On Tuesday, my husband, Clif, and I headed to the big city—Portland—to hear a lecture given by “legendary editor” Judith Jones, who “championed” Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking when it was a lowly book proposal at Alfred A. Knopf. (As if that weren’t enough, she was also responsible for the American publication of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. Let’s just say the woman has impeccable taste.) The lecture was sponsored by the Portland Museum of Art, and, as their online blurb put it, “made possible by the Bernard A. Osher Lecture fund.” Jones has edited cookbooks by Jacques Pépin and James Beard, among others, and along with her late husband, Evan Jones, she has written two cookbooks. She has also written on her own, including The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food. After listening to her snappy talk, I want my very own copy. 

I had read about Judith Jones in Julia Child’s My Life in France, and I had also seen her in a PBS special—American Masters, I believe—about Julia Child. In the special, Jones came across as lively and confident, and I hoped she would come across that way in person, even though she is well into her eighties. Well, she certainly did. Petite and slender with a surprisingly deep voice, Jones looked smart in a bright pink jacket, and she seemed to be perfectly comfortable speaking before a large audience. She was sharp, articulate, and funny, and I was completely captivated. 

Like Julia Child, Judith Jones had a food epiphany when she went to France, where good food and wine are such an integral part of life, where whole families go to the market together because they love shopping for food. Jones had come from a family who thought that food was “fodder” and that a home shouldn’t smell of cooked food. (I can’t help but wonder if this Puritan attitude transferred itself to our big grocery stores, which seldom smell of food.) Her mother had saved letters that Jones had written from France when she was in her twenties, and on rereading them, Jones was struck by her younger self, by this “cheeky girl who thought that food was a worthwhile pursuit.” (Jones also attributed her love of food to a maid/cook who had worked for her family. This was a woman who wasn’t afraid of the way food smelled, and she used garlic and spices when she cooked in her own home.) 

Naturally, Jones told funny (but affectionate) stories about Julia Child and James Beard. She movingly described how lonely she felt after her husband died in the 1990s and how she thought she would never cook just for herself. As it turned out, she was wrong about that, and one of her books is The Pleasures of Cooking for One. She asserted—quite correctly, in my opinion—that “the professional chef is in a different world from us home cooks, and we need to loosen up a little.” As an example, she mentioned fresh herbs in the winter, how expensive they are and how they really aren’t very fresh at all. (I have come to the same conclusion and often used dried herbs in the winter.) 

During the question and answer after the talk, someone from Weight Watchers asked how to combine the love of food with health and obesity concerns. How do we strike a balance? Jones responded that bad habits make Americans fat. She explained that she exercises a lot and doesn’t snack between meals. I suspect she also doesn’t go in for fast food or processed food, two major obesity culprits. She also spoke of the importance of taking the time to cook from scratch. 

I agree, and these are all things I’ve written about in previous posts. Unfortunately, time is one thing so many Americans lack, and I must say that I have a great deal of sympathy for frazzled parents who spend so much time away from home and don’t make enough money to hire someone to help with household chores, both inside and outside. (And a lot of us fall into that category.) 

Yet if we start with the notion that food, real food to borrow from Michael Pollan, is a worthwhile pursuit then surely this is a step in the right direction and quite different from the conflicted attitude so many Americans have about food. We love it; we hate it; we fear it; we desire it. And in the end, we don’t even know what we should eat. All the while, the French, who are among the healthiest people in the world, eat cream, butter, eggs, and white flour, and they relish them all. 

No wonder Judith Jones had a food epiphany in France.

Yesterday, when I took my dog, Liam, for his afternoon walk, the day was again sunny and warm, the temperature was 50ºF, and maple syrup was still on my mind. (See yesterday’s post, Maple Syrup Alert.) Where I live, it is  wooded and rural, and I passed by a section where the maple trees are being tapped. As luck would have it, two men were collecting the sap from the trees and bringing it to huge barrels in the back of a pickup truck. As I went by the truck, one of the men was in the back, and I stopped to speak to him. 

“How it is going?” I asked. 

“Slow,” he responded, grimacing. 

“Not getting very much?” 

“It’s too warm. We’ve lost three weeks. The other day, I was actually out picking pussy willows.” 

“When do you usually do that?” I asked. 

“Mid-March,” came the reply. 

It was my turn to grimace and to shake my head in sympathy. 

