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Reality Bites
May 5, 2009
Wow, the recession is really starting to make its presence known in my cosy little world. I'll admit it, I've been feeling all snug and cushioned from the GEC (Global Economic Crisis) here in SS land. I'm alright mate, what with growing my own food, keeping the lights turned off and doing all the countless other things us Simple Savers do. It's also a little hard to believe there's a recession on when the shopping malls are still crawling with people and you can't even get a car park. However it seems I can no longer stick my head in the sand; the recession is here and it's really hurting a lot of people.
This became all too obvious last week when I rushed Ali to the 24 hour medical centre after dinner. He and his brother were out wrestling on the trampoline (kids don't try this at home) when Liam dropped Ali and he landed badly. Panic ensued when we thought he had broken his neck - mercifully this turned out not to be the case but the fact he could barely move and his shoulder was jutting out like a tennis ball was still rather worrying. So we whizzed up the motorway and arrived at the 24 hour clinic at 8.30pm to find it had closed at 8pm. The 24 hour medical centre was now a 12 hour medical centre, 'due to financial constraints' the large sign on the door said. It was mayhem. We could see through the glass doors that the waiting room was still full of people but they weren't letting any more in. A crowd gathered behind us outside, all carrying sick children in pyjamas and peered in hopefully but continued to be ignored. One angry dad banged on the door until the receptionist gave in and came to see him but she still politely refused to let him in. For Ali and me it was a bit inconvenient but no huge drama; we could go home, give him pain relief to get him through the night and bring him back in the morning but I felt dreadfully sorry for all the other sick children and their families. A sad sign of the times and a big wake up call.
Every day now I hear more stories of how the recession is affecting people I know. At the weekend we were shocked to hear our local Retravision store had suddenly closed down. They had only just merged with another large appliance retailer in an attempt to stay competitive but still they couldn't keep afloat. Over the months we had watched as their range of products had got smaller and smaller. There is a shopping complex less than an hour away from us houses four of these retailers all in a row. Dick Smith, Noel Leeming, Bond and Bond and Heathcote Appliances. For longer than I can remember they have been empty of shoppers. People can't afford to buy large appliances any more and if they do buy them, they are getting them second hand or from The Warehouse. How long can they keep going like this? It was such a shame to hear of Retravision closing. For years it had been built up by a local family who had always gone out of their way to provide the best prices and service and always gave back to the community. I wonder what they are going to do now?
A recent visit to the hairdresser was an eye opener too. I had gone to that salon regularly over the years but there was no need to make an appointment any more, I was able to just walk in off the street. The hairdresser told me it was the same for the other half a dozen salons in the town. They are all so quiet, half the time they have been shutting up shop at 12 noon. People aren't getting the expensive stuff like foils and highlights done any more. At least as she said cheerfully, people always need their hair cut. It's the beauty salons who have been really suffering. As soon as times get tough, the first things to go are the acrylic nails, the eyelash tints and the deluxe facials. Just that morning the travel agent from across the road had come over to the hairdresser in tears to cancel her appointment. She had gone into work as usual, to be told she no longer had a job, to clear out her desk and go.
Even Lance the carpet cleaner was a revelation to talk to last week. I actually felt guilty for getting him out in the first place but I had tried everything to remove the stain and nothing could get the dye out. It felt like a huge luxury, calling out a carpet cleaner when I know so many people are struggling to put food on the table. He agreed that business had indeed slowed but was feeling pretty positive overall. Offices and other places still always need their carpets cleaned, not to mention all the plush city apartments which are being vacated at an alarming rate because their occupants can no longer pay the extortionate weekly rent now that their businesses are crumbling around them. Lance considers himself one of the lucky ones and after listening to him, I think he is too. He's a big fan of American author and social critic James Howard Kunstler and through his writings saw the GEC coming two years ago. So Lance started a vegetable garden. He now has six thriving vege gardens and his kids, who used to like nothing better than a feed at McDonalds are now at their happiest getting their hands dirty digging up potatoes. He says it's the best thing he has ever done for his family.
