Coffee heat rising

Hamburger helpless

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Slumgullion is one of the great comfort foods of the Western World. Slumgullion: that would be a stew-like mélange (some would call it “slop”) concocted from whatever fresh and leftover (preferably leftover) food happens to be in the house.

The folks who invented Hamburger Helper recognized this and capitalized on it. You take the contents of a box and stir it in with some fried hamburger; reconstitute some dried sauce by stirring it in, and…uhm…voilà.

Slumgullion under way.
Right: Macaroni a-cooking. Left: Slumgullion under way.

If you have a can of tomato sauce, a little hamburger, some frozen, canned or leftover veggies, and some pasta, rice, or potatoes hanging around the house, you can make your own slumgullion without the “help” of a megacorporation. It may not be cheaper (I don’t buy a lot of processed foodoids and so don’t know the price of Hamburger Helper), but you can bet it will taste better. And you’ll know pretty much what’s in it.

Slumgullion is mighty forgiving. You can whip it up with as many or as few ingredients as you have at hand, assuming you have some hamburger and something to flavor it up with. I happen to favor tomato sauce or canned tomatoes, but leftover gravy, milk, or wine will do the job. The other day I found chuck roast on sale at the Safeway for $1.27 a pound. I bought a humungous chunk of meat and had the butcher convert it to hamburger (which happened to be selling for $2.27 a pound that day). Most of this was dogburger: intended to be fed to Cassie the Corgi. However, I can’t resist good hamburger, and fresh-ground from a single roast can’t be beat.

So the first night I grilled several patties over charcoal, providing a feast for myself and about a half-dozen meals for the dog. This left a large amount of hamburger to be dispensed with. Last night, shoveling my way through a mountain of burger, I used some of it to build a tasty slumgullion, which made enough for dinner and at least two more meals. The general outline of the recipe looked like this:

You need:
• A large frying pan
• Some hamburger (1/2 to 1 pound, depending on number of people to serve)
• 1 or 2 small cans tomato sauce, or 1 can tomatoes
• A splash of red wine, if you have it; or some beef broth; or some milk
• Leftover or frozen veggies (I had a few frozen asparagus spears, some frozen peas, and some frozen corn)
• An onion
• Some garlic
• A splash of olive oil or other vegetable oil
• Whatever herbs you have around the house or garden (such as thyme, marjoram, basil…anything will work. I used some dried herbes de provence)
• Some ground cinnamon
• Cooked pasta, leftover mashed potatoes (!), or rice

Dice the onion. Coarsely chop the garlic.

Skim the bottom of the frying pan with oil. Over medium to medium-high heat, cook the onion until it begins to caramelize (i.e., to brown). Lift the onion out of the pan and set it aside on a plate or in a bowl. Put the hamburger into the hot pan; add the garlic and the cinnamon and cook, stirring occasionally, until the meat is done through. Add the herbs. Stir. Add the tomato sauce or canned tomatoes. Stir. Bring back to the simmer. Add the frozen vegetables. Stir around and allow to simmer until the veggies are cooked.

Meanwhile, reheat mashed potatoes (you can microwave them) or cook the pasta or the rice.

Assess the slumgullion. If it seems too thick to act like a sauce (it should be about the consistency of spaghetti sauce, IMHO), add another can of tomato sauce or a splash of red wine or some beef broth or milk to achieve the desired sauce-likeness.

Serve the miracle elixir over the starch of your choice. Top with some parmesan or other grated cheese, if desired and as desired.

This concoction, which is about as down-home as you can get, serves nicely as a full meal. You can add a salad, if you think you can get around it, to create an even more complete full-meal effect. Sooo good on a cold day! And it gets better when it’s reheated the next day.

