Get Rich Slowly, Michael Phelps, Christopher Marlowe

A strange line-up: a fabulously successful blog (25,000 daily readers, over 75,000 subscribers), an Olympic medal winner in trouble over a bong, and a 16th century playwright, who was killed at age 29 after getting stabbed in the eye in a tavern brawl. What do these unlikely colleagues have in common? Each reveals something about goal setting.

Get Rich Slowly was, by the account of its blogger, J.D. Roth, an accidental success. He began the blog a few years ago to chart his progress out of credit card debt, fueled by careless spending and an addiction to comic book compilations. En route to his goal, he attracted scads of devotees, got out of debt, and was able to quit his job in a family-owned box factory to pursue his dream of full-time writing.

I’ve been busy and so haven’t kept up with his blog. I enjoyed the energy of it as he worked to achieve his goal. By chance, I read his blog yesterday. He lamented that though he was out of debt, had made a lot of money in 2008, and was a full-time writer, he wasn’t happy.

Roth reached his goal.

Then, I read a bit on Michael Phelps, whose success and recent troubles are too well-known to need repeating. But even before the tell-all photo and suspension and loss of endorsement, I was struck by how aimless Phelps looked in photos.

Phelps reached his goal.

And here is Doctor Faustus, of the play by Christopher Marlowe. He is in his study (an enclosed space, very important, given the themes of frustration and desire in the play) and surveys his accomplishments. First, he thinks about philosophy and then medicine:

Is, to dispute well, logic's chiefest end?
Affords this art no greater miracle?
Then read no more, thou hast attained the end;

The end of physic is our body's health.
Why Faustus, hast thou not attained that end?
Is not thy common talk found aphorisms?

He then goes on to survey law and divinity and realizes that he has reached the limits of those pursuits.

Faustus reached his goal, or “end.”

And so…he sells his soul to the devil, with very bad results. The repeated word here is “end.” Once you reach your goal…well, all the energy disappears. You need a new goal. I remember my teacher said of Doctor Faustus that, like many plays of the 1580s, its underlying message was “I can’t get no satisfaction.” That got a big laugh in the 1970s, but only gets a little laugh now.

By this definition, I suppose I should be pleased with the decimation of my retirement accounts, since I now have to work harder to achieve my goal. (Just kidding folks!). Children provide a goal. My children have not reached the age of independence yet. When they do, it will be time for more goal-setting on my part and it is an anxiety-provoking prospect.

To chart Roth’s progress with his goals old and new, check out his blog, if you’re not already among his many readers: http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2009/02/06/what-next-the-third-stage-of-personal-finance/

For Phelps, well, I think we should leave him alone for a while.

For Doctor Faustus, drag out that old Norton Anthology of English Literature or read on-line here: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=1999.03.0010&layout.norm=compare

And so, dear readers, did reaching a goal cause both happiness and panic? What’s your goal now? Do you have a next goal lined up? Do share.

Frugal College Cooking: Locavores and Leftovers

Here is another post by Frugal Son. He aspires to live "la vida local," but this desire is hampered by the fact that he lives on a college campus and eats--mostly--in an excellent cafeteria.

His board card provides cafeteria meals plus $300.00 in Tiger Bucks, which most students use at the coffee shop or Taco Bell or other on-campus fast food joints. Frugal Son, whose curiosity about food is well-known on this blog, discovered the campus Dairy Store, which sells meat products from the Ag School. He also discovered that he could use his Tiger Bucks there!

Here is his post on beef stew. Like his salmon tale, this will be in two parts. Bon appetit.


In my last post, I tried to show how frugal, simple and satisfying a home-cooked meal can be. The real magic of frugal cooking, however, comes from using leftovers. Leftovers may not have the best reputation, but try not to think of them as something cold and slimy in the back of the fridge and instead think of them as building blocks. A wilted stalk of celery can come back to life when used to enhance a soup or—in one of my favorite uses of leftovers—the excess turkey from Thanksgiving becomes the backbone of a delicious gumbo. What I love about leftovers is the idea that you are sort of making something from nothing; what were once a useless scraps become, with the addition of a few more ingredients and a little time, something more than the sum of its parts.

Cooking with leftovers is not a technique that I have mastered, although Frugal Mom is a real leftover maven. It takes real creativity and even artistry to look at a bunch of seemingly unrelated raw ingredients and see a meal, and leftover cooking is made especially difficult in college where pantry and refrigerator space are extremely limited. I don't have the luxury of buying five pounds of chicken breasts when they go on sale and saving them for when I need to use them. Recently, however, I had a sort of leftover epiphany in what was probably my first real, unaided foray into cooking with leftovers.

