Coffee heat rising

Moments of Fame

by

Wow! GREAT Carnival of Personal Finance this week! It (Carnival No. 180) just went online over at Living Almost Large, who also included Funny’s rumination about the patriotism (or not) of frugality. You have got to see the editor’s picks! It’s hard to be hilarious about a recession, but I laughed over Kevin’s witty 12 Days of Christmas During a Recession, at the Red Stapler Chronicles. After days of red-eye travel, Beyond Paycheck to Paycheck comes up with a nice metaphor for life in the indebted lane. How LAL managed to separate out just a few editor’s picks escapes me, because so many of the posts are really excellent. Check out Andrea’s theoretical journey at Fools and Sages, for example. This carnival is more than worth a visit.

Eco Joe reports getting hundreds of submissions for this week’s Festival of Frugality. More than the normal number of submissions also came in for the Carnival of Money Stories, which I just posted. Bloggers must be taking this week off work and spending some of the time working on their sites! At any rate, with that competition I was flattered to see my post on the boutiqueful of clothes my friend inherited from her shop-loving mom. Speaking of acquiring loot, want some free stuff? Check out Madison’s list of Black Friday freebies at My Dollar Plan. At Saving Advice, David wonders whether this is the year to get a fake Christmas tree. OMG! At Raising 4 Boys, good ole’ Dad has figured out how to get LEGO blocks on the cheap! Wish I’d known about that when M’hijito was little.

The Make It From Scratch Carnival has just gone up at Feels Like Home. Hmm…lookit this interesting idea for recycling one of Dad’s shirts or sweaters to make a cute dress for a li’l punkin. With the holidays coming in, you’re likely to have some house guests; here’s a clever, quick, and delicious-looking breakfast croissant casserole! Awesome idea. After you’ve eaten your Thanksgiving turkey (with Funny’s brown gravy recipe that was included in the carnival), go on over to Out of Debt Again and follow Mrs. Accountability’s recipe for making turkey stock—she throws in an extra for potato-zucchini soup, too. As Christmas comes up on us, here’s the secret to how to make scented bath salts. Who knew?

Awww, C’mon! Am I really that dumb?

by

Seriously. How dumb DO they think we are? And more seriously: could they be right??

Late in October I dropped by my doc’s office to get a flu shot. I was there for all of 10 minutes, 8 of them spent in the waiting room.

Friday, comes a statement from my insurance company: the doctor has charged my insurer $86. The insurer is disallowing it, claiming the Her Doctorness is not in the RAN+AMN network. So now I’m expected to pay this bill.

Yup. You read that right. EIGHTY-SIX BUCKS for a $10 flu shot.

So I shot off an e-mail to her, she also being one of my coreligionists who sang in the choir with me ($86 for a flu shot: ain’t that Christian?). She replied that she was shocked and would get after the office manager. And so she did. Yesterday morning, comes this missive from that worthy:

I am very sorry for the inconvenience. We deal with hundreds of insurance plans and our front office MA should have known that we are out of network for Ran+Amn. You must understand however that your card also has BENEFITOPTIONS and BEECH STREET in large letters. We do participate in these plans and it is the ultimate responsibility of the patient to make sure hisor her primary care physician is on the plan.

Grocery store flu shots are less expensive because they are purchased in extreme bulk for the masses. They also have a greater incidence of sideeffects, Dr. Wallbanger [my doc friend’s senior partner in the practice] tells me.

In our practice, we normally do a nurse visit taking the vitals of thepatient receiving the flu shot. Insurance billing requires that we bill $40 for this procedure and insurance pays whatever they like.

Billing code 90471 is administration of the flu vaccine and the going ratefor insurance billing is $26. The rate for the vaccine itself is $20.

We administer flu shots in our practice as a service to our patients, andwhen billing insurance there are set amounts for each service provided.

As our front desk did make the error, we will write off all but $20 of the remaining balance for your flu shot.

Total price for a cash pay flu shot is $30, you already paid $10, so
remaining balance is $20.

Again I am very sorry for the inconvenience.

Okay. Are you following this?

