Don't Toss Those Onion Scraps

Like most people, whenever I cut an onion for cooking, I've always thrown away the ends and the dry, papery skin that surrounds the fleshy, edible layers. However, this is in fact a big mistake. Although you cannot eat onion skin, it has a lot of flavor in it. You can keep a bag in your fridge or freezer into which you can put onion skins and the drier outer layers of the onion that you peel off. From time to time you can boil them down to produce a flavorful broth for cooking. Just tonight, I boiled some onion skins along with the bones from some chicken I cooked and stripped for soups and stir-fry. I got a fair amount of broth that filled the kitchen with a mouth-watering scent.

It's now in a stainless steel bowl in the refrigerator, cooling enough that I can pour it into peanut butter jars and put it into the freezer until I need it for soup or other cooking projects. Although some people also put the ends of their onions into the bag for cooking stock, you can also start new onions with them. Especially if an onion is beginning to sprout, you can set the top and bottom in a shallow dish of water and they will produce roots. Once you have a solid root network, you can transfer them into potting soil to establish themselves, and then plant them in your garden. You can harvest them as green onions, or you can leave them to set bulbs. When you harvest them, save the ends and start the cycle all over again. You can also grow an endless supply of green onions from a single bunch of store-bought green onions. Instead of using them all the way down to the roots, cut only the green parts and save the small white bulb to which the roots attach. Set them in water, and they will soon produce fresh leaves. At this point you can either plant them in your garden or you can keep them in water and harvest an endless crop of hydroponic green onions. You can even do this if you live in an apartment, as long as you have a window at which you get decent sunlight and where you either have a window ledge or room for a small table.

The Siren Song of False Economy

When the money is tight, the first impulse is to cut back on non-essential spending. However, sometimes things that don't look essential will turn out to be far more expensive in the long run.

Two of the most common false economies are skimping on health care and on vehicle maintenance. However, there are other false economies. For instance, people buy cheaper cuts of meat and end up wasting them because they don't know how to cook them properly. This situation can become even more complicated when buying for a family, because some family members may flatly refuse to eat unfamiliar foods. Food that will only end up scraped from plate to garbage can is no savings.

Unfortunately, false economies are not always obvious, and often we realize them only in retrospect. For instance, there are times that it may look financially prudent to repair a vehicle, but in fact it just traps you in a vicious cycle of nickle-and-dime repairs to the point you can't afford to get rid of it. Trying to get by with inadequate or inappropriate equipment can be another ugly false economy.

The best thing we can do is try to learn from other people's mistakes so we don't repeat them.

Gearing Down, part 7 -- Personal Care

Personal care expenditures are one of those things where it may be easy or difficult to reduce when confronted with a sudden financial reverse. Obviously, if you are one of those people who routinely spends hundreds of dollars on hair styling, manicures, pedicures, facials, high-end makeup and the like, it may be painful to give them up, but it is possible to realize substantial savings by making the sacrifice. However, if you're already in the habit of using off-brand soap and shampoo from the dollar store and trim your own hair when it starts showing too many split ends, it's going to be difficult to squeeze much savings out of this area, for the simple reason that you don't want to fall into the trap of false economy.

Personal hygiene is an important part of physical health, and especially when you're in bad financial straits, you really don't want to become ill with preventable problems. So essentials such as soap, shampoo and toothpaste, things that enable you to maintain basic cleanliness, need to stay on the shopping list somehow.

It may be possible to make things last longer by changing your habits of use. For instance, do you usually run a bead of toothpaste the entire length of your toothbrush? Although advertisements usually show toothpaste being applied in this way, since it is more aesthetically pleasing (and helps sell more toothpaste), you generally can get an effective cleaning and decay protection with a lump about the size of a pea or kidney bean.

Also, it may be possible to get free samples here and there that will help you stretch your own supply. For instance, our dentist generally gives out free toothpaste, toothpaste and dental floss with every visit. If a family member regularly travels on business and stays in hotels, they may be able to bring you spare bars of hotel soap and bottles of hotel shampoo. (One trick if you're staying multiple nights at the same hotel is to hide the used soap and shampoo before leaving in the morning. The maids won't throw it away, so you can use the rest for your second or third stay, and will put out fresh soap and shampoo, which you can save and take with you at the end of your stay).

If things get really desperate, some food pantries and other charitable organizations also give away personal hygiene items. So there is never any reason that you should have to go without the fundamental basics of personal hygiene, even if you have to give up some of the creature comforts of personal care that you've been accustomed to. It may mean needing to know where and how to ask and require the humility to be willing to ask, but there is always a way to make sure that you are clean and presentable.

And So It Begins...

