Monday Q&A | Weird Schedules and Bread Ends
Every Monday, I answer a few of the questions that my readers send me. If you have a question you'd like me to answer in a future Q&A post, just leave me a comment here or email me (thefrugalgirl [at] gmail [dot] com) and put Q&A in the subject line. I look forward to hearing from you!
I don't have a formal question to start us off today, but several of you have written to ask advice about adjusting family life to an odd work schedule, so I thought I'd tackle that topic first.
This is something I've had a lot of experience with, unfortunately, as Mr. FG's worked almost every shift that one could come up with, aside from a true overnight shift (though a number of years ago, he had to be at work at 3:00 am, which meant he had to be up at 2:00, so it kind of felt overnight!) He's also worked rotating shifts at points, and that came with its own set of challenges.
Anyway, here are some things that have helped me cope.
1. Look for the good.
Though there are some shifts that have had precious little in the way of upsides (I'm lookin' at you, 3:00 am start time!), most of them have come with at least some sort of benefit. Though it's tempting to focus on all the downsides, I've found it to be much more helpful to steer my thoughts towards the happy stuff. For instance, when Mr. FG had a Tuesday-Saturday work schedule, we missed a lot of Saturday events, but having our "Saturday" on Monday was kind of nice because few other people were off, and so whenever we went to go do something, we didn't have to worry about crowds.
Even if a schedule has nothing good about it, one can always be thankful for the job itself. A job with a bad schedule is still generally preferable to no job.
2. Don't compare.
I am very, very familiar with the temptation to look with envy at other people who have more normal schedules and heaven knows I've given in to it more often than I should. But I can tell you that nothing good comes from comparison...it just bums you out and blinds you to the good of your own life. Focus on the good parts of your schedule, and remember that there are downsides to 9-5 shifts as well (like more time spent in traffic!).
3. Keep the rest of the family's schedule flexible.
Though I'm sure there are families who make two odd mandatory schedules work, it's a whole lot easier if you can deal with just one mandatory schedule. Because we homeschool and because I'm self-employed, we've been able to adjust our lives to Mr. FG's work hours. Without that flexibility, the amount of time we could spend together as a family would suffer significantly. For instance, with the Tuesday-Saturday schedule, we did school and I did my piano teaching Tuesday-Saturday so we could have Mondays off together.
Obviously, this isn't a solution for everyone, but if you can manage to minimize other mandatory schedules in your life, it does help a lot.
4. Think outside the box.
Sure, it would be ideal to have weekends off, schooldays from 8:00-2:00, family meals at 6:00 pm, dates on Friday or Saturday nights, and it would be lovely to sleep from, say, 10:00 pm to 6:00 am. But it doesn't HAVE to be that way.
If you can't have your family together for a meal at dinnertime, maybe you could have a big family breakfast. Dates with your spouse can happen over breakfast or lunch, and weekdays can work as well as weekends. If you homeschool, lessons can happen pretty much any time during the day. And even sleeping can be arranged differently. For instance, when Mr. FG worked that ridiculously early schedule, he'd come home and sleep and then get up to spend the evening with the kids and me.
Of course, a positive attitude can go a long way toward helping you to think of creative ways to make odd schedules work. Looking at it as a challenge rather than a sentence to misery helps. 😉
What do you do with your uneaten bread ends? I'm not a baker so I buy mine at the grocery store, but it never fails that we have 2 or 3 pieces of bread (on a good week!) left in the bottom of the bag, getting stale and falling apart. I tend to throw them out in the yard but I worry a bit about raccoons or other uninvited guests thinking that I'm inviting them! Do you toss them out to the birds?
-Becky
With six people in the house, we usually don't have a whole lot of trouble with this, but I'd recommend that you use your bread ends for bread crumbs. I've got a number of recipes that call for bread crumbs (like zuchinni patties), and I bet you do too. I just toast the bread, let it cool, and run it through my food processor. You can freeze the bread before or after you turn it into crumbs-whatever works for you.
Another idea is to cube the bread and use it to make bread stuffing (like you'd use to stuff a turkey or chicken). Again, you can freeze the ends as-is, or you can cube them and then freeze them. You could also make strata or french toast, both of which are really better with dried-out bread.
I'm sure my readers will have some other ideas for you as well. (Feel free to share tips for adjusting to odd work schedules too!)
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Stale bread can also be made into croutons - which are excellent in soup as well as on salad. There is also the Italian bread salad whose name escapes me at the moment.
My kids love my croutons as a snack.
When TV chef Alton Brown asked a French chef why they hold American cooks in such low esteem she looked right at him right and said "vous achetez des croí»tons." - You buy croutons.
I don't buy croutons most of the time. My wife occasionally picks up a bag at Aldi if we're going through them faster than we've got bread remnants because face it, I'm not making a whole loaf of bread just to have croutons. 😛
Re: The Bread Ends
In our house, we keep our bread in the freezer at all times, mostly because we go through phases of eating more or less bread and would end up wasting a lot of bread on the weeks we don't eat much. The up side to this, is that bread doesn't take long to thaw out, and is as fresh as the day you bought it/made it, and those ends will get eaten fresh.
