Salad Plate Lessons: Eating Green; Saving Green

Yesterday, in a fit of stubborn frugality, I refused to eat my money. But it was a hot debate between the $20 bill on my dining room table and the bag of pre-washed baby green lettuce in my frig. I have a weakness for salads, especially overstuffed, exotic salads with a wild assortment of tastes. My ideal meal: a big salad and a fabulous dessert. But after tax, tips and other charges that ideal meal usually costs about $20.




Feeling really frugal, I made my own salad. Here's my recipe:



1. Large serving of pre-washed organic salad: red and green romaine, oak leaf, chard, arugula, and other mixed greens. Thankfully, we had a bag of organic mixed greens in the frig.


2. Baby carrots


3. One vegetarian Morningstar chicken patty. (My favorite restaurant charges about $3 for that addition of veggie meat.)


4. Chopped almonds, walnuts and a sprinkle of sunflower seeds.


5. Chopped onions.


6. Minced, crisp miniature pickles.


7. Italian salad dressing.



Arranged on a large glass plate, my homemade gourmet salad was just as pretty as the $10-plus salad that I would have picked up at the restaurant. My own creation was a riot of color and taste, washed down with a tall glass of Asian Plum White Tea, sweetened with honey, which would have cost $3 at the cafe. For dessert: a generous serving of Oreo cookies, with the yucky cream center scooped out. (Yeah, I love the chocolate cookies, no cream.)



Bottom line: I didn't feel deprived; I felt pampered for a total cost of less than $2. And I learned several lessons from my salad plate:



1) Keep the kitchen well-stocked: Without the nuts, pickles and other perks, my meal would have just been lettuce on a plate. That so-called salad would have been no competition for the color-coordinated eye-candy salad at the cafe. Having a few extra ingredients in my cabinet and frig really saved me a lot of money.



2) Be creative: I don't normally put sour pickles on a green salad. But in a festive, anything-goes mood, I chopped and sprinkled the pickles onto my salad plate. My creativity was awarded with extra crunch.



3) Be patient: It took time to wash the pre-washed salad. (I never trust pre-washed salads!) It took patience to chop the carrots and the onions. Even reaching into the assorted bags of nuts was an exercise in persistence. But if I want to save money and live well, I'll have to stretch for the higher shelf, open the bag of baby greens and sprinkled the nuts myself.



4) Be honest: This is the big X-Factor. When I started to reach for the $20 bill on the dining room table, I initially told myself a lie, namely: I don't have time to make my own salad. It was easier, I thought to just walk out the door with my money and just hand over my green bill for a plate of green food.


But here's the actual invoice of time:

• Leaving my house is at least a 10-minute process.
• Walking to the little cafe near my home or the competing restaurants involves a brisk 10-minute sprint if I do that swishy hip-heel-toe weird walk demonstrated by speed-walkers that make little kids giggle.
• At this time of the year in Miami, my neighborhood is overrun with snow birds and the wait for a table at my little cafe could take as long as 20 minutes, with an additional 15 minutes to be waited on and served.
• The remaining balance of time: 20 minutes to eat, 10 minutes to wait for the bill and to pay my tab.
• And finally: 10 minutes to walk home.

Final time cost of cafe salad: 95 minutes (including meal time) or 75 minutes (excluding eating time)


Final cost of home gourmet salad: 10 minutes of prep time.





Bottom line: I saved about $18 in cash and over an hour in time. My gourmet salad was worth the effort.

~~~~

Sharon Harvey Rosenberg is the author of The Frugal Duchess of South Beach:How to Live Well and Save Money... Anywhere!, which will be published in the Spring of 2008 by DPL Press.

~~~~

_____________

Digg!