Our Christmas list this year includes 13 children who range in age from 7 months to 13 years – nine nieces and nephews and our own four children. When there are so many children, with such a wide age range and such divergent interests, it’s challenging to buy gifts that are personal, meaningful, and that stay within our budget.
To give personal and meaningful gifts that the children (and their parents) will appreciate, we try to focus on family gifts. Instead of spending $15 or $20 per child, we choose to pool the money we’ve set aside to buy a gift that is of higher quality and that the entire family can enjoy. When it comes to settling on exactly what we’ll buy, we use a list of focused questions. First, of course, we have to ask: “Does the gift fit into our budget?” Then we ask, “Is the gift built to last? Does it have multiple uses? Will the recipients enjoy the gift over a period of time? And will the gift help the recipients to build memories?”
It may sound like a tall order to answer yes to all these questions, but we’ve found plenty of gifts over the years that have fit the bill. Last year, for example, we bought a restaurant-quality waffle maker for the family with a trio of teens and tweens. And while it may not have been an awe-inspiring gift to a 10-year-old boy, I know he’s already eaten his weight in home-cooked waffles. His parents save money and no longer rely on boxed waffles from the freezer section. Plus, the gift gives this family the opportunity to build memories by starting a tradition of Saturday-morning waffles.
This year, we plan to continue giving family-focused gifts for our nieces and nephews. For the youngest recipients on our list, which include boys ages 2 and 7 months, we plan to buy a set of wooden, interlocking blocks. It’s a gift that will allow the unsteady hands of a toddler to build curved walls and tall towers. The boys and their parents will be able to play together with these blocks for years to come.
Art supplies, including scented colored pencils, bright beeswax crayons and tempura paints, are on our list for another family with two children. For yet another family, we’re giving games that suit the ages of the children and that will allow them to play with or without their parents. Still another family with girls ages 5 and 2, who love to spend time in the kitchen with their mother, will receive a gingerbread mold for making their own little villages and an accompanying storybook about gingerbread men.
We plan to apply the same principles to the gifts we buy for our own young children, focusing on quality gifts that they all can enjoy together. In the past, such gifts have included a wooden kitchen and a giant pop-up tent, both of which have inspired many hours of collaborative and imaginative play.
Though we’ve not made any final decisions about the gifts we’ll give them this year, we do have a few ideas that include a play parachute, an “ice cream ball,” where you drop ingredients into a canister and roll it back and forth until you make ice cream, or some new additions to their collection of dress-up clothing.
Birthdays and holidays can be rich opportunities to invest in the lives of the children we love. Ultimately, we hope our gifts will spark their imaginations – or perhaps help them discover a talent or interest that can bring them joy for years to come.
Friday, November 19, 2010
Friday, November 12, 2010
What’s for lunch? Small choices add up to big changes
When we found ourselves away from home last week at lunch time, we were faced with a decision. Should we dine at home on leftover baked macaroni and cheese and garlic-roasted cauliflower? Or should we eat out?
Our children were hungry and had overheard the lunch conversation my husband and I were having. They favored eating out and were shouting their opinions from the back of our van. We had fully intended to indulge our own desires (and theirs), when something made me rethink the decision.
To eat out, we would have driven past our home (and perfectly good leftovers waiting in our fridge), had to wrangle four squirmy, overtired children into a restaurant, and would have spent about $30 on a meal that we would have only marginally enjoyed. It didn’t exactly make sense to eat out when we considered all of these things.
So we went home and ate our leftovers, eating food we’d already paid for and that tasted better than the fare we might have driven out of our way to get. It seems so simple now, but making decisions about how and what to eat aren’t always so easy. In fact, food can be downright complicated.
We eat because we need food to survive, but the way we eat is influenced by many factors, including our habits, social circles, our lifestyles, our jobs, and our expectations. Once we start a pattern of behavior, it’s difficult to examine just why we do what we do. We just keep doing it because it’s what we’ve always done.
