Good, Clean, Money-Saving Fun

I had dinner the other night at Joya, a Thai restaurant in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. I've written before about its sister restaurant in Park Slope, called Song. Both places seem to have found a recipe for success in offering a hip atmosphere and really low prices-- they always seem to be jam-packed with a diverse crowd, people of every age, race, class, and orientation all chowing down on generously sized $7-8 entrees.

After enjoying some veggie dumplings, chicken masaman curry and a shrimp/portobello mushroom special, with a couple of drinks, all coming to about $50 for two people, I decided to stop in the bathroom on the way out. While I was, ahem, seated, I looked down and noticed a shiny quarter on the floor! As longtime readers will know, I love finding money and will stop and pick up a coin of almost any amount. A quarter is especially exciting, as it can be used for laundry.

But this quarter was on the floor in a bathroom. The bathrooms at Joya seem quite clean as New York restaurant bathrooms go, but the quarter was on the bathroom floor in a slightly puddly looking area, which was kind of sort of really near the toilet. This gave me pause. I stood there for a minute and thought, "should I just give up on this quarter? Is that too gross?" It also occurred to me that this might be one of those jokes where the quarter is super-glued to the floor and if I try to get it I'll end up on Candid Camera or YouTube as the crazy girl who's willing to scrape a quarter off a dirty bathroom floor.

But the intrepid penny pinching Madame X came through and I told myself, "@#(*&$ it, I want that quarter!" I turned on the water in the sink. I put some soap on my hands. I bent down to grab the quarter. This attempt at germ-busting then resulted in some comical slippery fumbling with the quarter (which perhaps you've already seen on YouTube, but god I hope not...). But I eventually got the quarter to the sink where I washed it and my hands thoroughly with more soap. I then dried off my prize and took it home in my coat pocket.

Yes, it's possible that this quarter might still have been crawling with nasty bacteria but I didn't hang onto it for long-- the next morning I ended up giving it to a friend to use in a parking meter.

And yes, this is how far I'll go for 25 cents. I think it's a good exercise, actually, in adjusting one's financial attitude. Picking up a coin reminds me that the little things matter, and that I don't take financial issues lightly. It reminds me that money is money, and no honest way of acquiring it should be considered beneath one's dignity. But really, if you see me on YouTube, please don't forward it to all your friends.

Today in the News

Oooh, it's a good day for finance related news today:
People are cutting back their spending, even in Europe.
Meanwhile, politicians are using taxpayer money to guzzle gas.
Despite inflation, there are still stores where every item of clothing costs less than $10.
Fewer immigrants are sending money back home.
And there's an editorial on why a temporary gas tax cut is a bad idea.

But enough about the world, what about ME!?!?!
My last 5 financial transactions were:
$3.35 on breakfast (cash)
$4.42 on lunch yesterday (cash)
$3.35 on breakfast yesterday (cash)
$23.18 on Chinese takeout for dinner the last two nights (credit card)
$31.19 to ConEd (e-payment from checking account)

Okay, maybe the world is more interesting.

Link Round-Up

Here's some things I've been meaning to pass along:

Queercents has a series of post on how to reduce the costs of pet ownership.

There's a new blog in town called Hunting Happiness, with a great post about financial literacy.

Speaking of financial literacy, the AARP has released the results of a survey showing that the majority of Americans are "befuddled by financial jargon."

TravelHacker presents 100 Ways to Get Free Stuff When Traveling.

Reader Archana sent me this frugal recipe:

I have a wicked dessert for you - involves minimal baking and vanilla
ice cream and everything else out of a can!!! Can't get any more
frugal.

One can condensed milk (not evaporated, please!!)
One can sliced peaches - drain as much as possible
One DEEEEEPPPPPP (very deep) dish - glass/metal - whichever!!!

Just layer the peaches and milk alternately in the bowl/dish and bake
at
250-275 for about 3 hours. Just watch occassionally to make sure you're
not too high on temperature which might make the milk bubble out. Serve hot with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream!!!! Trust me .. It's YUM!

A couple more new blogs:
Freethought: "A blog about social issues, politics, history and of course money"
Life on the High Wire: commenter Deonne has started a blog covering her move from Taos to NYC to get an MFA
Finance Gets Personal: "a Girl Trying to Get Out of Debt and Change Careers"
GershBlog: a Brooklyn bankruptcy and real estate lawyer


Thanks, and apologies to people who emailed me way too long ago about some of these links!

A Dinner with Friends

I went out the other night with 3 college friends:

Annabelle was visiting from out of town. She was just made a Vice President at a Silicon Valley company and though she totally downplays any sign of material success, I think she must make a lot of money.

Beatrice and Charlotte both live here in NYC. They are both involved in theater: one has a day job to support herself, and the other is currently living off some grant money.

