Furlough Friday: Nothing

Welcome young and old the the final of our 10-part bi-weekly money-saving series, Furlough Friday. Hopefully you've learned a little about eating out on a budget this summer. Hopefully you've also learned to laugh a little, even if times are tough. Now, live from Pennsylvania ... it's Furlough Friday!

Today is the final installment of Furlough Friday, and I'm going to change things up a bit. There will be no potshots at the financial industry. No self-depreciating humor. No food, actually.

That's right, nothing is the featured meal of the final Furlough Friday. Because if times are really tough for you, you might be eating nothing.

Maybe it's a few days without food because you're laid off and trying to save enough to make a house payment. Maybe it's a suddenly closed soup kitchen for someone who has no home left. Either way, life is horrible when you have nothing at all to eat.

Have you ever gone a day without eating anything? A few years ago I did to see what it's like. The hunger doesn't stay in your stomach. Every limb on your body has this throbbing yearning for food by the end of the day, weakening you.

Imagine feeling like that day after day.

Far too many people in the world have too little to eat. Keep that in mind if you have a job, or have been laid off and get one. A donation to the local food bank, even if it's just a few cans of Spam, is one of the most simply altruistic things you can do.

It doesn't devolve into the politics of "where's my money going." If you give someone food, they have it to eat. Organizations aren't out there spending food on lobbying or salaries.

Whether or not you've had a bad hunger in your belly because of job troubles, remember that everyone should have something to eat, and try to help people who are down on their luck with a meal.

Furlough Friday: Recycling Taco Bell's Grilled Chicken Burrito

Welcome all to Furlough Friday, the biweekly money saving sensation. Today's edition is the second to last in the summer series, so enjoy! Live from Pennsylvania ... it's Furlough Friday!

Here at Furlough Friday we're all about stretching your money as far as it can go. We're also about stretching every other resource as far as it can go. In light of that, it's time for a re-review of Taco Bell's Grilled Chicken Burrito.

You may recall June's review of the burrito and its avocado ranch sauce. The burrito I ate, which was made with plain white rice, snatched four sporks out of five. With some research I've learned Grilled Chicken Burritos typically have Taco Bell's tried-and-true seasoned rice, so it seems I rated a one-off.

On my return visit I was served a normal Grilled Chicken Burrito complete with avocado ranch sauce, some chicken strips and the seasoned rice. And it costs just 89 cents, making it perfect for Furlough Friday and saving me the extra dollar I would have had to spend reviewing another item for this feature. (Whew!)

Sadly, the burrito is just not as good with seasoned rice. The extra flavoring covers up the avocado ranch sauce, which only adds a trace of zest in this iteration. It also makes the burrito less unique among Taco Bell's lineup -- it starts to blend in to the tune of three sporks out of five.

It blends in because The Bell recombines a bunch of its ingredients to form seemingly new products. You get the same rice in all burritos, and the beans in some burritos are the same as the ones on your nachos.

And so the re-usal goes on and on, which brings us back to the point of this Furlough Friday: recycling. Because when you're out of work, you have to use everything you can as many ways as you can.

Furlough Friday: McDonald's Dollar Drinks

Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, eaters and unemployed: It's time for Furlough Friday, the biweekly feature that keeps you at the restaurant, ballin' for a buck or less. Live from Pennsylvania, it's Furlough Friday!

Tap water sure can get boring.

When you're trying to save money drinking good old city water is a sure way to keep your wallet padded. But all that H2O can leave your tongue screaming for a little more liquid flavor every once in awhile.

Enter a McDonald's promotion you may have heard about: The dollar drinks. This summer the golden arches is letting you pick up a drink of any size for just $1. (I've heard reports this deal varies from restaurant to restaurant and sometimes limits you to iced tea or imposes other such sanctions, but I've yet to find a franchise that actually restricts it.)

It's a deal that's good enough to force me to string posts on McDonald's back-to-back. Actually, it's going a step further and making me post consecutively on McDonald's drinks. For a food critic who prides himself on sampling a wide variety of the vast fast food world, this is a big deal.

It would be a bigger deal if McDonald's had a more interesting drink selection. They have your typical Coca-Cola sodas along with some Powerade and the bane of my existence, Light Lemonade. But I can't complain too much when I'm getting to fill a cup the size of my head with something other than water for $1.

And best of all, this promotion isn't limited to Mondays. So you can bookend your week with McDonald's deals. Free mocha on Monday, dollar drinks on Friday.

Mondays and Fridays that mean something -- it's enough to make you think you're working!

