The Gasto: The First Week

Emma's cooking on Wednesday went much better, although she did not cook what she had planned. I had picked up my chicken co-op order and had taken over a sizable part of the kitchen as I separated five-pound poly bags of chicken into smaller portions and placed them into labeled freezer bags. So Emma decided to make a quick and simple meal using the already-defrosted chicken tenders. She sauteed them and served them in a salad with cheese and the last of our store-bought tortillas, which she tore into bite-sized pieces and mixed with the other ingredients. She had supper on the table at 6 p.m., a big improvement over the night before. Her dad was grateful and let her know it. Even Nathaniel complimented her, saying, "Flavor flows from this chicken!" Fiona was grateful as well. Emma did not forget to take her back to the pasture after the evening milking.

This simpler meal gave Emma time to make ice cream for dessert and to bake biscuits to have ready for the following morning, when she wrapped them in foil and re-heated them in the oven while she cooked scrambled eggs with diced ham.

Receiving my chicken order, which comes every other month, caused me to pause and reflect on how this would affect Emma and the gasto. I haven't bought chicken from the grocery store in years because of the disgusting way the chickens are raised and processed. Likewise, I have avoided grocery store beef by buying the best alternatives I could find. For the last year or maybe more, I've been lucky enough to buy grassfed beef from the Sisks, a homeschool family we know. I have it custom cut and pick it up at the slaughterhouse, which is less than five miles from where the beef was raised and about 45 minutes from our house. I'm ready to order again, but I think the beeves won't be ready until next month.

I dislike depriving Emma of the shopping experience for poultry and beef, but I dislike the alternative more. So I guess I will just give her a price list and let her shop from our freezer. Another thing I need to think about is roosters. Emma has about 40 chicks in the brooder, and they are healthy and growing fast. (Sir Roosterlot is an awesome breeder!) Probably half of those chicks will be roosters, and Emma and her dad will butcher them for the freezer. I don't make her take money out of her gasto for using our milk and eggs, because she is the one who takes care of the cow and chickens, so I won't make her take money out of her gasto for roosters that she raised and butchered herself. In fact, I should probably credit her gasto for these items--another thing I need to figure out.

Though Emma was not scheduled to cook Thursday, she did anyway. She told me that she is happier now that she has more to do.

She spent the afternoon practicing making corn tortillas. We ate them just about as fast as she made them, spreading them with butter and sprinkling them with cinnamon sugar or salt.

The first try, Emma's dough was too dry, and she had to press really hard to get them to flatten. I had invited the Ladners over to pick mulberries and blackberries. We ended up in the kitchen first, and it's a good thing. Mrs. Ladner is Mexican and is well-versed in the nuances of tortilla making. She told Emma to add enough water to make the dough a peanut butter consistency.

Before adding more water, Emma had to push down with all her might.

Mrs. Ladner told Emma to hang the tortillas on the side of the bowl until the whole batch is pressed and ready to cook.

My dad bought me this griddle at Ace Hardware when I was a child. I wanted it for cooking pancakes over a fire in the woods adjoining our house.

Thomas was the official taste-tester. This proved very helpful, because he alerted Emma to when she had cooked the tortillas too long, which she couldn't tell at first by the way that they looked.

Emma didn't get to cook Friday's meals because she went to San Antonio for the pilgrimage to the mission churches. So the first week of the gasto had lots of things that didn't go according to plan, but we adapted. This is pretty much the way our life goes generally. I am really happy that we are trying to do this. It is much more realistic than the cooking classes that we did before, where the planning and shopping were done by the teacher, and the actual cooking was shared by three students.

This week I am increasing the gasto to $15, and I am going to add an allowance for flowers. I'm going to get all our cloth napkins and place mats washed and have Emma practice the napkin-folding skills that she learned from The Joy of Decorative Napkin Folding. Also, she will be starting as a mother's helper to Mrs. E. Hopefully she will get to assist in the kitchen while balancing a baby on one hip.

Eating Well on $68.88 a Week

It can be done! The Associated Press challenged two chefs and a foods editor to make meals for a week on what the average food stamp payment is for a family of four. One went over budget about ten dollars, but the other two were right on it. This means that theoretically, Emma should be able to provide meals on a gasto of $10 a day. I say theoretically because even professionally-trained chefs struggled and said that it took very careful shopping and a willingness to incorporate leftovers. The menus they planned would be so helpful if they had also given all the recipes. Instead, they gave one sample recipe from each chef. (Click the post title to read MSNBC's coverage of this story.)

Artwork: One of the Family by Frederick George Cotman
(I wanted to use a larger image, but in all the ones I found, the husband was almost completely obscured in shadow or partially cropped out.)