Charlotte picked the restaurant, a cute Italian place in Hell's Kitchen. I figured she would pick something reasonably priced but it turned out to be rather pricey-- appetizers and salads were over $10, and pasta dishes were $13-18 for portions that were not skimpy, but not large enough to share either. The wine list didn't have many choices under $30.

We had a nice dinner: Beatrice and Charlotte just had an entrée each-- actually Charlotte had half an entrée, since she took the rest home in a doggie bag. Annabelle and I split a salad to start. All four of us shared one bottle of wine. (I know, this sounds shocking for me! When we were ordering I originally proposed we get a bottle each of red and white, but no one else seemed to like that idea, so I just nursed my one large glass...) We all split 2 desserts, I had a coffee, and Annabelle and Charlotte each had a brandy. I definitely felt like Annabelle and I were more inclined to just order whatever we felt like having, whereas Beatrice and Charlotte were being more careful.

When the bill came, it was about $180 before tip. We all took out our wallets and started trying to figure out the tip, when Annabelle said, "I should pay for this," saying she'd come into town and invited us all out at the last minute. We all of course protested, saying that was a silly reason for her to think she should pay. Then I semi-jokingly added, "Unless you're expensing it!" We joked about her new Vice Presidency for a minute, and she said, "Hey, yeah, I've been telling you about my company all night and you're all going to check out our website, right? I should expense it!" At that, Beatrice and Charlotte said "Whoo-hoo, thanks!" I said "Are you sure?" Annabelle insisted it was no problem so I let it go and thanked her too. But I suspect that she may have actually used a personal credit card to pay for it anyway!

Anyway, I guess I just found it interesting to see how different people seem to deal with accepting the generosity of a friend. Sometimes it seems awkward to accept, and sometimes when you know the person wants to be generous, and can afford to be generous, you can just relax and enjoy it, especially if it eases your own money worries a bit!

Inflation

How do you feel about the effects of inflation in your own life? Are there things you particularly notice? I know for most Americans, the cost of gas is in the forefront. As a New Yorker, that isn't especially noticeable to me, and doesn't directly affect my life on a regular basis, though it may contribute to a rise in other costs. However, here's a couple other things that struck me this past weekend.

• Bagels: a bagel store I went to had just put up signs about their prices increasing from 80 cents to $1. (also noticed by Hedonic Adjustment)
  
• Wine: one of my favorite wines just went up in price, from $12.99 to $15.99, and in general prices seem to be higher on average.
  

The wine thing was what really hit me. A $12.99 bottle can sort of seem like it's a $12 bottle (you know, if you happen to ignore the last two digits of the price), and that is within the price range I feel okay about these days. I certainly don't spend that much on every bottle I buy, and I used to try never to buy anything over $8 or 9, but I've definitely been drifting upward in that respect, in part due to what I find in the most convenient liquor stores, in part due to an overall increase in prices, and in part due to me just being a lush. But I'm not so much of a lush that I'll spend $15.99 on my everyday plonk! $12.99 was my absolute upper threshold for everyday wine. I'll spend $15 once in a while for some kind of special occasion, or $20 for something that is a gift, but otherwise, I'm a cheap lush.

How about you? Is there anything that is costing you noticeably more lately?

About Those Sardines...

Another tale of a frugal meal attempt: it actually starts out with some pork chops, but stay with me...

I've had some pork chops in the freezer for a while-- I bought a large package a month or two ago, ate some right away and froze the rest, thinking I'd pull them out later for a cheap, easy meal. Well, yesterday morning I took them out and put them in the fridge to thaw. When I got home at about 8pm and went to cook them, they were still semi-frozen. I microwaved them briefly to try to defrost them further, but this made them take on a weird greenish color, and they smelled a bit odd. Who knows, maybe they were fine, but it skeeved me out too much to actually eat them. I think I have decided that freezing meat is actually NOT a frugal choice for me!

Anyway, that left me with just a salad and a baked sweet potato, which didn't seem like quite enough dinner. "Aha!" I thought. "I'll eat those sardines so I can report back to all my curious readers!"

I opened them up, while marveling once again at the $7.99 price tag. Inside, there was a little slice of lemon atop the sardines, giving them a nice smell. But the minute I looked at the fish themselves, which were large and rather shiny, I thought "oh no." One thing I forgot when I was all like "ooh, j'aime toutes les choses françaises" was that whenever I've had sardines in Europe, they haven't been the skinless and boneless kind you can get here. And I find it a bit gross to have to consider either crunching through and swallowing a sardine spine or surgically removing it.

Anyway, I did do the surgery and eat the sardines sans spines, and they were actually quite tasty! I ate them just as they were, without any toast or anything. With my usual sardines, I find that I want the nice buttery toast to go with them, as they can seem a bit dry otherwise (avocado can be another nice addition).

Here's some photos I took, at the risk of getting sardine oil all over my Treo:


Yes, that is a dissected sardine spine at about 7 o'clock on the plate. Ugh.
And here's the tin that started it all, about to be washed:


The can is rather jolie, don't you think?

