Ahh kale

I don't think I ever had kale when I was growing up. In fact, if I had to guess, I'd say I probably never had it before two years ago. For sure, I never cooked it before then. But, a year or two ago I was at a retreat center that inlcuded a "plain" food section in its buffet every day. One day, the regular fare (all vegetarian) didn't look all that appealing to me so I was looking around for something to add to my plate. That's when I found kale. At the time, I followed the example of the Buddhist nuns with whom I was sharing a table and I added Gomasio (sesame salt) and a dash of umeboshi plum vinegar (I learned fast that a small dash of this is enough!).

Now, I'm not sure that I would say that I think kale is the most delicious food ever but I enjoy the flavor and eating it always makes me feel like I'm doing something good for my body. Just look at the ratings: (table courtesy of The World's Healthiest Foods

Kale, boiled 1.00 cup 130.00 grams 36.40 calories
Nutrient	Amount	DV (%)	Nutrient Density	World's Healthiest Foods Rating
vitamin K	1062.10 mcg	1327.6	656.5	excellent
vitamin A	9620.00 IU	192.4	95.1	excellent
vitamin C	53.30 mg	88.8	43.9	excellent
manganese	0.54 mg	27.0	13.4	excellent
dietary fiber	2.60 g	10.4	5.1	very good
copper	0.20 mg	10.0	4.9	very good
tryptophan	0.03 g	9.4	4.6	very good
calcium	93.60 mg	9.4	4.6	very good
vitamin B6 (pyridoxine)	0.18 mg	9.0	4.5	very good
potassium	296.40 mg	8.5	4.2	very good
iron	1.17 mg	6.5	3.2	good
magnesium	23.40 mg	5.8	2.9	good
vitamin E	1.11 mg	5.6	2.7	good
omega 3 fatty acids	0.13 g	5.4	2.7	good
vitamin B2 (riboflavin)	0.09 mg	5.3	2.6	good
protein	2.47 g	4.9	2.4	good
vitamin B1 (thiamin)	0.07 mg	4.7	2.3	good
folate	17.29 mcg	4.3	2.1	good
phosphorus	36.40 mg	3.6	1.8	good
vitamin B3 (niacin)	0.65 mg	3.3	1.6	good

World's Healthiest Foods Rating	Rule
excellent	DV>=75%	OR	Density>=7.6	AND	DV>=10%
very good	DV>=50%	OR	Density>=3.4	AND	DV>=5%
good	DV>=25%	OR	Density>=1.5	AND	DV>=2.5%

Of course, the other fantastic thing about Kale is how incredibly cheap it is. I can buy a pound for a dollar and that will last me at least 4 meals. It's such a hardy plant, too, that I can get it fresh and local from the farmer's market for most of the year.


For preparation, I still tend to eat it just as I did that first time with a bit of Gomasio or plum vinegar. I make my own sesame salt which end sup being really cheap and useful to have around the house (I just toast the seeds with regular table salt in the toaster oven). If I have them, I may also add other Japanese seasonings.

Based on a general search for kale recipes, it seems to go well with lots of other ingredients, form noodles to beans to other vegetables.

For a nice selection of Kale recipes, try Culinate.com or Epicurious

Given what's hanging around my house at the moment, the two recipes I'm most interested in trying are:

Tuscan Kale Chips and Rice with Kale and Tomatoes

There are a couple of other recipes I'm eying up for next week too!

the Youtube Generation

As part of my research into food and money, I was looking for documentaries on the topic. Youtube was a surprisingly interesting source for newsclips, and low tech homemade videos as well as infomercial-like videos and other random things.

I knew that there were cooking "shows" and I was specifically looking for things like that which might concentrate on inexpensive food preparation.

I liked this video by Bethenny Frankel which has a very flexible and easy recipe for a brown rice breakfast dish. Although I generally eat oatmeal, if one is on a fixed budget, there may be times when it isn't possible to buy both oatmeal and rice and most of us are probably not going to want to eat oatmeal as a grain for lunch or dinner. So, for those times when you might have to pick one or the other, having a variety of flexible recipes is really useful.




Another nice easy rice dish is the salad in the video below (please ignore the ads, I am in no way related to the optifast company). They list this as a side dish but it could be a main course as well. The recipe has a lot of ingredients and I haven't worked out how much it would end up costing but it uses only a small amount of any one ingredient and makes several servings. The big flaw? She recommends making it 24-48 hours ahead of serving. Yikes, I'm a bit too much into instant gratification for that!



Since I seem to be in a rice recipe kick, here is a great video from the New York Time. Yet another very flexible recipe. Much to my surprise, The New York Times has a number of videos which are entertaining and are for recipes that end up being quite cheap to make.



Here is a basic fried rice recipe.

