January 5, 2010

As I started to see the fruits of my Five Dollar Days labor, otherwise known as a sagging refrigerator inventory, I began to contemplate where we came from, what is left, and how long it will last (and how can I get around the rules). That is what moving into week two is all about.

Lots of our friends and neighbors are privy to our January practice, so they think ahead when gifting for Christmas. Our neighbors brought us a few of their home made morsels – meyer lemon jam, a strudel – And a box of clementines. You may think, “Cute!”, while we think, “Two weeks of produce!”. Some friends and siblings brought or sent us wine, and Jeff’s parents gave us the fruit of the month club. It takes several years for others to catch on to our habit and remember that December does have some planning involved. I do have one warning about planning for the Five Dollar Days of January: don’t stockpile. It defeats the purpose. You are not fooling anyone, especially your checking account, if you drop $300 at Sam’s Club or fill your freezer with sides of pork during December just so you have a leg up on January. That is to say, if you happen to support a family that lives on a $300 a week food budget, December is the time to contemplate how much of that food you really need. Can you do without some of the sugary snacks and slow carbohydrates? Can you cut back on the bread and start using up all that flour to bake your own? Can you clean out all of those canned goods and older spices in lieu of buying more?

After years of Five Dollar Januaries, we have learned to stockpile wisely. Again, we re-learn how to be like our grandparents. From our garden we have prepared the following for January consumption:

• 20 pear rhubarb pies, which we have frozen (Most of those ended up being holiday gifts for colleagues and neighbors)
• 20 jars of pear ginger jam (As you can tell, we have a prolific pear tree. Too bad our 90 lb weimaraner likes to munch on the fallen pears on our white carpet all autumn long.)
• 12 jars of pickled green tomatoes
• 2 bags of pre chopped butternut squash
• 1 container of marinara sauce
• 5 containers or pesto

As you can see, we garden. There were years when we did not. We were busy. We worked multiple jobs. We were too tired or needed more fun time. However, we returned to the earth after moving to Austin and have not looked back. I encourage anyone who plans to take on this challenge to do so, and you will have some extended fruits to use. City slickers and condo dwellers certainly would find it difficult to rise to this challenge, but I do have an alternative. Although you want to avoid stockpiling, you can keep your eye out for auspicious sales as the fall unfolds. Grand openings and closings are great resources for big specials. When Sprouts, a farmers’ market grocer, opened in our neighborhood, they ran a special on ears of corn for a dime. Each family was allowed 30 ears. So, I marched myself down there and picked up my 30, shucked them, ate four that week, and promptly froze the rest for January use. Deep discounts like these I would not considered as stockpiling, just wise planning. We did the same with paper towels and turkey breasts in November (The day after Thanksgiving is a great time to buy a frozen turkey!), and onions in December. If I were really shrewd, I would have returned to Sprouts the next day and bought 30 more, made chowder for the freezer, and planned even better, but that did not happen.

As week two approached, I figured out a manageable food game plan to consume the perishables in the right order. Eat up the vegetables while they still have nutritional value or make stock from them. Consider recipes that use clementines. Drink the milk before the beer. Control portion size. Reorganize the spice cabinet and find recipes that call for cumin, cream of tartar, and marjoram because some time during the previous year we ended up with two containers of each.