Maybe you are so accustomed to always being busy that it seems natural to order take-out or buy frozen lasagna. Perhaps you’ve never felt comfortable in the kitchen, so you feel it’s easier to buy convenience foods. If you’re single, it can be more palatable to eat out than to eat alone. If you have a large family, it can be overwhelming to come up with new meal ideas every day, so you rely on prepackaged foods instead.
Over the last several months, my husband and I have become increasingly aware of how we spend our food dollars. To break out of our own patterns of behavior, we had to acknowledge that we wanted to make a change. Then, we had to find the motivation to help make this change possible.
One particularly effective method for creating change has been to ask ourselves, “What if we did (x) instead of (x)?” For example, if you’re tired of eating lunch out but never seem to have the time or motivation to pack one, what if you spent an hour preparing make-ahead meals instead of watching television? Or what if you got out your slow cooker and tossed in the ingredients for a meal instead of scrambling to make dinner when you got home?
What do you really want? What choices could you make that will help you reach your goals? For example, if you made your lunch instead of buying it, how much money might you save? What else could you do with that money? Perhaps you want to build up your savings so you have an emergency fund, or you want to buy a new car or computer. Maybe you could take a vacation.
It might take months of choosing to pack your lunch instead of eating out to save enough money to reach your goal. But when you’re enjoying your car or relaxing on a sunny beach, will you regret those burgers you didn’t eat?
With thoughtful planning, the choices you make now (including eating leftovers) can pay off in satisfying ways in the future.
Our children were hungry and had overheard the lunch conversation my husband and I were having. They favored eating out and were shouting their opinions from the back of our van. We had fully intended to indulge our own desires (and theirs), when something made me rethink the decision.
To eat out, we would have driven past our home (and perfectly good leftovers waiting in our fridge), had to wrangle four squirmy, overtired children into a restaurant, and would have spent about $30 on a meal that we would have only marginally enjoyed. It didn’t exactly make sense to eat out when we considered all of these things.
So we went home and ate our leftovers, eating food we’d already paid for and that tasted better than the fare we might have driven out of our way to get. It seems so simple now, but making decisions about how and what to eat aren’t always so easy. In fact, food can be downright complicated.
We eat because we need food to survive, but the way we eat is influenced by many factors, including our habits, social circles, our lifestyles, our jobs, and our expectations. Once we start a pattern of behavior, it’s difficult to examine just why we do what we do. We just keep doing it because it’s what we’ve always done.
Maybe you are so accustomed to always being busy that it seems natural to order take-out or buy frozen lasagna. Perhaps you’ve never felt comfortable in the kitchen, so you feel it’s easier to buy convenience foods. If you’re single, it can be more palatable to eat out than to eat alone. If you have a large family, it can be overwhelming to come up with new meal ideas every day, so you rely on prepackaged foods instead.
Over the last several months, my husband and I have become increasingly aware of how we spend our food dollars. To break out of our own patterns of behavior, we had to acknowledge that we wanted to make a change. Then, we had to find the motivation to help make this change possible.
One particularly effective method for creating change has been to ask ourselves, “What if we did (x) instead of (x)?” For example, if you’re tired of eating lunch out but never seem to have the time or motivation to pack one, what if you spent an hour preparing make-ahead meals instead of watching television? Or what if you got out your slow cooker and tossed in the ingredients for a meal instead of scrambling to make dinner when you got home?
What do you really want? What choices could you make that will help you reach your goals? For example, if you made your lunch instead of buying it, how much money might you save? What else could you do with that money? Perhaps you want to build up your savings so you have an emergency fund, or you want to buy a new car or computer. Maybe you could take a vacation.
It might take months of choosing to pack your lunch instead of eating out to save enough money to reach your goal. But when you’re enjoying your car or relaxing on a sunny beach, will you regret those burgers you didn’t eat?