Moments of Fame

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Doughroller kindly featured Funny’s squib on decluttering and recluttering at the top of this week’s Editor’s Picks for the 159th Festival of Frugality! That is very flattering, especially since the festival features quite a few excellent and entertaining posts. Saving Advice, for example, touches on one of my pet peeves: neighbors who jam their garages with junk and then leave the rolling stock parked on the driveway, in the front yard, and along the curb. At Value for Your Life, Amanda discusses her strategy for implementing her 25% Grocery Savings rule; before you read that post, definitely click on the first link in her post, where she describes the amazing result of her scheme. There’s a nice conversation going on at Cash Money Life that Patrick kicked off by explaining why he chose a PC over a MacBook. And speaking of decluttering & recluttering, if you’re of the female persuasion do check out Paula’s great commonsense steps to cleaning out and intelligently restocking your make-up stash.

The 92nd Carnival of Money Stories is up at Gather Little by Little—don’t miss the opening photograph! His favorite is a thoughtful story from Trisha at Empowering Mom, titled Are You Waiting for Your Ship to Come In?Funny’s rant about the dilution of pool testing chemicals appears among the money stories. At Free Money Finance, FMF realizes that one possibly ought not to be put off from buying online by an outrageous-sounding shipping bill. On a subject of interest to moi, Jeff Rose at Good Financial Cents shares a client’s experience with long-term care insurance. And at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity, Jim mounts my favorite hobbyhorse and takes a ride with The Total Cost of Owning a Dog.

Clever Dude hosts this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance with a highly original “fairy tale” narrative. Speaking of the cost of dog ownership, My Journey to Millions suggests making some provision in your will for the care of pets that survive you. To my mind it’s a little extreme to set up a trust in the name of your cat, but it might be a good idea to state specifically who is to take care of Fifi…and, uhm, to let that person know about it before you pass through the veil. Saving to Invest offers a very good guide for prospective apartment renters. Prime Time Money reminds us that it’s not too late to max out your contribution to your Roth IRA. Funny’s reflection on 2008’s best and worst personal finance strategies appears among this week’s CoPF selections.

This week’s Make It from Scratch Carnival appears at The Daily Dish. Once again, the food is to die for. If you love portobello mushrooms as much as I do, you’d better check out Simply Forties’s mouth-watering tomato broth with portobellos and spinach over gnocchi…good grief! By way of gilding the lily, she also explains how to make gnocchi. I went over to see Stephanie’s post on coffee liqueur, and by golly, what should come up but the very thing my mother used to make. It’s a lot cheaper than Kahlua and it tastes the same…or better! As a bonus, Stephanie also tells the story of how the MIfS Carnival came into being. Speaking of hoots and my mother (who crocheted like a wizard), My Recycled Bags is at it again, with a pattern for a great green shopping bag. I have got to relearn how to crochet! Funny’s contribution to this edition was the recipes for black-eyed peas and cornbread.

The Writer’s Coin hosts that blog’s very first carnival with this week’s Money Hacks Carnival, where Tina and I submitted our Copyeditor’s Desk post on setting freelance fees. At a blog I haven’t seen before, Pizza for a Dream presents a nice little fable for our times about a potato farmer and an apple farmer. Wealth Junkies discusses the pros and cons of short refinancing…nice trick if you can pull it off. And here’s something to look into, if you can afford to have a ton of money sitting in a bank: Mr. Banker reveals that some banks subscribe to a federal program that guarantees ALL your money in noninterest-bearing deposit transaction accounts. You learn something every day!

More shoes…cheap!

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Whoa! Frugal Scholar left a lead in a comment on yesterday’s shoe-buying adventure to the effect that you can buy Sanitas seconds (and seconds for many other prominent brands) at a site called Footprints.com.

Well. Naturally I had to shoof that one out immediately.

This Footprints.com outfit IS kewl!!!! If you go to the “SALE!” page you can search by brand AND by size, so you can see whether they have anything that will fit you. Annndddd…what do we find here but the very $110 Sanitas the Shoe Mill was peddling for $120, marked down to $70. And OMG, some of them are actually in cute styles, rather than nurse’s clogs.

Drat!!! No Pikolinos, though. That’s the brand of the hand-made Spanish gems. Presumably if you’re making everything by hand, you don’t have seconds, eh?