After the initial success of my salmon and fried rice meal (see post here), I was stuck with some vegetables that would go bad if I didn't use them soon, and there are few things I hate more than finding a shriveled and mold-covered vegetable wedged into some forgotten corner of the fridge. I had several bunches of scallions, most of an onion, a bell pepper, and half a pound of carrots left over from the feast a few days ago. Using these vegetables as a foundation, I decided to make a beef stew using meat from the LSU Dairy Store.

LSU has a fairly large agricultural science program that raises cows, pigs, goats, and sheep near campus. The main product of the agricultural science program is ice cream made from the cows’ milk. In addition, students of the meat science department butcher the animals and the meat is sold to the public, at very reasonable prices, through the Dairy Store. Ever since I found out that the on-campus Dairy Store sold meat, I have been longing to try out some of their products. The meat is very appealing to me because all of the animals are local: they live and die within three miles of campus and I never have to drive to the grocery store to buy meat because I can simply walk to the Dairy Store from my dorm. The animals are allowed to roam free and graze during their life, and because it is a small-scale farming operation, the animals are probably treated more humanely during slaughter. Another plus is that I can buy the meat with my meal plan (which is free courtesy of my scholarship) so I have $300 per semester to spend on Dairy Store products.

When I went to buy the meat for my beef stew, the Dairy Store had a fairly good selection of meats, including some cuts that don't normally appear on the shelf at grocery stores—lamb necks for $1.30 / lbs and goat meat for $2.50 / lbs—and normally expensive cuts for very reasonable prices—leg of lamb for $4 / lbs and oxtails for $1.30 / lbs. I grew up in a household that consumed very little meat, and as a result I know next to nothing about the different cuts of meat. The choice of beef was overwhelming and I had no idea what was a good stew meat. Did I want gravy steak, cube steak, chuck roast, or sirloin? Fortunately, there was also meat labeled simply "stew meat" for $2.20 per pound, so I bought a little over two pounds of meat. I will admit I was a bit embarrassed when I brought the meat to the counter since most Dairy Store customers only get the ice cream, but the cashier didn't even bat an eye.

To be continued . . .

Finance in the News for February 5, 2009

So while I was worrying about the ethics of my free lunch courtesy of textbook publishers, the New York Times was getting ready to post its story on the new paradigm shift in executive perks.
Read the article here.
Here is the juicy first paragraph:

Country club dues, gym memberships and personal assistants. Home security systems, chauffeur service and parking. And, of course, all those private jets to ensure the comfort and safety of the boss.

ERGGGG. I need a personal assistant. And I don’t even use the gym at the school where I work, because faculty and staff must pay a hefty fee, almost equal to the cost of local gyms.

And another juicy tidbit here.


[Note: when I click on the links they don't work; so you may have to copy/paste. Help!
Edit: Links should be working now.]

There may well be a slippage in the appeal of Wall Street careers as the pay differential with other professions declines. Over the years, for example, there was a big increase in the percentage of graduates of Harvard who went into finance. Two Harvard economists, Lawrence F. Katz and Claudia Goldin, studied the career choices of undergraduates since the 1960s, finding that the share entering banking and finance rose from less than 4 percent to 23 percent or so in recent years.

Surveying graduates from the 1960s through the 1990s, they found that Harvard graduates who chose careers in finance made three times the pay of their peers, adjusting for grade-point averages and test scores.

“We see a huge shift into finance over the years, and Harvard students clearly respond to economic incentives,” Mr. Katz said. “I certainly don’t think it was a pure love of finance that drove people into the field.”

When I reported the gist of this to Mr. Dr. Frugal Scholar, who was sitting in a comfy chair reading Thoreau for a course, he said, “Oh, I guess maybe people go to Harvard out of career ambition rather than out of intellectual interests.”

Do you agree with that?

And what do you think, dear readers, about all the finance in the news? Should we just tune out? Or go “Ergghhh.”

And, really, we're so lucky to be able to sit in comfy chairs and read wonderful books as part of our job.

Teenagers and Money, Frugal This, Frugal That

Many of the bloggers I read have a sense of impending doom, as they wait to hear about the future of their employment. Given the economic situation, I sometimes feel that my frugal thoughts are awfully trivial. Here are a few of them.

Teenagers and Money: This is a topic that recurs. How does one teach teenagers about money? In truth, we teach them by our actions.

