on a relationship with food

Sinful.  Divine.  Guilt-inducing.  Orgasmic.  Evil.  Blissful.  Shameful.  Indulgent.

Ragen recently pointed out that Trader Joe's is now offering 'reduced guilt' crackers.  Now, I'm not saying I don't get it; like everyone I'm acclimated to the societal encouragement and pressure to feel Super Duper Strongly about food.  I'm female, so there's this whole nearly-religious expected relationship with chocolate.  I'm supposed to feel repentant and guilty for eating something greasy/starchy/salty/sugary/whatever kind of food is being demonized right now.  People around me frequently describe something they're eating as sinfully delicious, but So Bad For Me!  I ask them why, and usually get a blank stare.  They expect me to go along with the social norm of hating on food while paradoxically loving on it, and when I don't I'm sure it's confusing.

It's complicated and it's high-pressure and I don't like it.  

It's not that I don't get the joke or the reference.  Presumably these crackers have less salt or oil or more whole grain or something.  Whatever.  The problem is that it's projecting this emotional value judgement onto a damn cracker.

I like food.  Food gives my body the nutrients it needs to do awesome things like walk around and breathe and dance and feel really good in a hot bath.  It gets me around and it's how I'm typing these words right now.  My body is a pretty neat contraption.  And I do get enjoyment from food!  I adore good home-cooked meals, and have a rather disproportionate love for pickled beets.  When Husband and I have date nights, it usually involves good restaurants or tasty food cooked outside when camping.

So I do have a relationship with food.  I just don't like it being (a) defined by marketing companies, and (b) having an assumed love-hate relationship by everyone around me.  For one thing, advertising people have an express mission to make me feel unhappy in order to extort me for money.  I wholeheartedly resist that paradigm, so damned if I'm going to buy that one.  Then there's this cultural expectation that my relationship with food must be this emotionally fraught rollercoaster, and I choose to opt out of that one too.  It is not your job to tell me what to eat, nor to corner me into condoning your value judgements about or fetishizing of your own eating.  I am simply an organism who needs to eat in order to function, and who additionally enjoys preparing and consuming a variety of tasty kinds of food.

Now.  This is not to say that all food is good at all times.  Sometimes I eat too much and then feel icky and hurty.  Sometimes I just want something light like a salad.  I do have a habit of researching nutrition, and feel ways about the fakeness of a lot of additives and not-foods that corporations are putting into mass-produced foods these days, though all food does have value.

But.

I categorically refuse to buy into the idea that food is exalted or evil, repugnant or indulgent.  I'm in charge of my health, and you can take your value judgements elsewhere.  If I skip dinner and have ice cream, it's not indulgent and it's not sinful.  It's a grown damn woman eating ice cream.  And there's nothing wrong with that.

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Edit: this post doesn't even touch on the potentially triggery nature of value-judgement food-talk on people who might have issues with eating disorders and/or the diet industry.  That's a whole enormous additional can of worms, and I acknowledge that I have a certain amount of thin and able privilege going on here, and do not mean to minimize any of the additional issues related to this topic.  

bento friday: favorite recipe roundup

This week has been kind of hectic, and I've been sick, so unfortunately I have no bento to share with you.  But!  Instead, I've put together a roundup of some of my favorite bento recipes that I use so so often, in photo essay form.  NOTE: all pictures in this post are taken from justbento.com or justhungry.com, specifically from the recipes linked.  They are used here with permission from Maki.

Have I mentioned lately how much I love Maki?  Maki is my hero.  My bento-hero, at least.

One of my favorite quick and delicious bento side dishes is carrot kinpira.  So yum.  

And hey!  Look!  You can make kinpira from other stuff too!  Rock on.

Maki's chicken teriyaki recipe taught me that teriyaki sauce is super easy to make, that it's very tasty, and that it's silly to buy pre-made teriyaki sauce in a bottle.  Apparently Japanese folks think that stuff sold in stores is kind of bizarre.  

Soboro is another super tasty recipe, though it does require prep.  It's not something you throw together on a weekday morning; rather, I'll spend some time on an occasional weekend making a big batch (usually from lamb), and then freeze small portions to use later as filling in onigiri.  

Bored of teriyaki?  Lemon chicken nuggets are a tasty alternative.

Tamagoyaki is a now-and-forever staple of my bento-making.  There's a bit of a learning curve to its construction, but once you've messed up a few it'll work out fine.  Super tasty, good reheated or at room temp, veggie-friendly, and Husband loves it.  Win. 

And finally, Maki's spicy lentil snacks get fantastic reviews and are apparently super tasty, but I still haven't gotten around to making the dang things.  I even bought red lentils months ago, and yet.  So I'm putting this one on here to remind me to make the darn things, and then I can tell you how it went!

Happy bentoing!

Bourdain: a win and a fail

So, Anthony Bourdain.  Professional irreverent jackass, travel show host, chef.  Cool guy.  I read Kitchen Confidential a few years back at the urging of a good friend (hi!), and fell in love with his prose and attitude.  He's a New Yorker through and through, so is callous at times, but also tends to not take himself too seriously.  And as I learned from his travel show No Reservations (he has more shows now, but I've only watched NR so far), he's supremely devoted to being a respectful guest when in someone else's domain.  He eats whatever the people he's visiting bring to him, no matter how disgusting it might seem to our American sensibilities about food.  He does his darndest to be a good guest.

He's touring, and we got to see him last night.  Awesome opportunity.  He mostly talked about food and travel and his show, of course, but I have a few slightly tangential observations to note.  These were smallish moments in the show, but I want to talk about them.

1) During the question-and-answer portion of the show, a lady asked something along the lines of 'what do you think the role of women should be in the restaurant industry?'

First off, it's kind of a weird question to ask, in my opinion (isn't this 2013?).  BUT!  Tony surprised the hell out of me by providing what might be the best possible answer to that question.  His response (possibly slightly paraphrased because my memory ain't perfect)?