Hm. No Naots or Mephistos, either.

But at least a zillion Birkies. If Dansko still fits your foot in its new incarnation, the site shows a bunch of those, too, including some attractive pump-like styles with soles that look sturdy enough to cushion your feet against the pavement. There are a lot of other brands, some of them Birkenoid or Danskoid, some of them of their own kind. They have men’s shoes, too.

And get this: You have as long as two months to try the things out!

{cackle!} I am going straight back to Shoe Mill to find out the brand name of that pair of heels I coveted. If these folks are carrying it, I’m gunna order it from them, straightaway. I may return the Sanitas and replace them with a pair from Footprints.com, too.

Thanks, Frugal!

Shoes

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Women’s shoes that do not hurt and do not look like orthopedic appliances for nurses are incredibly expensive.

Hevvin help me, this afternoon I dropped $450 on three pairs of pain-frees. Amazingly fine pain-frees…but my god.

The attempt, undertaken almost a year ago, to buy pain-frees at bargain prices by raiding the Clark’s outlet failed miserably. I did buy several cute pairs of Indigos that seemed comfortable enough in the store. Yup. They were just great, as long as I didn’t try to walk in them. As soon as I tried to walk any distance further than across the store to the mirror, they wanted to fall off my feet, exactly as one would expect backless clogs to do, being nothing other than slides on platforms. I had to struggle to keep them on, and that was very uncomfortable, indeed. Eventually I figured out that they would sort of stay on if I adopted a mincing gait, taking teeny little steps that didn’t require me to lift my feet off the ground for more than a fraction of a second.

Picture, then, mincing a third of a mile across a university campus in shoes that wanted nothing more than to fall off or, preferably, to twist their wearer’s ankle. That’s about how far I have to walk from my car to my office.

Well, hell. I knew better than to buy bargain shoes at an outlet. The immediate cause of the neuromas that have damn near crippled me for the past 20 years was a pair of sweet little heels I bought at a shoe outlet. They seemed comfortable enough—when you’re young, beauty knows no pain. After I’d worn them for a few months (all the time, even walking the dog…which occasionally entailed running), my feet hurt so much I couldn’t walk in anything. I couldn’t walk barefooted, for crying out loud! Not until I tried on a pair of Birkenstocks (ohhh lovely! perfect for officewear) was I able to walk around an amusement park on vacation with my husband and child. It took over 15 years for my feet to get to the point where I could wear anything other than Birkenstocks or Mephistos without excruciating pain. Heels have been out of the question for decades.

So. I should’ve known that shoes that cost something under $40 were going to mess up my feet.

Old, tired, not cute
Old, tired, not cute

I dispensed with the Clark’s Indigo slides in the late great decluttering adventure, tossing them in on top of the mountain of clothes that went to St. Vincent de Paul. Absent the shoes that I couldn’t wear to walk in, I still needed a pair of unclunky brown shoes and a pair of brown Danskos (having worn my beloved old brown pair until they fell apart). So this afternoon, with $2,500 in the much-refreshed savings account, it was off to my favorite purveyor of pain-frees.

There I found that the original Dansko shoe (which died when Dansko was sold and the new owners started having the style manufactured, with evil results, in China) is still produced by an outfit called Sanita. Lo! A pair of Danskos that actually fits like the REAL Danskos used to fit.

Buy: $120.

Then, these hand-made Spanish shoes of amazing cut-out leather, almost lace-like, utterly free of pain, the effect incandescent with élan.

Buy x 2: $320.

That would come to, yes, $440.

Plus 8.1% tax. Don’t ask.

But I was personful: I put back the INCREDIBLY cute pair of heels that hurt only one toe and would have looked so unbelievably awesome with the pin-striped pants purchased in the late great recluttering coup. And I also put back the STAGGERINGLY cute moccasin-like flats hand-made by the same Spanish shoemaker. So, you see…after all, I did not spend $600 on shoes today. What a triumph.