For the rest of the walk, indeed for the rest of the afternoon, I thought about maple syrup and Maine. Economically, it would be horrible for Maine if sap from maple trees could no longer be harvested because spring became too warm too soon. Maine has plenty of economic woes without having another one to add to the list. But there would be another loss to contend with—a cultural loss—which would be nearly as bad. Maine and maple syrup go together like Georgia and peaches and Florida and oranges. It’s almost impossible to conceive of Maine without maple syrup. 

Ever since I was young child, early spring in Maine has meant the tapping of maple trees and the wonderful sweet syrup that comes from boiling down the sap. Until I was eight years old, I lived in Waterville, Maine, a small mill city on the banks of the Kennebec River, which ran dark and dirty in those days. We lived in a tight neighborhood where the houses were close and the yards were small. But in that neighborhood there were maple trees, and some of those trees were tapped. One spring day when I was about six, and I was walking home from school with a group of girls, a neighbor let us have a taste of syrup he had made recently. Readers, I was smitten, totally smitten by the sweet, intense taste of real maple syrup. This was the early 1960s, and unfortunately my family was an Aunt Jemima family. But with that one taste, the scales fell from my eyes, so to speak, and I immediately understood that there was true maple syrup and that there was false maple syrup. The difference was so startling that even my six-year-old palate could tell the difference. 

Will I live long enough to see the demise of maple syrup in Maine? Perhaps not. But if this trend continues, then there is a good chance my children will.

What a thought!

Yesterday, the temperature reached 50º F in central Maine, and it has been sunny and warm for well over a week. The snow banks are nearly gone, and the sides of the road are so dry that my dog, Liam, hardly has any mud on his feet when we come in from our afternoon walks. I wish I could say the same thing about our backyard, which is fenced-in for the dog. Right now, most of the snow has melted, and the yard is a muddy mess, especially the paths that Liam has carved with his flying paws as he races around the perimeter of the patio. I’ve lived in Maine for over fifty-two years, and I have never seen a March like this. Usually, it is quite cold, and the snow doesn’t even think about melting until the end of the month. My daughter Shannon’s birthday is the end of April, and one of her ongoing birthday wishes is that all the snow will be gone by then, and a green flush will have crept over the lawns. Well, this year I expect she will definitely get her wish. At the rate things are going, the snow will be gone by the middle of March, which means we are over a month ahead of where we should be.  

So what’s to complain about? Who wouldn’t like warm, sunny days in March after the cold of January and February? And, the truth is, I do like the warmer weather.  Afternoon walks are a pleasure, and my thoughts have turned to gardening and yard work, which I truly enjoy. (Even raking, sweeping the driveway, and clipping brush. I just love being outside.) 

But there is a downside to all this, and it concerns maple syrup. In a previous post—Maple Sugaring Time—I wrote about how in Maine March is the month for tapping trees and making syrup, a sweet, sweet sign of spring and eagerly anticipated. As soon as the tubing and the buckets make their appearance in the woods, I’m ready for a maple syrup breakfast at Jillson’s Farm and Sugarhouse, and we plan to go this Saturday. 

However, the warm weather had me worried. For the sap to run, the days need to be warm, but not as warm as they have been, and the nights need to be cold, much colder than they have been. This morning, I called Jillson’s to find out if there would be a maple syrup breakfast this weekend. Yes, there would be. How about the sugarhouse? Would it be fired up, making glorious syrup from sap? Well, maybe not. “It might be a short season this year,” the man on the phone told me. “Very short. If the weather cooperates, we’ll make syrup. If not, then we won’t. We can’t.”

That’s how it goes. Last year’s sap season was short, and this year’s might be even shorter. It all depends on the weather. We all depend upon the weather, and when it changes—as it is certainly doing, despite what skeptics might say—we gain things, and we lose things. In Maine, over the years since my childhood, we have gained shorter winters, ticks, Japanese beetles, cardinals, and turkeys. We seem to be losing our maple syrup season, and according to National Geographic, sugar maples, along with other trees, have begun migrating north, entlike, at “an average clip of sixty-two miles a century.” With their flying helicopter seeds, maple trees are especially well suited for migrating, and in the National Geographic piece, there is speculation that these trees are migrating even faster than the aforementioned sixty-two miles a century. So in time, we might lose our sugar maples altogether, and that will be the end of maple syrup in central and southern Maine. (Northern Maine, perhaps, will be able to hold onto their trees. It all depends on how warm things get.) 