Out of curiosity, I did a little research and discovered the website of the French company that makes these sardines. (They offer a variety of other products including rillettes, Breton fish soup, and the intriguing "vegetable glass casings for toast.") They seem to sell the sardines direct to consumers online, at €14.50 for a box of 5 tins. That is a lot less per tin than I paid, but who knows how much they'd charge to ship to the US, if they even do it at all.

Final verdict: good sardines, cute can, but I don't think I'll be spending $8 on them again.

$8 Sardines

The other part of yesterday's "Dumb Money" story that I forgot involved the grocery shopping trip for the lasagna ingredients. Given the title of this post, you may already be alarmed and/or grossed out at the concept of sardine lasagna. I don't know, maybe such a thing could be good. But in any case, the sardines were totally separate from the lasagna.
Sardines are actually one of my favorite frugal meals. A can of sardines and a couple slices of buttered toast make a great dinner, though sometimes I can have a weird moment of self-awareness as I'm eating this meal. It's actually what inspired one of the most commented-on posts on this site, "What Makes You Feel Poor?" Eating sardines and toast for dinner doesn't necessarily make me feel poor, but if I really couldn't afford to eat anything else, it might.
But the point of this story is that sardines are sometimes not all that frugal! I was doing my grocery shopping at the Fairway in Brooklyn, which actually has very low prices on many items (such as Stonyfield Yogurt, which can be half the price it is elsewhere), but also stocks a lot of gourmet items which can start to get pricey. It's also just a tough place to shop because everything looks so yummy and you find yourself wanting to buy everything!
This time, my head was turned by a display of items which included a certain anchovy paste which I recognized as the product of a place I once visited in France, where anchovies were the local specialty. I almost bought some but instead turned to the cans of French sardines that were sitting right next to it. I had sardines on my shopping list anyway, and these French ones had a very pretty package so I thought I'd try them. They had lemon in them, which I wasn't sure I'd like, so I only bought one can and then got my regular sardines in a different aisle.
When we went to check out, I was putting the sardines on the conveyor belt and suddenly spotted the price tag: $7.99! For one can! I was shocked. The other ones I bought were less than $2 a can. How could these ones be so much more?
I pointed the price out to my friend, who said I'd be crazy to buy them. And I did almost put them back. But then I thought, well, it's still "only" $8, in the larger scheme of life, and now I'm really curious as to what could be so delicious about these sardines as to make them worth $8. Probably the only thing that makes them $8 is that they are French and the exchange rate stinks right now, but I still kind of wanted to try them. I waffled about it a little, but in the end I bought them.
My friend asked me afterwards if I was going to keep the can after I ate the sardines. After all, it was a very pretty red can with a quaint picture of a French girl on it, and I have a whole collection of cool old food and tobacco tins displayed in my living room. I said that yes, I did think I'd save the can and add it to my collection. Her response: "Oh, ok. Then the $8 is totally worth it."
Someone out there in food-marketing-land must be loving this story!

Dumb Money, Smart Money, Fat Money

I don't know where my head was last week. I ate dinner in a restaurant Thursday night, and paid for it with the Visa card I use all the time. Then on Sunday afternoon, I went to buy a couple of clothing items I'd found on sale (Ann Taylor Loft!) and freaked out when I couldn't find my Visa in my wallet. It took me a while to remember that the last time I'd used it was that Thursday dinner. The funny thing is that I actually did "use" it Friday night to pay for a delivery of Indian food, but since I have the number memorized, I didn't need the actual card itself and didn't notice it was missing!
Fortunately I was able to call the restaurant and they were holding onto my card for me. And no unauthorized charges had appeared on my account, much to my relief as a friend of mine just had to have her card suspended because of $7,000 worth of fraudulent charges at gas stations in Florida!
I didn't spend all that much at Ann Taylor, but I was a bit annoyed to have to put it on my Amex instead of the Visa. I was trying to rack up all the frequent flyer miles I could in hopes that I could reduce the cost of this year's big vacation trip... but I just called United and discovered that I couldn't get award seats on the flights I'd need anyway, so no great loss. Maybe next trip!

Part of the reason I didn't need my credit card the rest of the weekend was that I did some cooking with a friend. We bought the ingredients for two big batches of lasagna, for which she taught me her own recipe. So Saturday dinner, Sunday dinner and Monday lunch have been lasagna, and I have plenty left in the freezer. This was definitely an economical way to cook, but given the huge amount of cheese that went into this lasagna, I'm not sure it's all that healthy! If I keep eating like this I'll need to keep buying more new clothes, in ever larger sizes...

Compete or Cooperate?

