Waffle

Before I forget: Grocery expenses on Saturday totaled €23 - more than in the past month but I decided to relax the standards a little. Which is just as well because I found out on Sunday that I'd lost 4 pounds in a week. The good news there is that I'm now back at the weight at which I ran the 4 Mijl van Groningen last year in time for this year's event. The bad news is that 4 pounds in 7 days, without any fresh changes to my diet (and indeed with less training than last week in order to recover from my latest running/walking adventure, is a scary amount of weight for me to lose in one week and may have had something to do with why I hadn't been feeling that great last week.

I didn't know that on Saturday but I let myself spend a bit more because on Friday, I had looked at my bank account and realised that I'd become a tenthousandaire for the first time in my life. my assets (cash only - nothing else I own is worth much of anything) exceeded ten thousand Euro. And me at only 38! Clearly I have a bright future ahead of me. Of course, on Saturday afternoon came a notice from the rebates division of the tax authority informing me that yes, now that I'd mentioned it, they do really want those rental subsidies paid out over the year 2009 back, and they want them within the month. That's a thousand Euro, putting my assets back into the four-figure category and making my membership of the upper crust very short-lived indeed. But at least, thanks in part to a month of enforced frugality, that repayment will be relatively painless.

Total groceries bill this week: € 15.60. A little over the self-imposed limit, but that's not too bad as I'd just sold € 50 worth of comics an hour before. None of my food and other grocery expenses this month and until I go to the US again in October will come out of my bank account. This is just as well as I paid nearly € 600 in bills this week, including the first of the tax rebates (healthcare subsidies over 2008) that I have to pay back. I'm expecting another bill for 2008's rent subsidies, and while I'd be happy if that could wait another month, I would like to have it in by early October so I can settle it before I leave. The way things are going, I should be able to tackle it without hitting the emergency fund.

Good habits (i.e. shopping the pantry, looking for cheaper options, keeping a mental running tally of expenses and quitting when it reaches 15) are keeping up. The self-imposed limit is temporary but the good habits should last a long time.

Total grocery bill at the supermarket: € 14.70.

Changes in behaviour: the third week into my scheme to keep the groceries budget ultra-low, I found myself keeping a running tally of the prices of the items I picked out in my head. Cool; I've never been able to do that. I also gave myself some extra exercise by getting down on my knees and picking the super-cheap items from the bottom shelves.
And I am betting better at making choices: I needed cheese, so I couldn't have chips or nuts. Snacking will consist entirely of fruit this week. I managed to make this choice even though I went to the supermarket slightly peckish. I also forewent organic veggies this week as I couldn't afford the premium on the ones I wanted. Still kinda miffed about the supermarket not stocking any kale yet - I'd have had to go to the farmer's market for that. I got andyves instead. Yum.

The budget experiment only applies to groceries, just like in 30 bucks a week. It does not apply to eating or drinking out, which I'll do a lot of this week. There's Sunday's contribute-two-Euros-and-eat-with-me group dinner at Sidsel's, a restaurant dinner at Mechoui on Tuesday (pricey for me but worth every penny) and today I'll be going for a 10 K run out of town as part of a relay team, which means I'll probably eat fast food and drink beer afterwards, sitting downwind of the other eaters. That together should wipe out the rest of the money I made selling my drawing board this week.

Speaking of which, I love having the extra space in my bedroom, and I love having the extra € 100 in my pocket, but I do kinda regret selling it. I hadn't used it in years (there was another drawing board in the last studio I was in, which I had already given away) but I did have a sentimental attachment to it. But sentimental attachments don't pay the bills and there was no way I was going to ship such a large unwieldy thing to the US, so it had to go, and at least it's going to a good home.

I spent €60 at the market this afternoon, plus €17 at my local organic butcher's, and €6 at the market yesterday during my lunch break (when there were different stalls including an organic bread stall that I didn't discover until after I'd bought bread. I'd have spent much more if my lunch break had been longer) . It's safe to say that my food budget has exploded this week.

I'm not going through an itemized list this time, but I do want to mention that some of these expenses were one-offs. The biggest extra expense was tortilla chips plus four kinds of dip to go with them; the plan is for me to reverse-engineer and then improve on the dip I like the best (which is probably going to be the chilli), so that's €8-10 that I'll only spend once. I also bought enough cheese to last for three weeks, plus fresh cilantro, which I usually do without.
I've located milk! But I didn't buy any as it was €1.30 for half a liter. Locally produced and organic, so probably very good, but the price was one I'd expect in a cafetaria, not in retail. I can technically afford to pay € 2.60 a liter for milk, but only if I still save money overall, which I'm not doing.

Going back to the original purposes of the experiment, I ended up buying a lot of things that weren't whole food staples but prepared foods: melba toast, the dips, chocolate nuts, the tortilla chips which by Michael Pollan's definition are edible, foodlike substances. So the experiment's purpose was defeated entirely and I might as well get those things from the supermarket again. On the plus side, shopping at the market is a lot more fun - you're outdoors, there are bargains to be had and new products to try, and the smells from some of those stalls is just divine. Goat cheese in particular taunts and tempts me whenever I pass it, as do Moritz's olives, sun-dried tomatos and feta.

Experiment over! It would have been fun and interesting to do this for a couple of months; describing your shopping in great detail is the sort of thing that's dull if you do it once, but becomes more interesting if you keep it up until patterns become visible. But the pattern that's showing up already is that I spend more and don't stick to the experiment's purpose, so to protect my wallet, I'm cutting it off here. I'll be splitting my purchases between the outdoors market and the supermarket like a sane person.

Well, my experiment in staying away from the supermarket ended quickly. As predicted, the need for durable baked goods (or rather the need to have breakfast and lunch after the middle of the week) was what pulled me back in. Worse, I was so strapped for time I had to use an Albert Heijn supermarket, and it turns out their assortiment of durable baked products sucks as hard as their bread. And now for the boring minutiae: I did end up buying:

Half a loaf of organic whole-grain bread - on the off chance that their organic bread might be more palatable than their regular bread.
1 kg muesli, Euroshopper brand, non-crunchy.
3 tins of tomatos for use in pasta
1/2 kg bag of fusilli pasta
1/2 kg bag of whole grain rice
1 liter of organic non-skim milk, because I fear not the fat.

Total expense: €7.50.

Yes, I'm picky about bread. I blame my parents who raised me on fresh, whole-grain bread that they sliced themselves into thick, rough slices. Actually, I wasn't that keen on that particular kind of bread because it tended to lose its flavour after being frozen. But because they cared about bread, I learned to. Bread has to be non-mushy, have plenty of roughage and should have a smell to make you more hungry.
As for the whole milk, I only recently switched back to it after two decades of drinking semi-skimmed. It's tastier and the vitamin A and D in milk are fat-soluble. Considering how much oil I use in cooking, the difference in fat percentage between non-skim and semi-skim is trivial. Fat is tasty.