'What women should do?  I don't think that's a question I should be answering.  Anything that comes out of my mouth is going to be, let's face it, mansplaining.' 

Holy shit.  Holy shit.  This dude is self-aware enough to know that being in the food business for decades and being a famous chef still makes him unqualified on the general topic of 'what women should do,' even in his field.  He acknowledges that and is quite ready to say so.  And he even knows (and used in a public forum!!!) the word 'mansplaining.'

I don't know that I can quite convey how happy this makes me.  

So much squee.

2) Apparently a while back there was a big brouhahaha wherein Tony was pressed to tell who he thought was the worst celebrity chef.  He's always insulting people, especially famous people, so that's no real surprise (such as the whole Kwanzaa cake thing, which I actually found to be quite funny).  See the 'irreverent jackass' thing above.  His response was to name Paula Deen, because of her being the most 'dangerous' chef to America.  Because of cooking fatty food and thereby corrupting the moral fiber of the country, I guess.  Then he got to feel all sorry for himself because he subsequently got verbally attacked online a bunch by people sticking up for her and admonishing him for picking on a nice old lady and insulting Southern food.

Okay.  I have things to say about this.

He (correctly) pointed out that her cuisine isn't actually particularly Southern or traditional.  He pointed to her 'lady brunch burger,' which consists of a burger patty, fried egg, and bacon between donuts.

Okay, fine.   He also, naturally, had scare-tactic stats of the calories and fat content of the thing.  Then he criticized her for having Type 2 diabetes (um, okay), for waiting to tell the world about her disease (which is obviously everyone's business everywhere because, um, reasons), and then for partnering with a diabetes drug company for sponsorship and being open about things (she can't win).  These are all the same things that were said a bunch of times when the whole diabetes thing first came out.

And it's all bullshit.

Paula Deen owes no one an explanation of her personal health.  Full stop.  I don't care that she's a celebrity, and I don't care what her show is about.  Her health is her own business.

She had (has?  I don't actually watch television) a show about making delicious food that happened to be really dense and made with a lot of butter.  Shows have themes.  A chef's life is not necessarily a reflection of hir show (does that sweet genuis guy subsist entirely on cupcakes?  I doubt it).  I certainly wouldn't want a lady brunch burger every day; it's a silly oddity and ought to be treated as such.  If you actually think she eats this food all the time, I have a bridge to sell you.  And Tony?  Supposing that you can lecture a person on what her personal life must be like because of your Super Objective and Truth-Telling Perspective while refusing to listen to her words about her own lived experience is, I'm sorry Tony, 'splaining.  You know, that word you used so eloquently and appropriately to the question about women in food?  Yeah, that.

For more eloquent and kick-ass words about the Paula Deen affair, read this.  Ragen says it so much better than I could, and it's well worth a read.

Tony, you're wrong.  You're so wrong.  

Then it got worse.

He proceeded to wax poetical about the declining health of America, and how intervention is necessary.  I got more nervous as it became obvious what was about to happen.  He talked about McDonald's, of course, which I have no love for for a myriad of reasons.  And sure, he's gonna insult people and institutions.  Irreverent jackass.  Comedy.  I get it.  But he wasn't being funny, here.  He was being serious.  He's concerned about the health of the nation.  As exhibited by using this topic to segue into a rant about how people's fat asses can't get up off couches and are in his way on airplanes.

Ehhhhhhhhhhhh.

One, stop conflating weight with health.  There are skinny people who are unhealthy and fat people who are healthy.  Some factors correlate weakly, but it's simply bad science to think you can make assumptions about health from a person's body size.  Some studies suggest that having more body fat might actually provide some protection from disease, and be a predictor of lower risks of mortality.  Health is complicated, and reducing it down to fat = unhealthy is profoundly disingenuous.

Bad food does not necessarily make you fat.  Tony, you yourself exemplify this.  You are quite open about your past, with its terrible health choices, and you seem to have always been a pretty scrawny dude.  This means there must be other factors.  It is usually not a choice to have a particular body size.  Know that friend (maybe you, Tony) who can eat anything and stay skinny?  Yeah, I guarantee there are corresponding folks who eat relatively little and healthily and stay fat.  Bodies are funny like that.  We all have weights at which we are personally healthiest, and those weights are different for different people.

A body size is not a diagnosis.  Of anything.  At all.  It is not a diagnosis of personal habits, level of activity, or any sort of disease.  Looking at a fat person tells you one piece of information.  That they're fat.  Obesity is not a disease, and even if it was, we'd be going about dealing with it in a profoundly terrible way.

If you want to talk about health, great!  Talk about actual health.  Poor nutrition and being sedentary do cause health problems, but they do that to people with all kinds of different body sizes.  Know what you're talking about and (crucially) what you're not talking about.

Two, good grief, man.  Did it never occur to you that you're talking about actual people here?  Actual people, who already endure ceaseless hatred, judgement, criticism, and bigotry because of their bodies. Just for existing.  Jumping straight (via 'common sense,' of course) from a criticism of shitty American food to being pissed off at a hypothetical fat person for being in your way when evacuating an airplane, or drawing the equivalence that fat = useless and sedentary is profoundly horrible of you.  There was a heavyset man sitting in front of me during your talk, and I could feel him kind of freeze and tense up at that.  And I absolutely 100% do not blame him for maybe feeling a little defensive when you were attacking him*.