I know what he means. I'm so glad my kids know Simple Savings. I hope it will protect them from making some of the expensive mistakes our generation has made. I don't want them to grow up to be one of those families living hopelessly beyond their means, buying a house twice as big as they need or thinking they have to have a 40 inch plasma TV to look successful. It was interesting hearing Liam and Alex talking about the recession the other day. My boys can't understand how the whole world can possibly run out of money. Why don't the money factories just print some more for goodness sake? Alex explained that the problem is, there wasn't enough money in the first place. Too much of it was imaginary. The little people happily borrowed and borrowed from the big people because they were led to believe they could have whatever they liked. The big people had heaps of money and would help them get what they wanted. But what the little people didn't realise was that the money they were borrowing wasn't real. The big people were borrowing too, from even bigger people and on and on it went. Everybody thought the money they were borrowing was real, but it wasn't. It never existed. Alex described it as a house of cards. When the people at the top started to topple, everyone else fell down with them, all the way to the bottom. I thought it was a pretty good explanation and certainly backed up what Lance said about the people in the penthouses. Alex himself has just been told he's going to lose his after school job at the local gym. With nobody able to afford memberships the gym is almost empty apart from a few classes. It no longer opens on weekends as it can't afford to pay staff to work all day when nobody is coming in to use it. As a result, Alex and the two other students who work there will cease to be employed.
If there's one person who's doing very well for himself at the moment however it's 12-year-old Liam. Duck shooting season is here for six weeks in NZ and he announced last night that duck and goose were high on his list of favourite foods. In fact his favourites are all wild and put on the table for virtually nothing - duck, goose, venison, fish and scallops. Not a burger in sight! He's more adventurous than I am, I'll give him that. He's also extremely good at making money for himself on Trade Me. For example, in the school holidays Ali decided he would like a fish tank in his bedroom. That was easy, we just cleaned up an old one from the shed and it was soon as good as new. In fact it looked so good that Liam decided he wanted one in HIS room. He had been selling bits and pieces on Trade Me to raise money for a new Playstation game but decided he would rather have a fish tank. So he shopped around and found a fantastic 35 litre tank on a stand, complete with everything he needed to get set up for $129 - 56% less than the usual retail. A few fish carefully selected by price and temperament and Liam's mission was done. Both boys spend many happy hours 'fish watching' in their rooms - I would much rather they sat mesmerised by those than a Playstation!
He hasn't stopped there though. From then on emerged a continuous barrage of 'stuff' he wanted to sell. As I sit and write there are currently three baskets full of 'stuff' behind me, either waiting to be listed, currently listed, or sold and ready to post. In the last three weeks he has made no less than $530 and is still going! The ladies in the Post Office always make a fuss of him and praise him for being so motivated when he goes in there to post his trades. He seems to have a knack of knowing what people will buy and what is a realistic price. He puts a lot of time and effort into his trades and it's really paying off - although for what, we don't know yet. He just likes to have some money in the bank for when he DOES find something he wants! Smart boy - if only he was as motivated when it came to his homework. The ironic thing is, there's supposed to be a recession on, yet all these things are being snapped up and flying out the door as fast as he can list them. I mean, they're hardly essentials are they? Still, far be it from me to discourage them when Liam's doing so nicely!
OK Penny, you've done the recession to death, let's finish on a more positive note! We had a wonderful get together of Simple Savings members on Sunday, I think there were eleven of us in the end! Left to right in the photo is Tracy (3 Girls from the Forum) and her three girls, Marie, me, Heather, Pat (Gran), Rosanne and my mum Ann (Pompom Ann). Beverley was behind the camera! We wandered around Hamilton Gardens in the sunshine paying particular attention to the Kitchen Garden, the Sustainable Garden and the Herb Garden where we sniffed and nibbled on so many fragrant leaves we needn't have brought lunch! Still, we stopped in the end for a picnic and a chat. None of us had ever met before (except me and my mum of course!) but conversation was easy and everyone got along so well. Tracy's three daughters were adorable and so well behaved and as they tucked into all sorts of home made goodies (including muesli bars the girls proudly told me they can make themselves), I thought to myself how lucky they are to grow up the Simple Savings way, with a loving, savvy mum. I also thought to myself at the end of the day, isn't it incredible how this single website has brought so many people together? I would never have met any of these wonderful people if it wasn't for SS!