Furlough Friday: Dig your way out with plastic

Fear not, all ye without optimal work situations. Furlough Friday returns with money saving tips for the most depraved of the jobless. Life from Pennsylvania ... it's Furlough Friday!

As worklessness drags on and bills pile up, trips to the pawn shop and scrapyard can take a bite out of the best-stocked home. Goodbye fine china, so long artwork and farewell, silverware.

The only problem is that eating a steaming bowl of furlough-fine 50-cent macaroni and cheese with your hands is a painful, sloppy proposition. Even if you were forced to sell every last salad fork, you need some sort of utensil for eating. And if you're chronically unable to use chopsticks like me, whittling down some twigs from the front yard isn't going to help much.

Fortunately fast food restaurants stock plastic silverware. When you get a Toffee Coffee Twisted Frosty on your furlough day, make sure to keep the frosty spoon. Slipping an extra plastic fork from the tray whenever possible isn't a bad idea either. Pretty soon you can build up an impressive stock of plastic silverware for home use, wash, and reuse.

Try not to think about the strange chemicals from the plastic seeping out after a few washes. The way things are going, we might not have enough cash to feed ourselves, so we won't be living long enough to worry about poking our livers over the edge with little synthetic fork prongs.

There are also nice packages of plastic silverware that claim to be "dishwasher safe." I bought one the other day while in a pinch for utensils. Dishwasher capability wasn't actually one of my prerequisites when buying the pack, but I take every bonus I can find right now.

Those of you who are too honest to pocket an extra spork from Taco Bell might want to take the store-bough plastic silverware route. A box of 24 spoons cost 69 cents and could last me years. Sure, they sometimes break when digging in the bottom of a big peanut butter jar, but nothing's perfect. They're a lot more useful than the plastic in my wallet right now.

Plastic silverware is the only way to eat while laid off. It's cheap, reusable, and has that barely-made-my-mortgage feel that's so chic these days.

Plus, it serves as a visual reminder that you weren't born with a silver spoon in your mouth.

Furlough Friday: Free chocolate

It's time again for the jobless sensation that's sweeping the nation, offering money-saving tips for the out of work and low on luck. Live from Pennsylvania, it's Furlough Friday!

Chocolate can pick you up.

No matter whether you have a broken leg, totaled car or jobless day ahead of you, sweet cocoa butter will make it all feel better for a few minutes. The age-old remedy applied by grandmothers everywhere is truly useful if you're sitting at home, wishing you had some money to buy paint so you can watch it dry, and waiting for work.

The problem is that if you don't have money for paint, you might not have money for chocolate, either. Fear not, my cash-strapped foodies! Mars has you covered.

They have this little marketing campaign going on called The Real Chocolate Relief Act. It's a fun play off the bazillion-dollar American Recovery and Reinvestment Act the U.S. government passed earlier this year that gives you a free chocolate bar. (Don't panic, fiscal conservatives. I don't think this is funded by the stimulus, just inspired by it.)


Milky Way, Twix, M&M's -- they're all at your fingertips once you go to RealChocolate.com fill out a mailing address and wait a week or two for a coupon to arrive in the mail. You can do this every Friday through September, as long as you're one of the first 250,000 people to get there. I got a coupon, and I can tell you that free chocolate just tastes sweeter.

You do have to wait a little while to get your coupons, so this isn't a remedy for immediate food requirements. It would be prudent to plan in advance for chocolate-needing funks and pre-order a coupon, though. I also recommend ordering if you think your job is on thin ice. You'll need the free food as a pick-me-up.

Lest I sound like an advertisement for M&M's, let me recommend scouring life for giveaways, freebies and discounts during your forced time off from work. Two days ago I managed to get up to $14 off of two tickets to see the new "Transformers" movie from Kmart. There must be other deals like that out there!

If you don't have Internet access, this will be a harder task. But if you don't have Internet access you probably aren't reading this, either. (Shame on you!) So head down to the library and look for some deals!

Maybe you'll even find a deal for free paint so you can slap it on the wall and stare at it as it dries while you eat your free 3 Musketeers. Now that's Furlough Friday excitement!

Furlough Friday: Wendy's Toffee Coffee Twisted Frosty

Once again it's time for the biweekly feature designed especially for all of you who've been unceremoniously dumped from the working world. Live from Pennsylvania ... it's Furlough Friday!

As the sweltering summer months roll in and your unemployment makes air conditioning too expensive to fund, ice cream breaks can be all that separate a spirited but hopeless job hunt coordinated from your parent's sweltering second floor from going completely insane.