The Gasto Challenge: Finding Our Way

Emma and I ventured to our local Mexican meat market for the first time yesterday. Among other things, we returned with this wonderful new tool, which I've forgotten the name of, and a cup full of fabulously flavorful lard, rendered from pork cracklin's by the vivacious proprietress.

I hadn't planned to have Emma shop there, but somehow the topic came up during a conversation with my friend, Eliza, and she said that the meat is fresher, and there is more personal service at the Mexican meat markets.

She was absolutely right.

My original idea was for Emma to start planning and cooking on Monday, but I realized two things: she needed a sizable chunk of time for planning, and Herb and Nathaniel are not home on Monday or Thursday nights.

Then my mom called and said she needed Emma to clean this week. I had totally forgotten about that, because Emma does not have a regular day that she cleans Grandma's house; she goes when Grandma says she needs her. So I completely re-thought my original plan of having Emma cooking and shopping every day. Tentatively, she will be responsible for meals on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Those are days that the menfolk are home at night. It gives Emma two back-to-back days to better utilize leftovers, and it gives her a Friday for working on her repertoire of meatless meals.

She told me that she definitely wants to keep a notebook, so she sat down Monday with notebook and a spread of cookbooks to plan her menus.

I was hoping that she would be able to shop Tuesday morning, but I had an early hair appointment. Therefore, she had to get her milking done and process it all herself, cook breakfast for herself and Nathaniel (scrambled eggs and toast with homemade strawberry jam) and clean up afterward.

After I got home, we decided it was time for the chicks to be moved from a box in her bedroom window seat to the brooder in the garage. The chicks all panted and swooned once they were moved, worrying Emma to death. So additional time was spent finding and setting up a fan for them and watching over them to make sure they recovered. This took up the rest of the morning.

After lunch she asked me to accompany her on her first shopping trip because she was a little nervous, and I agreed.

There was no need to be nervous, though, because the people at the Mexican Meat Market adopted us right away. While Emma worked with the butcher, I visited with his wife, the lady with the gorgeous smile, pictured above.

After Emma had completed her preliminary communications with the butcher, utilizing pictures and some English, she joined me in the kitchen to learn how to make tortillas.

I completely forgot to introduce myself and Emma. Consequently, I didn't learn their names either. So I will call the lady Maria and her husband Jose.

Maria showed Emma how to pat the dough and told her to use warm water when she mixed it.

Then she had Emma try it.

Emma enjoyed the process and was pleased with the result. Maria told us that her mother's next door neighbor in Mexico makes the tool, which I will call a tortilla dough smasher.

Then Jose came in to get Emma's approval of the meat he had selected for her. He apologized for not knowing much English. I told him not to apologize, Emma would not have had nearly as much fun if he spoke fluent English. He explained that he had worked in a plant here for about 20 years, but he operated a machine and rarely got to talk with an English-speaking worker.

I told him that Emma was trying to do "the gasto", and his face lit up. He said he would look after her when she came back by herself.

I asked Maria about lard, hoping they sold some that didn't have all the preservatives in it. That's all I can find at American stores. All she had for sale on the shelves was that same kind, the Armour brand. The only difference was that it had Spanish on one side. But she told me that she could sell me some that she makes and that it would make the best beans I ever tasted. One of the Mexican restaurants in town buys her homemade lard for their beans, she explained, telling me which one. "Don't tell. It's a secret," she whispered with a mischievous glint in her eyes.

We hated to leave, but we needed to stop at another store to complete Emma's list. I told her I would wait in the car with the air conditioning running since we had lard and meat. I told her to text me if she needed me. Soon I received this message:

"Meet me in the frozen foods."

She could not find pearl onions. That was the first time that I looked at her list. I saw "Fontina cheese" and "Italian plum tomatoes".

Uh-oh.

These were definitely not ingredients you would find in our little hometown grocery. I helped her make substitutions. As we approached the checkout, she looked over the contents of her cart worriedly. "I'm over," she wailed, disappointed, making a reference to the $10 a day goal.

"Maybe I can just give y'all smaller portions and make it last longer," she suggested, brightening at the thought.

On the way home, we tried to take pictures of a digital church sign that's been making me laugh for several months, but they didn't come out. The sign says:

"Sun worship, 10:30"

The first time I saw it, I thought, "What next? Human sacrifice at noon?"

We got home about 3:00 and Emma began cooking. That's when I had the next "uh-oh" moment. She had chosen Beef Short Rib Stew with Chili Biscuit Topping for her entree, and it was supposed to be baked in a dutch oven. I don't have a dutch oven, except for a cast iron one with legs for cooking on campfires.

I read through her recipe and decided that the closest substitution we could make would be for her to use my electric roaster, which is huge, a whopping 18 quarts. She had to use more oil to saute her vegetables in than what the recipe called for in order to compensate for the large surface area.

