If you remember, here at the Choko Tree we were going to get by on the contents of our pantry and garden, and avoid going out and spending unnecessary cash, we were going to do this for the entire month of July and christened it: No-Buy July (NBJ). If you want to know how it went, read on!
INITIAL THOUGHTS
The first few days of NBJ felt strangely like a final exam. Sort of like just having finished a class where you have been taught a whole stack of techniques and then have to put them all together for a final exam. Probably because we had been doing a lot of these thing on and off for years but not necessarily all at once. Anyway, that’s what the first few day were like, until we settled into a routine and then it just became “how we do things around here” or in other words – business as usual.
In terms of what we set out to do as mentioned in the previous article, ie –
- Reduce unnecessary consumption and with it, waste
- Save money
- Make best use of existing resources by learning new ways of looking at things and learning new skills, and
- Have fun
It was a resounding success on all fronts! Here is some detail on how things went –
FOOD
Breakfast – I usually have muesli and Linda usually has porridge in winter, and we had sufficient of both of those in our stores to continue on as we usually do for the month, but during this time I did think about my muesli. I am going to buy in a larger supply (5kg or so) of organic rolled oats then design up a “muesli concentrate” which can be mixed with the oats to make……….muesli! Research is ongoing, more on this in a later article.
Lunch – typically I/we like a cheese and salad sandwich or wrap for lunch. Anyway, this is simple in summer but to provide fodder for a salad based lunch is a bit more difficult at this time of year (winter!). We have some cheese in the fridge but would need to buy in salad fixings. That was until I came up with the idea of teaming up some of our bottled diced tomatoes which were already in the pantry with pickled beetroot (also a pantry staple), lettuce from the garden and then a boiled egg or two (from our own chooks). This made a nice salad sandwich or wrap, depending on what bread was available.
Ah, yes! Bread. We had made quite a bit of bread in the solar oven over the years, but at this time of year I can make it in the oven attached to the slow combustion wood heater. I have gotten a bit lazy and it is easier to buy a loaf of stone ground wholemeal, which comes in a recyclable/compostable paper bag than to bake our own. But this is NBJ! So I needed to get back into baking. We use a fairly simple bread recipe but it takes a number of hours for rising and such and I need to be organised to do it so we have bread when we need it, so what to do if time was short?
The answer? Make unleavened tortillas! I can throw them together in less than an hour (and most of that is waiting time) and they make a great wrap, as well as bean burrito or whatever else. I just needed to take a bit of a mind shift to realise that tortillas also make a great lunch as well as dinner. That was a winner!
Dinner – For the most part this didn’t change much and we still made stuff which is mostly vegetarian (Check out some recipes here) but we also tried some new stuff, like making spinach and ricotta dishes based on our own home made ricotta and likewise vegetarian Indian dishes based on our home made paneer.
The dishes we normally made that have sour cream (I lurve sour cream!!) in them could have been a problem, but we have been converting over to Greek style yoghurt instead and have started making our own based on powdered skim milk and using commercial pot set yoghurt as a starter. (which you buy once).
We have also been making our own desserty type stuff like choc chip biscuits, impossible pie, apple pie, which we restrict to Friday nights…………………and possibly Saturday nights as well.
Friday night dinner has been, since time immemorial, special and we usually get takeaway. This is more often than not a hamburger/steak sandwich/chips/fish cocktails or whatever from our really nice, privately owned (ie not chain or corporate) local hamburger shop. When we originally talked about NBJ I was in favour of laying in a stock of the bits and pieces to make such treats and do that at home, however, my sweetie pointed out that there was little point in buying in all the stuff just so we could make it at home. So I caved and we used some of our discretionary fund (to the tune of about $16) to pay for dinner on Friday nights. We also used to buy in dessert for Friday nights but as mentioned above, we now produce this ourselves.
DISCRETIONARY CASH
Well, to me the above bit is a great segue into how (or if) we used our weekly $50 allowance. Taking into account the four full weeks in July and how much we allowed per week, that gave us $200 to cover off any stuff we needed but could not produce during NBJ.
How much did we spend? All up of the $200 allotted we spent $106.45.
This mainly went on Friday night dinner, stuff we couldn’t produce but needed for a certain dish such as mushrooms and a small tub of pot set yoghurt to kick ours off. Linda was taken to a farmer’s market by the kids and picked up a couple of small bits and pieces and then there was coffee, which requires an entry on its own!
Coffee
I don’t smoke, drink or gamble, but over the years I have come to look forward to a cappuccino at our local shops after breakfast and Don (our local barista) makes a good one. However I found over the years that a small drain on funds can cost a bit when you add it up and I would get my cappuccino (in a keep cup by the way) on average six times a week.
Unfortunately, when I did the math this worked out to somewhat over $1300 a year. (say what?) To be fair I had resisted some efforts to get me to reduce my consumption previously but NBJ meant that I had to get serious and so I cut my store bought coffees down to 1 per week (to be consumed with the other members of Grumpy Club). This in itself would save us over $1000 per year. So on the other days I would have a home coffee, using jars of coffee we had accumulated and which Linda could no longer drink. This meant that the coffee I was consuming had already been bought and which would have gone stale over time and had to be thrown out if they were not used, so it was essentially free. After doing this for a month, I have found it is possible to habituate myself to this coffee and still enjoy it.
PETROL
To make things interesting I decided to allow one tank of petrol for the whole of NBJ. A tank will usually last us from one to two weeks and I was hoping to push it to a month. Unfortunately, that was not to be, not because we went out all over the place and ignored the whole NBJ thing, but because neighbours and family required being ferried around all over the place. While I wanted to see if we could make it or not, unusual circumstances cropped up and I needed to do the driving because assisting neighbours and family comes before arbitrary limits set up as an experiment. In the event we made it to half way through the third week before I needed to refill the tank.
Going Out
As luck would have it, for most of NBJ we spent at home with the odd outing to visit family or attend required meetings such as the permaculture Sydney west general and committee meetings and our own sustainability group. We did intend to go on an outing one day but for various reasons it did not happen. Planning it did make me more aware that a greater percentage of our going out involves a “retail experience” at some point in the outing and the opportunities for doing free stuff in our area are not that great.
WHERE TO FROM HERE?
In the words of my brother, Jim, now we move into “spend like a drunken sailor August”.
A couple of days after the end of NBJ we sat down and had a look at what we did, how it all went, and then talked over where we were headed next. Surprisingly, we liked most of the experience of NBJ, and the challenges of making do with what we have on hand. Another amazing thing was that all of the experiments we tried with making new foods from scratch or using exiting supplies in new ways turned out well. They were edible and tasty to the point where we are going to keep doing most of them.
Saving the cash did not hurt either.
We have decided to continue doing most of what we started, but with the odd coffee, meal and trip out thrown in. Next year we might even give No-Buy July another go, but take it to the next level (whatever that means!)