As a practical matter, shoes purchased at this particular emporium last for many, many years. The pair I had on when I walked in the door are about six or eight years old and still fully serviceable. When I went into the closet this afternoon to throw out three pairs of shoes to make way for the three new pair, I really could find only one pair decrepit enough to justify tossing, and I haven’t bought good shoes in more than two years. Guess I’ll have to count the three pair of Clark’s clogs I tossed as the “one out for every one in.”

I think that, especially where shoes are concerned, it’s better to spend more on good products less often than less on shoddy products more often. I dunno about you, but when my feet hurt, I’m miserable. And most shoes hurt my feet. Women’s shoes are designed to hurt your feet: a good 95 percent of them are bone-crushers. When you find well-made shoes that don’t hurt and aren’t hideous, you should buy them, cost be damned. When I pay $120 for pair of Danskos Sanitas that last upwards of six years, their actual cost to me is about $20 a year.

So. In 2009 I’ll pay $75 for the use of three pairs of not-hideous, fully pain-free shoes.

Not a bad buy, eh?

shoesJan08

LOL! The pair on the left is not really peacock-colored. They’re black and a subdued green, with gold thread decoration.

The sequelae to this story appear here and here.

She who squawks gets

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So after our Copyeditor’s Desk client tried to faze an indemnity clause past us in our 2009 contract, I politely demurred. We couldn’t, said I, sign a contract in which we promised to pay their lawyer’s fees for any action they should take against us, regardless of whether we were in the wrong or the right. In Arizona, I observed, courts generally award lawyer’s and court fees to the complainant if the suit is found to have substance. And, I added, the proposed arrangement was not fair to us.

It worked. The client allowed as how this paragraph was a piece of boilerplate she’d lifted off the Web and thanked us for pointing out its unfairness. She asked that we simply cross out and initial the offending passage and said the company would accept the revised agreement.

What a relief! Naturally, I wasn’t happy about causing a stink over a contract with our bread-and-butter client. On the other hand, there’s no way we could have agreed to any such arrangement. Better to go hungry now than to be pauperized later by circumstances over which you have no control.

A$k, and ye shall re¢eive.

Cheap, easy spot remover

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The new laundry detergents may be ecofriendly but they’re none too housekeeper-friendly. Though they wash the stale B.O. out, they scarcely touch grease stains. If you use table linens and ecofriendly cloth napkins—or occasionally spill a little food on your clothes or get grease-splatters on you while you’re cooking—you’ll find that Costco’s Kirkland liquid detergent doesn’t get the spots out, even if you soak the spot in undiluted detergent. Nor does the new version of Spray-‘n’-Wash.

After the Christmas feast, my tablecloth came out of the laundry with a big grease spot. Three washings did nothing to remove the stain. As I was about to resign myself to either buying a new tablecloth or just getting used to the spot, I recalled the folk household hint that used to say Windex would work to remove spots from carpets and furniture.

Hmm. In the course of cooking up our own glass cleaner, we discovered that the main ingredients of Windex are varieties of alcohol, a solvent. I still had half a bottle of isopropyl alcohol purchased to make the DIY window and tile cleaner, so…..

I tested it first on a similarly stained napkin. Pouring straight rubbing alcohol on the stain and popping the napkin into the wash took out the grease and did not seem to remove the dye, as straight Kirkland’s laundry detergent has been known to do. So, yesterday evening I slopped some more of the alcohol on the tablecloth’s stain, let it sit for 15 or 20 minutes, and then ran it through the washer.

Hallelujah! The stain is GONE!

Score one for the frugalist: rubbing alcohol works to remove grease stains from fabric.

Remember that the stuff is flammable—don’t wave a cigarette around while you’re using it, and if your washer is right next to a gas water heater (as mine is), you might want to take the item somewhere else for the stand-and-soak step. I don’t think I’d use it on washable silk without first trying it on an old piece that I was about to throw out anyway. But it works fine on cotton.