Then she realized that she hadn't bought beef broth, and she needed four cups of it. So I sent her to the freezer to get a package of soup bones and told her how to make it herself. The result was far superior to what she could have bought at the store, but it took extra time, and it was getting late.

Great clouds of steam billowed upward as Emma kept checking the progress of the stew. I tried to explain that if she were baking it in a heavy dutch oven, she would not be lifting the lid like that and losing all her moisture.

About this time she felt overcome and sighed deeply, pressing the back of her hand to her dewy forehead. I said, "Hold that pose!"

At 6:30 Emma took the milk bucket and left to milk Fiona. She brought the milk in about 7:00 and resumed cooking.

At 8:00 Herb asked, "Have you talked to her about timing?" He had just finished a bag of Fritos.

About this time, I thought I heard a plaintive "moo". I asked Emma, "Did you take Fiona back to her pasture?"

Emma's eyes grew large. "I forgot! And she's tied up with her nose jam-up against the fence!" She flew out the door.

By 8:30 she had returned and started making the chili biscuits. She asked me whether she could use Maria's lard. I said, "Sure!"

The biscuits were supposed to bake on top of the stew. Conditions were not optimal for this, but Emma tried it anyway.

At 9:00 she dished it up, lamenting that it didn't have enough vegetables or broth. If she decides to keep the recipe, she said that she would copy it in her notebook with these modifications.

We sat down and took our first bite. It tasted yummy. The meat was tasty and tender, and the chili biscuits with pork lard were out of this world. A great success!

After we finished eating, Emma began the laborious process of scrubbing the roaster. She had done most of the other clean-up as she worked. She finished about 10 p.m. and went directly to bed.

Honing Homemaking Skills

For this writer stands in awe of the real housewife: an accomplished housewife must be far more knowledgeable than the so-called professional man or woman and much of the knowledge, as she will tell you, is difficult to achieve.--John Seymour, Forgotten Household Crafts

For a long time now Emma and I have been talking about her taking over the menu planning, shopping, and cooking. Now that she is driving by herself and can find her way back home from the grocery store (if she exits the same side of the parking lot that she came in), we are ready to start.

She wants to try using the gasto system.

We learned about it when we read My Heart Lies South by Elizabeth Borton de Trevino, the true story of an American young woman who weds a Mexican, Luis de Trevino, and how she adapts to the Catholic culture of Monterrey, Mexico. She says, "Gasto means 'expense' and is generally used to indicate exactly the sum set aside for the daily purchase of food and household necessities. . .With my gasto I was supposed to buy meat, milk, vegetables and fruit, bread and such staples as sugar, rice, beans, and coffee. Luis had fixed the gasto after long worried discussions with Adela's husband, and they had calculated in a certain amount of slack because of my inexperience with Mexican ways."

We see many advantages to this method, but the top two reasons are: we expect that as a young housewife Emma will be working within a limited budget, and being given a gasto helps reinforce the husband's role as head of the family, which in America needs all the reinforcing it can get. I just wish I had Luis here to help me figure out how much to give her. At least she doesn't have to bargain with vendors. That was Mrs. Trevino's undoing, and I am sure that it would be Emma's too.

Starting tomorrow, I will give her $10 a day. She then has to plan menus for that day, determine what miscellaneous household items must be bought and then go shop for them. I never shop daily, but it would seem a good way to start this project until she and I get the hang of it. I figure we're going to be eating a lot of rice and beans. But at least she doesn't have to waste any of her gasto on dairy products or eggs. I expect that I will be adjusting the gasto before the end of the week. That's OK, because I'm really choosing ten dollars at random.

I would like for her to keep a notebook with her shopping lists, menus, and expenditures, but I won't push it. She's already pretty busy with the twice-a-day milking, chickens, rabbits, a batch of new chicks, and s sewing project and is going to start working one afternoon a week as a mother's helper for a lady from our parish. She is from Puerto Rico and has read and loved My Heart Lies South, too. So I'm hoping Emma will learn a lot.

Seeing this all written down makes me a little worried. It's probably too much. Herb wants her to take college classes in the fall. Once you throw that in there, I don't know when she would get a chance to do anything. And I didn't even put weaving on the list! We both got so excited at her District Check workshop because several of the weavers there weave their own linen sheets. They said nothing you can buy in a store can compare to them. Talk about an outstanding hope chest project! Plus, Emma sat next to the lady who wove her daughter's wedding dress fabric. She brought it to show, and it was gorgeous! Emma and I talked about her weaving her own wedding dress fabric and enough for the groom's shirt as well. Now I'm thinking it would be really wonderful if she wove enough to make an heirloom christening gown. She could have it done and waiting in the hope chest. . .the wedding dress, groom's shirt, and christening gown all from the same fabric--so symbolic, so romantic. . .

Then there's reality. Darn.


In the photo above, Emma is posing with the ten half-pints of strawberry jam she made on Friday.