We now have our Ebola Patient Zero in the United States. Already we are beginning to see panic on social media sites, especially among people who have seen the current Administration fumble so many important things in recent days. Can a CDC that's mislabeled vials of viable anthrax spores and sent them to non-secure facilities be relied upon to handle one of the world's most infectious diseases (requiring as few as ten virus particles per exposure to result in the patient coming down with it)? Can an Administration that's been caught lying and covering up on other important things be trusted to tell the truth about the preparedness of the nation's medical system for this threat?

Particularly given the horrific nature of Ebola (in its end stage, the victim's tissues literally turn to mush and disintegrate), there's an atavistic urge to flee, to swathe ourselves in bubble wrap, to shut out the world and hope to wait it out until the whole mess blows over. Obviously it's not practical to shut ourselves away indefinitely from the outside world, so what can we do to protect ourselves?

First, get the facts. Fear thrives on misinformation, and half-knowledge often leads the imagination to paint things in far darker colors than the actual situation. If you don't trust the CDC or other US government agencies to provide accurate, factual information, seek out the websites of other countries' government health agencies, of privately run hospitals such as the Mayo Clinic, and of international health groups such as Doctors Without Borders.

Second, take basic sanitary precautions and be rigorous about them. Wash your hands regularly, particularly after using the bathroom and before eating.

Third, make basic preparations for a disruption in basic services. If things were to prove worse than anticipated, it is possible that the United States could experience a general quarantine period similar to the one in Tom Clancey's Executive Orders in which nobody would be allowed to leave their immediate area. Most grocery stores have only a day's supply of basic goods, and even the local warehouses have only a few days' supply -- a problem we see whenever a hurricane or winter storm disrupts the transportation of goods into the area.



Preparing means first knowing what you need. Food is an obvious one, but also think about the toiletries and cleaning supplies you and your family use in a week. Things can get very nasty, very fast if you run out of toilet paper or dishwashing soap. Also, make sure to lay in an adequate supply of water for your family. Municipal water supplies may be interrupted or contaminated in an emergency, and you don't want to be in a situation where desperate thirst would drive you to drink from contaminated sources. Also, think about any medicines you or family members may need. Can you make sure that you'll have an adequate supply on hand if you can't get to the pharmacy for days or weeks?

The key think is don't panic, but be prepared.

It's Not So Simple Any More

Although we can look at a lot of the skills our grandparents and great-grandparents used to survive the Great Depression in order to guide us through the current mess, some things have changed radically. This was brought home to me as I was preparing a set of articles on identity theft for a website on money and credit I am working on.

Back in the 1930's, people generally knew one another, and there was little need for formal identification documents. A person could easily go for weeks or even months without needing to produce one. Most Americans of the time found loathsome the very idea of having to routinely carry documents proving who you were -- it belonged in nasty dictatorships Over There, not the land of the free and the home of the brave.

How things have changed since then. Not only do we have to regularly prove who we are, but our very identity is continually susceptible to being misused to defraud others, leaving us vulnerable to being punished for what someone else did with our name. We have to constantly think about what everything we say and do reveals about our private information, something unthinkable in the 1930's. (If people worried about what they said and did, it was to keep from being accused of sexual immorality or other reputation-damaging activities, not because someone else would take their information and use it to create a paper persona).

Even as late as the 1980's, when I was first beginning to submit stories to publishers, it was considered the normal thing to do to include one's Social Security number on one's manuscript. This enabled the business office to send a check for an accepted story without having to go through the trouble of asking for the SSN so that the 1099 could be filled out for the IRS. But by the mid-90's, I remember being scolded that I was putting myself in danger by doing so, which somewhat bewildered me because other Authoritative Voices were instructing me to put it there.

Although some things do stay the same, there are some things that change, so we need to be aware and avoid getting tripped up by them.

Job Seeker Beware

With job security becoming nearly non-existent, even at long-established firms, even people that still have jobs are thinking about picking up an additional job on a part-time basis. But in today's busy lives, fitting a second job into one's schedule may well seem like a monumental task.

And then you see that ad, maybe in the newspaper, maybe on a website, touting how you can make big bucks working at home in your spare time. It doesn't look like an obvious fraud -- there's actual work to do, maybe assembling crafts or stuffing envelopes. And it would be so much easier to have something you can pick up and put down at need, rather than having to constantly juggle two regular jobs, each of which acts as though it were your only obligation in life.

But be very careful, particularly if you are being asked to send money for information or to purchase supplies. Unfortunately, a large number of these "job opportunities" are in fact scams which prey on unsuspecting or desperate people, particularly those who have difficulties working regular face-to-face jobs: people with disabilities, full-time parents, etc.