Above, I said that fatness is not a good predictor of disease or death (science!).  Want to know what is a good predictor?  Being the victim of social stigma.  Yup.  It turns out that being preached at and judged and admonished for one's audacity to exist causes stress!  Funny, that.  So by mocking and judging a segment of society that has to put up with this shit every day of their lives (it's not like you can walk around without your body to avoid the stigma), the same people you probably think you're 'helping' or 'saving,' you are being part of that very problem.  You are contributing to the cultural pressure that tells fat people that they're worthless, that they're disgusting, that everyone except them knows what they need and what their lives are like.  That they have to exercise more (but don't actually do so in public because you'll be shamed for that), that they have to go on fad diets (as it turns out, dieting not only has never been shown to cause long-term weight loss in more than a tiny fraction of the population and is a really great predictor of weight gain but also is extremely detrimental to health --- you know, that health thing you're on about?), that being thin is more important than being fulfilled and pursuing things they think are awesome (and of course they couldn't possibly be good at things in their actual bodies), that they have to change their bodies before they can receive reasonable health care when they're injured or sick.  You are not criticizing people for their behaviors here.  You are criticizing their right to exist in their bodies, and layering even more abuse on top of a really shitty lifelong experience.  You might want to think about that.

I would have hoped that someone with the awareness and sensitivity to provide the best answer ever when questioned about women's place in his industry would have actually thought about these things or done a tiny bit of research instead of launching into a humiliation and judgement tirade that serves only to uphold a nationwide campaign to get people to hate themselves.

Stick to food, Tony.  It might be a good idea to lay off the moral preaching.



*Note: I do not presume to know what this fellow may have been thinking or feeling at the time; I am not him and do not know him.  I only have my observations of his body language and my knowledge of how I would probably feel in his place. 

awesome thing of the day

100 rules of dinner.

This is beautiful.  Husband and I cook a lot, deeply enjoy food, and like cooking together.  Well, sometimes, when we're not grouchy, anyway.  Anyway, I identify with so many of these items.

For the record, I'm totally on board with 2, 7, 24, 38, and 95.  88 is the most true thing ever.  Oh, 88, I love you so.

Holy crap I had never thought of 25.  Where have you been all my life?

91 is true, though Trader Joe's mayonnaise is pretty damn good too.  Miracle whip is NOT FOOD.

I disagree oh so strongly with 81.  Garlic is never something for moderation.  Never.

Ahhh... food.

garlic

I read a number of foodie blogs.  One that often provides a nice brief brain-break in my day is The Kitchn, which hosts short and to-the-point pieces about some aspect of food or kitchens or kitchen tools or chefs or really anything vaguely food-related.  It's often really valuable information, but always offered in snack size.  Often I simply scroll through most of the entries in my RSS reader, looking for something that jumps out at me.

A few weeks ago, one did.  A dude in a video was claiming that you could peel a whole bunch of garlic with minimal effort.

Now, I like garlic.  A lot.  But peeling the stuff is really freaking annoying.  If you just try to peel it with your fingers, you'll spend all day trying to pry the skin off the clove.  There are fancy 'garlic peeler' gadgets on the market, but they always strike me as a remarkably clever way to extract money from people while providing them with a completely useless tool.  I was taught to smash the individual cloves with the flat of a chef's knife, which does loosen the skin, but you still have to smash every single clove and then peel the skin away from the smooshed garlic meat, and in the process absolutely everything --- your knife, your hands, your cutting board, your counter, the floor, the ceiling (don't judge me) --- gets appliquéd with bits of garlic skin, thoroughly glued down by sticky garlic juice.

It's not a pretty sight.

So while fresh garlic is delicious, we only pull it out occasionally.  When we have the time and energy to invest in this rather intensive procedure.  So we have one of those Costco jars of pre-chopped and preserved garlic in the fridge, and the lovely local bulbs of fresh stuff sit in the bin, give up on the prospect of becoming part of a delicious meal, and slowly, hopefully, yearningly attempt to grow into full fledged plants.

So hey, it's worth watching like a one-minute video given by some wacky dude who seems to know a better way.  His way, inexplicably, involves putting the cloves in between two big bowls and shaking the bajeezus (that's a technical term) outta them.  Kind of goofy.

But holy crap.  It totally works.

We don't have two conveniently-sized prep bowls, so I use our biggest stainless steel bowl with a pot lid over it.  It does take some real shaking, so it's a good arm workout, and it's loud as hell.  But when you're done, there are the little naked beauties, just nestled in among the loose skin.  It's freaking magic is what it is.

So now every week or so I'll peel up two or three bulbs of garlic, toss them in our cute little mini food processor, and then we have a jar of actually fresh chopped garlic in the fridge.  It takes like fifteen minutes.  Including cleanup.

The next day, our scrambled eggs had so much fresh garlic in them.  At six in the morning, when I usually don't have the time or the wherewithal to even cut up an apple.  Fresh chopped garlic.  Because I could.   And they were delicious.

Now I just have to figure out what to do with that damn Costco jar...


Oh, and here's the video.

bento friday: usuyaki sushi

Bento is a meal (sometimes of Japanese food) packed attractively in a box.  I love making bento, and will be showcasing my current and past creations periodically. 

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an experimental bento: usuyaki-wrapped sushi, broccoli stir-fry, and spicy peppers. 

Usuyaki is a sort of Japanese egg crepe.  In this case, following the guidance of my Just Bento cookbook (have you noticed that I adore Maki?), I wrapped the crepes around simple sushi rice balls.  Sushi, you see, doesn't actually mean raw fish; it just means rice.  So I took vinegared rice, formed them into cubes, and wrapped the crepes around.  They were pretty tasty, if tricky to eat.  

While I wholeheartedly follow Maki's philosophy of taste and color being infinitely more important than cutesy bento details, I do occasionally try to add a little visual flair to my preparations.  This time I used a tiny cookie cutter to cut a star out of the center of each usuyaki, in the hopes that the rice would show through and be subtly pretty.  Unfortunately, cutting through the crepe was difficult, and it tended to tear instead.  Then after wrapping around the sushi, the star was generally kind of distorted and invisible.  So... that kind of failed.  But now I know not to do that again, so there's that. 

For side dishes, I threw together a really simple broccoli-ginger stir fry, along with some remarkably spicy bell pepper.  We had a lonely pepper half floating in the fridge, so I figured it would make an ideal side, fried up with some Laos chili paste gifted to us by a neighbor.  I guess I used a bit more chili paste than I'd thought, because wow those were an adventure.  I alternated bites with the blessedly mild and starchy sushi. 