With thoughtful planning, the choices you make now (including eating leftovers) can pay off in satisfying ways in the future.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Eat well on a budget without an expensive overhaul
During a discussion with friends about meal planning, one woman declared, “We don’t eat cheap food.” I immediately bristled, then fielded a barrage of my own mental questions: What did she mean by “cheap food”? Was it packages of dehydrated noodles and boxes of macaroni and cheese? Fast food? Red beans and rice? Does my family eat what she would consider “cheap food,” I wondered?The exchange reminded me that what we eat can often be as much a social issue as a personal one. In essence, my friend’s statement drew a metaphorical line: cheap food is bad; expensive food is good. When I found myself on the side of “cheap,” (we enjoy boxed macaroni and cheese and eat fast food on occasion) I realized it’s easy to end up feeling excluded when you aren’t eating the “right” foods.
It’s true that there are many so-called cheap foods with little nutritional value, but I balk at the idea that there is a point of perfection, a food utopia, when it comes to eating. I also vehemently challenge the notion that you have to spend a lot to eat well. Instead of striving for perfection in your eating habits, it’s much wiser, and more productive, to focus on making progress.
If you’re like me, “eating well” means striking a good balance. I shop for nutritious foods my family likes and that fit into our budget, and l look for ways to integrate more organic foods into our diet. However, it can be difficult to know how to find this balance, particularly when you consider that organics typically cost more and can sometimes be more difficult to access. But eating well doesn’t mean you need to push for a complete – and expensive – organic overhaul. You can start small and make a few significant changes.
These changes can start with the help of two key shopping lists. To help consumers prioritize which organic foods they should focus on buying, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) has a published list of foods proven to retain the most residual pesticides. These foods, commonly known as the Dirty Dozen, include seven fruits: peaches, apples, strawberries, blueberries, nectarines, cherries, and imported grapes. Five vegetables round out the Dirty Dozen list: sweet bell peppers, celery, spinach, kale/collard greens, and potatoes.
The EWG has another, perhaps more practical, shopping list known as the Clean 15. As the name suggests, the Clean 15 is a list of 15 foods known to have little to no pesticide contamination. The list includes foods such as avocados, onions, sweet peas, sweet potatoes, watermelon, grapefruit, and cantaloupe.
With these two lists, you can look for produce that fits your budget, while considering which foods you may be willing to spend more on. You might find, as I did, that there are organic produce choices that cost the same or less as the non-organic variety. Last week, I bought a pound of organic Bartlett pears for $1.99 a pound; the non-organic variety was the same price. I also bought a bunch of organic grapes for the same price as the conventional ones. I did spend slightly more to buy organic Fuji apples ($2.19 a pound, compared to $1.59), but they were literally the best apples I can recall having ever eaten.
For me, those tasty apples – a food that is delicious, good for me and won’t break my budget – is how I define eating well. Next week, I’ll share how this definition of eating well has changed the way I shop and cook for my family.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Budget challenge: Can organic foods be good for your wallet?
Something unexpected has happened as my husband and I have looked more closely at how we spend our food dollars. As we began paying closer attention to what we were spending on food, we gradually became more aware of exactly what we were eating.
In other words, our spending and eating consciousness were both awakened. Now, when I walk the aisles of the grocery store, I consider how the price of one item will influence what I have left to spend on other things. I’m also more apt to think about the nutritional value of everything I put into my cart.The results of this combined awareness have prompted us to prepare more meals at home, led us to rely less on convenience foods, and taught us that eating well doesn’t necessarily cost more. We’re eating tastier, more wholesome foods than we ever have before, and we’re spending half as much as we used to. We’ve reduced our monthly food budget (including groceries and eating out) from $900 to just over $400.
Some small, yet significant, changes have made this possible. First, I’ve started making more of the foods that we once ate at restaurants or bought as convenience foods. For example, we no longer buy what my children have deemed “cardboard pizzas” (a telling descriptor). We enjoy rolling out our own dough from an old family recipe (find the recipe below). I invested in pizza stones so I could achieve that restaurant-quality crispiness. I’ve also introduced some new recipes; caramelized onion and goat cheese pizza is our new favorite.
Second, I’ve begun to prepare more vegetarian meals, enjoying dishes such as baked macaroni and cheese, vegetable fried rice, and parmesan risotto. If I use meat in a dish, it’s more as a complement to it, rather than the main focus, such as the pancetta I used in minestrone I made last week. These dishes may sound like gourmet fare, but they are surprisingly easy to make, and my children love them.