Example: my daughter's friend Sadie, whose parents lost their house two summers ago. They had been living in a small house in the country for 15 years. According to them, they got a notice saying they had to be out at the end of the month. So they left, and moved into a trailer on the farm of their employer. Only a few months later did I realize that these were probably the first people I knew (albeit tangentially) who had lost their house because of a sub-prime loan.

Sadie is a senior in high school. She works in a salon doing shampoos a few days a week. She takes home around $150 a week! Bossy me (an occupational hazard), I asked if she had a savings account. No. I asked if she saved any money. No. She explained that she had "expenses," which turned out to be pet food, meals out, and clothing (she has no car and lives with her parents). I launched into a lecture (an occupational hazard) about the importance of saving.

Next time I saw her, I repeated my questions (an occupational hazard). She said that while she still did not have a savings account, she keeps $80.00 in her room at all times for an emergency. This teen runs through $7000.00 plus a year! She's been working for two years and has $80.00.

Then I realized that her parents probably had out-earned Mr. DFS and me. We were in school till we were 30. We became teachers, not the most lucrative profession. These people did not go to college and began working at 18, buying a house then and starting a family.

Am I being too judgmental? Should I continue to ask questions and make suggestions?

Frugal This, Frugal That: Today, Mr. DFS and I, along with the rest of our department, had a free food opportunity, a catered lunch provided by a textbook publisher. We have 2 or 3 of these every couple of years. I'm not sure of the ethics here, but the food was delicious! We had seafood chowder and a waldorf salad (chicken, apples, and pecans), followed by king cake. If you're not from Louisiana, you probably don't know about this cake. It is cake topped in Mardi Gras colors--purple, green, and gold--and contains a tiny plastic baby. If you get the baby in your piece, you have to buy the next cake.

While I was eating, I was musing on the ethics of all this. Then I read about the perks gotten by various political figures recently. I suppose that they would scoff at my little lunch. Any thoughts, dear readers?

Frugal Dilemma: Our Frugal Daughter, though she does not supply posts as our Frugal Son does, is never far from our thoughts. She is up for two college scholarships. The competitions are on THE SAME WEEKEND and cannot be re-scheduled.
Choice 1: A big school in another state offers the chance to be one of 40 fellows, who are mentored and groomed by faculty. $1000 over whatever other scholarships you get. 50 students are invited to compete.
Choice 2: A private college offers FREE TUITION, ROOM and BOARD to 3 or 4 students. About 80 students are invited to compete. Frugal Daughter has already been given a scholarship almost equal to tuition.

School 1 offers an almost sure chance of a lesser benefit; school 2 offers an enormous benefit, but almost no chance.

At first she was drawn to the smaller school, mostly because of the wonderful recruiter. But now a good friend who goes there is saying the school is TOOOOO small and she wants to transfer. So Frugal Daughter is conflicted.

Aren't we lucky to have these trivial problems in these difficult times? Even so, dear readers, we welcome your counsel. Any thoughts on any of these?

Frugal College Cooking: Practice

(Continuation of yesterday's post by Frugal Son)

I began by arranging all of the ingredients and cookware around me (my mise en place) and I soon ran into my first snag. None of the pots was large enough to contain the quantity (three cups) of rice I needed to cook and there was no saucepan or skillet large enough to fry the rice and vegetables together. Undeterred, I split the rice-making duties between two smaller pots. Interestingly, even cooking the rice was enough to elicit fascinated stares from my friends who had never cooked rice from scratch! With the rice cooking away, I cut up the vegetables (two bell peppers, four carrots, four bunches of scallions, half an onion, a tiny bit of fresh ginger, and paper thin slices of lemon for the fish) on a minuscule cutting board using my three-inch pocketknife, the only knife available.

There is something really beautiful about a pile of freshly chopped vegetables: the red of the bell peppers, the creamy yellow onions, the burst of orange from the carrots, and the subdued green scallions all neatly delineated in their tidy piles. Even the smell of fresh vegetables—sharp onion scent, earthy ginger and faintly sweet carrot scent blend in the kitchen air—is satisfying and transforms the dingy kitchen, garishly lit by fluorescent lights, into a sort of alchemist’s laboratory where the most mundane ingredients come together to form something wonderful.
As the rice cooked, I threw the vegetables onto a skillet with some canola oil to stir-fry them. By the time the rice was done, the onions were translucent and lightly browned and even the carrots had softened up. I transferred the vegetables to a large mixing bowl so I could begin to fry up the rice (remember, there was no cookware big enough for rice and vegetables at the same time). I added a bit more canola oil to the skillet before scooping in half of the rice. I stirred it around occasionally to make sure the rice fried evenly and after about four minutes, I cracked two eggs into the rice and stirred it around until little wisps of cooked egg white and yolk were evenly distributed throughout the rice. Once this batch of rice was done I transferred it to the large mixing bowl with the vegetables and started on the second batch. The second batch followed the same plan, although this time I only added one egg.


