Adventures in Debt

In an effort to reduce my grocery bills, and also to start eating different recipes, I made the dreaded Experimental Meal tonight. Now, since I live alone this isn’t as daunting an event as in my sister’s house, where my brother-in-law will running screaming out of the house when she says those three words.

Tonight I took a look in my fridge and started searching around on AllRecipes.com for ideas. This site is my favourite one for recipes, as they’ve got such a huge database of them, plus users can also rate them, which is a bonus. There’s also a handy feature that lets you type in a few ingredients, and it will search for recipes with those ingredients in them.

On tap for tonight:

• pasta
• feta cheese
• garlic

My father used to enjoy making a variation of this meal, using olive oil, capers and hot peppers, which was not one of my favourites, as I don’t really like capers. But the idea is a sound one.

So I whipped out the frying pan, poured in a little olive oil, and tossed in a few garlic cloves. I sprinkled some dried oregano, basil and cayenne pepper. Then I cooked up the pasta and took out the garlic cloves from the pan. I dumped the pasta in the pan, and then transferred the whole lot back to the pot. I sprinkled in some feta cheese, gave it all a swish, and poured it into a bowl.

Voila!

Approximate cost for the meal:

• 50 cents for the pasta
• 10 cents of feta cheese
• pennies for the spices and garlic

Total: Less than $1! And it was tasty, tasty, tasty.

What are some of your cheap-o recipes? Leave a comment and let me know.

Last weekend the girls and I headed out to Pittsburgh to watch our hometown Toronto Blue Jays play the Pirates in a little InterLeague MLB play. Sadly both teams are not the best right now, so neither game we saw featured a lot of scintillating play, but our trip was a success nonetheless (and aside from the fact that our Jays lost two out of the three games!)

Spending Money

What money was I using to fund this trip? My Vacation fund. This fund is supposed to be used for my trip to Italy next year, however since I’ve still got an entire 12 months to save up for that trip, I figured it was okay to dip into it right now. So I withdrew the $220 I had saved up and off we went. I actually came back with some of the cash still in my wallet, a whole $57 worth, which I thought was pretty good. Of course since I still owe my one friend for the hotel bill, that will be wiped out, but I was pleased that I didn’t need to dip into too much for that.

Hotel Deal

My friend Je was able to get us a really good deal on a the Omni William Penn hotel, which is the grandest hotel in downtown Pittsburgh. She was able to use her employee discount and got us two nights (for three people) for $300 total, which is tremendous. I am quite pleased at that.

Gas Prices

Gas prices were of course going to be the second largest bill we’d have to pay, considering Pittsburgh’s about 500kms away from Toronto, however due to the former strength of the US dollar, and their own oil production, gas prices are still “cheap” in the US in comparison to the rest of the world. Don’t get me wrong, they are still creeping up there, but considering in Toronto we are paying about $1.35/L, anything less than $4/gal in the US was going to be good, as that was still less than $1 Canadian after all the conversions. We were able to do a complete fill for $3.97/gal the first day, and then I topped up the tank in Buffalo for $4.39/gal, which is still cheaper than the $1.32/L it was once we crossed the border. In all we spent $120 CDN on gas, which split three ways, is a good deal for a whole weekend.

Fun & Shopping

The girls had wanted to do a bit of shopping, so they spent some money on some really nice clothes, although to be honest, they didn’t spend as much as they could have. Where we really did well was at the ballpark. PNC Park is one of the better ball parks in MLB, and we had a great time. Since we weren’t sure if we’d be able to make it in time for the Friday game, we ended up buying tickets from the box office when we got there, and we got some tremendous seats for $20. These seats would have been easily over $45 each in Toronto, so we were quite pleased. Add the fact the game went 12 innings, we got there in the third inning, and there were free fireworks after the game, and we were happy. For the Saturday game we had already purchased our tickets before leaving Toronto, and we were even MORE impressed then. We had club seats (read: cushioned and with our own private bar/restaurant area) for $47 each. These types of seats are hard to come by in Toronto, in fact, I’m not even sure if you can buy them individually. I believe they’re mostly season ticket holders. Regardless, we were treated like queens in the Club seats at PNC Park, and while we were surprised the game was only 2 hours long, we had a great time. Too bad they didn’t go into extra innings that night as well.

Conclusion
Don’t let high gas prices stop you from planning a fun road trip with your friends or family. A great trip can still be had for relatively cheap. The total cost of this trip for me is about $240, $20 more than I had saved up. Not bad at all for a 3 day trip with some good friends.

Oh, and I even found a penny at the ball park, which I was able to add to my total in the Change Challenge.

In anticipation of my road trip this weekend, I went out to clean out my car tonight. This will be the inaugural road trip for my new car, so I’m excited. I thought I’d take advantage of the $2 car wash in my building’s parking garage. It’s one of those insert-your-coin-and-grab-the-wand-and-go type things, which I’m always happy to use. They’re so much fun. (yes, I’m that strange.)

I was excited to see that the washer had some rince/soap and wax options, as I’ve developed an appreciation for waxing the car. Living in Canada, it definitely comes in handy in the winter time, since it keeps the salt and snow from sticking to the car. I know, we’re in spring/almost summer right now, but the wax is good at this time of year to keep off all the bugs.

At any rate, I popped in my toonie, selected Rinse, and off I went. The building management had thoughtfully attached the hose on the ceiling with an arm that would keep it away from the car, and still allow enough slack and spin for you to walk around the whole car. Very nice. The one thing I wasn’t sure about was how long my toonie would last. Would it allow me to rinse, wash with soap, wax and then rinse again? Only time would tell.

I whipped around the car quickly to rinse it all off, and then started again with the Wash & Soap option. I pulled the trigger to use the high-pressure wash too, as I had some gunky mud near the wheel wells. I walked briskly around the car, spraying merrily away. I was having a blast, both literally and figuratively.

I switched it over to the Wax, and whipped around the car again, getting the wax on. And just as I got to the front, the timer ran out, and the water turned off. Nice timing indeed.

The total time was about 7 minutes, and the total cost was $2. Considering the super max car wash at a gas station is almost $10 these days, I thought $2 was a bargoon! I brought the car back to my parking spot and then pulled out my squeegee to clean off the front and back windshields. As I was walking around, I noticed that there was still dust on the side of the car (my car is black, which means it shows all the dirt quite nicely.) There was still dust on the car! And I even used the high-pressure wash trigger too!

*sigh* So the DIY car wash, while fun, wasn’t the best thing in the world. I will still have to wash my car at some point in order to get all the “dirt” off. Of course considering it’s supposed to be rainy & cloudy all week, I am not too upset about only losing $2, but it’s the principal, you know? *sigh and double sigh*