Clark's Big Book of Bargains (4 page)

Another way to save is to look for coupons for fast-food restaurants. Mark bought a coupon-filled calendar at Chick-fil-A for $5, got a free chicken salad sandwich immediately, and throughout the year got several free or almost-free lunches. He saved probably $20 to $30 for the $5 he spent on the calendar.

The venerable “Entertainment” coupon book is especially good for saving money on mid-priced and fast-food restaurants, with a lot of buy-one, get-one-free offers. If you use one of these books, you’ll get a tremendous payback. But you have to keep it with you in your car. The purpose of these deals is to get you into a place that maybe you don’t visit enough, or to introduce a new restaurant to you that you wouldn’t have used otherwise. But even if you use it only for restaurants you like to frequent, you’ll get a nice payback. Look through one first though, to make sure it has places you might like. The coupon books are not cheap—$8 to $25 depending on the city and the seller.

• Tips on Fast Food •

• Skip the fries and buy the sandwich that’s on special.
  

• Don’t buy the “combo” meals.
  

• Look for discount coupons, either the free kind or coupons you can buy in coupon books.
  

• Internet •

www.entertainment.com

* LEARNING TO COOK *

One of the easiest ways to save money on food is to eat at home more and eat out less. But a lot of twenty- and thirty-something people don’t know how to cook well enough to eat at home. As a result, people under age twenty-five spend 45.5 percent of their food dollars eating out, a higher percentage than any other age category, according to the National Restaurant Association. The twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds aren’t far behind, spending 43.8 percent of their food budget to dine out.

The lack of expertise of Generation Xers and Generation Yers in the kitchen has prompted a new wave of books, cooking shows, and cooking classes. There are a number of celebrity chefs on TV, including Emeril Lagasse, Bobby Flay, Caprial Pence, and Sara Moulton. There’s even an entire channel, the Food Channel, devoted to cooking and enjoying food.

GenXers are the first generation of adults since two-income families became the norm, and for many that meant breaking the traditional cycle of homemaker mom teaching her daughter how to cook. Christa DiBiase, executive producer of my radio show, says her mother, who was busy with her career, didn’t teach her how to cook. But Christa’s mother-in-law used to make a home-cooked dinner almost every night for her husband, Mike.

Some GenXers don’t want to cook and eat at home. They’re perfectly content eating out all the time. But others are finding they want the sense of home that a restaurant can’t provide. Eating at home also allows you to control what you eat, making it easier to enjoy meals that are nutritionally better for you.

Christa is pregnant with her first child, and doesn’t look forward to taking the baby to restaurants all the time. She says, candidly, that not knowing how to cook “makes me feel kind of inadequate.” She’s trying to remedy that by taking cooking classes. They’re not cheap. Christa paid $60 for a single, hour-long basic cooking class. But learning how to cook just a few meals can save plenty of money over the years.

Of course, you don’t have to learn to cook from a chef. If your local community college has a culinary department, that’s a great place to look for affordable cooking classes. Some supermarkets offer instruction, to tempt you to buy the ingredients there, and you might find classes that cover certain types of cooking—low-fat or low-salt cooking—at a community center or hospital. Look for smaller classes so you can see what’s happening, and if they don’t automatically give out the recipes, ask for copies of them.

Cookbooks are an even less expensive alternative. Look in used-book stores or the library for a book that emphasizes basic cooking, find a recipe that looks appealing, and give it a try. The worst thing that can happen in the kitchen is to cut or burn yourself. If you can avoid that, the only thing to worry about is that the food won’t taste so good. If it doesn’t, try it again and you’ll get better at it. Cooking isn’t rocket science. If you can read and follow directions, you can figure it out.

Christa says she can make French toast, sandwiches, and pasta. She knows how to make stuffed shells, but the first time she tried it, she didn’t realize that you have to boil the pasta shells first, before you stuff and bake them. She remembers thinking, “Why is it so hard to stuff these things?” Live and learn.

Nancy Meltzer, wife of my co-author, Mark Meltzer, is a terrific cook who makes it look easy, and she learned how to cook in her early twenties by watching Julia Child and Graham Kerr, the “Galloping Gourmet,” and by reading cookbooks. One of the most frustrating things about picking a recipe out of a book or following one from a TV show, Nancy says, is that recipes may call for a spice or ingredient that a beginning cook doesn’t have. It’s too expensive to get everything you might need all at once, so Nancy used to buy a new spice at the supermarket every week, and gradually built up her supply. Other dishes might involve a piece of cooking equipment. Making pesto, for example, takes about fifteen minutes. But you can’t do it unless you have a food processor, a blender, or a mortar and pestle.

