Eating down goes on and on and on....

The Farmer's market was a challenge this morning. Everywhere I looked I though "Oh, I'll just get that." But, i was good and I really stuck to my plan of buying only milk (half gallon of 2%) and rhubarb.

Because I still had some rhubarb left from last week that I wanted to use up, I decided to make a variation on a bread pudding. For this, I used:

4 thin stalks of rhubarb
1 apple (I found a decent one in the refrigerator)
splenda
5 eggs
1 cup milk
honey
brown sugar
3 slices cinnamon raisin bread
whole wheat flour
cinnamon

I chopped the rhubarb and apple and put them in a5 qt casserole with some splenda and about 1/2 cup of water and put that into the microwave for 3 minutes
While that was in the microwave, I mixed all the ingredients except the bread and flour together.
Once the fruits mix was done, I sprinkled about 1/3 bup of whole wheat flour on it and ripped up the bread slices and layered them on top.
I poured the liquid mix over the fruit and bread layers and baked in the oven at 350 for about an hour.

It ends up being kind of sweet and custardy.
With my housemate's help, this week, I have managed to finish off the following items from my list of the other day:
lentils
cauliflower
one jar of honey
bananas
chicken thighs
bread (which I notice wasn't even on the list but the rye bread is gone now too)
brown sugar
rhubarb (which has been replaced)
the almost empty tub of margarine


I still have to work on that heap of lettuce but it should be gone in a few days.

Tonight's dinner will be a big salad with something that I haven't decided on yet. I still have tortillas but may save those for lunches this week with the tuna and/or sardines. Maybe one of the prepared Indian packets will work. I've been trying to get my housemate to eat the frozen pizzas but he isn't going for it.

This brings up an interesting point. Most of the budget guidelines suggest that families and couples can eat for less than a single person can. I can see that this would be true if everyone is willing to eat the same thing. In my household, my partner and I have very different diets. mine is primarily vegetarian with meat at a couple dinners a week. His is primarily carnivorous and he never eats vegetables or anything spicy or unusual. Trust me, there have been more than a few occasions when I've freaked out over his food choices. But what this means is that we are each pretty much eating like single people.
He will eat things like the bread pudding above or oatmeal with fruit in it but he won't touch my salad or bean dishes ever. As a result, I get no real benefit from having two people in the house unless I compromise my diet to meet his.

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 %