Okay, so I'm a bit of a wimp. 

bento friday: miso chicken and unreasonably delicious green beans

Bento is a meal (sometimes of Japanese food) packed attractively in a box.  I love making bento, and will be showcasing my current and past creations periodically. 

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a super-tasty bento: miso chicken, broccoli, and green bean/onion stir fry

Now this was an unreservedly successful bento.  It doesn't happen very often that I nail a preparation and there isn't even a single 'blah' side dish, but on this day I lucked out.  My miso-marinated chicken was delicious (and I even got a specific compliment on it from Husband), and the thrown-together green-beans-that-were-languishing-in-the-crisper-drawer-and-onion stir fry was Simply.  Delicious.  I deliberately overcooked the onions a bit so they'd get a browned and soft with a couple of little burned bits, and added plenty of fresh ginger and garlic.  Oh my.  Lick-the-bowl good.  

bento friday: lemon chicken

Bento is a meal (sometimes of Japanese food) packed attractively in a box.  I love making bento, and will be showcasing my current and past creations periodically. 

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Lemon chicken, broccoli, and soba. 

Not shown: teriyaki noodle sauce.

I love soba.  Have I mentioned that?  It's just a simple buckwheat noodle, but it's so delightfully chewy and full of flavor.  Mmmm, soba.  

This bento involved lemon chicken nuggets, soba, and some steamed broccoli.  The very slight cornstarch crust on the nuggets got a bit soggy by lunchtime, which tells me that I need to let the bento cool more thoroughly before closing it in the morning.  But the flavor was excellent.  I also packed a little container of bottled teriyaki sauce to toss on the noodles, as they'd get somewhat soggy themselves if they were left to soak in a sauce all morning.  

On the note of teriyaki, Maki taught me how to make teriyaki sauce.  My goodness, but it's easy.  I'm now somewhat amused by the fact that we Americans actually buy the stuff in jars.  Sure, it takes having a few culturally unusual ingredients around, but they're so versatile in other things that it's really not a problem.  Regretfully, I had purchased a Costco-sized bottle of teriyaki a bit before starting bento, so I'm working on using that up, and that's what went with the soba this day.  

On a side note, regarding teriyaki ingredients, whatever you do, do NOT touch something called 'cooking mirin.'  Holy hell, but that isn't food.  Lesson learned.  

brilliant infographic

Well.  This infographic totally blew my mind.

I'm often vaguely intimidate by more esoteric grains, largely because I lacked this particular and rather simple bit of easily-googled information.

Someone has compiled together and formatted it rather nicely.  Now I have no excuse.

wine and overthinking

This nifty infographic depicts a fairly naïve (I feel) but impressively thorough approach to pairing wine with food.  Husband and I are amateur foodies and also do adore our vino (bringing two cases of ice wine through customs in Niagara was less painful than you might think), but we usually don't put too much conscious thought into pairing.  I think most dinners-with-wine go something like this:

'Want wine with dinner?'

'Sure.  How about that neglected bottle we bought ages ago?'

'Sounds good.  Oh wait, what are we having with it?'

'Meh.  Pour the wine.'

Well, I'm approximating.  But we go more by vibe and momentary preference than any cerebral hard-and-fast rules about how thou shalt pair thine wine with thine food.  I'll leave that to the sommeliers of the world.  For me, I know that if it's red and Australian, it's bound to be delicious.

But hey, this infographic might be helpful on occasion.

repost: eat food

Metapost: my first attempt at the newfangled blogging thing ended when I decided I no longer identified with the name I'd chosen, and thus The Organized Geek was abandoned.  However, there was some good stuff in there, and I'll be reposting a few selected entries occasionally, so they don't get entirely lost to oblivion. 

Originally posted on 01.04.12, this post contains some of my thoughts about food, specifically related to food budgeting.  The timeline is of course out of date, and a few things have been updated from the original, in order to fit into the new vernacular of this blog. 

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I found the above fabulous flowchart from The Summer Tomato today.  It puts me in mind of Michael Pollan's summary of the entirety of his own advice, 'eat food, not to much, mostly plants.'  How many of us truly follow this type of advice?  Unless I've bought the given product before, I'm constantly reading labels and getting jumpy if there are unpronounceable ingredients or my favorite, 'natural flavoring.'  However, I'm sure I still purchase and eat more than my share of not-food.   

In my budgeting adventures recently, Husband and I sat down to take a real hard look at our financial situation.  Our main expenditures are for housing, fuel, and food.  Housing costs are pretty stable and unchangeable, since our rent isn't likely to change and we already keep the house between 55 and 65 F during the winter.  It was the spreadsheet cell labeled 'grocery' that was truly staggering.  There's absolutely no reason, even with rising food prices and an unstable economy, that two people should need to spend that kind of number just to keep fed.

For reference, I've been tracking my own spending for nearly the past year (see immediately previous post), but have not been following the spending out of our joint account.  This despite the fact that I have personally used the shared debit card for an awful lot of grocery shopping, for the simple reason that I didn't have enough money in my own account at the time.  Bad me for not paying more attention!  

In addition, while I do make an effort to take frugal measures when shopping (scouring the circulars to figure out where to do the week's shopping, clipping coupons when they present themselves, stocking up on stuff when it's on sale, etc.), obviously there's been more than a little mindless spending when it comes to the grocery store.  We do tend to splurge on good ingredients fairly often, since we both love to cook and are amateur foodies.  Food spending falls into three basic categories: 

• Deliveries from our local CSA: I'm not giving this up unless I absolutely have to.  Fresh, in-season, local food is absolutely worth it.  I need my fresh veg.  Maybe it should drop to every other week.
• Pet food: our dog and cat are both on species-appropriate whole prey model raw diets, but I already buy their meat only when on sale and portion and freeze it myself, so I seriously doubt this eats up too much of the budget.  The guinea pigs get fresh veggies along with their pellets and hay, but it's generally leftover bits from prepping ingredients like carrot peels, stuff that's about to be past its prime anyway, or cheap bins of leafies from Costco.
• General grocery

So what really is to blame?

