 Surviving lean times
When there have been periods of time that I have had less money in my life (a divorce with two young children and only a part time job and erratic payments from their father for one). I learned to pay the necessary bills (rent, utilities, phone), never buy on credit cards and to splurge at the end of the month, never the beginning of the month when I did not yet know how far my money would stretch. By splurge I mean I would treat the children to an ice cream cone out for which I had a coupon or I took them to a base movie theater for a special matinee for children with lower priced tickets. Once I won a contest at the base library for Taco Bell. I even stretched out those winning coupons by buying some food and using some coupons, taking the children out for about three visits over as many months.
My children were delighted when I was able to locate some brand new levis jeans at $2 a pair. I had learned to haunt every base exchange on Oahu (where I lived at the time) for bargains. These were slightly out of date with bell bottoms, but since my soon to be ex never let me shop very much for the children, well, they were thrilled with new clothes in some quantity. To this day I never buy clothes unless they are on sale.
I had always been a careful shopper as I was married to a mean old tightwad, but I honed my skills at that time. Coupons became even more important and the food I had always stocked in my pantry which would not spoil saved us during the divorce. I had a lot I did not have to buy since it was already on my shelves. Toilet paper, paper goods and canned goods. Meat was in my freezer and I was able to eek out things like chili by adding soy beans or other canned or cooked from dry beans. We ate well, but not expensively.
I learned to budget my money even more stringently for groceries. I made a real effort to buy food on sale and in season. I also learned to shop in the local farmers market and flea market and plan menus around what I could find there at good prices and foods I already had on hand.
I found a Mennonite cookbook, the More-with-Less Cookbook in paperback in our BX and it helped me stretch my dollars--it is available used at Amazon. There are many other such cookbooks out there now, but this one saved us during a difficult time when money was tight (ironically it was another time of high prices and stagflation in the early '80s). It is still highly rated by others on the Amazon site. This cookbook was where I learned to add some vinegar to the pot when making chicken soup to add more calcium from the bones to the broth. I quickly figured out that freezing all the bones left from a whole chicken I roasted until I had two to three of them to make soup saved me a lot of money. I would cook the carcasses until they yielded a rich broth (I used some bullion cubes or canned broth to add salt and flavor at this stage along with chopped onions and celery) and then cool it. It is amazing how much chicken is still on the bones of whole chickens which were prior meals. If there are chicken necks in the package you never used when roasting chickens freeze them too and then throw them in the pot with the bones as they have a very flavorful and tender meat when simmered this way, although there is some work to pick off the meat and get out all the little bones from the broth. I even used the hearts and the livers chopped finely into the soup, but not all may like this texture or flavor. Sometimes, if I had enough money, I would add some extra chicken thighs to the soup when I started the bones. After I did all this I would add the vegetables and spices I wanted and at the end I would add in some cooked rice or macaroni or potatoes or a can or two of beans. All this yielded a large batch of soup which mostly came from chicken carcasses that would have been thrown away.
In the winter buying beef marrow bones and making beef vegetable soup can also be a way to stretch dollars. It can be made many ways, just like the chicken soup.
We also learned to save our change and then later sort it into rolls. This became the way we were able to eat out occasionally in a fast food place or go out to a recreation place like Bellows and stay for the weekend (military run and it was affordable to us because of that). I tried to make life as normal as possible. I realize now I should not have been so proud and applied for food stamps.
Still we made it and I think that many times it was due to the kindness of strangers. Like the sargeant who noticed that I could not afford the price of a Christmas tree and told the children this lush beautiful tree was only five dollars, about all I could afford, especially as the Grinch (their father) had taken all the ornaments for himself. Yes, unbelievable, but that story is really true. There is a real Grinch, just like there is a real Santa Claus LOL. I can laugh about it now, but despite the lean times that Christmas was one of our most memorable because it was one where the children made the decorations and a friend lent us extra lights for the tree. I found some wonderful things for the children, because they were there and waiting for me to find them. Like my son's first pair of Nike's for $5. How much richer could we have been? I think though this is the most important thing I learned. That no matter how little I had or might have in the future life is rich because of the kindness and the love we share with others. These cost us nothing, but can leave the world a better place.  | 
July 6th, 2008, 07:21 PM
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