Confessions of a frugal foodie: How growing food is saving me $11,000 a year

Budget schmudget. I’m more interested in my own budget than Michael Cullen’s this week. While writing our next special edition, Homegrown 2: Live off your land for less (on sale June 16), I thought I’d take a look back at how much I used to spend on food (and alcohol) before I launched my self-sufficiency project and vowed to cut my weekly supermarket bill to $10 as a challenge. So I printed out my old bank statements and thought I’d compare what I spent in the first two weeks of May in 2006 (pre-self-suffciency project) vs 2007 vs 2008.
Now, before I tell you all this, you have to promise not to laugh or recoil in horror at my fiscal frivolity. (Honestly, it makes quite alarming reading to see how much I used to spend/waste on takeaways and at cafes before I set out to grow my own food.)

May 1-14 2006: On the 1st of May I spent $29 at Frolic Café and bought a bottle of wine for $16.99 at Liquorland. On the 2nd of May I spent $57.55 on groceries at Foodtown Grey Lynn, $13.50 at Atomic Coffee (latte, sandwich and cinnamon brioche)… and then went out to dinner at Sawadee Thai restaurant ($30). On the 3rd it was back to the supermarket for $33.37 of groceries. On the 5th I went to Tamuki’s Cave (Japanese) for dinner. Came to $120 (must have drunk a lot of wine!). On the 8th I had lunch at the New Orient (Chinese) restaurant for $63.50. On the 9th, spent $7.50 at Atomic Coffee and went to the supermarket twice: spending $25.91 on the first trip and $36.84 on the second. On the 10th, yep, lured back to the supermarket again, spending $77.34. Also spent $21.90 at Il Forno bakery in Grey Lynn. On the 12th, dinner at GPK in Ponsonby $48. On the 13th, Atomic Coffee for a latte and brioche: $7.50; and finally lunch at Circus Circus in Mt Eden for $17.50 on the 14th.
GRAND TOTAL FOR TWO WEEKS: $589.41
(Cafes/coffee/takeaways: $358.40)
(Grocery shopping: $231.01)

(Now keep in mind that I am a single city gal and we single city gals do have to have a social life, but even I’m embarrassed by that total. And don’t think that was an aberration that fortnight: I ate out all the time. In 2006, my Visa card statement was 56 pages long.)

May 1-14, 2007 (the middle of my first year of self-sufficiency): On the 1st of May I spent $23 at Verve café (weekend brunch with friends). On the 3rd of May I spent $14.50 at The Mount in Mt Eden (two glasses of wine at book club) and $68 at Winehot in Morningside (dinner out with friends). Then spent nothing for the next two days as was holed up in bed with mighty hangover, after winning 2007 NZ Magazine of the Year and 2007 Supreme Editor of the Year at the Magazine Publishers Awards. On 8 May, spent $20.92 at Foodtown and went to dinner at Prego ($70). No other food expenses that fortnight.
GRAND TOTAL FOR TWO WEEKS: $196.42
(Cafes/coffee/takeaway: $175.55)
(Groceries: $20.92)

(Wow. I cut my overall expenditure by almost two-thirds and it would have been even more if I didn’t count wine! Notice that I only ate out for dinner once, because I was cooking at home instead, and that I spent 10 times less on groceries too! And I can tell you, I must have cut the amount of wasted food going into my wheelie bin by at least 90%.)

Now, for the first two weeks of May 2008: On the 2nd of May I spent $23 at the supermarket (would have been less but I needed olive oil). On the 5th of May I spent $50 (tapas and two glasses of wine) at Didas in Herne Bay. And on the 14th of May, I went to Winehot and spent $50. Plus I probably had a coffee every second day at work but I pay cash for those so they’re not on my bank statement, but lets say $20.
GRAND TOTAL FOR TWO WEEKS: $143
(Cafes/coffee/takeaways: $120)
(Groceries: $23)

That means that, by growing my own food... and actually eating it, rather than just going out every night because it's easier... I'm now saving about $223 a week compared to the same time two years ago. That's more than $11K a year. Which could explain why, for the first time in my life, I now pay off my credit card on time every month and have knocked a fair chunk off the mortgage over the past 12 months.