This biweek I recommend trying Wendy's Coffee Toffee Twisted Frosty. That is, if you can muster up the courage to try to spit out this tongue twister to the person behind the counter. Don't bother with the drive-through -- the poor audio quality means drive-through folks can't get "cheeseburger with no pickles" right, so Coffee Toffee Twisted Frosty will no doubt turn into some sort of salad by the time you cruise around to the next window.


Coffee Toffee Twisted Frostys are pretty robust. Toffee. Is. Everywhere. And not in small chiclets. We're talking enormous chunks of flavor.

Plus the soquid (remember those commercials?) doesn't skimp on the coffee flavor. It's not packed into every bite, as it seems Wendy's uses the base chocolate Frosty and squirts coffee in before a halfhearted attempt at blending. But coffee comes out in well over half the bites, and it builds into a strong taste by the end of the Frosty.

All the flavors combine into a symphony of rich coffee, sweet toffee and milky chocolaty Frosty. It sounds like it should be too much, yet somehow the wacky combination works.

It works for a price, though. The smallest one costs $2.49.

Hold your outrage. I can hear your angry questions now.

"How can he review something over 99 cents on Furlough Friday?"

"Couldn't he find anything to fit Furlough Friday's 99 cent criteria?"

"Is he such a dunderhead that he forgot his own rules for Furlough Friday? Everything is supposed to cost 99 cents or less!"

The Toffee Coffee Twisted Frosty is such a perfect furlough food that I worked out a way to get one for 99 cents. You just have to bring two friends and split a small. Then the three of you will only pay 87 cents each for a third of the cup.

It's perfect for Furlough Friday because you get to spend hours practicing the name before ordering one. That will fill up those long hours not holding your breath for those elusive phone calls to set up job interviews.

And when you bring friends, you can sit around and discuss the name while you eat it. As you get tongue tied, you'll no doubt forget about the fact that you don't have jobs because the fools running Wall Street and overseeing the United States' financial policy forgot to bring along a tenth grade understanding of economics.

Furlough Friday: Fire up the grill!

After a hiccup in its biweekly schedule, Furlough Friday is back! So come ye unemployed and laid off, come job seekers and unwilling early retirees. We have the tips you need to bite down on a budget. Live from Pennsylvania … it’s Furlough Friday!

Wireless Internet works in mysterious ways. Mine, for instance, decided to prevent me from accessing all Google services. Anything Google owns – Gmail, YouTube, Blogger – I get an error message when trying to access it. Other Web sites are fine. It’s just Google.

You can no doubt see how being unable to access Blogger can put a hiccup in blogging. You can also no doubt see how hard it could be to fix a problem with Google while being unable to access Google. Fortunately I've managed to determine it’s a problem with the D-Link router that threads the Web through the air in my home, and learned to circumvent the problem with good old-fashioned CAT-5 until a more permanent fix can be discovered.

But enough excuses. You came for Furlough Friday, and Furlough Friday you shall have!

With summer arriving in full force, the gray days of winter are gone. But the hopelessness you used to blame on those overcast days are still around, even when the sun shines. So it goes when you have job problems.

There’s nothing better to cheer you up in the summer than a cookout, though. A little meat you salvaged from the “Must Sell By Today!” section of the grocery store, some veggies you borrowed from your neighbor’s garden, and you’re in business. Throw in some lemonade you snatched from the little girls’ stand down the street when they weren’t looking, and you’re in business! (Figuratively, not literally. I wouldn't call this a job.)

Still, all of that is worthless if you spend lots of money fueling the fire. Don’t let your dwindling reserve of dollar bills go up in smoke by spending a bundle on store-bought charcoal.

No, scout local streams for driftwood. Check for late spring clean-up days, which will let you salvage unwanted wood furniture.

Kindling to start your fire should be no problem. That notice of termination from your boss should be a good start, as should the stubs from your unemployment checks. And if you’re a recent college graduate, the program from your commencement ceremony is worth a lot more going up in smoke than it is in some scrapbook

And judging from the job market for a bunch of recent college grads, (Did you really spend four years in school to get an unpaid internship? That's exploitation.) your diploma might be worth more in the middle of a barbecue pit than on your resume.

Furlough Friday: Reese's Dark

Since forced days off can make long weekends that are perfect for traveling, Furlough Friday is taking to the road this week. A trip to Syracuse resulted in a quick perusal of the candy aisle in a gas station and a startling revelation. So without further ado, live from New York, it's Furlough Friday!


Nothing is darker than a day spent unemployed. When you're unsuccessfully looking for work the sun seems to shine a little less and the clouds seem to swoop in faster. Crows take on a deeper shade of black and always seem to perch nearby.