One of my favorite restaurants in New York, if not THE favorite, is Pearl Oyster Bar. The lobster roll there would probably be what I'd ask for if I had to request a last meal before dying. A lot of other people feel the same way, so it's a very popular restaurant. There is always a line outside the door before they open at 6pm, and since they don't take reservations, chances are you'll have to wait a while before getting a table.
Across the street from Pearl, there is another restaurant called the Cornelia Street Cafe. You'd think they would be considered the competition, right? But no... the two restaurants actually manage to do each other a lot of good. When people are waiting for a table at Pearl, the hostess says they can go and have a drink at Cornelia while they are waiting, and that she'll come and get them when their table is ready. Meanwhile, at Cornelia, if the bar is full, they'll seat you at a table for just drinks if they know you're waiting for Pearl. And lest you should worry that you won't have time to finish a drink or two, they tell you that you can take your unfinished drink with you over to Pearl, who will know to return the glasses. (Never mind that walking across the street with a drink is actually illegal in New York!)
Anyway, I just love this little arrangement. Everyone's happy, and everyone makes money. Well, the restaurant owners are making it, while the happy drinkers and diners are spending it! The tab for 4 people: $40 for drinks at Cornelia, and about $225 for dinner at Pearl. But the taste of that lobster roll, of course, is priceless.

Take That, Starbucks!

Can I get a skim semi-decaf eggnog hazelnut creme coffee? Chez Madame X you can!

I had been noticing recently that I was running low on coffee and wondering if I should buy some. I was holding off until visiting my parents-- though I have written a lot here about my total financial independence from them ever since I was a recent college graduate, I have to confess that I've actually been relying on my father for coffee supplies!

My dad is signed up for some kind of monthly coffee shipment from Gevalia. He gets both regular and decaf coffee, but since he doesn't drink coffee all that heavily, he had ended up with a growing stockpile, especially of regular coffee. He asked me if I wanted some-- since I was starting to run out of some coffees he'd given me for Christmas one year, I said yes, the result being that I haven't actually spent money on ground coffee for at least 2 or 3 years now! (I only drink 2 cups of coffee per week at home, sometimes even less.)
Unfortunately, my dad cut back on his Gevalia subscription and didn't give me any the last time I visited. So the last couple of weekends, I kept watching the supply dwindle but was reluctant to buy more. Should I just switch to decaf? I had plenty of that. While searching my cabinets, I also realized that I had three little tins of coffee that I had gotten as a Christmas present from my great-aunt. Each one is probably about a pot's worth of coffee, and they have Norman Rockwell paintings on them.

On a side note, aren't great-aunts wonderful for this kind of thing? Mine is 94 years old, and she's given me some fun Christmas presents over the years. My favorite was the set of four glasses, each decorated with a picture of a different Massachusetts Revolutionary War site. Three of them have broken over the years, but I treasure the one that's left!

Back to the coffee tins, one was just regular coffee, one was Eggnog flavored, and one was Hazelnut Creme. Last weekend, I decided I could extend the life of my nice Gevalia coffee by dumping the regular Norman Rockwell coffee in and mixing it up. It tasted fine.
This morning, it got to the point where I decided I'd better use the other flavors. I opened the Eggnog and it did have a rather cloying sweet smell. I opened the Hazelnut and it didn't seem too bad. But still, I thought they might overpower what little regular coffee I had left, so after dumping them in, I mixed in a lot of decaf as well.
The resulting brew did have a rather bizarre flavor, but it actually seemed kind of yummy in a festive, cozy, Norman Rockwell holiday kind of way.
At this rate, I might have enough to get me through to Christmas, and who knows, maybe then someone will give me another gift of coffee!

Moral of the story: do whatever you can to delay spending money for as long as possible, and if you're lucky, maybe you won't have to spend it at all!

$800 a Month on Food = Obese??

An anonymous commenter questions my food spending and whether I'm obese... for the record, as I'm writing this I am wearing a pair of size 4 pants. I'll admit that I might be somewhat more comfortable in a pair of size 6 pants, or even an 8, depending on the brand, but this post is about food, not clothes, so let's move on. How can someone like me with a normal caloric intake spend $800 a month on food sometimes? (Also for the record, no bulimia issues here. That is one way in which it is really a shame to have money go down the toilet.)

Let's take a closer look at my spending, starting with a recent credit card statement, covering 8/25-9/25/07:
I made 5 trips to local supermarkets, totaling about $146 overall. I bought pasta (on sale), Sapporo beer, Gatorade (on sale), broccoli, prunes, maple syrup, peanut butter, bananas, shallots, garlic, chicken breasts, potatoes, tinned sardines, tomatoes, yogurts, apples, canned tuna, Clif bars, lettuce, lamb chops, and a steak. I also bought non-grocery items such as kleenex, dishwashing liquid, and laundry detergent.

I made 4 trips to upscale/gourmet markets (Whole Foods, Garden of Eden), where I spent a total of $40: $12 on fresh herbs, fancy mushrooms and heavy cream for a pasta dish I cooked for a guest, $7 on trout fillets and fresh spinach, $9 on trout fillets (again) and manchego cheese, and $12 on salmon fillets and apples.

Then there was the liquor store: 3 trips, $55, 6 bottles of wine.

