My latest and greatest weapon in the fight to find something cheap and good to eat: homemade pizza. A few months ago I found a tip online that changed homemade pizza for both me and my friends forever: bake the dough first.
Its not easy to get your oven to the temp that a pizza oven gets to, and because of that whenever anyone I knew made homemade pizza it was always soggy and soft in the middle. Not undercooked necessarily, but the dough would get soaked by the sauce and toppings before it crisped. The outside of the pizza was fine, but the inside was eaten last.
Then I read a frugal cooking blog that recommended baking the crust alone for 5 minutes or so and THEN put sauce, cheese and toppings on. All I can say is, its a raging success! Not only that, but it solved something else I had been thinking about: frozen pizzas.
I really wanted to have frozen pizzas in my freezer, but you have to have enough space in your freezer to lay the pizza flat on a cookie sheet, with nothing else on it until it hardens. Then you can wrap it up and stack it with everything else. I have a small freezer, so that just wasn't an option.
But with pre-baking the crusts, I can make dough or buy it at the store, roll it out, and bake it. Then stack the crusts in a ziploc bag and stick them right in the freezer. Its not a complete pizza, but its close. All the hard parts are done.
I keep a jar of sauce in the fridge and some shredded mozzarella in the fridge or freezer. Then I just heat the oven, take out a crust, put sauce on and cheese on (and any toppings around) and bake. So easy, and way WAY better than delivery or frozen pizzas are.
Its also super cheap. I make the dough in my bread maker (or buy it for a buck if I'm not prepared.) I make the sauce myself too, using canned tomato sauce as a base. I saute some garlic and onion, pour the tomato sauce in, add spices (I like oregano and fresh basil, and maybe some salt since the sauce is low sodium), and then pour it into a jar and put it in the fridge. Easy peasy. I figure each pizza costs $1 if I buy the dough and some toppings, or as low as $0.40 if its just cheese and I make the dough myself. Nice.
NOTE: staples like tomato sauce are CHEAP at warehouse stores. The only problem is, you have to have a plan for the sauce, because its a LOT
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Thursday, April 23, 2009
The Truth Will Set You Free
A couple of weeks ago, my friend Don posted a blog post about his struggle with what to do with himself right now. Specifically, whether he should pursue his love, film-making, or pursue a paycheck and dabble in film on weekends he had free. Its a difficult choice: saftey and security or happiness and self-fulfillment.
Its a choice we've all had to make at some point, for me at several points in my life. The most recent was applying for and taking an accounting job when I really wanted to do was to continue to teach voice, because accounting was a steady (and larger) paycheck.
You might think that I'm unhappy, defeated, etc about it, but I'm not. Something fairly interesting happened to me, and to my mindset, several months ago that changed my situation from where I had to be to where I wanted to be. I've struggled with explaining to people how this happened, or how it works, and I've written and deleted several blog posts that weren't quite right. Hopefully, this one will be better.
I spent time trying to live as a singer, and then as a voice teacher. Before that I tried a soul sucking but well paying job in genetics (my major). Neither really worked. Obviously the soul sucking job didn't work. I hated it, and I hated myself for accepting it. At first pursuing music was great, but because I didn't just have to enjoy it but live off of it, that faded quickly. When your livelihood is dependent on whether people like you and what you've created, its takes all the joy out of creating and replaces it with varying degrees of pressure, fear, and insecurity about why it works one time and not another. In the end, neither makes me happy.
I started working at Roadside as an accountant to survive, but found I actually enjoy it. The work is decently challenging and I like the people who are here. Even better, the work is fulfilling my actual dream: to do the things I love as much as I want without needing to make money from them. To have my entire day free to sing, write, dance, spend time with family, spend time with friends, work on a new skill, or travel the world.
How does this happen? Passive income. We've been chasing that for a while, but the book Your Money or Your Life gave me a fail safe path to it, even if Jeremy's real estate never comes through. After reading this book, it became completely and totally real to me. It will happen, there is no doubt in my mind. I've done the math, I've charted the course. Worst case senario is that it won't happen for 18 years. More likely is around 10 years, and if we do well in the next few years and there are significant increases in our income, it could as little as 5 years. 5 years. That's retirement at age 35, without major windfalls or making millions of dollars a year.
You should really read the book, but it involves paying off debt, lowering expenses, increasing income and saving all the extra income until it builds up to paying interest and dividends high enough to cover all your living expenses. There's a lot of math and explanation to our plan, but here's the first part: paying off our debt by the end of the year.
