Category — Food

Virginia and I recently went on our first extended vacation since we moved down to Corpus Christi, and I must say that it was wonderful. Since it is almost impossible to get anywhere quickly from south Texas, it’s always an adventure planning the flights.

We decided to reward ourselves (more on that later) by spending some extra time in New Orleans on our way to Seaside, FL. We ate very well, and all in all had a great time. While in Seaside, we decided one night to commence with the July 2008 Craig Family Financial Overhaul.

For a couple of months here and there we have been able to add considerably to our savings account, but we decided that our inconsistency was more than an annoyance, it was a problem. The ultimate problem, it turns out, is our nonchalance and indifference to the active management of our finances and the rationalization that comes with spending hard earned cash on wants.

I decided to dive a little further down the rabbit hole. I decided to build a spreadsheet that would track and label our spending according to category. I used the following categories to break down the expenditures:

• Insurance (Renter’s and Auto)
• Cable (TV, Internet)
• Car Maintenance
• Cell phone
• Credits (Could easily have been lumped into deposits category)
• Deposits
• Eating Out
• Entertainment (Renting movies, going to movies, going out)
• Gas
• Groceries
• Home Maintenance
• Miscellaneous (Cokes at the gas station, etc.)
• Personal (Clothes, gadgets, Woot! stuff, etc.)
• Rent
• Savings Deposit
• Tithing
• Travel
• Utilities

These may not work for everyone, but they fit for me. I have Bank of America, and they make it pretty easy to manage your stuff online, but I wanted to export to Excel – which is a great option.

Once I exported the file to Excel, I selected everything and sorted according to date so that I could compare month to month expenditures in each category.

Could you guess where we were spending most of our money?

It was on eating out. We spent 8% of our income on eating out. It may not sound like a lot but when compared to 2% spent on groceries; it’s sick! If we flip-flopped these categories we would save a ton of money, because groceries can feed you for a fraction of the price. If this is the case, why do I continue to eat out so often? Here are a few thoughts to consider:

• I feel like I have a refined sense of taste, or that I’m “kind of over that eat at home biz, I mean, I’m not in high school.” What a joke. I’m no connoisseur or anything of the sort, so why try to convince myself and others that I am?
• I think I deserve a nice meal for having a hard week. Or weekend. This fallacy is hard to overcome sometimes. It’s like going up to someone and saying, “Hey, I’m feeling underappreciated, so I’m going to burn this money.” Double-whammy.
• Feeling like breaking a weekend tradition of going to the sushi place will literally end my life. We go to the same sushi joint every Saturday night when we are in town, and drop like $80 bones. Don’t get me wrong, the sushi is the best I’ve ever had, (check out my post on SushiBar), but can I really afford to eat there so often? No! Rationalizing is the enemy.

Some practical solutions we’ve started implementing:

• Sit down Sunday afternoon and plan out the meals for the week. We try to pick meals that will carry over so that the leftovers won’t be as redundant. For example, this past week we made some homemade spaghetti sauce and added some ground beef. We got enough for spaghetti Sunday and Monday nights, and then used the rest of the ground beef for a hamburger grill out with friends Tuesday, and then got a $3.00 pre-made pizza crust which allowed us to use the rest of the spaghetti sauce.
• After the meals are written down, make a quick sweep of the fridge and see what you need. Before, we would get home and realize that we already had a bunch of the stuff we just bought. Make the item by item list of stuff after the sweep, and avoid generalizing – it only aids rationalization. For example, don’t write ‘Salad Stuff’, you’re just psychologically positioning yourself to say, “Yeah, those organic-fat-free-vitamin-infused-live-active-soy beans are what I was talking about,” write what you need. Lettuce mix, carrots, cucumber, celery, dressing.
• Only buy what’s on the list. This is hard to police on yourself, but easy when someone else is with you. That’s why we go to the grocery store together.

I’ll update you later on the success (or failure) of our attempt to narrow our margin. I’d love to hear some tips you all have on saving with respect to eating out, or any of the above-mentioned categories. Post some comments.

For the longest time, I have subconsciously associated generic names of businesses with mediocrity. I finally have a data-point to warrant a change in this paradigm.

As many of you know, beach towns produce good seafood. I have generally liked seafood for most of my life, but it’s been the tame kind (i.e. fried shrimp from Red Lobster, or the occasional gourmet crab cake). Living in Corpus Christi has opened my eyes (and tastebuds?) to seafood – through necessity. When it comes to food diversity in the Coastal Bend, we’re batting about 0.190. Therefore, seafood brings a new option for me, and one that I can pretty much trust will be a good one; as all of the fish is very fresh.

Enough with the background. I used to hate sushi. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t eat it. In high school, a group of guys started eating sushi each week on a certain night. I wasn’t in the group, but I joined them occasionally. It took some serious intestinal fortitude to hold down the new slimy substance that hadn’t found a special place on my pallette just yet. But, like most things, the more I ate, the more I came to appreciate raw fish.

Moving down here, I didn’t exactly think about the abundance of opportunity for sushi, but in our exploration of the finest in two-star dining, we were fortunate enough to stumble into the best place on Padre Island. Sushibar, is an awesome place to enjoy a relaxing night in Corpus Christi. The website allows you to view pre-recorded video of the restaurant and its patrons as they eat. I don’t know why. The people who work there are all really hip, and the place is furnished in a very modern asian way. Huge, high quality pictures of people eating sushi flank the walls, and several flat screen TVs show totally random closed-circuit broadcasts of their favorite abstract music videos and breakdancing competitions.

Onto the best part though. The sushi is the best I’ve ever had. I’ve had sushi in a lot of places, too. Places like Uchi in Austin, Two stick in Oxford, Little Tokyo in Jackson, Nagoya, Aka, Stix, etc. And none even come close. A typical meal…

Start off with some ninja noodle salad. Literally – pasta noodles, crab, tuna, squid, avacado, homemade srirachi and green onions, etc. It’s like a seafood pasta salad. Accompany that with seaweed salad. Very finely shredded seaweed, cucumbers, green onions, and sesame seeds, covered in a very light, sweet oil based dressing. We’d likely have some of the gyoza next. Flash fried pork dumplings garnished with eel sauce, and green onions. These are unbelievably good. The goto rolls for us are the “Flying Fish” and the “Geisha”, but we also usually get one or two of the special rolls of the night. Last night, it was blue marlin, avacado, krabstik, cream cheese, and green onions. Ridiculous. Occasionally we’ll have some fresh peppered yellowfin tuna, but their specialty lies in the Escolar (white tuna). Here’s a PDF of their menu.

If anyone comes to visit us down here, I’ll take you to eat here. If it’s not the best sushi you’ve had, it’s on me. Until next time.