Comfort food is pretty important during those desperate hours. Unhealthy eating makes frustrations disappear for a moment -- only a moment since they end up bloating your body, thereby contributing to frustrations. But I'm not here to tell you how to break out of a slump. I'm here to tell you how to dull the pain of tough times.

You need dark comfort food to match dark times. Chocolate with a sense of the gallows. M&M's won't do with their cheerful colors. Neither will Pop Rocks with their bubbly personality.

Reese's seems to know this. They offer their classic peanut butter cup in a dark variety.

It's the same Reese's peanut butter wrapped in the same chocolate shape. The only difference is the kind of chocolate. Gone is that chipper, sweet milk chocolate, replaced by the bitter undertones of dark chocolate.

You'll get that burst of comfort from the flavor, too. Dark chocolate works even better than milk chocolate in peanut butter cups. The flavor is more complex and holds the tongue's interest far longer.

If you can spend a longer time on each peanut butter cup, maybe you won't have to eat as many, which will lead to less weight gain and ... oh, who am I kidding? While the price varies, you should be able to find packs of these things for around 80 cents.

Reese's Dark won't mean anyone eats any less. It just means we can enjoy deeper flavors while we stuff our face and stare all day at the crows perched outside the window.

Furlough Friday: Triple Layer Nachos

Welcome back to the biweekly feature for those of you seeking to hand out resumes but not cash! Live from Pennsylvania, it's Furlough Friday!

Seventy-nine cents. That's smaller than pocket change. It's under-one-cushion-of-the-couch change. It's one cupholder-in-the-car-as-I-approach-the-toll-booth change.

I can't even buy a Twix at work without adding six pennies to 79 cents. (On Furlough Friday I can't buy a Twix at work at all, actually. Or anything at work, for that matter.) In spite of all that, Taco Bell is offering a generous portion of nachos for your three quarters and four pennies.

By "generous" I mean generous considering the price. The CD-sized heap of nachos won't last you through the first five minutes of, say, the baseball game you smuggled them into with a fake pregnant belly, but they will take the edge off your hunger.

And when you're furloughed or unemployed or seeking full-time employment instead of your current part-time work, taking the edge off your hunger is all you really hope for. Hunger never really goes away, even when you just ate a carton of ice cream while staring hopelessly at "General Hospital" in the middle of the afternoon, does it?

So take your stack of nachos that Taco Bell layered with refried beans, cheese and hot sauce and appreciate this novel fact: Hot sauce has apparently become a nacho layer in our stumbling employment market. Meaning you can treat it as a side dish.

In other words 79 cent Triple Layer Nachos legitimize a dinner consisting of lettuce and hot sauce. Perfect for Furlough Friday or staying out of a Hooverville.

Furlough Friday: Cadbury Creme Egg

Welcome to the first Furlough Friday! As a service to all of you who may be seeking employment and as a nod to my colleagues (and to myself) who are struggling through coerced unpaid days off the job, I'm introducing Furlough Fridays as a way to check out the cheapest food you can find. You won't find anything over a dollar featured here on Furlough Friday. So ... Live from Pennsylvania, it's Furlough Friday!


With Easter just two days away, those of us reclined on the couch watching Billy Mays sell Mighty Putty from under a thin layer of Cheeto dust should be abandoning the typical non-working man diet of boxed macaroni and cheese and Jell-O for something a little more seasonable. That will be easier after the holiday when all the Easter candy is on sale.

Waiting for Monday doesn't do our spirits much good right now, though, so our choices are limited if we want to keep to a budget of a buck. There's the Reese's Peanut Butter Egg,. but that's too close to a peanut butter cup to truly embody a holiday spirit. There are marshmallow Peeps, but some of us are a bit sick of them after staging a massive Peep photo shoot and subsequently eating the participants.

So how about the famous Cadbury Creme Egg? You can typically pick one up for about 80 cents, and it's packed with milk chocolate shell goodness and creamy yolk-colored filling. The egg shrunk a couple of tenths of a gram from past years, yet its still an Easter bargain. The bigger ones were a recipe for a stomach ache anyway.

Why not use the Cadbury Creme Egg as a replacement for that retirement nest egg you aren't accumulating because you're spending the day unemployed? A batch of Cadbury Eggs, as cheap as they are, are probably worth more than your stock portfolio at this point anyway. Plus, even if they do cause a little indigestion, it will pale in comparison to how sick you feel as you take the penalty and withdraw funds early from your 401(k).

Forget investment bankers! Trust the Cadbury Bunny.