Slow Cooking on a Budget

When my husband, Steve, was in graduate school his professor assigned a project that required the acquisition and analysis of a unique set of data. Due to a few of Steve’s quirkier (though useful) traits, he happened to have kept a set of small notebooks that detailed everything he had spent during his first few years out of college. In those days he was in banking, so they still wore suits every day. There was always a convenient pocket for him to keep his little notebook and pen. 

To complete the school assignment, Steve decided to analyze this truly unique, although not very complex, data set.  The primary pattern that emerged from the data though not surprising, was still insightful.  Excluding the expenditures of groceries, student loans and rent, virtually everything he spent was on three days of the week:  Thursday, Friday, or Saturday.  And primarily those expenditures were with his new girlfriend (AKA, me).

That insight did not result in a dramatic change of behavior.  Of course, after marrying me, it was too late to dispense with the apparently quite expensive girlfriend, now wife.  But it did foster the concrete realization that there was really a limited set of choices to make in saving money.  The really big expenses (rent, student loans) were, at least in the short run, fixed. And there were limits to how much we wanted to curtail our social activity. But we determined that there were trade-offs that could be made. 

We found it was just as much fun to stay at home and cook together (after all, we were still newlyweds) as it was to go out to a restaurant, however the cost differential was huge. The same was true for dining out with friends versus dining in with them. So those were trade-offs worth making more often. And a nice meal at home didn’t have be build around a hefty slab of expensive steak. This analysis came from a man who grew up raising Angus cattle on an Iowa farm.

Fast forward to today. We’ve laid out with our own college student a recently instituted “monthly budgeting exercise.” While the system is far from perfect, nor is it well executed or embraced, it has produced some of the hoped for realization that comes with money management, i.e.,”I didn’t know how much I was spending on…” This has been coupled with the anxiety producing reflection of “how am I going to pay for the upcoming expense of …” 

We’re still hoping for the eventual, “After college is over I’m going to have to make enough money to cover all these expenses!?!”

All this brought to mind how many college and graduate students and young couples are facing the challenge of trying to figure out how to make ends meet on their own. So, with a growing number of millennials joining our slow cooking journey, we decided to make four delicious slow cooked meals that each cost less than $20 to feed a family of four.

Zen Moment

“Money won’t create success, the freedom to make it will.”

– Nelson Mandela

So join us this month as we help fit good meals into tight budgets…