Item 1: The head partner in this practice is actually suggesting, with a straight face, that the vaccine he’s getting is BETTER than the second-rate vaccine dispensed at Walgreen’s or Safeway, where, if I’d had the time and patience to track down a flu shot clinic event, I could have had the shot for a $10 copay.

Oh, dear Dr. Wallbanger: can you spell S-P-E-C-I-O-U-S?

You understand: he and his office manager assume I’m so stupid I will buy this story.

Item 2: We’re told the insurance company requires that the practice overbill, in the amount of $40, for a grand total of 2 minutes of a junior college graduate’s time.

And Item 3: We learn that really, we shouldn’t believe anything we’re told by the front office staff. Just because the staff says the practice is in-network doesn’t mean it is in-network. In other words: it’s the patient’s responsibility to read our minds. And BTW, try to read RAN+AMN’s corporate mind, too, since that worthy organization does not publish a list of participating providers online, at least not that three Google searches will bring up.

What’s being said here is either “we try to gouge your insurance company and if we can’t get away with it we still overcharge you but only by about half of the overcharge we try to extract from your insurer” or “we think you’re dumb as a post.” Or maybe some combination of those.

Okay, okay, I admit it: They could be right!

This afternoon I donned some garden gloves and rolled the compost bin into the alley by way of trying to salvage it after the Great Bee Fiasco. By the time I got it where I wanted to dump the contaminated compost, wisps of white vapory stuff that looked like smoke were leaking out around the lid. It kept on leaking. “Is it on fire?” I wondered. Felt the side to see if it was hot: no, not especially. So I waited a while till this phenomenon settled down.

Finally opened the lid. White airborne powdery stuff was still floating around inside.

Waited a while longer. Then rolled the thing upside down and tried to dump out the compost.

No luck. It really needed to be pulled out a fistful at a time, not a practical option with weird (stinky!!!!) white powdery stuff drifting in the air.

Went into the garage to drag out a little hand-sized pitchfork-like thing. Held my breath and tried to fork out the bin’s contents without inhaling any powdery vapor.

This did not work well, and soon I was fairly certain that if I breathed much more of the “beekeeper’s” crud, it was gunna make me good and sick. Rolled the composter over to the bulk trash pick-up place, where it will sit for the next two and a half months, providing the Trash Cop doesn’t wander up the alley before the next pick-up is scheduled. He hates that.

By the time I finished, my throat was burning and I felt dizzy. Luckily, I’m going to dinner at the home of friends, one of whom is a nurse-practitioner. A psychiatric nurse-practitioner (where was she when I was busy hiring the bee dude?), but a nurse nonetheless. Matter of fact, this is the very friend who gave me the composter as a lovely and much-valued gift, some years ago. She should be able to recognize if I start to croak over during the salad course.

The bee dude’s bill is in hand: Contrary to his listing online as such, this guy is no “beekeeper.” He works for an outfit called “Atomic Exterminating Company.” Atomic, indeed: young Dr. Strangelove nuked my bees, nuked my composter, and damn near nuked me.

Well: Dumb tax, eh?

I’m still left with the question of how we’re supposed to know when service people are lying to us! I guess that requires you to be smarter than this Ph.D. is.

Costco and the Single Girl

by

Yesterday I spent half the day running around reprovisioning, a new paycheck having landed in my checking account at the start of business. A large part of that trek was devoted to the big once-a-month Costco run. Often when you see blog discussions of Sam’s Club and Costco, you’ll find one or more commenters remarking that they can’t cope with the lifetime supplies of this, that, or the other arcane product. And I have to allow, when you’re single and none of your friends want to split up bulk purchases with you, taking advantage of the quality and price available at these outfits can be a challenge.