• Too much processed food: this is pretty minor, since we do both cook so much.  But why are we always buying so much store bread when I love baking?  The answer, of course, is that I'm just a little too lazy and don't have enough of a plan to make the time to bake enough bread for the week.  This applies to multiple things; what business do I have ever buying pickles, when I've canned up so many jars?
• Over-purchasing:  looking into our pantry is a fear-inspiring endeavor, since it seems the piles of goods may fall on you at any moment.  Heaven help you if you wanted to add something to a shelf.  The fridge, similarly, is quite a deathtrap.  
• Lack of inventory management: last year sometime we organized and inventoried everything in the pantry, fridge, freezer, and chest freezer.  However, it hasn't been updated particularly regularly, and so has fallen into irrelevancy.  Not knowing what we already have leads to both over-purchasing, and...
• Food waste: throwing away what was perfectly good food and only isn't due to inattention is idiotic.  Far too many containers of leftovers get lost at the back of the fridge only to be discovered when they're developing intelligent life, and far too much good produce goes to the crisper drawer only to turn to slime out of either negligence or simply not thinking of something to do with it.  

The solution: in addition to re-instituting some sort of inventory management system, I think it's finally time to try out menu planning.  Ordinarily meals are crafted by staring into the fridge for a while until an idea occurs to one of us.  This means that we both have to keep a huge assortment of ingredients on hand at any one time for any unknown genres of food (hence part of the overstuffed fridge problem) and that shopping is done on the simple method of replenishing whatever gets used up whether it's truly a staple or not, coupled with whim.  And whim gets expensive.  My CSA orders are similarly random, and I just guess what we might find a use for in the coming week, thus leading to languishing slimy lettuce.  There must be a better algorithm to find a practical optimum for the system.  

In theory, sitting down to plan a week's menu shouldn't take too much time, and should allow for both more selective shopping and less stress after work.  I've never done this sort of thing before, aside from planning a few days' worth of bento lunches at a time.  We'll see how it goes.

Along with all those plans, we're talking about a new policy that prohibits using the shared account for food.  If I have to use my own money, it's quite likely that the pressure will be a great help in enforcing frugality.  It's working for everything else, so why not apply it to this as well?

I think there may be all of three people who know this blog exists at this point, but in case anyone has input, what do you think?  Any thoughts or tips on menu planning or reducing grocery expenditures?  How are these things handled at your house?

chocolate

Happy chocolate-themed, excessive-spending-laden, cutesy-idealization-of-heternormative-love day!  Also known as the day before OMG ALL THE CHOCOLATE IS ON SALE day.  I like that holiday a lot.

So, chocolate.  For some, it's a deeply profound experience.  For others, it's something enjoyable, but nothing to write home about.  I do have one coworker who actively dislikes the stuff.  That, at least, baffles me entirely.

I fall somewhere toward the decadent-indulgence end of the spectrum, as a really good piece of chocolate really can send me to blisstown, though my taste for sweets has decreased rather dramatically in the past few years.  In any case, my poison is the really dark, bitter stuff, so that's not in too much danger of dropping in priority.

For an incredible description of both the process of chocolate-gasm and the bewilderment this leaves some with, see this incredible little story by John Scalzi.  No really.  Go read it.

Also, this menu for an all-chocolate-all-the-time dinner kinda gets me going.  Nothin' quite like a good savory chocolate dish.  Mmm, molé...

Finally, on a not chocolate-related but still very romantic note, I totally dig this guide to cooking with your sweetie.  In my household we call this the 'kitchen dance,' and it's a tricky proposition indeed.  It's funny how the other person unerringly stands in front of the one cupboard you need to access.  Perhaps it's a natural law or something.  We often fall into temporary head/sous chef roles, depending on if we're cooking on of 'his' or 'my' dishes, but I liked the suggestion in the article of formalizing that relationship.  Then it's clear who's in charge of creativity and who just needs to chop the damn onions already.

Hey, you do what works.

bento!

In my household, we've settled into a weekday pattern surrounding food.  Husband gets home an hour and a half earlier than I do, so he generally pulls dinner together, and I get the lovely benefit of a tasty meal that's all prepared when I walk in the door.  He's awesome like that.  

I, on the other hand, take care of the lunches we bring with us to work.  

What are the goals of a brown-bag lunch?  To save money, certainly.  Many of my coworkers go out for lunch every single day, and I can't imagine spending that kind of money on daily mediocre restaurants.  To use up leftovers, and this does happen a lot.  It's a handy way to eat through overly large batches of food from dinner.  To provide more nourishing, healthy food than grabbing a burger.  And finally, and certainly NOT least importantly, to be interesting and beautiful and tasty.  

Ultimately, sandwiches and leftover pizza, though easy and cheap, get boring.  

A few years ago, I discovered bento.  More specifically, I discovered Just Bento, an absolutely fantastic site that makes bento accessible for even ignorant Americans like myself.  I found the idea... intriguing.

Fundamentally, a bento is simply a meal packed in a box, and almost any packed lunch would technically qualify.  But generally it means several different dishes packed together, and intended to be eaten at room temperature.  Often they contain Japanese food, as bento is a Japanese concept, but they certainly don't have to.  Admittedly, I've been getting a hell of a kick out of expanding my repertoire to Japanese cuisine, but eventually I'll probably calm down and branch out into other options. 

Some bento, called charaben or kyaraben, are incredibly detailed works of art that must take hours to assemble.  I don't have that kind of time in the morning, people!  But Maki of Just Bento focuses on tasty, healthy bento that are appealing to the eye without involving painstaking amounts of effort.  