That leaves the restaurants: 7 eat-in meals, and 2 take-outs. The whopping total on these? $605. This is an unusually high restaurant tab for me. One of these meals was when I bought dinner for my sister, her husband and two kids. A couple of the other restaurant meals were my share of a tab split evenly, and some were with a friend I go out with frequently enough that we alternate picking up the check. One of these meals was fairly expensive, a bit of a splurge with dessert and coffee. Usually, it's just an entrée each and 2 drinks each, and sometimes maybe a shared appetizer, in restaurants where the entrée prices range from about $12-22, and a glass of wine is $7 or $8.

So that was all the credit card spending. Then there's cash-- pretty much every weekday, I buy coffee and a bagel, or sometimes oatmeal, and a banana, costing me $3.25-$4.05, so that can be $80 or so a month. Then there's lunch, which can be $3.25 if I get pizza, $6 if I get a sandwich, $7.50 if I get a salad, or about $9.00 if I get sushi-- average it out and that can be over $100 a month, and I've been really bad about bringing lunches from home lately.

So you can see how a girl can easily spend $800 a month on food, or even more!

Contrast all of that with how I've been eating this week:

Monday:
Breakfast: coffee, banana and oatmeal for breakfast: $4.05
Lunch: cup o' soup from home, bought with coupon, so cost about $2, plus bagel $1
Dinner: chicken and rice with lemon sauce, and a salad: ingredient cost about $5 or $6. Washed down with a beer costing about $1.50.

Tuesday:
Breakfast: same
Lunch: same
Dinner: same but with sweet potato instead of rice, cost about the same. Again, $1.50 beer.

Wednesday:
Breakfast: coffee, banana and bagel: $3.25
Lunch: just soup this time, no bagel. about $2
Dinner: pasta and frozen spinach, cost of ingredients $2-3, with about $6 worth of wine.

Today I'm having the usual breakfast, lunch will be a business expense, and for dinner I might have a frozen Trader Joe's quiche or perhaps buy some fish, so the cost will probably be under $10, not including any alcoholic enhancement. If I ate like this every week, I'd be in great shape financially, but the reality of life is that I also like to go out and I'm willing to budget for that.

But enough about me... here's a question that I'd love to see some data on: who spends more money on food, obese people or skinny people?

Just do it. Then do it again.

This week, I've been on a little campaign of financial virtue. Well, okay, I actually spent some money on clothes and a new bag, but in other ways I've been good.
For four nights in a row now, I've cooked dinner at home. I also brought lunch from home every day I went to work. (There was a day I would have had to buy something but I ended up calling in sick.) As I write this, I'm prepared with enough groceries in the fridge to keep cooking for another 3 or 4 nights.
I also started off the week well by going to the gym, though having a cold prevented me from keeping that up. I'm determined to get back to it soon but it's frustrating to feel like I barely got going.
The point here is that just doing something, and then doing it again, and another time after that, can be very satisfying, and every time you do it, it becomes a little easier. It starts to become a habit. You start to wrap your brain about how to do it again. This can apply to exercise habits, eating habits and financial habits.
Am I going to stop eating out and ordering takeout forever? No, of course not. And there will be plenty of other choices I make where I spend money, perhaps more than I should, just because I want to. But that is what makes it all the more important to grab all these little times when I can save money. If I have that brief wavering moment and choose to go to the grocery store rather than to a restaurant, every time I make that choice it's money I've put in the bank. Money I can use later for something that matters more to me than the few extra minutes it will take me to cook a meal.

What Price Durian?

Do you know what durian is? It's a fruit that is popular in Asia but famous for having a disgusting smell. I'd read about it somewhere, so when I was recently offered a durian popsicle for dessert, I jumped at the chance! Well, okay, I accepted the chance with great trepidation, but I was really curious.

After hearing my hosts debate whether the flavor was more reminiscent of chemical waste or excrement, I was surprised to find the popsicle completely inoffensive, and actually almost pleasant. I pronounced it "sweet and fruity, sort of like a piña colada," at which my friends practically fell off their chairs they were laughing so hard. "Although," I continued, "it does taste worse every time I take another bite."

It turned out that they'd had the durian pops in the freezer for a while, so the flavor was much less strong than when they'd tried them: they'd had to spit out the first bite, and ended up feeding the rest to the dog (who enthusiastically lapped it up, perhaps finding it reminiscent of toilet water).

Anyway, the reason I'm writing about durian is this part of the Wikipedia entry:


It's illegal to carry a durian on public transportation in parts of Southeast Asia, including the Singapore subway, where these signs are posted. But if the smell is really that bad (or the spikiness that hazardous) why isn't there a fine, as there is for smoking and eating? Does the lack of a fine mean people are constantly flouting this regulation? Is this law ever enforced?
I guess this is one instance where durians are actually "odor: free!"