Over time, I’ve developed two strategies:
1. Divide and conquer the perishables
2. Convert every nook and cranny into storage

dcp_2221Conveniently, my house has a large garage with a door, and it also has a spare bedroom. A few months after I moved in, I’d squirreled away enough cash to have a guy come in and build some inexpensive garage cabinets. They don’t look bad, and they hold several lifetime supplies of Costco merchandise. The house’s previous owner also had bolted one of the old kitchen cabinets over the washer & dryer at the time he changed out the kitchen; that holds a fair amount of junk, too. One shelf in the new cabinets will hold an entire gargantuan package of toilet paper, about half a giant package of paper towels, a huge box of kitchen trashcan bags, and enough food storage bags to last me upwards of a year. The paper goods represent several months’ supply.

The rest of the paper towels end up over the washer. That industrial-sized bag of Arm & Hammer baking soda, a substance I use for cleaning, laundry, odor control, and fire extinguishing as well as in cooking, will dcp_2222not go bad and so lives in the garage for two or three years. Part of it has been dcp_2223transferred to a more convenient glass jar on the kitchen counter, where I can easily grab a fistful if a grease fire starts on the stove (note the actual fire extinguisher next to it, though—in behind the vinegar bottle).

The spare bedroom serves as a gigantic storage closet. Instead of yard-saling the extra bookcases that had been serving as garage shelves before the particleboard cabinets were installed, I cleaned the old things up and moved them into that room. dcp_2220They serve conveniently not only for craft supplies and books that won’t fit in the front room but for a month’s supply of Corona. We’re thinkin’ outside the box here…

All well and good, say you, but what about food items? How can you eat 30 bushels of green beans before they turn to a pile of mush and mildew?

And the answer is…the freezer! After hauling the loot inside yesterday afternoon, I spent another hour or so preparing, packaging, and storing fresh foods in the freezer. No law says you have to eat all those steaks as they are cut, for example. For one little old lady, about a third of a strip sirloin will serve for a dinner. So, I cut the steaks into serving size pieces, wrapped them individually in plastic wrap, and stashed them all inside a large Ziplock freezer bag. A single package of four steaks morphs into 12 meals for me. Ditto things like shrimp and scallops.

dcp_2206Yesterday I found some nice brussels sprouts, perfect for the holidays but in an amount meant to serve all the guests at a big fat Greek wedding. Costco also sells tasty little French green beans in massive quantity, and I also picked up some very nice sweet corn on the cob.

It’s easy to freeze fresh produce, and the result is much better than the frozen veggies you buy in bags from the grocery store. Flavor is better, and you know what’s in the stuff. The trick is to blanch the dcp_2207vegetables briefly before you put them into the freezer. “Blanching” means dropping them into boiling water briefly, until their color brightens or deepens, and then immediately transferring them to ice-cold water. So, I brought a stockpot full of water to a rolling boil and started with the beans.

As soon as they turned bright green, I dumped them into a mixing bowl full of ice and water. This stops the cooking—your goal is to blanch, not to cook, the produce. Slosh them around in the cold water to be sure the entire batch is thoroughly chilled. After they’re all cold, drain them and then spread them on a clean kitchen towel in a single layer, cover with a second towel, and pat and roll them dry. They need to be pretty dry before you can package them.

dcp_2209dcp_2211

After the produce is dried off, wrap it into serving-size packets made of wax paper. This is cheaper and greener than using sandwich-sized plastic bags, as the wax paper is biodegradable. Also, you can microwave the frozen veggies inside the wax paper, whereas it would be inadvisable to cook them (and probably even to defrost them) in plastic. Once they’re all packaged, place them inside a large Ziplock bag, press the air out of the bag, and seal it tightly shut. Now you’re ready to freeze them. They’ll keep for quite some time, and whenever you need a serving of vegetables, all you have to do is pull it out and microwave, stir-fry, or sautéto your heart’s content.

dcp_2213dcp_2217

I repeated the blanch-dry-and-wrap process with the brussels sprouts and the corn. Since I’ve never tried this with corn on the cob, I decided to test only two cobs. I’d already raided the package and gobbled two of them for lunch, and so freezing two left only four pieces to eat within the next few days, a challenge to which I believe I can rise.

dcp_2215dcp_2214

After this project was finished, I held out a handful of brussels sprouts to eat with a piece of ribeye that evening. Brussels sprouts are particularly delicious when they’re fresh and braised in butter with the tarragon that grows in the backyard. You can, though, use dried tarragon to excellent effect.

