#Penny pinching packrat full#

But since I read a lot of fashion magazines and blogs, it’s more often really obvious advice like:Īctually like consider whether you really need something before you buy it.Īnd my personal favorite: Go shopping in your closet. Occasionally, it’s disgusting Depression era suggestions like boiling your dental floss and then reusing it. With the current economic crisis, I have been reading a lot of “helpful” advice on penny-pinching. More problematic is the fact that my mother actually thought I had tried to poison her and my grandmother. concerned,' she said.Īnd it turns out that, according to the nice lady at Poison Control, the olive oil probably wouldn't have killed us, although it's always possible that if it was old enough, some bacteria might have grown in it, but it would have only given us garden variety food poisoning and not actually killed us. 'But did you feel sick after you ate the food?' I asked. They're a much smaller operation now, but the woman who answered the phone was so nice, and it turns out they're located just up the road.'įascinating. You would think most people would just look stuff up on the internet these days,' I said. 'Well, I looked them up and it turns out they're still in business,' she said, sounding delighted. Yuk jingle starts running through my head and I try my best not to curl up on the floor in the fetal position. OF COURSE, I remember the Poison Control hotline. 'Do you remember the Poison Control hotline?' 'So, I hope you don't mind, but I was a little worried about the olive oil,' she said. She did manage to choke the dinner down, and it wasn't terrible (although a bit overcooked, which was totally not my fault.)Ī few days later, she called to thank me for cooking. 'If you say so,' she said, which is of course what people say when they don't believe you. 'It doesn't have an expiration date on the bottle. 'You used the olive oil in that cabinet?' she said, in a tone that implied I had taken the olive oil off a public bathroom floor. The only ingredient I got from her kitchen was a tablespoon of olive oil. She tried to micromanage the whole endeavor, and she forced me to overcook the chicken because she was convinced it wasn't going to be done enough not to give us salmonella. I brought all the ingredients to her kitchen and got to work.

My mother's dietary restrictions (she's pretty much only allowed to eat dew off petals**) mean that there are only two or three dinner options available, and I was bored with all of them, so I figured that I could easily cook something within her restrictions. A few weeks ago, I offered to cook dinner for my mother and grandmother. (This may have something to do with my father, who was pretty much the opposite of my mother and used to do things like feed me raw ground beef.*)Īnyway, fast forward many years. Growing up in that sort of atmosphere, you can either become completely crazy and avoid anything potentially dangerous, or you can go in the opposite direction and not worry much about anything. That thought apparently never occurred to my mother. Although I was only six or seven, I remember thinking that something made for kids probably wasn't toxic. Then she got right on the line to Poison Control. First, she washed my mouth out with soap (I am perhaps the only child in history who has had her mouth washed out with soap for reasons other than bad language). Once I inadvertently colored my tongue with a magic marker (long story). While shopping, she ruthlessly examined all canned goods for any sign of a dent (botulism kills!), and she had the Poison Control hotline on speed dial. I was raised by a mother who was deathly afraid of germs, food toxins, and generally any kind of bad thing one might accidentally ingest.

#Penny pinching packrat full#

To really get the full impact of the story I'm about to tell you, you have to know a little about my childhood.