All I can say is, we humans had better start wising up.

Weather wise, the past few days have been very odd. In fact, the whole darned winter has been a strange one. Parts of the eastern seaboard have been pelted by one storm after another, and surely New York and Washington, D.C., have received more snow than they ever thought they would get. Meanwhile, the weather in central Maine has been relatively balmy with not much snow. Even around our little house in the big woods, there are bare patches of ground that grow larger every day. Today is March 1^st, yet in some ways it has felt as though most of February was, in fact, March, that intermediate month of gray weather, mud, and gloom, when it’s not quite winter but not quite spring, either. While we are not sorry to be spared the massive snowstorms, most central Mainers are not exactly excited about the prospect of having two Marches. To our way of thinking, April is certainly not the cruelest month in Maine. That honor belongs to March.

To go right along with the weird weather we’ve been having, a tempest blew in last Thursday. While New York City, where our eldest daughter, Dee, lives, was again bombarded with snow, Maine got rain—and plenty of it—along with strong winds. It rained and rained until basements filled with water, rivers flooded, and in one town—Rockland—a roof blew off a house and blocked the main street. On our road, a huge tree came down, taking power lines with it, and we were without power for twelve hours. We felt very sorry for ourselves until we heard from our friend Bob Johnson in New Hampshire, who had been without power for two days.

On the Friday after the storm, I took our dog, Liam, for a walk. It was a sunny day and fairly warm. Water raced down the ditches—in February!—and it ran so clear that underneath the leaves and the sand were in sharp detail. Birds sang their spring songs, and the remaining snow banks, so little and dirty, had a discouraged look, as though they knew their time was soon coming to an end.

To cheer the family up, I decided to make whoopie pies, those round, little chocolate cakes filled with cream. Moist, chewy, yet made to be held in the hand as they are eaten, whoopie pies are big in Maine, and the whole family is very keen on them. Not far from where we live, there is a company—Isamax Snacks—that makes such good whoopie pies for such a reasonable price that I haven’t made them in years. Many years. In truth, since I was a teenager. Our local grocery store carries them, and whenever we are in a whoopie-pie mood, usually once a week, I just buy them.

But, as someone who likes to cook from scratch, I thought I should give whoopie pies a shot, and the weekend after the tempest—when February had felt like March, and March was still ahead us—seemed like the perfect time to tackle the project. Our daughter Shannon and her fiancé Mike came over, and the whoopie pie making commenced. I used a recipe from The Tightwad Gazette II, and we were all eagerly anticipating an afternoon of whoopie-pie indulgence.

Maybe it was the tempest. Maybe it was the weird February we just had. Maybe it was the recipe or the baking soda I used. Who knows what really happened? But let’s just say my whoopie pies won’t be competing anytime soon with the ones from Isamax Snacks. Flat and disappointing, my whoopie pies looked more like a chocolate cookie than those puffy little half-circles held together with cream that we all love so much. Mine were edible, but that’s about the best that could be said about them.

Now I have to decide how much effort I want to put into learning how to make a good whoopie pie. On the one hand, when a cook fails at making something, the best thing to do is to keep trying until he or she succeeds. Julia Child writes about how she poached so many eggs before she got the results she wanted that she and her husband Paul couldn’t bear to eat any more eggs, and they had to be flushed down the toilet. On the other hand, even though we love whoopie pies, they are a treat that should be an occasional indulgence—once a week at the most. Do I really want to make them over and over until I get them right? Unlike Julie Child, I can’t bear to throw out food that is edible but not perfect. Should Clif and I really be eating so many whoopie pies? And, finally, we have such good local whoopie pies, courtesy of Isamax Snacks, that we never have to go without.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. But this morning, I was looking at whoopie pie recipes on the Internet. While I don’t want to make any firm commitments, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to predict that I will be trying to make whoopie pies sometime in the near future.

“Life is sweet when you’re addicted to the sap.”
—Craig McInnis, the Ottawa Citizen

A few days ago when my dog, Liam, and I were out for an afternoon walk, I noticed something in the woods that made me positively dizzy with excitement—a maze of long blue tubing stretched from tree to tree. No, we don’t have an entrepreneur making moonshine in central Maine. The blue tubing I saw can only mean one thing—the sap has started to run in the maple trees, and from sap comes maple syrup, “golden delight.” As far as I’m concerned, the South can keep its whiskey. Without even a moment’s hesitation, I’d take maple syrup over whiskey. Anytime.