Another thing people have trouble with at first, Nancy says, is cooking a meal so that everything is ready at the same time. If you’re serving roast chicken with mashed potatoes and asparagus, the meal doesn’t work unless you can serve all of the three foods when they’re cooked and hot. That’s just a matter of knowing how long it will take to cook each one, and doing a little math.

• Tips on Learning to Cook •

• Cooking classes aren’t cheap. A one-hour-long basic cooking class might cost $60 or more. But you’ll still save if a class or two can reduce the number of meals you eat in a restaurant.
  

• You can learn how to cook for less by watching cooking shows or reading cookbooks. Pick up a few cookbooks inexpensively at a used-book store.
  

* WINE *

It’s a great time to be a wine lover.

Winemakers have planted so many new acres of vineyards that there is a massive oversupply of wine, one which probably will last for years. And as basic economics dictates, when there is too much supply and demand remains steady, prices come down.

I don’t understand wine at all—to me, it tastes like medicine. But people who drink wine say it’s now possible to buy a very good bottle of wine for just $5 to $8. Wine connoisseurs used to say you couldn’t buy a good bottle of wine for less than $12. But because of this oversupply, there is very good product, from winemakers in the United States as well as Australia, Chile, and Argentina.

People assume that a $9 bottle of wine will be of higher quality than a $7 bottle, or a $15 bottle will be better than an $8 bottle. But that isn’t true. Either might be terrific.

Kim Curley, longtime producer of my radio show and now a wine distributor in Oregon, says people worry too much about the rules of wine drinking, when in fact there aren’t any. There are thousands of kinds of wines, and the best ones are the ones that you like. Instead of being intimidated by snobby wine etiquette, try different wines and find kinds that you enjoy.

Kim likes to invite a few friends over for informal wine parties. Each person brings a different bottle, usually priced from $8 to $15. They number each wine, and everybody tastes them to see which ones they like. So for the cost of one bottle, you get to sample six or eight wines. Do that a few times and you’ll have a great idea of what kinds of wines you prefer. Kim suggests keeping a “wine journal” you can use to note different wines, and wine characteristics, that you like.

For white wines, Kim likes drier, lighter varieties, such as Pinot Grigio, as opposed to sweeter varieties, like Riesling or Gewürztraminer. For red wine, she prefers Pinot Noir, which is the lightest kind of red wine in color and in flavor. At the opposite end of the reds is cabernet sauvignon, which is aged longer in wood barrels and has a stronger, more intense flavor. Merlot, a red wine many Americans love, has a hint of sweetness.

The Wall Street Journal Guide to Wine
is a great guide to the different flavors and characteristics of different varieties of wine. It’s a great read.

If you know anything about your own preferences in wine, use them as a guide to trying new wines, and don’t worry about price. Most people—70 percent—buy wine because of the look of the label, which is why you see a lot of wine labels with butterflies and beautiful vistas. That won’t tell you anything. Wine should be an experiment. If you like it, it’s a discovery. If you don’t, you’ve learned something about your tastes.

Where you buy wine is almost as important as what you buy. Buying wine at a discount outlet makes a huge difference. The warehouse clubs have struck fear into traditional wine stores, because they buy in such massive quantities and mark it up so little that it’s possible to get terrific deals.

The cost of wine is affected also by state tax. Florida, for example, charges an excise tax of $2.25 a gallon on wine, while California charges just 20 cents a gallon and New York charges only 19 cents a gallon. The U.S. median is 60 cents a gallon. Other high-tax states include Iowa ($1.75 a gallon), Alabama ($1.70 a gallon), Georgia ($1.51 a gallon), Virginia ($1.51 a gallon), and Hawaii ($1.36 a gallon). Low-tax states include Mississippi, which charges 35 cents a gallon in excise tax on wine, Maryland (40 cents), Kansas (30 cents), and Minnesota (30 cents). People who are really into wine buy it in a low-tax state and bring it home to their higher-tax state. State revenue departments frown on that, but they’re not going to bother you if the wine is for personal consumption.