On Shopping

Just as I"m puzzling over the vast quantities of food in my kitchen and my shopping habits, I received an email from my local supermarket with coupons to celebrate their "grand re-opening". As far as I can tell, no one knew that the store was ever closed and if it was, it must have been in the middle of the night.
The coupons include two free items (juice and a frozen meal), $5 off a meat item, $1 for a pineapple, discounted frozen entrees, and a discounted cleaning product.

Generally, I would never buy a pineapple because this time of year I get all my produce from the farmer's market but a dollar for a pineapple is a great deal and I do like pineapple...

I'd consider using the meat coupon if there is a cut of meat that ends up being pretty cheap.

But wait, I wasn't planning on going to the store at all until I have used up a lot of what I already have.

This points out to me the problem of habit shopping (which, for me, may be worse than habit eating). Sunday morning, I'll be up and going to the Farmer's market even though I really will only need milk. Chances are that I will buy rhubarb because I love it and the season is so short. Depending on what I have left, I may buy asparagus for the same reason. If strawberries are cheaper than they have been, I'm likely to get some of those to go with the rhubarb. Now, these things are all good for me so I don't feel bad about buying them.

But, I'm a habitual weekly supermarket shopper too and that's where it gets dangerous. I've even said "Oh, I haven't been shopping in a while, I guess I should go." I may need only one thing from the store, yogurt or rice, for example. But, I don't have a car so going to the store isn't really convenient and once I'm there I figure I should get other stuff that I need. That's when I end up with the things like barley and random tea, extra vinegars, instant mix things, etc. None of it is really bad for me but, food that is sitting unused is just as wasted as food that has been thrown out.

I can do all the tricks to cut back on impulse buying; eat before I go, take a list, etc. But, when it comes to it, I always think of those trick as being to prevent me from buying chips and cookies. It's just too easy to justify another bottle of vinegar.

I'm not likely to cut out the weekly trip to the farmer's market, it's as much for socializing as for food procurement. But I think I need to force myself to cut out the supermarket trips unless there are at least 4 items that I really need.

The Great "Eat Down"

Today I begin “eating down” the kitchen. I realized almost immediately that this needs to be done carefully so that I don’t fall into the same old traps. What this means is balancing the desire to get the stuff eaten and out of the house so that I can move on with it and not over consuming just because the stuff is there. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if I start my new food plan next week or the week after or if I have a modified plan for a few weeks as long as the plan is sensible and not wasteful.

Today I planned the following menu:

Breakfast:

Tea

Rhubarb pie oatmeal (rhubarb and frozen berries cooked with a bit of sweetener and then cooked with a layer of oatmeal sweetened with honey over it)

Snack:

Rye toast with butter

Lunch:

Curried lentils

cauliflower

Banana

Salad of lettuce, dried fish (these are small anchovies that are sweet and spicy from a Chinese grocery), sunflower seeds and dried cranberries with a rice wine vinegar and oil dressing.

Snack

Almonds

Dinner:

Cauliflower

Couscous

Chicken thigh

Asparagus

salad

Looks like a good day’s worth of eating and comes in just under 2000 calories but I still had to fight the inclination to add more to it just because the food was there to be eaten. As it is, this menu barely made a dent in the food that is around the house. I used up the mixed berries (but gave half the oatmeal to my housemate) and about half the rhubarb. This day’s diet is also fairly high in fat, even though the fat comes from sources that aren’t too bad (olive oil, almonds).

Grams Calories %-Cals Calories 1,900 Fat 115.8 1,002 53 % Saturated 21.4 187 10 % Polyunsaturated 30.0 257 14 % Monounsaturated 57.3 496 26 % Carbohydrate 173.4 669 35 % Dietary Fiber 40.2 Protein 65.6 231 12 % Alcohol 0.0 0 0 %

Starting Out

This blog is my attempt at regaining control over my finances, food, and life in general. The focus is where food and money meet: my weekly food budget. I"m planning on a budget of about $35 a week (more on where that number came from later). The goal is to re establish my priorities when it comes to my food and spending choices.

In order to prepare for this endeavor, I decided that I needed to get a handle on what food I currently have around the house. I’m frankly ashamed at how much stuff there is. As a result, my goal this week is to spend nothing at all on food and “eat down” the kitchen.