Most Mainers are crazy about real maple syrup, and even though I am a frugal cook, maple syrup is one area where I don’t economize. I just can’t make do with the imitation stuff. No Mrs. Butterworth’s in our house, thank you very much. According to MELiving.com, “In Québec, cheap imitation maple syrup is called ‘sirop de poteau’ or ‘pole syrup,’ suggesting that it was made by tapping telephone poles.” My sentiments exactly.

In southern and central Maine, the sugaring season begins in late February or early March, when the days are warm and the nights are cold. This means that there’s a very small window of opportunity for collecting the sap, which is then boiled down to make syrup. (Depending on sugar content, it takes roughly forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.) Pat Jillson, of Jillson’s Farm and Sugarhouse in Sabattus, Maine, told me that sometimes, if the weather cooperates, they can get six weeks of good sap weather. Last year, the season was short. It started the beginning of March, and it was done by the beginning of April.

Who knows how long the season will be this year? But I am ready, poised on the brink of this sweet season. I don’t tap trees, but Jillson’s Farm and Sugarhouse is not far from where I live, and during the month of March, they feature maple breakfasts. My husband, Clif, and I will be there at least once. We might go back a second time. We’ll buy maple syrup. Will we give in to the temptation of maple-cream donuts? I expect we will. Ditto for maple-flavored kettle corn. We’ll tour the sugarhouse, where we can watch the alchemy of sap being turned to syrup.

My mouth is already watering. Stay tuned.

On Saturday we were invited to have dinner with our friends Bob and Kate Johnson. They live in New Hampshire—the banana belt to those of who live in central Maine. Indeed, there was a striking difference in the amount of snow around our two homes—nearly bare in New Hampshire and about three feet or so around our little house in the big woods in Maine.

Both Bob and Kate are terrific cooks, and an invitation from them means two hours of anticipation as we drive to their house. There were four of us—me, my husband Clif, our daughter Shannon, and her fiancé Mike—and by the time we reached New Hampshire, we had worked up good appetites. To be truthful, almost embarrassingly good appetites.

This meal was Kate’s creation, and for appetizers it included homemade French bread, two homemade salsas, Brie, and blue corn chips. Almost a meal right there. But next came macaroni and cheese, pickled carrots and onions, and flank steaks. Then of course dessert, apple crisp, which I brought. The icing on the cake, so to speak, was the conversation that went with the meal, and the topics ranged from books to movies to politics.

We did show some restraint. We didn’t completely devour everything. (I’m not ashamed to admit I considered eating the last of the steak.)  But let’s just say we made a good dent in the food Kate served, and, if I’m not mistaken, I think we pretty much polished off two loaves of French bread. (My, they were good. Crusty on the outside, soft on the inside, and a beautiful, perfect shape.)

Kate graciously allowed Clif to photograph the food and the process, and the photos below will give readers some idea of what a wonderful meal we had. Truly, it was worthy of a “bon appétit” as well as “merci beaucoup.”
Thank you, Bob and Kate!

Every since I started this blog, in August 2009, I have been extolling the virtues of cooking from scratch. Homemade food tastes better, is more economical, and is better for your health. (See my previous post “A Christmas Miracle” ) As Michael Pollan puts it in his new book Food Rules, “Cooking for yourself is the only sure way to take back control of your diet from food scientists and food processors.” And, as an added environmental bonus, cooking from scratch usually means less packaging and therefore less trash.

In general I practice what I preach, and my husband, Clif, and I make most of what we eat. Except for pasta and crackers, there is very little commercially processed food in our cupboards.

However, two weeks ago, I caught a rather nasty bug, and I have been more or less out of commission ever since. I call the bug a bad cold. Clif calls it the flu. Whatever it was, I spent way too much time on the couch, watched too many British Sitcoms, and have had too many coughing fits. During this time, cooking from scratch went out the window, and here is what I wanted to eat and drink: ginger ale; Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup, with rice added; sherbet; canned peaches; and saltine crackers. Comfort food of my youth. When sickness strikes, how easy it is to regress.