We pay over $1000 a month in debt payments: credit cards, personal loans, car loan, timeshare mortgage and taxes. We have put together a debt snowball to pay all this off, and when that's done, the $1000 in minimum payments plus the extra we pay all goes into savings every month. Currently we expect to have $3000 extra a month to put into savings. And that's without Jeremy making more as a grip or me getting any raises.
That adds up fast, and the end result is enough savings to kick off interest payments that cover our living expenses. Knowing that I'm creating that life for myself, every day I work, makes me feel so good, so fulfilled that I don't need to do the artistic stuff also. When I have a bad day and I don't like my job, all I have to do is look at this and I'm inspired again.
I would never have believed it if someone had told me this five years ago. I believe my response would have been something like "that hasn't worked since the 50s." But you can't get away from math. The math shows the truth, and that truth has set me free. I have a job that's secure AND emotionally fulfilling. Who knew it was that easy?
Its a choice we've all had to make at some point, for me at several points in my life. The most recent was applying for and taking an accounting job when I really wanted to do was to continue to teach voice, because accounting was a steady (and larger) paycheck.
You might think that I'm unhappy, defeated, etc about it, but I'm not. Something fairly interesting happened to me, and to my mindset, several months ago that changed my situation from where I had to be to where I wanted to be. I've struggled with explaining to people how this happened, or how it works, and I've written and deleted several blog posts that weren't quite right. Hopefully, this one will be better.
I spent time trying to live as a singer, and then as a voice teacher. Before that I tried a soul sucking but well paying job in genetics (my major). Neither really worked. Obviously the soul sucking job didn't work. I hated it, and I hated myself for accepting it. At first pursuing music was great, but because I didn't just have to enjoy it but live off of it, that faded quickly. When your livelihood is dependent on whether people like you and what you've created, its takes all the joy out of creating and replaces it with varying degrees of pressure, fear, and insecurity about why it works one time and not another. In the end, neither makes me happy.
I started working at Roadside as an accountant to survive, but found I actually enjoy it. The work is decently challenging and I like the people who are here. Even better, the work is fulfilling my actual dream: to do the things I love as much as I want without needing to make money from them. To have my entire day free to sing, write, dance, spend time with family, spend time with friends, work on a new skill, or travel the world.
How does this happen? Passive income. We've been chasing that for a while, but the book Your Money or Your Life gave me a fail safe path to it, even if Jeremy's real estate never comes through. After reading this book, it became completely and totally real to me. It will happen, there is no doubt in my mind. I've done the math, I've charted the course. Worst case senario is that it won't happen for 18 years. More likely is around 10 years, and if we do well in the next few years and there are significant increases in our income, it could as little as 5 years. 5 years. That's retirement at age 35, without major windfalls or making millions of dollars a year.
You should really read the book, but it involves paying off debt, lowering expenses, increasing income and saving all the extra income until it builds up to paying interest and dividends high enough to cover all your living expenses. There's a lot of math and explanation to our plan, but here's the first part: paying off our debt by the end of the year.
We pay over $1000 a month in debt payments: credit cards, personal loans, car loan, timeshare mortgage and taxes. We have put together a debt snowball to pay all this off, and when that's done, the $1000 in minimum payments plus the extra we pay all goes into savings every month. Currently we expect to have $3000 extra a month to put into savings. And that's without Jeremy making more as a grip or me getting any raises.
That adds up fast, and the end result is enough savings to kick off interest payments that cover our living expenses. Knowing that I'm creating that life for myself, every day I work, makes me feel so good, so fulfilled that I don't need to do the artistic stuff also. When I have a bad day and I don't like my job, all I have to do is look at this and I'm inspired again.
I would never have believed it if someone had told me this five years ago. I believe my response would have been something like "that hasn't worked since the 50s." But you can't get away from math. The math shows the truth, and that truth has set me free. I have a job that's secure AND emotionally fulfilling. Who knew it was that easy?
Monday, April 20, 2009
A Day of Cooking
This week, I decided to take the plunge: a Once-A-Month Cooking(OAMC) day. Jeremy has work for the next three weeks, and his days off are not on the weekend, which means I won't have the car. He's filming 12 hour days, many of them night shoots, so I won't see him much on those days. That means no help for dinner, even if I have to work late.
Last week he worked three days during the week, and the lack of his help had me forgetting to take my lunch with me to work (an extra $4 spend a day on lunch) and arriving home at 8pm only to then think about what to make for dinner (we had some enchilada leftovers, so that worked, but only just). Looking forward to three more weeks of that, and I knew I'd eat away a lot of the money he was making, because I had no time to prep meals.