I’ve been including more whole grains and vegetables in our meals, and I’ve started looking for more simple, approachable ways to prepare wholesome foods for our family. That is what motivated me to visit a local organic market a few weeks ago, where I was greeted by Vinny Alessi-Narr, one of the store’s owners.
With a squirmy 2-year-old on my hip, I struck up a conversation with Vinny. I explained how I (and many others I know) understand the importance of eating well, but we sometimes feel that organic foods are prohibitively expensive. Vinny made a case for why it’s worth it to pay a bit more for organic foods. Most significantly, he maintains that organic foods are more nutrient dense, therefore meaning that a person will, by nature, eat less. (This resonated with me particularly well, considering that all six of us in our family have legendary appetites—just ask our friends and family.)
I asked Vinny point blank, “Is it possible to eat the way you’re suggesting and still keep my budget intact?” His unwavering answer was yes. So, I asked Vinny if he was up for a challenge: help me find practical, affordable ways to include more organic foods in our diet.
Since then, we’ve roughed out a plan for doing just that. Together, we’ll be looking for simple ways to eat well for less money and exploring which organic foods represent the best value. We’ll also be adapting and creating family-friendly recipes that are wholesome and affordable.
I'm looking forward to learning alongside Vinny and sharing this new knowledge with you in the weeks to come.
Mama Mia's Pizza Dough
1 pkg. yeast (or 2-1/4 teaspoons)
1 tsp. sugar
1 tsp. salt
1 c. warm water
2 tbsp. olive oil
2 1/2 c. flour
Disslove the yeast in the water. Then add remaining ingredients. Beat vigorously for 20 strokes (or use the dough hook attachment on a stand mixer). Let the dough rest for 5 minutes, covered.
Divide dough into two balls. Roll out onto corn meal-dusted cookie sheet or baking stone. Top with favorite ingredients. Bake at 450 degrees for 10-12 minutes, or until cheese is bubbly and just beginning to brown.
In other words, our spending and eating consciousness were both awakened. Now, when I walk the aisles of the grocery store, I consider how the price of one item will influence what I have left to spend on other things. I’m also more apt to think about the nutritional value of everything I put into my cart.The results of this combined awareness have prompted us to prepare more meals at home, led us to rely less on convenience foods, and taught us that eating well doesn’t necessarily cost more. We’re eating tastier, more wholesome foods than we ever have before, and we’re spending half as much as we used to. We’ve reduced our monthly food budget (including groceries and eating out) from $900 to just over $400.
Some small, yet significant, changes have made this possible. First, I’ve started making more of the foods that we once ate at restaurants or bought as convenience foods. For example, we no longer buy what my children have deemed “cardboard pizzas” (a telling descriptor). We enjoy rolling out our own dough from an old family recipe (find the recipe below). I invested in pizza stones so I could achieve that restaurant-quality crispiness. I’ve also introduced some new recipes; caramelized onion and goat cheese pizza is our new favorite.
Second, I’ve begun to prepare more vegetarian meals, enjoying dishes such as baked macaroni and cheese, vegetable fried rice, and parmesan risotto. If I use meat in a dish, it’s more as a complement to it, rather than the main focus, such as the pancetta I used in minestrone I made last week. These dishes may sound like gourmet fare, but they are surprisingly easy to make, and my children love them.
I’ve been including more whole grains and vegetables in our meals, and I’ve started looking for more simple, approachable ways to prepare wholesome foods for our family. That is what motivated me to visit a local organic market a few weeks ago, where I was greeted by Vinny Alessi-Narr, one of the store’s owners.
With a squirmy 2-year-old on my hip, I struck up a conversation with Vinny. I explained how I (and many others I know) understand the importance of eating well, but we sometimes feel that organic foods are prohibitively expensive. Vinny made a case for why it’s worth it to pay a bit more for organic foods. Most significantly, he maintains that organic foods are more nutrient dense, therefore meaning that a person will, by nature, eat less. (This resonated with me particularly well, considering that all six of us in our family have legendary appetites—just ask our friends and family.)