Dig for Victory!

It's official: Vege gardening's back in global fashion, thanks largely to the combined effect of rising food and petrol prices. Of course, as the editor of a gardening magazine I could say "I told you so", but if you think I'm a little biased... check out these stories from the Christian Science Monitor, The Observer, The Reading Eagle, The St. Louis Dispatch, The Dutch News, the Dodge City Daily Globe, the Connecticut Post and The Guardian. All these stories were published in the last couple of days. I predict a run on radish seeds...

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants"

The Auckland Writers, Readers and Eaters Festival is on at the moment. Well, actually it's just the Writers and Readers Festival, but eating was high on the agenda at the lunch session with American journalist Michael Pollan at Soul bar this afternoon. (On the menu: an entree of roast beetroot carpaccio with vodka potato salad and rocket, followed by crisp duck leg on silverbeet and chorizo, with tamarillo creme brulee for dessert.)
Michael is the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and, more recently, In Defence of Food. Both are jolly good reads if you're interested in how your food gets from paddock to plate, and what you're actually consuming at the end of the food chain.
In Defence of Food is intriguing because, although it's a timely read from an environmental perspective, its central concern isn't saving the planet but defending real "food" - the unprocessed stuff that comes from nature, rather than the synthetic low-fat, low-carb, sugar-free, Omega-oil-infused substitutes you'll find in boxes on supermarket shelves.
Michael reckons food needs defending because it's under attack from what he calls "nutritionism" - the scientific ideology that food is no more than the sum of its nutrient parts and can be improved by fiddling about with those parts in a lab.
Proponents of "nutritionism" look at an apple and see only vitamin C, vitamin A, iron, fibre and boron to keep your bones healthy. (When I look at an apple, however, I see apple crumble. Or apple pie. Or apple fritters drizzled in lemon juice and sugar.) But the food industry forgets about such cultural pleasures because it's too focused on antioxidants and phytochemicals (not to mention making a profit).
The problem with nutritionism as a concept is that, as Michael points out, instead of suddenly getting healthier by cutting carbs or banishing fat or swallowing more protein or gulping down gallons of fish oil, all that's happened is that we've got fatter. And unhappier. And unhealthier.
(Personally, I've never given any thought to nutrition or the advice you get from nutritionists: my theory is that you should never trust anyone who insists you eat cottage cheese and tinned tuna every day.)
Michael's book concludes with a few rules about eating. Namely: don't eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn't recognise on a plate. (Clearly someone had tipped him off about Kiwi cuisine of old, though, because he relaxed that rule at lunch today. He said it's perfectly ok to substitute your own culinary-challenged great-grandmother for one of those Sicilian ones instead.)
But his general philosophy can be summed up in seven words: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." To which I'd add, "And grow the darn things yourselves!"
I've suspect I'm fast approaching "terminal bore" status when it comes to trying to encourage people to grow their own food, but I had a captive audience at my table at Soul. (Captive as in they couldn't escape because their bosses had paid them to be there, rather than captivated as such.) Talk turned, as it invariably does when I've got anything to do with it, to rising food prices... and one of my dining companions confessed that during the recent school holidays, her weekly grocery billed topped $800 to feed two adults and six children.
$800!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I would have choked on my tamarillo creme brulee. If I hadn't already polished it off.

The darling buds of May?!

Lord help me.
I went to the local Foodtown supermarket today... and guess what I spotted in the produce aisle?
Fresh asparagus! (At least the sign said "fresh" but the stuff looked about as fresh as I feel when I step off a long-haul flight.)
I did a double-take. Fresh asparagus in MAY? That's like trying to sell Christmas cake in March or Easter eggs in October.
It was airfreighted American asparagus. For $3.49 a bunch. Honestly, I felt so aggrieved that, if I wasn't already running late for a meeting, I would have stood there and accosted anyone who tried to buy the stuff. And had I later been charged with assault, I would have argued a provocation defence. Our tastebuds deserve better.