So I Jeremy him look at the grocery flyers on Wednesday to find out what meats are on sale (Tip #1: use the wednesday flyers to plan your meals, and your weekend shopping trips. You can find them online as well as in your mailbox. The deals usually start Thursday or Friday, and go all week. Sometimes there are additional savings on a particular day, like Saturday, so read all the fine print.) Turns out ground beef, chicken breasts with ribs, whole chickens, and boneless beef bottom were all on sale, as well as mushrooms and bell peppers. Wednesday night I planned out seven dishes I could make in bulk based on that list:
Ginger Beef for the slow cooker (using the beef bottom) - 2 entrees
Cheesy Chilada Bake (using the ground beef) - 4 entrees
Arroz con Pollo (chicken breasts, ribs removed) - 2 entrees
Swimming Rama, a thai curry dish (chicken breasts) - 3 entrees
Berry-Roasted Chicken (whole chickens) - 2 entrees
Thai Red Curry with vegetables (mushrooms and the leftover ingredients from Swimming Rama) - 2 entrees
Tofu Stir Fry - 1 entree
Breakfast Burritos - a whole bunch
For clarification, an entree is feeds 4-6, depending on the meal. Most of the recipes came from my OAMC cookbook: Fix, Freeze, and Feast. You do prep and some cooking, then freeze the meal and do the last bit of cooking the day you want to eat it. Very nice. And all the recipes are for multiple entrees, using warehouse sized meat trays. Arroz con Pollo came from the Dream Dinners cookbook (which I will be checking out of the library soon. I love this company, had no idea they had a cookbook until I searched for my favorite meal from them: Arroz con Pollo.) Ginger Beef was in Fix, Freeze and Feast, but I used a variation of the recipe I found on crockpot.com, and the breakfast burritos were just made, no specific recipe. I'm posting the recipes on my other blog I write with my friends: Cooking Kama Sutras
The night before I did some prep: soaked the black beans, made rice, chopped onions and peppers, and really cleaned the kitchen. In the morning I started the beans right off (So easy! Just a little salt and bay leaf, and in an hour, $2 worth of dried black beans had grown to more than 8 cans worth, and tasted WAY better) and whisked up 2 dozen eggs. Cooked some onions and peppers with the eggs, and got started making burritos. Super easy, and in a flash they were in the fridge, and the utensils were in the bowl of soapy water I had laid out.
Then I cooked the ground beef for the Chilada Bakes, put those together in foil trays and into the freezer, and mixed the marinade for the Berry-Roasted Chicken, poured it over the chicken and threw those in the freezer too. I was rockin! Then lunch, and a break and 'do I really HAVE to got back to working? I've done so much already!!' But there were 15 lbs of chicken to be deboned, and 3 lbs of beef to be prepped.
So I started deboning. I've gotten pretty good at this since for the last month only breasts with ribs have been on sale, but this was awful. The chicken was Foster Farms. Foster Farms doesn't butcher their chickens at all well, or even consistently the same. Each breast I had to stare at to figure out the best way to attack it, and by the end I was doing ok, but if I have a choice, I won't choose Foster Farms again.
Once it was done, half the chicken got cut into pieces and went into the curry, and then other half was layered in the Arroz con Pollo and put in the freezer. While the curry simmered, I browned the beef for the Ginger Beef and then made the Veg. curry. While the two curries cooled (I didn't want to pour hot food into ziploc bags. They get too weak) I toasted the tofu, and then put the veggies and tofu bits in a bag for the Tofu Stir Fry (I didn't freeze this one...decided to have it for dinner last night.)
The last bit was the udon noodles for the Ginger Beef. These noodles are intense! (At least as far as noodles go) You have to boil them, then cool them with a cup of water, then boil them and cool them again, then boil them and let them sit for 5 minutes. No wonder they always come precooked (and triple the price.)
At the end of the day, I didn't have a whole lot more dishes than any other big cooking day, as I used the same ones over and over, simply rinsed or wiped clean (as long as they had no raw meat in them, of course.) And cooking on Sat meant I had all Sunday to clean up, which took maybe 30 minutes. Now I have a freezer full of food, a clean kitchen, and a whole new skill set!
I'm thinking about making some marinades next weekend so that if we want something else, we can just pick up meat and go.
It took a fair bit of planning everything out, and knowing what cook when, but when it came down to it, It was pretty simple. I printed out an inventory to put on our fridge that also has the directions for cooking the meals, so as we eat them, we can keep track of what's left, and the cooking directions are never far away.