Butter-Braised Brussels Sprouts

You need:

dcp_2216-trimmed brussels sprouts, blanched
-a chunk of unsalted butter (but salted will do)
-a tablespoon or so of fresh tarragon or a teaspoon or so of dried
-a little ground nutmeg
-a saucepan with a lid

Melt the butter in the pan over medium heat. There should be enough to coat the vegetables and also leave a shallow layer of melted butter in the bottom of the pan. Add the sprouts and tarragon, and season with a pinch or two of nutmeg; stir to coat well in butter.

Turn the heat to low and cover the pan. Allow to cook slowly until the sprouts are done to your taste. Season with salt and pepper.

And so that was my day. Not bad, all things considered.
🙂

Real brown gravy

by

Okay, I’m going to tell you how to make the real stuff: turkey gravy the way my great-grandmother used to make it. It was brown, it was intoxicating, and it was delicious.

Back in the Cretaceous, we didn’t worry about things like fat. Calories were known but not a focus of obsession. As a consequence, food tasted pretty darned good. Gravy, in particular, was very good, indeed. Here’s the trick…or rather, the series of tricks:

Reserve the turkey neck and giblets. At the time you’re preparing the turkey for roasting, put the neck and innards in a small pan with a coarsely cut up onion—no need to peel the onion. Just hack it apart and toss it in there. Add water to cover these ingredients. Pour in a little white wine or sherry, if you have some around. Bring just to a boil and then turn to a low simmer.

While the turkey’s cooking, let the turkey parts and onion simmer slowly. Add a little water or wine if the liquid reduces by as much as half. If it seems to be wanting to reduce too much, turn off the heat after two or three hours.

About the time the turkey is ready to come out of the oven, pour the broth through a strainer into a bowl to strain out the turkey meat, bones, and used-up onion. Set aside.

Lift the turkey out of the roasting pan and set it on a carving platter to rest. While someone else is fiddling with the other fixings, inspect the pan drippings. One of these two possibilities will present itself:

1. The drippings may consist mostly of fat; or
2. The drippings may contain a lot of liquid.

If the drippings are mostly liquids, take a big cooking spoon or the baster and skim off a fair amount of the fat floating on the top. Discard this fat (not down the drain in the kitchen sink!). Pour about a half-cup of white wine, sherry, or cool water in a mug or measuring cup and add one or two tablespoons of flour. Beat this up nicely with a fork to get rid of any lumps.

Place the roasting pan over one or two burners on the stove and turn up the heat. Remember to use a hot pad when handling this pan, since it will already be hot as a bygod and you’re about to make it even hotter. Bring the drippings to a fast boil. Add the floured liquid and mix briskly with the fork or a wire whip. The liquid should start to thicken shortly. Add the strained turkey broth as the liquid is thickening. Continue to cook at a fast clip, reducing the liquid substantially—the idea is to concentrate the liquid and all the flavors you’re mixing together. If you can reduce it by about half without leaving too little gravy to go around, do that.

If, on the other hand, the drippings are mostly fat, you’re in luck. This makes a far more delicious and richer brown gravy, IMHO. With your spoon or baster, skim off all but about two tablespoons of the fat. Don’t waste any delicious other liquids in the bottom of the pan. Place the pan over one or two stove burners and turn to medium high. Sprinkle one or two tablespoons of flour over the drippings and stir briskly with a wire whip or wooden spatula. As the flour starts to brown, carefully add the turkey broth. Stir smartly to combine all ingredients, scrape up all the drippings, and avoid lumping. Allow the gravy to reduce a bit—at the very least, it should simmer along for five or ten minutes to mellow the raw flavor of the flour.

Personally, I’m fond of adding a dollop of red wine to this second type of gravy. Be sure the gravy is deep brown, though…otherwise, you can end up with purple gravy. If you have any doubts, use white wine or sherry instead. Or nothing: it’s not really necessary.

To give either of these gravies a little extra polish, add some chopped parsley just before serving.