Wine Flu
May 25, 2009
Sorry it's been so long. We've all been sick with the flu. I've had it for 26 days so far and there's no sign of it disappearing - in fact I'm getting worse! At least I don't feel so lonely now the whole family has joined me. We have officially declared today a Family Sick Day and are spending it in our pyjamas by the fire. At first I really was convinced I had the Swine Flu but as time has gone on I realised I must have a different strain so in case nobody else has named it, I've called mine Wine Flu. So-called because I've been living almost solely on a liquid diet - soup by day and wine by night!
Living on soup is extremely good for the budget I've found. We've been able to exist almost totally on leftovers for days. If I don't have a recipe for using something up in a soup, I just head for the Forum and find the answer there. I've been so grateful for all the comforting food threads on the Forum, such as 'Mimi's favourite winter warming recipes' and 'Soup, soup, glorious soup' Never a truer word spoken! I'm a soup fiend from way back but the sub-zero temperatures also had Noel craving soup faster than I could make it so he bought some cans the other day. Alas I fear we have become too spoilt! Being as accustomed as we are to home made soup, the canned soup was just bleurgh! It tasted so bland and artificial we couldn't bear to eat it by itself and had to hide the taste in shepherds pies and potato bakes instead. Won't be doing that again!
After his canned soup horror, Noel decided to take matters into his own hands and make a huge pot of pumpkin soup. It was delicious and he couldn't believe how easy it was to make something so good out of a few simple ingredients. This recipe comes from the trusty NZ classic Edmonds cookbook and is a winner every time!
Pumpkin Soup
1 tbsp oil
1 onion, chopped
750g pumpkin, peeled and chopped
1 large potato, peeled and chopped
4 cups liquid chicken stock
salt
pepper
nutmeg
Heat the oil in a large saucepan. Add onion and cook until clear. Add pumpkin, potato and stock. Cover, bring to the boil and cook until the vegetables are soft. Puree the vegetable mixture in a blender or push through a sieve. Season with a pinch of salt, pepper and nutmeg to taste. For extra flavour, a ham hock or bacon bones can be added when cooking the pumpkin.
So yummy, so simple and so cheap to make - especially when you have free pumpkins growing at home! Out of interest we decided to compare Noel's pumpkin soup recipe with the ingredients on a canned version. We were pleasantly to surprised to find most of them contained pumpkin, onion, potato and nutmeg, same as ours. However the canned version also contained maize thickeners (which Liam can't have, being maize intolerant), at least three artificial flavourings (so determined by their numbers) and colouring. Colouring! Why the heck would you need to colour pumpkin soup?!! Isn't it orange enough? And how come our home made pumpkin soup is lovely and thick without any need for thickeners, when the canned version uses thickeners yet is runny? Either way, the whole experience made us never want to eat pumpkin soup from a can again!
Talking of revolting foods in a can, I have been meaning to share this new convenience food with you which has recently been launched in NZ. 'Mr Cheese' is the super easy way to enjoy cheese - squirted out of an aerosol can. If the thought of that alone doesn't make you heave, check out the list of ingredients! CHEDDAR CHEESE 35% (PASTEURISED MILK, CULTURES, SALT, ENZYMES), WHEY, CANOLA OIL, WHEY PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, NATURAL FLAVOUR, EMULSIFYING SALTS (339, 331, 341), SALT, FOOD ACID (270), THICKENER (401), YEAST EXTRACT, PRESERVATIVE (200), EMULSIFIERS (322*, 306*). *CONTAINS SOY. Compared to the ingredients in a block of regular cheese (milk, salt, rennet and cultures) that's a heck of a lot of extras to get it squirting out of that can. Sorry, but to me that's just plain yuk - and no, I haven't been brave enough to try it!