For those who think they need it, I totally recommend Once a Month Cooking. In the future, I'll hopefully be doing some of it with my friends, a OAMC party. :D
Last week he worked three days during the week, and the lack of his help had me forgetting to take my lunch with me to work (an extra $4 spend a day on lunch) and arriving home at 8pm only to then think about what to make for dinner (we had some enchilada leftovers, so that worked, but only just). Looking forward to three more weeks of that, and I knew I'd eat away a lot of the money he was making, because I had no time to prep meals.
So I Jeremy him look at the grocery flyers on Wednesday to find out what meats are on sale (Tip #1: use the wednesday flyers to plan your meals, and your weekend shopping trips. You can find them online as well as in your mailbox. The deals usually start Thursday or Friday, and go all week. Sometimes there are additional savings on a particular day, like Saturday, so read all the fine print.) Turns out ground beef, chicken breasts with ribs, whole chickens, and boneless beef bottom were all on sale, as well as mushrooms and bell peppers. Wednesday night I planned out seven dishes I could make in bulk based on that list:
Ginger Beef for the slow cooker (using the beef bottom) - 2 entrees
Cheesy Chilada Bake (using the ground beef) - 4 entrees
Arroz con Pollo (chicken breasts, ribs removed) - 2 entrees
Swimming Rama, a thai curry dish (chicken breasts) - 3 entrees
Berry-Roasted Chicken (whole chickens) - 2 entrees
Thai Red Curry with vegetables (mushrooms and the leftover ingredients from Swimming Rama) - 2 entrees
Tofu Stir Fry - 1 entree
Breakfast Burritos - a whole bunch
For clarification, an entree is feeds 4-6, depending on the meal. Most of the recipes came from my OAMC cookbook: Fix, Freeze, and Feast. You do prep and some cooking, then freeze the meal and do the last bit of cooking the day you want to eat it. Very nice. And all the recipes are for multiple entrees, using warehouse sized meat trays. Arroz con Pollo came from the Dream Dinners cookbook (which I will be checking out of the library soon. I love this company, had no idea they had a cookbook until I searched for my favorite meal from them: Arroz con Pollo.) Ginger Beef was in Fix, Freeze and Feast, but I used a variation of the recipe I found on crockpot.com, and the breakfast burritos were just made, no specific recipe. I'm posting the recipes on my other blog I write with my friends: Cooking Kama Sutras
The night before I did some prep: soaked the black beans, made rice, chopped onions and peppers, and really cleaned the kitchen. In the morning I started the beans right off (So easy! Just a little salt and bay leaf, and in an hour, $2 worth of dried black beans had grown to more than 8 cans worth, and tasted WAY better) and whisked up 2 dozen eggs. Cooked some onions and peppers with the eggs, and got started making burritos. Super easy, and in a flash they were in the fridge, and the utensils were in the bowl of soapy water I had laid out.
Then I cooked the ground beef for the Chilada Bakes, put those together in foil trays and into the freezer, and mixed the marinade for the Berry-Roasted Chicken, poured it over the chicken and threw those in the freezer too. I was rockin! Then lunch, and a break and 'do I really HAVE to got back to working? I've done so much already!!' But there were 15 lbs of chicken to be deboned, and 3 lbs of beef to be prepped.
So I started deboning. I've gotten pretty good at this since for the last month only breasts with ribs have been on sale, but this was awful. The chicken was Foster Farms. Foster Farms doesn't butcher their chickens at all well, or even consistently the same. Each breast I had to stare at to figure out the best way to attack it, and by the end I was doing ok, but if I have a choice, I won't choose Foster Farms again.
Once it was done, half the chicken got cut into pieces and went into the curry, and then other half was layered in the Arroz con Pollo and put in the freezer. While the curry simmered, I browned the beef for the Ginger Beef and then made the Veg. curry. While the two curries cooled (I didn't want to pour hot food into ziploc bags. They get too weak) I toasted the tofu, and then put the veggies and tofu bits in a bag for the Tofu Stir Fry (I didn't freeze this one...decided to have it for dinner last night.)
The last bit was the udon noodles for the Ginger Beef. These noodles are intense! (At least as far as noodles go) You have to boil them, then cool them with a cup of water, then boil them and cool them again, then boil them and let them sit for 5 minutes. No wonder they always come precooked (and triple the price.)