My pide and joy

I've spent the afternoon in a soup kitchen. My kitchen, in fact, making 10 litres of homegrown soup to freeze in portions for lunch at work.
Having finally conceded that summer has departed, I figured it was time my summer crops did the same. So this weekend I ripped out the tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes and beans (although I've given the basil a stay of execution because I reckon I can get another jar of pesto out of it, just as soon as I buy some pine nuts). I also dug up a couple of stray onions, a couple of carrots and a handful of finger-sized 'Urenika' potatoes that were hiding under the rampant apple mint.
There's only one thing to do with that sort of end-of-season harvest hodge-podge... and that's make soup. Chop it all up, bung in some chicken stock or a bacon hock, and boil the bejeezus out of it. Easy peasy.
I made a special trip to the supermarket to buy the bacon hock (although apparently the Mad Butcher sells the best ones in town) because my mum always made soup using a bacon hock. Must admit I was a bit horrifed when I found them in the butchery department: they look much too much like a pig's leg for my liking. And, after boiling it down in a big stockpot of water for a couple of hours, my house smelt like worringly like an abbatoir. Yes, I remember that smell from childhood trips to the petfood factory. Probably explains my early (and now lapsed) conversion to vegetarianism.
Soup rocks. I made mine using a packet of Kings soup mix for the base - split peas, lentils, barley, alphabet pasta etc - because (and this will reveal how long it has been since I last made soup) the blimen supermarket no longer sells any of those ingredients in the bulk bins. The bulk bin aisle is clearly considered naff these days. Unless you want to buy pineapple lumps on the cheap.
But I digress. My soup ultimately also featured: the boiled-down foot of a small pig, a couple of Oxo stock cubes, a hearty splash of Worcestershire sauce, carrots, onions, tomatoes, capsicums, spinach, chilli, courgettes and chopped up purple potatoes. (I soon discovered that when you add purple potatoes to soup, it all goes a very peculiar shade of purple-brown)
Now soup just isn't soup without crunchy, buttery garlic bread. So yesterday I bought some delicious Turkish pide bread for $4 from the French farmers' market at La Cigale in Parnell. Then I figured, I'm sure I can make that stuff myself! A little trawling of the internet later and I found this recipe (I found others, but they required either eggs or yoghurt, neither of which I have in my fridge at the moment).
Making Turkish pide bread was definitely easier than making ciabatta, as the dough actually looked like dough. And it rose when it said it should. And it stuck to my fingers when it said it would. I halved the recipe to make 5 mini-pides (that's lunch Monday-through-Friday sorted), rolled out the dough, poked holes in it with my fingers, brushed it with olive oil and sprinkled it with sea salt. Then I baked it on the pizza stone in my barbecue.
The verdict? It looks just like the bought stuff.

The F word

Go Gordon. The foul-mouthed celebrity chef has come out with a new F word: fine. He reckons chefs should be fined for using imported, out-of-season ingredients such as strawberries in winter (my personal irritation here). Ramsay's comments have, naturally, caused a bit of consternation in the kitchens across his restaurant empire, as most of his own menus include a few out-of-season flavours. I think the H-word (for hypocrite) might be his next show.
Anyway, it's a fascinating idea. And I'm all for it. Nothing gets up my nose more than supermarkets stocked with sugar snaps from Kenya and peaches and nectarines flown in from the United States in July. They look like nectarines, but they don't taste like anything. No wonder our tastebuds get so confused.
I think our chefs should lead the way when it comes to using the freshest, most flavoursome food each season has to offer. But in recent months I've seen Kiwi chefs promoting recipes using oranges in March (I'd like to know where you can pick a fresh orange in March) and asparagus tarts in April (those must be seriously confused spears). It makes me cross, but not as cross as going to a posh restaurant and finding all sorts of unseasonal stuff on the menu. If I see a strawberry anywhere between now and November, I'll complain to the chef. The strawberries they import from the United States over winter are disgusting. They're an insult to the whole point of a strawberry: a sweet bite of summer.
The other thing that bugs me is canned stuff when the real stuff IS in season. Last spring, at one of the top restaurants in the Viaduct in Auckland, I saw tempura globe artichokes on the menu. Yum! I love globe artichokes and this was the peak of the season. I ordered them, having first asked if they were fresh. I was assured they were. They weren't. They were tinned. I complained, my dining companions cringed... but I'm not giving up on this battle. We deserve better from our dining establishments.