We use our leftover bread ends for crumbs, like you say, but we also make bread pudding once in awhile for breakfast. That's a great way to use up stale bread.
I love croutons, but I also love bread pudding. That is excellent for using up all kinds of bread--even random cinnamon raisin bread!
As a German, I always make Semmelkní¶del with left-over sandwich bread:
250 g old bread (break it into pieces)
250 ml milk
2 eggs
1 chopped onion
butter to fry the onions in
salt, pepper, nutmeg
parsley if you want
Mix milk, eggs and seasonings and pour it over the bread pieces. Let it sit for 20 min. Meanwhile fry the onions in the butter and let it cool for a short time. Then mix the onions and the parsley into the bread mix and form into 8 dumplings. Steam the dumplings for 30min and serve with gravy.
It´s a wonderful and easy dish.
Oh and there are wonderful recipes for bread salads to make with stale bread.
The only time that I've had a bad work schedule was when I was an undergrad student working in a restaurant. I would work until 1 or 2am, starting at 5pm on weekdays and 12pm on weekends. Because it was just me, I could just sleep in the next day and it wasn't a big problem.
Last year though, my work hours were regular and my boyfriend (at the time) was delivering pizzas every single day of the week. He would start work at 5pm and work until about midnight and I wouldn't get home until 5:30pm and would be in bed by midnight. He also worked all day on the weekends and I had weekends off.
To be honest I struggled a lot with this arrangement because our hours were almost the exact opposite of each other, meaning we never got to spend time together. Plus he never knew his hours ahead of time, which really sucked for making plans. I did keep having to remind myself that a job was better than no job at all, and luckily after a few months he got another job with more regular hours.
That's so hard, isn't it? We had a bit of that when we were first married, and it's why I'm really grateful that since then, my schedule and the kids' schedules have been flexible, because then we can always make sure family/marriage time happens.
My BF works shifts, so we often have to be flexible about meals and such. When he works the weekend night shift, we make sure to do the regular weekend things during the week, so that we still get a feeling of having a weekend together!
If you do put bread scraps or any other kind of scraps out for our bird friends put them onto a table raised above the ground to discourage raccoons. A piece of wood attached to a cut off tree, something hung from a tree branch or attached to the trunk of a tree. And if you put it out in the morning it will most likely be gone by night time when the raccoons come out.
We need to encourage our natural bug predators the birds, so we are not encouraged to put down poisons to kill bugs.
One thing I learned from my husband's family to use bread ends is French Toast Bites (http://crystalscozykitchen.blogspot.com/2009/09/french-toast-bites.html). We love these - you can freeze the ends to make a large batch or just use what you have for a smaller batch. I typically toss in a few regular pieces of bread as well.
Kristen, I have been reading your blog for more than half a year now. And in all this time I still did not figure out what Mr. FG stands for. Are those your husbands initials or does it stand for Mr. frugal guy?
I think it is just "Mr. Frugal Girl".
Mr. Frugal Girl I believe. 🙂 I think it's just because Kristen is The Frugal Girl. He's the Mr. 😉
Yep, that's right! He gets my surname online. 😉
I work 9-5ish and my husband is home with our kids and does freelancing evening and weekends. When work is busy for both us we are basically doing opposite shifts. I get home after he and the kids have eaten dinner after which he goes to his office to work and I put the kids to bed, clean the kitchen, do lunches etc then go to bed. He stays up late and sleeps in while I get the kids ready in the morning. I wake him up when I take the two oldest to the bus stop in the morning and then we have breakfast together with the youngest when I get back from the bus stop. On those days I arrive to work a bit later but it's important to connect and it's the only time when we can in a reasonable and sane way. And then, things get a bit easier in the schedule and we do our catching up after the kids are in the bed. It's tough but I'm grateful we have the work and the kids have a parent with them.
My husband's and my schedules have never been far off, but our kind of work has. When we were first starting out, I had a job outside hiking and doing field work all day. He worked inside in a lab. On the weekends, he wanted to go hiking and I wanted to do things inside. It did take a bit of creative compromising to work out activities to do together that we would both enjoy.
Here is a link to the handout I gave out at a food demo I did in the local food pantry last fall on using bread. we give out lots of bread 🙂 http://www.craftivistinthekitchen.com/2012/09/using-bread.html
At the demo I handed out samples of strata--it is always a huge hit in the soup kitchen when I make it and it was a hit in the pantry, too 🙂 It's a great dish because not only can you use the bread, but you can use whatever you've got on hand!
Slather toasted bread ends with butter and jam. It is like a giant crouton only yummier.
Slather toasted bread ends with butter and jam. It is like a giant flat crouton only yummier.
I have a lifetime of experience living on an odd schedule. I used to run a music school - the kind that gives lessons to people in the after school and evening hours, so for years I worked a 2-10pm schedule - well, I was lucky to get out of there by ten, and if we had an event it could easily be 2am before I got home. I also had to work Saturdays for the first few years.