At the end of the day, I didn't have a whole lot more dishes than any other big cooking day, as I used the same ones over and over, simply rinsed or wiped clean (as long as they had no raw meat in them, of course.) And cooking on Sat meant I had all Sunday to clean up, which took maybe 30 minutes. Now I have a freezer full of food, a clean kitchen, and a whole new skill set!
I'm thinking about making some marinades next weekend so that if we want something else, we can just pick up meat and go.
It took a fair bit of planning everything out, and knowing what cook when, but when it came down to it, It was pretty simple. I printed out an inventory to put on our fridge that also has the directions for cooking the meals, so as we eat them, we can keep track of what's left, and the cooking directions are never far away.
For those who think they need it, I totally recommend Once a Month Cooking. In the future, I'll hopefully be doing some of it with my friends, a OAMC party. :D
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
LA Library
My new favorite thing? Downloadable audiobooks from the LA library! I can log in with my library card and download audiobooks to listen to on my commute to and from work for free! Most of the books are in WMA format, so that's a bit of an issue, but they are getting more of them in mp3 format now. A LOT of recent fiction and some great non-fiction stuff too.
I love it! I can download them to my phone, and listen through my earbud while I crochet or whatever. If your local library has a website, ask if they have e-books and e-audiobooks.
I love it! I can download them to my phone, and listen through my earbud while I crochet or whatever. If your local library has a website, ask if they have e-books and e-audiobooks.
Tea Party Protests
Today thousands protested government bailouts with "Tea Bag" parties. Clearly these people are about 20 years behind the times. 'Tea bag'? Seriously? You seriously don't know what that means? ok....
Jokes aside, I probably would be supporting these yahoos, cause their point is pretty accurate. Here's my issue though: Its not a Democratic problem, and not an Obama problem, its a GOVERNMENT problem. Most of the bailouts were started under Bush. Bush got us into this huge deficit in the first place. Stop with the partisan bull and wake up.
I'm not against gov't spending to help us get out of this hole. Not at all. I'm just against throwing good money after bad. Every bit of research I've done has proved to me that there is no way our gov't has the funds to bailout all these large institutions. No way. And trying to bail them out only means we have less money for what is really needed. We are in a recession. Possibly entering a depression. We don't need bailouts, we need extra unemployment insurance, homeless shelters, food banks, and low/no cost health care. These programs were all cut to within an inch of their lives in the last decade. They now only cover those who are well below the poverty line (unemployment is the exception), leaving those at or slightly above the poverty line S.O.L.
Right now, and into the coming months, we will need more support and funding for these programs. So lets stop throwing money away on bailouts that won't save anyone, and spend money on programs that actually will save people. You want the market to grow? You want people to have confidence again? Then let the populace know their needs will be taken care of.
Jokes aside, I probably would be supporting these yahoos, cause their point is pretty accurate. Here's my issue though: Its not a Democratic problem, and not an Obama problem, its a GOVERNMENT problem. Most of the bailouts were started under Bush. Bush got us into this huge deficit in the first place. Stop with the partisan bull and wake up.
I'm not against gov't spending to help us get out of this hole. Not at all. I'm just against throwing good money after bad. Every bit of research I've done has proved to me that there is no way our gov't has the funds to bailout all these large institutions. No way. And trying to bail them out only means we have less money for what is really needed. We are in a recession. Possibly entering a depression. We don't need bailouts, we need extra unemployment insurance, homeless shelters, food banks, and low/no cost health care. These programs were all cut to within an inch of their lives in the last decade. They now only cover those who are well below the poverty line (unemployment is the exception), leaving those at or slightly above the poverty line S.O.L.
Right now, and into the coming months, we will need more support and funding for these programs. So lets stop throwing money away on bailouts that won't save anyone, and spend money on programs that actually will save people. You want the market to grow? You want people to have confidence again? Then let the populace know their needs will be taken care of.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Swapluck!
I just read this fun blog about Swaplucks. Basically, its where you bring stuff you made and swap with other people who also bring stuff they made. Veggies from your garden, cookies you just baked, a hat you crocheted, soap, jam, freezer meals, potholders, pots, whatever!
What I really like is that the idea encourages everyone to try out new crafts, cause you know you have someplace you can bring it.
I don't know if there are enough people here who would be interested, but I'm definitely keeping the idea in the back of my head for when there are enough people! And who knows, maybe I can scrounge up enough friends to get this going.
What I really like is that the idea encourages everyone to try out new crafts, cause you know you have someplace you can bring it.
I don't know if there are enough people here who would be interested, but I'm definitely keeping the idea in the back of my head for when there are enough people! And who knows, maybe I can scrounge up enough friends to get this going.
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