Frugal Treasure Hunt
I've been posting some excerpts and summaries of a fun Grace Livingston Hill novel over on my regular blog.
For those who don't know, GLJ was a Christian 'romance' writer in the early 20th century- mostly from the twenties to the early forties. Her books are formula fiction, but it's a fun formula fiction (to me) because of the period flavor and because of GLH's particular formula. Her formula generally involves a young woman who must make her way alone in the world, figuring out ways to make ends meet under dire circumstances, and often this includes finding ways to cook delicious meals from scratch using odds and ends on hand, making do with a drinking cup made of folded paper, and innovative uses of a pile of newspaper.
Here's an example of the creative cooking- when an employer charges a GLH heroine with making a 'clear soup' for some dinner guests, and tells her she will have to figure out how to make it from what she can find in the icebox, young Joyce rummages through the icebox and pulls out some chicken bones, a small piece of boiled beef, a leftover lamb chop, a bowl of chicken gravy, a few lima beans, and a cup of mashed potatoes. She skims the grease from the gravy, cut the fat from the meat and put it all on to simmer. She finds a carrot or two and onion, which she dices and adds to the pot on the stove. Later she will add some diced celery and a couple of sprigs of parsley, simmer them briefly. Then she will skim the mixture and serve the nourishing broth to the guests.
When we were first married and incredibly poor, I am sure that my misspent college days when I read a batch of my room-mates Grace Livingston Hill books instead of studying as I should have been contributed toward some of my frugal adventures in the kitchen. We often had a cup of soup with our meal of beans, rice, and/or potatoes, and the soup would be made by saving the broth and liquid from any can of vegetables and from other cooking.
I have, for instance a recipe for spinach lasagna which calls for defrosting a package of frozen spinach, squeezing the liquid out. I always squeezed the liquid into a measuring cup and made a light 'cream' of spinach soup with the liquid and a white sauce, or a sauce for crepes.
For the dinner meal above, Joyce also makes a salad by scalding and skinning some tomatoes, setting them on ice to get firm, scooping out a small bit from the center, filling it with a bit of diced celery, nuts, and home-made mayonnaise, and setting this on a bed of lettuce.
For another meal, she stuffs the chilled tomatoes with chicken salad made from a few bits of leftover chicken in the ice-box, including the gizzard, her home-made mayonnaise, and a stalk of celery (saving the leaves for flavoring soup).
And then there's this:
Then she made a game of getting an interesting supper out of the odds and ends she had in her little tin box out the window, which she called her refrigerator. A stalk of celery, too tough to enjoy raw, nearly a cup of stewed tomatoes left over from yesterday, a lump of baked beans, the last of a can she had opened a week ago, a scrap of hamburg.
She put them all in her little tin saucepan, and watched over them carefully, till there came out a very tasty dish of soup- was it bean or beef? At any rate, it had a delicious flavor.
There was also a lettuce leaf, two leaves of spinach, one radish, and a half a tiny onion, besides the little white leaf top of the celery stalk. Minced fine they made a very attractive salad with the last cracker from the box and a tiny wedge of cheese. It was a good dinner and she really enjoyed it. And then as she nibbled at a single chocolate peppermint left over from some that had been passed around in the office that day, and now serving as desert, she got to thinking that she really ought to go out somewhere and get a brighter outlook on life.
Partners, by Grace Livingston Hill..
Make it a game. Probably thanks to my reading of those silly, frivolous books in my college days, from the beginning of our marriage, at a time when we were sorely lacking in any spare cash (I looked for change on the sidewalk in order to do a load of laundry) I have imagined the grocery store as one giant board game, and the object of the game on my part is to keep as much money as I can, or make the most of the funds I have, while the object of my opponents is to get me to spend more of my money with less to show for it.
When cooking, I made a game of using as much as I could as wisely as I could, using the last shred of celery leaf, or putting a bit of milk in a bottle of seemingly empty salad dressing and shaking it up to mix into a bit of mayo or into a drier than it should be chicken salad.
These, and other reasons I have posted on before, are why it simply is incomprehensible to me when people read frugal blog posts here or elsewhere and make criticisms about somehow missing out on something by frugal living. Where is this special joy and blessing in waste? In material things that have a lifespan far more limited than the pinch of debt?
In the biblical story in the gospel account of Luke, when Jesus miraculously took two fish and five small loaves of bread and turned them into enough food to feed five thousand people- even though he had created this bounty with a word and could do it again and all day long without cost- he instructed his disciples to 'gather the fragments.'
I love that story, and I find joy in gathering the fragments and putting together ways to bless my family and friends with them. I like that part of my life is a treasure hunt for those fragments.
How do you make frugal living a joy and a pleasure? And if you don't- maybe it's time to start, because joy begins and ends not with what we have, but with who we are and an attitude that recognizes that the best things in life don't put you in debt.=)
You can read other posts about GLH books with similar domestic details at my regular blog:
Here
here
here
here
here
and here
Also here
and here
Grace Livingston Hill Books from Amazon
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4 Responses to “Frugal Treasure Hunt”
July 30th, 2010 at 5:32 pm
Total agreement here. I take pride in my thriftiness and enjoy the challenges. We are happy to live well within our means. It’s a peaceful life.
On the other hand, our general thriftiness means we have the extra money to spend when it makes sense.
July 30th, 2010 at 10:55 pm
My mom read those books when I was a kid, and I did too. Loved them. What about Emily Loring? Did you read her? Similar genre and values…
This post is so true– frugality can be such a fun challenge, if you just set your mind to it!
Mary, mom to many
July 31st, 2010 at 7:37 am
I just love your definition of “gathering the fragments!” Cooking with a bit of this and a bit of that is so much fun! I often make a “gourmet lunch” with an apple peanutbuttered, and few leftovers from the fridge.
August 2nd, 2010 at 7:31 pm
I feel quite clever when I’m thrifty! I love being creative like that.
GLH is a bit saccharine for me, in general, but I do adore the thrifty, plucky heroines enough to read her
Some of this I learned from my dad, who would put a bit of water in the all-but-empty ketchup bottle, shake it, and get every last bit of ketchup out. He called the water “ketchup stretcher.”
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