I asked Vinny point blank, “Is it possible to eat the way you’re suggesting and still keep my budget intact?” His unwavering answer was yes. So, I asked Vinny if he was up for a challenge: help me find practical, affordable ways to include more organic foods in our diet.
Since then, we’ve roughed out a plan for doing just that. Together, we’ll be looking for simple ways to eat well for less money and exploring which organic foods represent the best value. We’ll also be adapting and creating family-friendly recipes that are wholesome and affordable.
I'm looking forward to learning alongside Vinny and sharing this new knowledge with you in the weeks to come.
Mama Mia's Pizza Dough
1 pkg. yeast (or 2-1/4 teaspoons)
1 tsp. sugar
1 tsp. salt
1 c. warm water
2 tbsp. olive oil
2 1/2 c. flour
Disslove the yeast in the water. Then add remaining ingredients. Beat vigorously for 20 strokes (or use the dough hook attachment on a stand mixer). Let the dough rest for 5 minutes, covered.
Divide dough into two balls. Roll out onto corn meal-dusted cookie sheet or baking stone. Top with favorite ingredients. Bake at 450 degrees for 10-12 minutes, or until cheese is bubbly and just beginning to brown.
Friday, October 22, 2010
The best gifts are simple, caring or memorable
Why is it that gift giving, a social ritual intended to bring joy to those we care for most, often ends up causing so much discomfort? We fret about what to buy the person who has everything. We buy because we feel pressured or obligated to do so. We worry that the gifts we buy won’t be enough (or the right size). And we buy what we cannot afford.To understand a little bit more about these issues and to offer some practical advice on how to make the best use of a gift budget, I decided to turn the tables, so to speak. I canvassed my co-workers, friends, and family and asked them a simple question: Given the opportunity, what would you like the gift givers in your life to know about you?
As I collected their responses, a few themes began to emerge. The first of those themes centered around people explaining what they don’t want: a gift the giver cannot afford, no matter how beautiful or useful it might be. Along the same lines, others said they don’t want anything extraordinary or expensive; they’d prefer practical gifts they would rather not buy for themselves. “If I ask for socks or dishcloths,” said one friend, “it’s because I really want them.” (New socks, in fact, were another prevalent theme.)
This sentiment, of receiving practical, even consumable gifts, was echoed by others as well. “The gifts I appreciate the most are those I do not have to store or find some place to put,” declared one of my co-workers. Specifically, respondents mentioned receiving a quarter of beef every year, wood to build a small deck, and flower bulbs and seeds as gifts that continually remind them of the giver.
Still others explained the pleasure of receiving gifts that say, “I know you,” even if those gifts cost almost nothing. Surprisingly, my husband says the best gift I’ve ever given him was serving him biscuits and gravy, his favorite breakfast, in bed. Someone else told me that a birdhouse made from materials salvaged from her parents’ house is among the most treasured gifts she’s received. Another friend, who relishes the sheer pleasure of opening gifts, reflected on a time when someone gave her 40 small gifts to celebrate her 40th birthday. None of the gifts were expensive, but together, they made a big impression on her.
Gift recipients also cherish personal presents that illustrate how well gift-givers know them. A handmade shooting bench for the marksman, a photo album chronicling a family trip, or garden herbs for a cook’s countertop all fit the bill, according to those who shared their gift savvy with me.
Experience gifts, such as tickets to a dinner theater, a day at a water park, or a wine- tasting event, rated highly among respondents, too. These types of gifts have the advantages of being both consumable and personal. One of my own most memorable gifts was tickets to see musician Arturo Sandoval. I can still recall watching in amazement as the band’s drummer pounded the bongos so feverishly that I thought he might pass out.
Some liked surprises, when it comes to gifts, while others preferred more predictability. But above all, gift recipients said what they really want aren’t presents that are costly or complicated, but simple things that help them make lasting memories or that just say, “I care about you.”
Simple, caring, memorable. Keep these words in mind this holiday season. Thoughtfully investing your time and gift-giving budget in those you love will be a joy for you and those on your gift list.
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