So I worked up my courage, picked out some simple-seeming Japanese recipes, and packed lunches for us in some random tupperware.  For a first attempt, I remember it being reasonably tasty and reasonably pretty.  I got the satisfaction of having prepared something special and thoughtful for our lunches, and it gave me something to look forward to through the morning in a way that a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is simply incapable of.  And Husband was surprisingly supportive.  Also, it made my coworkers somewhat jealous. 

I was hooked.  It's a simple way to expand my culinary ability, take care of Husband, and feel taken care of myself.  

So,  I'm going to post occasional bento, with pictures and descriptions.  I don't have pics of all of my past creations, but I have a few and will get those up gradually.  Also, most of the pictures were taken with my crappy phone camera, so don't expect stunning quality (side note: learn how to take actually decent pictures of food someday).   I generally bento about once a week now, generally on Tuesdays.  My bento aren't spectacularly pretty or incredibly detailed, but they are yummy, and maybe someone out there will be inspired to give it a try.  It's easy and it's delicious. 

Without further ado, some bento!  

Yesterday's lunch: cashew chicken and brown rice. 

Ironically, this week's bento was remarkably plain, and probably  not one I'll be repeating.  I found a recipe for cashew chicken in a magazine, and it's been living in the 'to try' section of The Book for a while now.  I mostly followed the recipe, except for adding in a bunch of zucchini, as it was notably deficient in veg content.  I packed it with brown rice.  

It was... okay.  The chicken was kind of dry (it would have been much better with dark meat rather than white), I slightly burned the cashews (oops), and the sauce was a pretty straightforward and uninteresting blend of chili garlic sauce and soy.  It's a very simple recipe, and possibly one I'll adjust and keep around in my head, but it definitely needs some tweaking and I think I can safely throw away that magazine page now.  Live and learn!

gardens

I love gardening.  There's something magical about being able to see gorgeous plants grow out of virtually nothing, keep them healthy, and be rewarded with the most local food of all.  

Okay, so The Guy actually does a lot of the plant maintenance.  That's not my fault!  I have a longer commute.  And stuff.  

Anyway, I wanted to take you on a mini tour of what we've got growing.  

First up, we have the Great Tomato Jungle on the back porch.  The seedlings were originally purchased from the farmer's market, and were mislabeled.  I thought I was getting heirloom tomato plants (the ugly, bulbous, multicolored, ungodly delicious ones), but they turned out to be cherry tomatoes.  And as it turns out, cherry tomato plants like to take over the universe!  It's unreal.  We have our very own thicket of tomatoes.   One was also planted in an upside-down-tomato thingie, and it promptly grew all the way down to the ground.  These plants are unreal. 

So, so many tomatoes.  These pictures were taken a little while ago, when they were just starting to think about ripening.  We'd had to continually pinch off the flowers to keep them from over-extending themselves even more.  Lately we've been getting buckets of the juicy little ripe tomatoes, and have taken to throwing them in everything, and to grilling 'em on skewers for tomato sauce.  Yum.

Then there's the herb trough.  It's a nifty metal animal-watering sort of thingie, that we filled with dirt.  Grows stuff like you wouldn't imagine.  Earlier in the summer the chive plant set off on its own world-conquest plan, and we harvested armfuls of the stuff.  Much was chopped and dried --- one handy thing about the desert is that anything placed on a metal tray in the sun becomes beautifully dried in about an hour.  The porch table becomes practically a cooking surface.  The rest of the chives were mixed with butter and frozen, for a ready supply of chive butter.  Makes everything better.  That's a fact.

After the chives were thwarted in their evil plans, the basil plant took the opportunity to thoroughly dominate the herb-trough population.  There's also oregano, marjoram, and quite a lot of Italian parsley, but they're all eclipsed by the basil.  The only thing that's immediately apparent in this picture is some of the baby lettuces developing at the edge of the trough.  Witness the quite upwardly mobile basil:

And its cousin, across the yard.  Yes, that's a basil shrubbery.  I, for one, welcome our new basil overlords.

Ah, summer.  Grilled superfresh tomatoes + all the basil you can carry = the most delicious pasta sauce ever.   As autumn comes upon us, we will have to harvest the glorious basil, and it will probably be made into pesto.  Also, proto-pesto basil cubes, made by grinding the basil up with olive oil and freezing the concoction in ice cube trays, then popping them out into a freezer bag and tossing in the deep freeze.  Instant basil punch to whatever you're cooking!

weekend project: noms!

I love to cook.  So does The Guy.  We have gazillions (yes, that's a technical term) of cookbooks.  We also have so many recipes that have been cut out of magazines, printed out and folded for years, or scribbled on the backs of grocery lists.  He's had a pile of recipes on scraps of paper that have just floated inside a cookbook, sandwiched behind the front cover.  It was a bit of a deathtrap, admittedly. 

A while ago, I got fed up with that.  Finding a particular recipe was rather difficult, and they kept falling everywhere.  Enter The Great Recipe Organization Campaign of 2012.  This started a few months ago, wherein I began corralling stray recipes in a box, and going through our stash of back-issues of Bon Appétit for ones worthy of cutting out.  I was inspired by so many other projects like this out on the interwebs.  I found a nice big binder for the finished product, and a bunch of page protectors.  

Then all of that sat in the back room and was completely ignored.  

Until this past Sunday morning, when I hauled it all out and spread it on the kitchen table, sorting into piles.  The Guy pitched in, helping decide which ones to keep and what categories they should go in, and digging out his old family recipes from their hiding places for me.  

I ended up with five categories: new stuff to try, savory, sweet, old family recipes, and concept pieces.  I used write-on-able sticky tab thingies put right onto the sheet protectors to delineate the sections, but there are all kinds of tools for that sort of thing.  

