the cheapskate handbook, by Amy Dacyczyn (Pronounced 'Decision') We read it and took comfort in her words that we would be OK, it was our bible, and our coach when we felt low.
From her, and other sources, we learned to make our own bread, our own yogurt, our own beer, our own soymilk, our own tofu, cheese, pickles, and even how to age a ham.... an experiment in progress. We have found that homemade cleaners work as well as store bought at a fraction of the cost. That we can made red beans and rice, as good as a any chef in New Orleans for about a buck fifty for a family of four. Not that we didn't have failures along the way, but that's part of the fun. Our breads, and pickles and beer is the wonder of the neighborhood. One little neighborhood boy when asked what he wanted for his birthday, he nearly shouted he wanted homemade croissants! I have eaten in some of the finest restaurants in the country since then, and always when the food was memorable, I couldn't wait to try to make it at home, sometimes with very poor results, but sometimes the remade version at home was better than the original.
I guess, if I have a point it's this. Marry someone when you are poor and make sure they can cook. Eat cheap, because cheap usually means it is abundant fresh, and local. Don't be afraid to experiment, even when it's bad, it will give you some insight into the beauty of good food, and if nothing else, it will give you a good story.