There was a time when working at home was quite common. In the Gilded Age and the early decades of the Twentieth Century, whole tenements were filled with families busily assembling paper flowers, hand-rolling cigars, or participating in other cottage industries. Jobbers would come around on a regular basis to pick up finished products and drop off fresh supplies along with payments for previous work done.

However, during the Progressive Era heightened concern about product safety shifted most of this labor to factories where the workers could be supervised to ensure the quality the merchandise being sold. Over subsequent decades, most of this hand work has been outsourced to countries such as China and Thailand where labor is so cheap that a company that actually paid the prices promised in those "assemble crafts at home" ads could not compete.

Instead, they make money off the marks they sucker into "working" for them, generally by requiring them to buy overpriced equipment (for instance, a sewing machine for twice or three times what one could get it at a regular retail store) and materials. In addition, they will often refuse to pay for the finished product on the grounds that it does not meet their "quality standards," although these are often vague and there is no transparency on the inspection process. Unfortunately, many people will buy two or three more sets of supplies in hopes of meeting the quality standards if they just try harder, never suspecting that the standards are in fact an ever-moving target to which they can never catch up.

Similarly, envelope stuffing at home was once a thriving cottage industry, with smaller companies finding it cheaper to send mailings out to contractors rather than deal with the payroll issues of actually hiring the people to do it in-house. However, the invention of the modern envelope-stuffing machine in the latter part of the twentieth century destroyed this line of work as a legitimate work opportunity.

Instead, the modern "envelope stuffing" scam is little better than a pyramid scheme. The marks who respond to the ad are given a set of "instructions" telling them how to buy mailing lists and send people a letter offering them fabulous income for stuffing envelopes, and to send the same instructions to the people who fall for it in turn and send their money.

Unfortunately, these days there are very few legitimate work at home jobs save those we make ourselves. That is, creating a legitimate small business to sell an actual product or service on our own.

Tips for Saving Food

With prices rising and food budgets shrinking, it's always frustrating to have something go stale or otherwise spoil before it's used up. Here are some tips for avoiding needless waste of perfectly good food:

If you get a whole head of iceberg lettuce, immediately unwrap it and rinse it under cold running water. Then wrap it in paper towel and put it in a zipper bag in your refrigerator. If the stem starts to show rust (reddish spoiling), immediately trim it back and remove any leaves that show rust.

If a loaf of bread starts to go stale on you, slip a piece of fresh celery into the bag and tie it back up. The moisture will restore the flavor of the bread.

If you burn gravy when you are making it, transfer it to a clean pan and continue cooking. Add sugar by the pinch to cover the burned taste.

To keep cookies fresh, crumple a little tissue paper in the bottom of your cookie jar.

Some of these ideas are taken from the March 2009 SHARE Food Peoria newsletter.

Baby Steps

Making a major lifestyle change can be overwhelming, particularly if it affects multiple areas of your life. How can you possibly manage to change everything at once?

The answer is, you don't. Whenever possible, take one thing at a time. Find the most critical aspect of your life that needs to be changed and tackle it first. Perhaps it's getting a budget together so you know what your financial obligations are and where your money is going. Perhaps it's something even more basic like making sure that you have a reliable source of food in spite of a loss of income. But make sure to identify that one thing and focus on it until you at least have a strategy for dealing with it. Then move on to the next most critical thing, and continue the process until you have finished your lifestyle overhaul.

This process of breaking a major project down into manageable chunks goes under several other names: divide and conquer, the salami tactic, bird by bird. But the principle is always the same -- to reduce an overwhelming task into a number of smaller tasks that will actually feel doable.

Remembering to Learn from the Past

When I was young, I would often listen to my grandmother talk about surviving the Great Depression as a young farm wife in America's heartland. Sometimes the stories were funny, sometimes they were heartbreaking, but they were always a window onto another time.

After my grandmother passed away in 1995, I remarked to one of my history professors at Illinois State University that my greatest regret was that I'd never thought to record any of those stories for posterity. So what if she was just a farm wife, just one of many -- she'd still lived through a significant and tumultuous period of American history, and her experiences would help historians understand what it meant to the ordinary Joes and Janes who built this country and made it strong.

More recently, I was talking with some friends about the current economic crisis, and one of them made a comment that really struck a note with me. He said that there was no real reason to be so afraid of a new depression, since every one of us is here because our parents or grandparents survived the Great Depression.

But even as I agreed and talked about my own grandmother's experiences, I realized that a lot of this knowledge has been lost. How many of us still know those skills that allowed her to get her family through those hard times? How many young people know how to darn a sock, or pull some leftovers together with a few potatoes or a cabbage for a hearty meal?

But if some of us still remember, all of us can learn from those reminiscences and recover the skills we need to survive.