Being sick for so long is really frustrating. I know it sounds like I'm having a real pity party for me and I'm well aware there are others far worse off but there's so much I want to do! It's almost the end of Get Organised month and I achieved hardly anything I set out to do. However one achievement I was really happy to get out of the way was organising our chest freezer. Noel and I braved the icy depths at the weekend with our Icelandic strength gloves and an impressive collection of reuseable shopping bags, which had been sitting unused in the boot of my car forever. We had never thought of doing this until reading the enlightening thread 'How to organise a large chest freezer'. With National $21 Challenge Month just around the corner, we had to get our bums in gear and find out exactly what food we have. We unearthed the following:
2 venison roasts
11 lamb roasts
27 packs of sausages (that's PACKS, not individual sausages!)
86 venison steaks
10 beef roasts
7 packs of beef steak
3 packs of stewing steak
22 packs of smoked fish
1 whole ham
24 packs of beef mince
3 corned beef silverside
1 unopened box of lamp chops
1 whole roast chicken
2kg chicken pieces
1 salami
2 loaves bread
2 packs of pork schnitzel
2 packs of beef shin
3 packs of lamb shanks
2 oxtail (oxtail soup, yum!)
1 tongue (eww!)
1 liver (double eww)
2 kidneys (triple eww!)
3 mysteries - could be lamb, beef or venison, no idea!
I think that should keep us going for a while! I still have our upright freezer to sort out and the pantry looks like a bomb site but anything we are able to achieve in our current state of health is a bonus. The coloured shopping bag system has made finding things in the chest freezer sooo much easier. I have everything written down in an inventory and stuck it up next to the freezer. As well as the food item and the amount, I also have written which coloured bag they are in, so it says 'Beef Roasts - 10 - Blue'. All I have to do is find the blue bag. It doesn't even matter if it's at the bottom of the freezer, I simply lift out a couple of bags and there it is! So much easier and faster. Thank you wonderful ingenious SS'ers!
PS: Liam has been making the most of his sick spell at home to list even more of his worldly goods on Trade Me. He is now up to well over $700!
Modern day cavemen
May 28, 2009
*Grin* every $21 Challenge month this happens! As soon as I write the contents of my pantry and freezer in my blog in the lead up to a $21 Challenge I get letters from members saying 'Penny that's not a stocktake, that's a whole supermarket!' Admittedly Noel and I were quite delighted to discover just how much food we did have in the freezer the other day - and that's just one freezer, mind - we still have another to delve into! I honestly think a large freezer is one of the best investments you can make. Our freezers save us a staggering amount of money. If you don't have room for one, get rid of something else less useful and put a decent sized freezer in its place instead! Ours sits in the back porch. It is probably older than I am but is still going strong. We inherited it from Noel's grandma in 1993 and it was a good few years old even back then. It measures 1300mm x 660mm x 900mm and is full to the brim with meat. I was amazed when I took this photo this morning to realise that out of the hundreds of packages in there, just TWO have been bought from a shop - a bag of chicken pieces and a whole roast chicken. All the rest has come about through Noel's hunting and fishing exploits. I never realised how much we take it for granted until Fiona asked how on earth we ended up with so much meat in our freezer. My answer was 'Two blokes, a shotgun and a fishing rod'.
Noel learned to fill the freezer from a very young age. From the age of eight years old he loved nothing better than going hunting or fishing with his uncle and young cousin. Together they would spend hours, days at a time in the bush on hunting expeditions. Whatever he shot or caught he would proudly bring home to his mum and she would dutifully cook it and serve it up for the family. At 19 he met me. Being a keen shooter himself, Noel and my dad got on like a house on fire. I was used to dad bringing home pheasants for my mum to pluck when I was small in England so this shooting lark was nothing new to me. The difference was, I had never had to cook it before. The first time I went duck shooting with Noel I burst into tears. Didn't go down well I can tell you!