With the fried rice finished (all I needed to do was mix up all the veggies and serve it), I turned my attention to the salmon, which was sitting patiently on the counter fully defrosted in its vacuum-sealed package. Daniel, my former roommate, wanted to bake the salmon, which is not a fish cooking technique I have experience with—so we preheated the oven to 350 and cleaned off a baking pan. We rubbed each piece of salmon with a bit of olive oil and under each filet we put a few of the thin slices of lemon. Before putting the pan in the oven I sprinkled a tiny bit of salt over each piece. With the fish cooking and out of the way, I turned my attention to the last piece of the meal, the sauce.

The sauce is actually incredibly simple, consisting of only four ingredients: butter, canola oil, lemon, and capers. I first melted about three tablespoons of butter (although in hindsight I realize I only needed about one and a half tablespoons) with a little canola oil to raise the smoking point. Once the butter had foamed and subsided, I turned off the heat, added the capers, and squeezed a bit of lemon juice into the pan. A very spiffy and professional looking sauce done in less than five minutes! The sauce was finished a minute or two before the fish was done so I took the extra time to put all of the plates in the oven to warm them, a sort of homage to my grandfather, who always likes to serve meals on warmed plates.
The salmon was perfectly cooked after just five minutes (the filets had been thoroughly defrosted in a bowl of lukewarm water) so I removed it from the oven and began to plate everything. I stirred up the rice with the vegetables and spooned a generous heaping portion of rice onto one side of the plate while a tender pink salmon fillet graced the other side. The heated plates were fantastic and kept everyone’s food at the right temperature until all the plates were on the table and we began to eat. Before everyone began to eat, I went around to each plate and spooned some of the sauce on top of their fish.


It was a truly magnificent meal and, given the state of the kitchen and my limited equipment, I was ecstatic that everything had turned out so well. The fish was moist and flavorful and the sauce, a combination of the sharp tastes of lemon and capers with the rich subtleties of butter, was the perfect complement. The surprise hit of the night, however, was the fried rice. I am convinced that people in general, and college students particularly, are deprived of the simple pleasures of fresh vegetables that aren’t smothered by other powerful flavors. The simplicity of the rice and vegetables, accentuated with a dash of soy sauce, was irresistible and the four of us managed to finish almost all of the rice. So, dear readers, you have now seen that even a college student using an underpowered electric stove, minimal ingredients, and cheap cookware can make a meal fit for a true gourmet. Go cook! What have you cooked recently?


The breakdown:
1lbs Salmon, vacuum sealed, frozen: $4.88
3c Rice: $1
½ pound carrots: $0.50
2 Bell Peppers: 1.64
½ Onion: $1
3 tbs. Butter: $0.50
Lemon: From garden ($1 in store)
Scallions: $1
Capers (used about 1/16 of jar that cost $3.88) $1
Soy Sauce (can be reused): 0.50
Canola Oil (can be reused) $0.25
3 Eggs: $0.50
Total: $15.14 including tax or $3.79 / person

At restaurant: 17.95 + 10% tax + 15% tip = $22.44 / person or $89.76!
Save $74.62!

Frugal College Cooking: Theory

This post is courtesy of my dear Frugal Son.


Few people are nostalgic for their college eating experiences. College is a time of tight budgeting, and neither money nor time is available to spend on cooking. For most people, college food memories probably conjure up images of a mystery meat concoction from the cafeteria, greasy fast food, ramen, microwaveable entrees, or other unsavory morsels. Nothing very appetizing or nourishing to be certain. Except for the lucky few who are in the know, the vast majority of college students—and people in general—are under the impression that to eat well requires a lot of money and / or a lot of time or that “restaurant quality” food is out of reach of the average cook. While in some cases cooking is a time-consuming process—there is just no way to speed up the process of making a demi-glace—practical cooking can be cheaper, easier, and more satisfying than buying pre-packaged convenience food or going to a restaurant.