If you have brined the turkey…don’t even think of trying either of these recipes. Brined turkey exudes salty pan drippings. Way salty. If brining is your preferred approach to making flavorless mass-produced turkeys taste like something, use canned gravy instead; add a little wine to zing it up.

And if your opinion of commercially raised turkey is the same as mine, you’ll be pleased to know that this recipe works just fine with any other holiday roast: a nice standing rib roast, for example, or a leg of lamb. Substitute a combination of wine and canned beef bouillon, beef broth, or chicken broth for the turkey broth.

Are Margaret & Helen for reals?

by

Dunno about you, but I’ve developed quite a crush on Margaret and Helen, two alleged old bats with strong sentiments about moronic politicians, about the state of the economy, and about life, the universe and all that. I especially enjoyed their pre-election characterization of Sarah Palin, which was somewhat less kind and distinctly more on-target than anything that ever appeared on SNL. Apparently I’m not alone: as of this evening they’ve scored more than a million hits.

The question is…are they real? Are these really two li’l ole ladies given to tooling around on electric scooters and, incidentally, regaling the planet with their trenchant opinions on the lunatics, nincompoops, and would-be dictators who have been in charge of this country lo! these many years? And if they’re not real, well then…who’s behind the blog, anyway?

I hope they are real. They’re my kinda women, if I had the guts to be their kinda woman. But I’ll admit to harboring some doubts. After umpty-gerjillion years teaching English and editing writing from all kinds of scribblers, I’d hazard a guess that they sound more like 28-year-olds than 80-year-olds. The syntax, the vocabulary, the rhythm of the language…none of it rings of 1928.

Right up until my generation (and beyond, really), women with the kind of education and wit reflected in the blog’s writing were powerfully socialized to refrain from vulgarity. Nice girls did not use coarse language. Neither, surprisingly, did many men—certainly not in mixed company. Not until Vietnam radicalized us and the women’s liberation movement oversensitized us to the restrictions that bound us to the pedestal did women begin to use the f-word, or even the s-word or the p-word or any other of those words. It just wasn’t done. You can be sure my mother would have thought all sorts of “words” about the incumbents, but even more surely, she wouldn’t have said them. And god forfend that she should put them in writing!

That kind of training is not easily overcome.

Hilariously typical, for example, is this passage, where the conversation turns to bail-outs:

So many of you kept wanting us to talk about Sarah Palin. Sorry, but I have tuned her out. If I want to hear an ass talk I can just ask Harold to pass gas. And speaking of gas, several of you asked about the Auto Industry Bailout. At first we thought “How Boring” but then Harold showed me his credit card bill from Exxon and that got us going…

But just when you’re thinking “naahhh! The grandson’s writing it. This is the language and the humor of a 28-year-old guy of the sort who sits in front of the computer a lot,” ZAP! Up pops something unmistakably produced by a female mind of a certain age:

Life is short. You realize that even more when you are old. I have said before that in dog years I am already dead. So each morning when I wake up there is a brief moment until I realize that I still need my glasses to see the clock before realizingI must still be in this old body of mine… Then I turn and put a mirror under Harold’s nose to determine ifI still need to put on my make-up and do my hair.

Even a passage or two in the Bitch Palin post can ring of the mature voice:

I’m old enough toremember the Republican party of Barry Goldwater – when the party stood for fiscal responsibility, small government and personal freedoms. I remember whenI couldtalk withfriends about politicsand just agree to disagree. And then religious nut cases decided that if you didn’t agree with them you were immoral.So they went and elected George Bush President so he couldtake the Republican Party from being a party full of respectable people to a party filled with asses, jackasses and yes – bitches like Sarah Palin.

Goldwater himself famously used the a** word in reference to the neocons, and if he were alive today I’m sure he’d be using it and other choice expressions…dare we say it?…liberally. And I do know one woman pushing 75 who has been heard using plenty of strong language about our soon-to-be former leadership. One. A wild one, she.

Here we have two wild hares. Is that credible? What do you think? Are they real or not?

My money’s on the grandson. But my heart is with Margaret and Helen.