For years I struggled to eat the things he brought home. It didn't seem right to me, not coming from a supermarket and all nicely wrapped in plastic. It was too real to me. I didn't like thinking about the beautiful animal that once lived in the bush and was now served up on my plate. To be honest I was still like that until quite recently - I would serve it up to everyone else but not have any myself. But the more I learned about Noel's work in the livestock industry, the more I realised how daft I was being. I was really lucky - Noel was giving me a choice. What would you rather do Penny? Would you rather your meat came from an animal who had known nothing but complete freedom in the wild and simply had the misfortune to come across a bloke who was a good aim with a shotgun? Or would you rather it had spent its days in captivity, being pushed from pillar to post and fattened up with the sole purpose of ending up on somebody's table, before being sent to the abbatoir with a truckload of other stressed and bewildered creatures?
Even the kids prefer 'wild meat' to shop-bought meat any day. Liam's favourite all-time foods are duck, venison and scallops - all provided by Dad - and nothing beats a feed of freshly caught fish! No additives, no preservatives in any of them; just real food. It didn't cost a fortune in feed and resources to raise them, just grass and natural foraging. Venison is one of the healthiest meats you will come across, containing next to no fat or cholesterol. I've never thought about it before but I can also see it's a far more environmentally friendly way to source meat too. No real transport costs, no excess packaging. Where possible, Noel does the butchering himself. If it wasn't for him, we would never get the chance to eat venison. Deer were once a feral pest in this country. The problem was so bad that in the 1930's the government enlisted professional hunters to cull the population. During the 1960's entrepreneurs recognised the opportunity to ship to Europe where venison was traditionally a favoured dish. Hunting became so lucrative that the deer population dwindled to the point that deer farming became economically viable, at least once deer-proof fencing was invented! Today NZ is the biggest supplier of venison in the world but only 5% is eaten here, the rest is exported.. According to 2008 prices Kiwi customers wanting to buy venison from supermarkets were having to cough up anything from $36 to $99 per kilo. So going with the average price being $55 per kilo and the average amount of meat we end up with being around 45kg, Noel saves us around $2475 with every deer he brings home! Jeepers! Even if it only got put into sausages (which it doesn't) you're still looking at an easy $1000. Gold plated bangers! To be honest, I still prefer the taste of beef over venison any day, but if it keeps us well fed and is almost free, I guess I can learn to live with it!
I'm very glad - and fortunate - to have married a hunter gatherer. We never catch or hunt for more than we need and if we do have a surplus we give as much as we can away to friends and family. It's great that my kids appreciate the good food they have and where it's come from. I realise that we are in the minority living the way we do. The skills Noel has have been passed down from generation to generation and in turn he is passing it on to his sons. Liam's favourite thing in the whole world is to go out on the boat overnight with his dad and beloved dog Hubble, catching fish and cooking it on board. Ali first learned to shoot when he was 8. At 10 years old he is as capable as any adult in the bush and has the utmost respect from men three times his age who hunt with him. He is mature, responsible and his knowledge of nature and wildlife blows me away. Heck, it even blows his teachers away! He knows just how lucky he is too and finds it hard to believe that most of his friends have never eaten fish that didn't come out of a packet and weren't covered in breadcrumbs, let alone venison. His favourite place in the world is deep in the heart of the bush with his dad, learning about the world and creatures around him.
It sounds ironic, but Noel, Ali and my late father are the biggest conservationists I know. They have nothing but love and respect for wildlife - yet they all hunt them. I can see it for myself, plain as day but it's always been such a strange combination to come to terms with. Having written this blog it finally makes sense to me and I appreciate their efforts far more. My fellas are modern day cavemen; hunter gatherers who continue to provide food the old fashioned way. They save us THOUSANDS of dollars a year. The food they bring home is additive free, preservative free, styrofoam free and almost cost free. Best of all, it has been allowed to BE free. I would definitely rather eat my meat that way! It's great to know we have so much food on hand going into $21 Challenge week. We have free, fresh eggs from the chickens and the vege patch is worth its weight in gold at the moment. Bring on National $21 Challenge Month!
PS: It might sound like it but not ALL our meat is sourced from the wild. Members have been writing to ask how we save money on other meat too, particularly beef and lamb. That's a whole other blog, I'll tell you how we do it in the next one!