Here is a partial list:

Stuff I can keep:

1. 2 bottles of red wine vinegar*
2. 1 bottle rice vinegar
3. 1 bottle plum vinegar
4. 10 packets instant miso soup
5. 2 boxes broccoli soup ( ready to eat, not powdered)
6. 2 cans progresso soup
7. 6 prepared Indian dishes (spinach paneer, spicy potatoes)
8. 2 boxes of farfalle pasta
9. Frozen chicken thighs*
10. Bag of frozen cauliflower
11. 2 frozen pizzas
12. Frozen black beans (fresh from farmer’s market once upon a time)
13. Frozen berries*
14. Flax seeds
15. Wheat berries
16. Dried apples
17. 5 jars of jams/jelly of various flavors and sizes
18. 1 ½ jars of molasses
19. 2 jars of honey
20. Box of artificial sweetener
21. Most of a 5 lb bag of sugar
22. Lots of flour (white, whole wheat, rye, etc.)
23. Dried apples
24. Dried coconut
25. Sunflower seeds
26. Almonds*
27. Dried fish
28. Couscous
29. Sesame seeds
30. Soy sauce
31. Seaweed (for sushi)
32. Tofu
33. Brown sugar
34. Granola*
35. 2 bananas*
36. Dried figs
37. Lentils
38. Olive oil*
39. Vegetable oil*
40. Raisins*
41. Dried cranberries*
42. Large container of oatmeal*
43. 4 Boxes of instant things like risotto and bean dishes
44. 5 cans of tuna fish*
45. 2 cans of sardines
46. 4 boxes of jello and instant pudding
47. Large jar of olives
48. A huge amount of lettuce*
49. Rhubarb*
50. Potatoes*
51. Spring onions*
52. Asparagus*
53. 2 partial loaves of rye bread*
54. One large and two smaller tubs of margarine (one small tub almost empty)*
55. 1 ½ dozen eggs*
56. Jar of thai soup mix
57. Tea*
58. Ground coffee (I don’t drink coffee in the summer, usually)*
59. Mayonnaise*
60. Packets of ketchup from delivery food*

Stuff to be thrown out:

1. Peanut butter that expired in 2007
2. Old dead apples, onions potatoes
3. Something that I think was chili that could now sleep on the bed with the dog
4. A jar of pasta sauce with less than a serving left in it
5. A can of concentrated fruit juice that was purchased years ago
6. Old can of cooking spray
7. Huge jar of pickles
8. Packets of rancid ramen noodles
9. Ancient tube of tomato paste
10. Box of phyllo dough- bought thins for some project and never finished it.

Stuff I’m undecided about:

1. Huge jar of ice tea powder mix that is one solid lump.
2. Huge container of Italian herbs that’s been around for ages
3. Packets of instant oatmeal
4. Very old herbal teas
5. Lots of other old herbs and spices
6. barley

The items that are asterisked are what I would consider “currently active”. These are items I bought recently and eat routinely. The other items have been around a while or are things I eat in the winter and have some left over. Some of them I bought and simply forgot about. That’s 24 out of 60 items. So, not even half of what is hanging around the house is food that I use on a routine basis. I doubt that I’m very unusual in this respect. I’ve seen in some of my friend’s and family’s cabinets. I’ve seen the refrigerator at work.

The stuff that I’m undecided about presents an interesting issue. In some cases, these are things I just over bought. As a single woman who doesn’t cook a lot of Italian food, there was no way I was going to make it through a giant container of Italian herbs. Honestly, I’ve had that thing for maybe 6 years and am only half way through it. I tend to go crazy with buying spices and then I feel guilty throwing them away even when I want to buy more.

Other things like the teas and the barley are often things I bought because they seemed like such a good idea at the time but I ended up not liking them. The same is true for many of the items to be thrown out. I either bought more than I needed or I bought things that are inconvenient (the giant jar of pickles, for example) or that I didn’t really want to eat.. Probably, what should have happened is that I should have offered the things I don’t like to my friends who might have been able to make better use of them. I should have offered to share some of the herbs with people.

On the other hand, I could have made more of a commitment to eat the stuff I had. This brings me to a topic I find fascinating: wasting food.

Once you’ve eaten all you that you want at a meal and there is still food left over, you can choose to save what ever is left, eat it, or throw it away. Many of us are squeamish about just throwing it away but, many of us are concerned about our weight and don’t really need to be eating more than makes us comfortably full. Just as many of us are lazy and can’t be bothered to store the leftovers and then figure out what to do with them later.

Before you start hovering up everything on the plate, though, I think it’s worth evaluating the nutritional impact that might have. For example, as a child, it was always my job to finish the salad after everyone else had had what they wanted. I loved salad and that was a healthy choice for me. On the other hand, my housemate feels an obligation to finish my French fries when I’ve made a conscious (and difficult) choice not to eat half of them. I just don’t see the point in eating something that I am then going to spend an hour trying to exercise away again. Now, I can’t really compost French fries so they will just have to be thrown away. But there is a negative consequence to eating them that, I feel, out weighs the positive of keeping them out of the landfill.

So, for me, waste is more than just throwing away. It’s also eating low nutrition, high calorie food to begin with. In that case, the choice about waste has to be made before the food is even purchased and not just when it’s being prepared or served.