Cheap Trick

I’m about to have made four meals out of one chicken.

First there was the brined and roasted chicken, then leftovers from said chicken, then a chicken casserole, and then chicken soup. 

This makes me feel like we should be dressed in holey turtlenecks and singing “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” while we forage around in the root cellar looking for the best rutabaga. Those were heroic days and heroic people, though, and I don’t mean to mock them. 

I know thrift. It’s a place I visit pretty often but I don’t want to live there all the time. 

Still, I think the skills of thrift are valuable and I’m glad I have them. Making food last would be an obvious one, less obvious is the well-developed skill of foregoing, not buying something even though I can, because it is too expensive or I don’t really need it. What I have found is that the wanting is often so slim and transitory that I barely feel deprived.

I frequently used the response that “we can’t afford it” when one of my kids asked for something even though we almost always could. I just wanted them to have that in their heads, that question, ‘can I afford that?’ I don’t know if it worked, I try not to talk about money with my kids, they work hard, what they do with their money is their business. As mine is mine.

Years ago, I teased a friend about how his mother, who was quite well-off, would turn an old dish soap bottle upside down so it could drip its last drops into a new bottle. “Your mother’s rich, why would she do that?” “How do you think she got rich?” was the reply.

Of course, as off-hand comments often do, this made me think – about dish soap, maple syrup, ketchup, and a million other opportunities for impatience and carelessness because ultimately wasting food and things is about those two things – impatience and carelessness. And indulgence, which is something I prize but not about ketchup. I’d always rather have a new bottle of ketchup than the dregs of an old one. But I turn it upside down and let it drip. Or, more honestly, my husband does. He is the thrifty coach in our lives.

The casserole and the soup make me feel like I could get through tough times (well, I have gotten through tough times but not for a long while), that I haven’t strayed so far from my roots of potato soup and boiled beef heart, and that I could slap on the flannel shirt and soldier through catastrophe with the best of them. And I like that. Even if it is ridiculous. I will need more than a chicken to survive the Apocalypse.