My most recent cooking experience is a good example of the kind of cooking that can be done in an EXTREMELY limited kitchen by a person with limited skills on a limited budget, but without skimping on taste or perceived fanciness. My meal for the night—salmon baked on thin slices of lemon garnished with a butter and caper sauce and a stir-fried rice with vegetables on the side—would seem to be more at home on the menu of a fancy eatery than in a simple apartment kitchen. How much do you think this meal cost me to make? At P.F. Chang’s, where I ate recently for a friend’s birthday, a similar menu option (Salmon Steamed with Ginger and served with a side of White Rice) came to $17.95 before tax and tip; for four people to eat this dish at a restaurant would easily cost $70 and take up at least a two-hour chunk of the evening. While a $15 or even $20 per person meal might be nice every now and then, it is definitely not something that is sustainable on a college budget or really any budget; eating a $15 meal three times a week for a year comes to $2,340, which is money I would much rather spend on a plane ticket to Korea or some other foreign locale!

In addition to the gustatory, nutritional, and financial benefits of cooking for yourself, a little known side-effect is a markedly improved social life. Casually mention that you love to cook but need a kitchen and suddenly you will have three times as many friends as you thought you had. Also, if you cook seemingly complex or fancy foods, you will soon gain a reputation as some sort of cooking genius. I must admit that part of the reason I love to cook for friends is the ego-stoking I get from them and I was beaming at the praise I received for this meal.

As Dr. Frugal Scholar says, frugality is not about depriving oneself of things but rather it is about getting more from less, and home cooking is one of the most rewarding frugal tasks I know of. For the cost of a single person’s meal at a restaurant I can cook the aforementioned meal for myself and three other people and I can do it in about the same amount of time that it would take to go to a restaurant. I can see the skeptical looks on your faces, dear readers, but fear not; in my next post I’ll show you how to cook a meal that leaves your belly (and your friends’ bellies) satisfied and your wallet intact.

Frugal Cooking: Deborah Madison's Lentil Minestrone

My mention of Marcella Hazan’s cabbage soup caused a minor sensation. Like many people, I always think everyone knows what I know. So I assume that everyone knows about Marcella Hazan’s wonderful cookbooks and that everyone has read them cover to cover as I have.

Another wonderful cookbook author is Deborah Madison. Like Marcella, she puts out cookbooks in which everything is tested. Sadly, this is not always the case. There is nothing more annoying to the frugal heart than wasting precious time, money, and ingredients on something that doesn’t work. If I were to buy one Marcella book, it would be Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. If I were to buy one by Deborah Madison, it would be the famous Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. This is a pricy tome, but worth it, whether you get a deal on it or buy it full-price from your local bookshop. I received my copy from my dear in-laws in 1998.

The only problem with Madison’s book is that, perhaps because it is huge (over 700 pages), and because many of her categories overlap, it is difficult to use. The index is terrible (perhaps this was fixed in the new edition that came out recently). I have made a couple of things that I could not find again. Now I write the page numbers of things I want to find again on the title page of the book.

On Sundays, my thoughts turn to dinner for the next week. Breakfast is easy, since we discovered steel-cut oat groats. Lunch is easy because we have peanut butter sandwiches at work most days. I dislike frantic cooking when I get home from work, so I like to make soups. Since I work from home on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I generally cook on those days plus Sunday. Luckily, we love leftovers.

I have a stuffed pantry and freezer, so one of my goals is to “eat from the pantry” for a while. Today, out of love for Mr. DFS, I will be making Madison’s lentil minestrone, which is a favorite soup both of the cookbook author and of Mr. DFS.

Ingredients (with some variations, based on my habits; I am leaving out the aromatics)
2 TBS olive oil
2 cups finely chopped onion
2 TBS tomato paste (I use canned tomato or even a bit of ketchup!)
4 garlic cloves, chopped
3 carrots, chopped
1 cup chopped celery

Saute all these.

Then add 1 cup washed lentils (I use brown), 9 cups water. Cover and simmer till lentils are done (30-45 minutes).

Then add: mushroom soy sauce to taste (I use regular), 1 bunch greens, 2 cups cooked pasta. Salt and pepper to taste.

Top with parmesan.

Frugal people! Don’t run to the store! If you don’t have tomato paste, use regular canned tomato. If you don’t have lentils, use another bean (but lentils and split peas cook in 1/3 the time). If you don’t have pasta, use rice or even croutons or pieces of toast. If you don’t have greens (I have a garden), use a box of frozen spinach. If you don’t have parmesan, use any old cheese.

YumYum. Frugal, easy, and flexible.