All except the 'to try' and 'concept' categories exclusively contained tried-and-true recipes that were known to be delicious and we'll definitely want to make again.  Stuff from the 'to try' section will be moved to savory or sweet, as appropriate, once they're made and declared to be worthy.  The 'concept' section is for ideas that were kept just as notions, but not necessarily as whole recipes as written.  The idea of making a semi-frittata out of fettuccine is more important than the magazine's exact recipe for the tomato sauce to go with it.  We're semi-accomplished cooks, and free-lance off of recipes anyway.   Once tried, incorporated, and remembered, the 'concept' recipes will probably just be thrown away, but in the meantime they serve a useful purpose as a reminder of new ideas to try.  

Others might have different categories, of course.  Main courses, sides, breads, etc.  But for our purposes, and because I didn't really feel like sorting through with that fine-toothed of a comb, I stuck with some pretty broad categories.  It all depends on how you cook, what sorts of recipes you've got, and how finely you want to split hairs.  Perhaps as the book expands it'll undergo a reorganization at some point.  Who knows?

Here it is.  I've taken to calling it The Book.  

If a sheet protector didn't contain a full-page printout of a recipe, I stuffed in some blue paper I found in my craft stuff to serve as a backdrop.  Then recipes were just layered on top of the backing paper in whatever configuration made sense.  I found that they didn't even need to be glued down, which made the whole thing simpler as well as more modular.  If they shift around too much over time, some gluing-down might happen, ultimately, but for now it seems to be holding just fine as is.

The beautiful thing about The Book is that not only do we no longer have to dig through stacks of papers to find a particular favorite recipe, but the sheet protectors mean that the things are largely water-resistant.  This is good in a kitchen, as they'll be less prone to getting destroyed by water, blobs of cookie dough, and bacon grease.  To be fair, many of the recipes in The Book already have spots and stains from just such treatment, and I didn't bother to retype them or anything.  I think it lends character.  But the water resistance will add to their longevity, especially for those multiple-decades-old papers for old family recipes.  

By the way, we've already started using The Book.  Thy Guy made a delicious pilaf for dinner last night, cooking out of the recipe I'd transcribed into the book.  In case you're curious, it's originally from Alton Brown, the science nerd of food.  So tasty. 

And that's my weekend project.  I love it, and it's nice to actually finish something for a change.  Here's to many years of yummy cooking, expanded recipe collections, and good organization!

today I love...

...this narrative of the difficulty in navigating the waters of healthy eating culture.   I like to think of myself as a healthy and ethical person, and I deeply enjoy cooking with local produce.  I adore Michael Pollan's sensible way of approaching food.  I do my best to ignore silly food trends.

But sometimes it's hard.  Sometimes the research is a trap.  Sometimes I just need to step back and regain perspective.



Every Wednesday, I write about something I love that day.  It doesn't necessarily have to be remotely related to anything; it just has to be fabulous!

pantry challenge, final

This month I issued a challenge to my household: we would refrain from buying anything that resides in a package, to clear out pantry (and freezer) clutter. 

June has come and gone, and with it, our silly little pantry challenge.  We managed to get through the month without killing each other over shopping lists, so that's a plus.  Let's revisit the original goals for this project: 


use up the majority of the forgotten food

I must confess that we didn't manage to use up nearly as many stockpiled food items as I'd hoped.  As I mentioned last week, one revelation during this challenge was that we simply don't seem to do a lot of cooking from the pantry, at least in the summer when fresh veggies are plentiful.  This means both that we could probably make do with a much smaller 'stash,' and unfortunately that it will take a lot more than a month to go through the extra.  


temporarily reduce the grocery budget

Viewed from a strictly budgetary standpoint, the experiment was a dismal failure.  As you can see at the bottom of this post, I spent nearly $500 on food this month, and that's rather higher than my monthly average of around $350 ($368.25, if you're into precision).  So... goal #2 was not particularly successful.  But we did eat better, with a focus on the fresh food available at the farmer's market.  I'm mildly disappointed that we didn't manage to save any monty this month, but the lack of actually using up cupboard materials quite sensibly correlates with a lack of reduced expenditures. 


create more space in the kitchen

While there's a little more wiggle room in some areas, it's not necessarily noticeable.  No significant elbow room gain has been realized.  

At this point, it seems that the project has failed on all fronts --- we've still got a lot of ignored food to use up, June saw a rise in food expenditures, and the kitchen is no more livable or organized.  However, this brings us to goal #4...


gain a better awareness of what we have (and what we buy)

...and this is the real triumph.  Through the month we've poked through cupboards and freezers, can see what's behind where the 'staple' items customarily live but have not been replaced, and we now have a pretty solid idea of how much food we've got stashed around the kitchen.  If June was a failure in terms of money and actually using up extra items, it was a definite triumph in terms of mindsets.  By focusing out attention on the issue for a whole month, I feel that we've come to have a subtly different outlook when it comes to shopping. 

The original stated purpose of the challenge was to do a one-time clean-out, and wind up with less stuff.  That didn't happen, but we gained the infinitely more valuable shift in outlook that will be needed to change our food-buying habits and be just a little more sensible about stocking the kitchen and avoiding some of the excesses of consumerism.  Instead of a single massive purge, I suspect that we'll slowly whittle down the superfluous, and the problem will self-correct over time.  With periodic reality checks, of course.  Habits can be tricky to change, but it's never too late to tackle them.  

Yesterday my husband asked me to add dijon mustard to the list for the simple reason that we were out of it.  Then a bit later he crossed it out and declared that we could simply  use up some of the fabulous gourmet mustards lurking in the cabinet.  When at the store, I actually think about each thing I'm getting, not just in terms of price but also whether we actually need the item, and if anything else could possibly substitute.  

Shopping is no longer done on reflex.  I kind of like that. 
  

food budget tracker: week 2

farmer's market: $12

grocery: $109.66

other (kettle corn): $11

total: $132.66

grand monthly total: $497.16

pantry challenge, week 3: cruising right along

This month I issued a challenge to my household: we would refrain from buying anything that resides in a package, to clear out pantry (and freezer) clutter. 