This Christmas, the one present my daughter Shannon really wanted was How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. (For more about this, read “Shannon’s Plan: Cooking with Mark Bittman.”) I am happy to report that this is one cookbook that’s not languishing on the bookshelf, and Shannon has already begun tackling this cooking tome. (What else can you call a cookbook that has 960 pages?)

She’s had some failures. The breading on the fried chicken was too doughy (she thinks perhaps the frying oil wasn’t hot enough) and a lentil soup with homemade broth was “inedible.” (She’s not exactly sure what the problem was with the soup.)

But there have been successes—notably chicken wings, with two different sauces—mustard-honey and a spicy one; garlic roasted chickpeas and pistachios, and tortilla chips made from corn tortillas. Shannon made all these things on Super Bowl Sunday, which also turned out to be the day we celebrated her fiancé Mike’s twenty-seventh birthday.

“Eat up,” she said, as she put the food on the table. We didn’t have to be urged twice. We are, after all, good eaters. By the time we were done, there were only a scattering of chicken wings left, a handful of chickpeas and pistachios, and a few chips. Some thoughts about the chips: Mark Bittman recommends frying them in lard, and Shannon followed his suggestion. They were utterly delicious—far better than packaged chips. The chips can be fried in vegetable oil, and I’ll be soon trying them this way. But let’s be honest. Lard gives fried food that certain something that vegetable oil just doesn’t have. I’m not suggesting that cooks should switch from vegetable oil to lard, but it would be dishonest of me to pretend that lard doesn’t taste better.

The roasted chickpeas and pistachios were my favorite. Shannon made this for the first time at Christmas, and at odd hungry moments, I daydream about them. A very simple combination—chickpeas and pistachio tossed with chopped garlic and oil—but I find them irresistible. They don’t keep well, but who wants to keep them anyway? In a week or so, my friend Diane will be coming over for dinner, and I plan to make these as an appetizer.

But back to Super Bowl Sunday. We ate until most of the food was gone. Mike opened his presents. There was an ice cream cake. Then we settled in to watch the Super Bowl. I know almost nothing about football, and Mike had to explain what was going on. Nevertheless, I found myself rooting for the Saints. (I most always tend to go for the underdogs.)

And, by gosh, the Saints won. Go, Saints, go! And go New Orleans!

Well, this piece was supposed to be posted on Saturday, January 23^rd, and here it is Tuesday, January 26^th. Every year I think that after December, things will slow down. They do, of course, but January is still pretty busy. However, this is a story definitely worth sharing, even if it is a little late.

Last week, the heating element in my oven broke, and I mean this literally—it was in two pieces. I discovered this when I was about to bake some shells with a cheese sauce. Upon finding the broken heating element, I immediately changed my plan, and into the microwave went the shells and cheese. A good save, but the shells would have tasted better had they been baked. 

It is never a good thing for a home cook to be without an oven, especially when that cook makes the family’s bread. Therefore, the following morning, I did not procrastinate. I called Dave’s Appliance, a small in-town shop where we have bought all our appliances.  And why not? They are local, their prices are competitive with the big box stores, and they make house calls not only to deliver new appliances but also to fix broken ones. 

So I called Dave’s, and the man who answered listened as I explained what had happened. When I asked if someone could come fix the stove, he said, “You know, those heating elements are easy to replace. If you do it yourself, then you’ll save yourself $90.” He had a record of the stove we bought, way back in 1991, and he had heating elements in stock for that stove. 

Unfortunately, I am about as handy as our dog, Liam. But luckily, my husband, Clif, is pretty handy. So I said, “I’ll be in to pick up an element.” 

On Friday, a day Clif works at home, I made my great circle run of errands, which included the Transfer Station, where I found two books in the book box; the bottle redemption center, where I asked after the owner’s three dogs—Tex, Babs, and Cody, who were all napping in his car; and finally Dave’s Appliance. 

On the way to the parts department, I saw some pretty impressive gas stoves with some pretty impressive prices. My favorite was a white enameled gas stove designed to look like an old-fashioned wood cookstove. A complete conceit, but if I had the money and the space, that’s the one I’d get when our Whirlpool finally goes to stove heaven. 