That Bananaman is No Dope

This morning, when I greeted the bananaman, and as usual, selected a large banana from his pile, he called my attention to the fact that he now charges two different prices for bananas. The large ones are 35 cents, while the smaller ones remain 25 cents. He obviously knows how to do his math and did the same kind of analysis I did about banana prices by weight.
He apologized for having to raise the price, but said that by offering two prices, he hoped to keep everybody happy. I said it was no problem, and though I had a quarter already in my hand, I decided to stick with my large banana and went digging for an extra 10 cents. I was fumbling around a bit trying to find it. I was about to tell him I could give him 8 cents now and 2 more later when he started to tell me not to worry about it and that I could just give him the extra 10 cents on Monday. But just then I found a dime for him, so we were all squared away. We wished each other a good weekend and I went off to work thinking "I love my bananaman...."

Do Clueless Waitresses Get Better Tips?

During the last few weeks, I've eaten in restaurants a couple of times with my friend "Cookie." The first time was at a Mexican restaurant in my neighborhood, on a quiet night where we were almost the only people in the place. We had a couple of margaritas, and when the waitress asked if we wanted another round, we said yes. But then it seemed to be taking a while for them to arrive. We'd already been guessing that the waitress was new-- I'd eaten in this place a couple of times before and never seen her, and also, the waitress was not Mexican herself, which I couldn't help but see as a sign of the times in a gentrifying area. Aside from all that, the waitress just didn't seem to be quite in her groove yet, and didn't bring us utensils and napkins until our food arrived, even though I'd asked for a napkin when she brought our drinks.
Eventually, the waitress comes to our table looking apologetic, and says "Um, about those margaritas? I'm really sorry but we ran out of margarita mix." Cookie and I just look at each other and start laughing. By this time we're almost done with our food anyway and we don't really care whether we get another drink, and we just think it's funny that A) a Mexican restaurant would run out of margarita mix, and B) they wouldn't know how to cope with making one from scratch! We tell the waitress it's no big deal, but she does come back a few minutes later saying someone has figured out that they can just squeeze some fresh limes to solve the problem. The resulting margaritas, when they arrive, turn out to be almost undrinkably strong, but Cookie and I bravely manage to finish them after a few jokes with the waitress about whether someone behind the bar is trying to kill us. Cookie picked up the check for this dinner, and after we left, she said "I gave her a big tip!"
Then just the other night, Cookie and I went to a different place where, again, the waitress was obviously new. She hadn't yet figured out how to pronounce "ceviche" and seemed a bit vague about a few other things. When I asked to take home the uneaten portion of a gigantic pasta dish, the waitress went back into the kitchen and brought a plastic container to our table. "This is big enough, right?" she asked, and then proceeded to pick up my plate and start scraping the pasta into the dish. I had to grab a fork and help her, because the pasta started falling all over the table and she would barely have gotten any of it into the container. She laughed and thanked me for helping her, but just seemed to have no idea that servers in restaurants are supposed to do that stuff behind the scenes in the kitchen, where presumably they can drop as much as they want on the floor and then still throw in back in the doggie bag for you to eat the next day.
But there was something kind of charming about her, so Cookie and I ended up giving her kind of a big tip too. I guess sometimes a good attitude wins out over competence...

Rib-eyes and Fashion

I love the Thursday Style section in the NY Times. It's always full of crazy things to spend money on, and stories that point out the crazy ways we live:

Be Yourselves, Girls, Order the Rib-Eye

This article is about how women have stopped trying to eat salads and other light, dainty fare when they're out on dates:

Red meat sent a message that she was "unpretentious and down to earth and unneurotic," she said, "that I’m not obsessed with my weight even though I’m thin, and I don’t have any food issues." She added, "In terms of the burgers, it said I’m a cheap date, low maintenance."

Of course, what you order on a date has financial significance too, for both parties:

Hamburgers, she added, say you are down-to-earth, which is why women rarely order those deluxe hamburgers priced as high as a porterhouse.

“They’re created for men who want to impress women, so they order the $60 burger, then they let the woman taste it,” Ms. Gershenson said. “The man gets to show off his expertise and show that he can afford it.”

Then there's this story:

When High Price Is the Allure

Designer labels are expensive, and getting more so:

This is the fourth consecutive autumn season in which a weak dollar has meant higher prices for designer clothing, much of which is made in Europe or stitched from fabrics imported from European mills. As the value of the dollar shrinks against the euro, prices continue to climb, with retailers citing hikes of as much as 15 percent for shoes and bags this year compared with last.

Yet, merchants and manufacturers have seen surprisingly little resistance in recent seasons to the cost of luxury goods.....

“Price certainly plays into a product’s allure,” said Robert Burke, a retail consultant in New York. “For certain people, the higher the price, the more attractive the item becomes.”

I guess that is our economy right now-- rich people can have plenty of money to afford expensive clothes, and the garment industry is taking advantage of it, knowing that even non-rich people will follow along.