I think we're starting to get the hang of this.  The copious pantry supplies don't seem to have dwindled dramatically, but we're definitely in a different frame of mind.  Meals are planned around what we already have, not what we could pick up at the store.  Going to the market every Saturday is a necessity.  I haven't had to stop for some last-minute ingredient on my way home from work all month.  Yesterday, The Guy found himself sorely tempted, when at Costco, to pick up a few pantry items, but just couldn't bring himself to do it.  Instead, he limited himself to the lettuce, mushrooms, and parmesan that were his reason for being there. 

Oddly, this challenge has highlighted for me the extent to which we don't actually cook from the pantry.  That is, most of our ingredients tend to be perishables from the fridge. From a nutritional standpoint, this is ideal.  The majority of our diet appears to consist of fresh (and this time of year, local) veggies, dairy, and meats, supplemented by just a few pantry staples.  The thought that we'd 'run out' of things and get desperate by the end of the month of only buying fresh food seems hilarious now.  We've (mostly) adhered to the rules of the challenge, are eating wonderfully well, and yet have hardly touched the pantry stores.  What this tells me is that we definitely don't need to be sitting on such huge stockpiles, or doing so much shopping!  We don't even use most of the stuff in everyday life!

All in all, I like this.  This cold-turkey 'challenge' approach seemed somewhat silly at first, and the strict rules led to a few arguments and some temporary resentment.  However, I suspect that it's doing a lot to affect our outlook on food, and may help maintain a bit more of an 'enough is enough' mindset instead of always stocking up whenever possible.  This could lead to more elbow room, fewer shopping trips, and maybe even more sanity in the kitchen.  

One more week (and change) to go!

food budget tracker: week 2

farmer's market: $36.50

grocery: $122.27

total: $158.77

pantry challenge, week 2: settling in

This month I issued a challenge to my household: we would refrain from buying anything that resides in a package, to clear out pantry (and freezer) clutter.

After last week's mad veg-acquiring rampage, between the market and the CSA, we really didn't need much fresh produce this week.  We did go to the market on Saturday, but mostly just bought a lot of eggs.  We didn't even feel the need to place a CSA order this week.  It has provided a great opportunity to clean out the random bits in the fridge, and there's actually some elbow room in there!  It's a rather odd state of affairs for me.  I'm far too accustomed to a fridge that is bursting at the seams, often with a tendency to attack when opened.

Wednesday saw a stop by a real grocery store on the way home from work, largely because we needed more food for the pets.  While there I did pick up some baking soda, but it is a standard baking resource and we were only out because I used it up for scrubbing out the bathtub.  I'm a fan of cleaning products that don't contain noxious chemicals.

This week, we've used up:

• some leftover frozen lentils and quinoa from various salads I made for a camping trip several weeks ago; they went into homemade carrot burgers and a sort of a dill-yogurt salad for a lunch
• a container of ends of veggies, used to make stock
• a bag of hamburger buns, frozen for who knows how long
• a bag of mustard-flavored pretzels
• a jar of home-canned green chile, and one of peaches
• 2 lbs. of ground lamb; it became a delicious mediterranean meatloaf, that was then repurposed into pseudo-gyros

food budget tracker: week 2

farmer's market: ~$25*

grocery: $58.11

total: ~$83.11

* Farmer's markets are inherently cash-based expenditures, and unfortunately I didn't keep terribly good track of how much was spent this week.  Bad me.  But that's a pretty good estimate, based on what I remember getting.  

pantry challenge, week 1: reframing

On the first of this month I issued a challenge to my household: we would refrain from buying anything that resides in a package, to clear out pantry clutter.  On the very next day, I found myself at the farmer's market and looking at my beaming husband, who was proudly showing me the local artisan dry pasta he'd just bought.

Well, damn.  

But instead of admitting defeat, I shall simply change the rules.  My blog, my rules.  New rule: 

• Anything purchased at the farmer's market or CSA is fair game.  Even if it's in a box. 

There.  I feel better now.  

On another note, remember how I wanted to avoid supermarkets this month?  Yup, that one fell by the wayside, too. I have a pesky orange juice addiction, so I found myself scampering into the local megamart while out running errands.  But I only bought juice, so it's not too bad.  And it's at least a pseudo-fresh food, so it's close enough to fitting in the approved list for this challenge.  Oh, what I wouldn't give to live in a place where citrus could grow again, and to be able to procure actually fresh OJ.  But such is very much not the case out here in the desert.  

It's time to adjust expectations.  But then, that's kind of the point; this is an experiment.  Sure, there are rules, but I made them, and I can change them.  As long as we come out ahead in at least some of the fundamental goals of the challenge, I count it a win.  Other than that, it's an exercise in self-observation, much like my spending tracking project (more on that later).  

This week, we've used up: 

• freezer: lamb chops, 2 lbs. ground lamb, a lonely frozen half banana, an entire jug of homemade stock*, and some random frozen mixed veggies
• pantry: the last of the chocolate chips**

food budget tracker: this week

farmer's market: $62.50

CSA: $52.96

grocery: $7.18

total: $122.64 

* We habitually save the end bits of veggies and meat bones in the freezer and then make stock in the crock pot.  Homemade stock is delicious, and this way it's free too.  Unfortunately we have a pesky tendency to make the stock, fill old orange juice jugs with it, toss them in the chest freezer, and forget about them forever.  There are like three jugs still in there, plus several gallon-sized plastic bags of the stuff to make even more with.  It's kind of ridiculous.  Actually using it is a major win.  

** The Guy went to Costco the other day, and came home with a replacement bag of chocolate chips, claiming that it was because he had planned on making his famous chocolate torte for his coworkers.  This highlighted the fact that we've had insufficient communication about this endeavor, as the point of the challenge is to see how creative we can get at coping with not replacing staples.  Plans will need to be modified if we're out of something.  That's what makes it a challenge!  But the chips are purchased, and the torte will be made.  Learn from it and move on.  This doesn't get a rule adjustment; it's just a learning experience.