I sadly left that white enameled beauty and bought a new heating element for $40. The man in the parts department gave me careful and involved instructions to give to Clif so that he wouldn’t zing himself when installing the element. “One man zapped himself good trying to install one of these heating elements. It won’t kill you, but it will give you a nasty jolt. If that man had just followed my instructions and had flipped the right switch at the fuse box, using the oven light as a test, then it wouldn’t have happened. But he didn’t flip the right switch. Then, he was so afraid that something was wrong that he insisted on paying $500 for a new stove. $500 when he could have spent $40. We tried to talk him out of it. The old stove was perfectly good. But he insisted on getting a new one.” The man, a little younger than I am, shook his head over the foolishness of spending $500 when all it took was $40 and some care with the fuse box. 

I didn’t take notes, but I listened attentively and passed on the instructions to Clif, which he diligently followed and more or less already knew. He didn’t get zapped, and I am now in the baking business again. The new heating element has only been in my oven for two days, and it’s already baked a batch of biscuits, some gingerbread, and a loaf of bread. They all turned out exactly the way they should. 

I’ve always been very satisfied with Dave’s Appliance and their service. Now, I am even more impressed. They could have easily made a house call and charged me the extra $90. I wouldn’t have complained. Not at all. But frugality runs deep in central Maine, and an honest business will never try to charge you more than is necessary. Not all central Maine businesses are like this—we’ve been stung a few times—but quite a few of them are, and when we find a place like Dave’s, we become loyal customers. 

Frugality, honesty, and loyalty might sound corny to the point of being New England clichés, but here they are in central Maine, at Dave’s Appliance, in the twenty-first century. Maybe we aren’t going to hell in a handbasket after all.

After the previous post, which was a little bleak, I thought I would go with something a little more inspirational—two incidents designed to tickle the frugal cook, which I most certainly am. Indeed, sometimes I wonder if the title of this blog should have been The Frugal Cook rather than A Good Eater. But The Frugal Cook has already been taken, and A Good Eater, in fact, gives me quite a bit of latitude. I can focus on frugality as much as I like, but I can also move on to other topics.

Part One

My father was a child of the Great Depression, and like many children of that era, he grew up in a very poor family. While my father and his family never actually starved, I think it is fair to say that there were years when they didn’t have quite as much food as they would have liked. One time, upon hearing that his aunt and her family wouldn’t be staying for dinner, my father replied, “Good. That means there will be more for the rest of us.” And he wasn’t joking. My grandmother, of course, was mortified, but I can’t help sympathizing with my father, who, I suspect, was always a little hungry as a child.

Not surprisingly, my father grew up to be very frugal, and he delighted in scrounging, in finding use for things that might be tossed into the rubbish. Our barns and sheds were filled with things he had scavenged and saved. “That might be useful,” he would say, tucking away another scrap of wood or a bit of metal. My father had the same philosophy when it came to leftovers. Throw good food away? Never!

I am a father’s daughter, and he has passed on to me his love of frugality and scrounging. I thought of him the other night after I had made a veggie soup stock, following a recipe in one of my Moosewood cookbooks. The stock consisted of carrots, potatoes, celery, an onion, garlic—the usual suspects. After the stock had simmered for a few hours, I strained it, and I was about to throw the vegetables into the compost bucket. After all, the onion, garlic, and celery were like mush, and even in my frugal world, there didn’t seem to be much use for them. But the potatoes and the carrots were another matter. They were cooked but still reasonably firm. They looked good enough to eat. When I nibbled the edge of a potato, a little spicy from the stock, I discovered it was good enough to eat. So rather than going into the compost bucket, the carrots and potatoes went into a bowl in the refrigerator. But, I wondered, what should I do with them? Make them into home fries, came the immediate answer. Well, why not? I often make home-fried potatoes, and while I have never made home-fried carrots, I figured they were worth trying.

Readers, they were delicious, and Clif and I gobbled them in our usual good eater fashion, with gusto and pleasure. The potatoes tasted pretty much the way any home-fried potatoes do, and the carrots were crispy and sweet and good. So good, that I have since boiled carrots with the sole purpose of making them into home fries. “They taste a little like sweet potatoes,” Clif said, and he was right.

My father, who has been dead for over twenty years, would have been proud of me. I must admit that I was more than a little tickled to turn food destined for the compost bucket into something utterly delicious.

A final note on my father’s frugality. As an adult, he outgrew his childish selfishness to become a generous father, husband, and friend. Guests were always welcome in our house at mealtimes. Along with instilling in me a love of frugality and scrounging, he also illustrated how it was possible to be generous as well. A good lesson.

Tomorrow: Frugality in two acts, Part Two