At first the schedule was really hard on me, but here are some tips I learned to make it easier. These are probably more applicable to a single person than someone raising a family.
1. Find a social group that keeps the same hours you do. After a few years at the music school, I developed a close group of musician friends who all kept the same hours I did. We knew all the restaurants in town whose kitchens were open until 2am, and were regulars. We had our parties and social gatherings on Sunday evenings, and having Monday off started to seem normal.
2. Don't let the world push you into trying to maintain a "normal" schedule. If you don't get home until midnight, there's really no way you can eat dinner, wind down and be in bed much before 2am. So don't even try to schedule morning meetings or appointments - and if people ask, just say something general like "I'm not available before noon." An 8am "breakfast meeting" might be convenient for some board member who can just fit it in on their way to the office, but for me it was like trying to conduct business in the middle of the night! I also learned to keep my phone off the hook until I got up in the "morning" and to place an explicit "No Solicitors" sign on my front door.
3. Go with what works. At first I really struggled with my schedule because I was trying to maintain "normal" ways of doing things. This generally meant that I was always trying to make myself go to bed ASAP, without any wind-down time. And then I was always trying to make myself get up early to do chores etc. before I had to go to work. I finally just gave up and decided it was OK to do laundry at midnight if that's what made sense for my schedule.
4. Take advantage of technology. I learned to love things like timers that would turn on my lights in the evening while I was away at work, or voice mail systems & 24 hour support lines that would let me deal with business type things in the middle of the night. I also learned to love the all night grocery stores!
Hope something there is helpful to someone!
I keep a bread bag in the freezer to collect the heels. When it's full, I make bread pudding. I just added two slices this morning and noted sadly that the bag is only half full. I can't wait until I can make some yummy, custardy, wonderful bread pudding.
Two thoughts...first, aside from your ideas, I love to make bread pudding from old bread. 🙂
Second, my husband works evenings (4pm-midnight). Thanks to your blog, I got the idea to eat our big meal at noon. With that one adjustment, we actually love this schedule because my husband ends up with more hours at home while our daughter is awake.
Odd schedules?! Welcome to the wonderful world of being married to a law enforcement officer! 12 hour shifts, 3 on/2 off, 2 on/3 off, for day shift four months in a row, THEN nights for four months, then days again. As soon as you adjust to one schedule, BAM. New schedule! Now, I don't have children (just DH and I) but I can say it helps to be fiercely independent, LOL. I value my alone time and secretly groan a little when DH is off for a weekend. I think the most important thing is to forget about everyone else's "normal" - our "normal" is to go shopping at Sam's once a month, and that's how it is, doggone it!
I make croutons too! They are so much better than the store bought ones. I cube the ends, add crushed garlic and olive oil. Then I bake on a cookie sheet in a 375 degree oven until brown. My kids love to snack on them and they make a salad really tasty.
My parents used to save the bread ends for us to feed the ducks at the park pond on the weekend! They also saved the bread bags to use for dog waste pickup, which I thought was fairly frugal.
Bread ends at our house get tossed into the freezer until there's 5-6 and then we make strata. Mix together eggs, veggies, and chopped up bread ends. Leave in refrigerator overnight or for later that day and viola - a delicious meal! I always do this for Christmas but it works on a weeknight, stove-top in an iron skillet (one dish dining!).
http://gogingham.com/2012/12/christmas-morning-strata/
Nobody mentioned meatloaf! I save heels until I have enough to make a double or triple recipe of meatloaf. I cook one & the other two go into the freezer. *The key to good meatloaf is to make barbeque sauce & put it on the last 10 minutes in the oven- none of that plain ketchup nonsense 🙂
I just wanted to put this out there too. I think that feeding bread to ducks and other wild life is REALLY BAD for them. Our city has launched an educational program on why not too, deformed wings from a constant diet is just one reason. And I have found only support for this from many, many good sources.
I toast our bread ends in the oven and make bread crumbs in the blender for meatloaf ect. I intend to make croutons when I feel brave enough!
A way back Italian recipe secret is to soak small pieces (1/2" cubes) in milk and them mix into your ground meat (along with the usual ingredients) for making meatballs, meatloaf or hamburger patties that will never be dry.
I second your recommendation to focus on the good points of shiftwork. My previous job switched to 12-hour shifts a few years ago, and I moaned and complained about the hours and working weekends. Both parents doing shiftwork was a childcare scheduling nightmare, so I recently switched to a "normal" job.
Now that I work 8-5 Monday-Friday I miss having at least one day off during the week to be able to make appointments, and I'm commuting in rush hour traffic both ways. Being able to be home for dinner and bedtime with the kids is worth it, though.
Bread crusts get made into croutons when I have the time, or put into the freezer for future meatloaf. And I don't process them into crumbs for meatloaf - my MIL's recipe says to run 5-6 heels under warm water, then "smoosh" between your fingers and mix into the meat. Perfectly moist meatloaf every single time.
I just eat the bread ends! There's nothing wrong with them. They are just fine for sandwiches or toast.