At Bergdorf Goodman, a Stella McCartney turtleneck devoid of trim sells for $995, and her cable-stitched sweater for $1,495. A pair of Kieselstein-Cord sunglasses is tagged at $595. Far from daunting, such a ticket might be downright seductive to customers, Ms. Sokol said. “When you are looking at a handbag or even a pair of sunglasses, a high price can have inherent snob appeal.”

Consumers tell themselves, Ms. Sokol went on, “ ‘If those glasses are $150, I’m not going to be as interested as if they are $350.’ ”

That is not to say that consumers are indifferent to price. Many are making emotional adjustments, finding ways to balance a love of fashion with the reality of its increasingly exorbitant cost. Eunice Ward, a lawyer in Chicago with a taste for quirky labels like Dolce & Gabbana and Stella McCartney, pays full price only for items that resonate with her sense of style. During a recent shopping trip, she spied a Yohji Yamomoto sweater. “I knew it would fit with my wardrobe and update everything,” she said, “that it was going to be my workhorse for fall.

“I didn’t even check the price at first. I knew I would love it, and I didn’t care.”

.... As a technical designer for a fashion house, [Kate Strachan] is well acquainted with the price of style. “I know a lot of quality, craftsmanship and time goes into some of these pieces,” Ms. Strachan said.

Regardless, she is determined to put a cap on her spending. Combing the racks at Saks, she sighed wistfully: “I can’t afford these kinds of things, so usually I buy what I need most. This year that would be a winter coat.”

Then with a self-mocking smile she added, “Of course there are times when I’ll splurge.”

The Price of Bananas

Remember my post about the Bananaman? That and some comments on my deli posts got me thinking about doing some price analysis on the cost of the items I buy for breakfast, to see if I could really be saving a lot of money by buying them elsewhere. Here's the results of some research into banana prices in New York City:

Garden of Eden (a sort of gourmet deli): .79 per pound. 3 large bananas weighed about 1.5 pounds, so one large banana about 40 cents

FreshDirect: as low as .59 per pound. 3 banana minimum. est 1.35 lbs, so .26 per banana. But FreshDirect does not deliver to my neighborhood.

Whole Foods: .99 per pound for organic bananas. 3 bananas were about 1.25 lbs, so about .41 per banana.

Sunset Park Key Food: 2 lbs for $1.00. The bananas were pretty average in size though I didn't actually weigh them, so I'm guessing something like .23 per banana. This was definitely the cheapest per-pound price I found for bananas.

Bananaman: 25 cents per banana. Bananas tend to be a bit smaller than the ones at Garden of Eden, but sometimes just as big, and sometimes even bigger.

I don't know how else to sum this up other than to say "SIZE MATTERS!" As long as I make sure I get a nice big banana, the bananaman is actually one of the cheapest places to buy bananas. But if he always has wimpy little bananas, then I might be able to do better elsewhere on a bite-by-bite basis.

Well, that was interesting... maybe I will do some more price comparisons on other fruits I regularly enjoy, such as cherries, fresh figs, melons...

Up to Their Old Tricks Again

I do have a love/hate relationship with my morning deli. After many years, they have finally gotten to know me well enough to make my coffee the way I like it without my even asking-- which is only a problem when I want to switch to iced in the summer and have to flag them down and say "Not the usual, not the usual!!" It always reminds me of some movie scene where you see the hero in slow motion, running and screaming "NOOOOOoooo" as someone opens the door where the bomb is hidden...

Anyway, aside from the coffee drama, and occasionally ending up with a bagel that is half whole wheat and half plain, the deli is great and the people who work there are friendly. But they still sometimes do this annoying thing of rounding amounts in their own favor. Today my bagel and iced coffee came to $2.93. I hand them a $20. They give me $7 back. I stand there with the change in my hand, waiting, and finally say, "I gave you a $20?" So they give me $10 more, with this odd look as though I'm a little crazy for wanting it. At this point I don't feel like carping about it anymore so I just decide to forget the 7 cents. But I think I will have to do a little psychological test on them. I'm going to count out my change and go in there a few times with exactly $2.85 (even if I have to use some laundry quarters) and just hand it to them with a smile to see what they say!

(I also noticed last week that samerwriter shares another pet peeve of mine about how most cashiers give out change!)

Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is

I haven't been overly obsessive about my food spending lately, despite my post about financial lessons learned from a diet book! So it's time to get into the nitty gritty again...
I'd been feeling good about keeping my food expenses under control, as I've been under budget every single month this year except while my mother was visiting. But as a single person with a pretty normal dietary routine, it still seems like my expenses are higher than they should be. Do I make great efforts to clip coupons and cook frugally? Well, no. But I don't go to restaurants much lately, and I at least try to sometimes bring lunch and snacks to work instead of buying them each day. So where is my money going?
Here's a graph of my monthly dining spending since January 2006:


A few things to point out:
Breakfast and lunch spending are relatively consistent. I always buy a coffee, and usually a bagel and banana in the morning. I buy lunch most days of the week, except for occasional times when I do get my act together to bring lunch from home.
Liquor spending is another fairly consistent sliver in the graph. Consistently too high, that is. I do love a glass or two of wine but I should probably cut back a bit for health as well as financial reasons!
Then the biggest chunks are dinner and groceries. You can see that most of last spring and summer and into the fall, my dinner expenses were much higher than they are now. For part of this time, I was living in sublet apartments with lousy cooking facilities, so I didn't have much choice but to get a lot of takeout. Also, I was going out more back then. Sadly, another one of my best friends (and most frequent partner in crime when it came to restaurant spending) left New York City a few months ago, and the result is that since then, my dinner-out expenses have dropped quite a bit.
And since I haven't been going out as much, I've been cooking at home more. Hence the increase in grocery spending. It's not as dramatic increase as I thought-- possibly because I haven't been buying as much expensive meat as I used to. I used to make lamb chops (at up to $15 a pound) at least once a week, but I don't any more, mainly because I find it hard to broil them in my new oven without the fat catching on fire. Talk about weird cause & effect relationships.
What else? You can see a big spike in November from when I stocked my kitchen just before moving into my apartment, and again in March when my mother was visiting and I was entertaining family a lot. December was a small month because I was away on business and for the holidays. I should also note that the grocery expense category just captures whatever I spend at the supermarket-- this can often include cleaning supplies, toilet paper, etc, which I tend to stock up more on now that I have more storage space.

What else has been affecting my eating habits? As I said, I hardly ever order takeout anymore. Part of the reason is that I no longer live in delivery range for some of my old standbys. (And strangely enough, when I was back in the old 'hood this past weekend, I realized that my two favorite places had both closed! I must have been giving them more business than I thought!) Not that my new neighborhood doesn't have lots of restaurant choices: you can have Mexican, Mexican, or Mexican. Ok, that is an exaggeration: you can also have Chinese. I'm also not that crazy about the local supermarket, so I find my grocery shopping habits have changed: I'm more likely to buy food in Manhattan and carry it home with me. And when I shop in Manhattan, it tends to be at pricier markets like Whole Foods or Garden of Eden. But on the other hand, now that I live in a much more comfortable apartment, I'm less likely to go out for food on days when I'm not working. I tend to make sandwiches for lunch at home, or have crackers and cheese, and the other day I made myself a delicious banana/peach/blueberry smoothie that would have cost me $5 or so if I'd bought it elsewhere-- the price people charge for smoothies always astounds me, as it is just a handful of fruit and ice thrown in a blender. Or if I'm going to be out for the day, I dump a bunch of nuts and fruit into a ziploc and bring a bottle of water from my Brita pitcher so I don't have to buy snacks. Now that I have more room to store food, I tend to keep more of these kinds of snacks on hand, which may also be a reason I'm spending more on groceries.

Well, as usual there is no clear answer, but it is always interesting to throw things into an Excel chart to see the effect of various factors on my spending habits. I'm already trying to whittle these expenses down by clipping out some new recipes for pasta dishes that are cheap and easy to use as leftovers. I will also have to revisit the frugal food blogger cookbook for some other ideas!

I Love Roz Chast

I have been a fan of the cartoonist Roz Chast for more than 20 years now, since first discovering her in my father's copies of the New Yorker magazine back when I was in high school. Now that I am a grown-up (well kind of) and living in New York, I find many of her drawings funny on a different level-- perhaps it is some kind of rite of passage, that you know you've truly become a New Yorker when you see your life in a Roz Chast cartoon!

Back in February of 2006, I wrote a post called "The Ick Factor," about the money I waste when I let food go bad, or at least when I smell it and suspect it may have gone bad, even if I'm not 100% sure. So when I saw Roz Chast's cartoon in the June 25th issue of the New Yorker, called "Old Family Recipes," I had to laugh at the cartoon, and at myself too.
I'd love to just reproduce the cartoon here, but to do so legally, I'd have to pay the Cartoon Bank $250, or since I give my ad revenue to charity, maybe I could get their non-profit rate of $200. Sorry everyone, but I'm not going for it! You can click through the link to the Cartoon Bank site to see it, or read the exciting description below:

Old Family Recipes
"Questionable Chicken: Find some chicken at the back of the refrigerator. Smell it. Then ask somebody else to smell it. Throw it in the garbage." [Man and woman look very disturbed while examining obviously odorous pan of chicken.]
"Leftovers à la Ugh: Take out all your leftovers and gaze at them. Get really depressed. Dispose of them immediately." [Bouffant-haired woman surveys table full of reeking takeout containers and tupperware.]
"Hot Dogs in Reality Sauce: Locate package of hot dogs. Throw away the ones that look like Lincoln Logs. Then toss the rest." [Man frowns while holding smelly-looking half-package of hotdogs above a trashcan.]

This one is definitely going on my fridge-- the perfect place for it!