The Vine: July 23, 2010
Dear Sars,
I am a single woman with limited amounts of time and money. I’d like to start eating healthier and thriftier, but the two don’t seem to go together very well.
There have been a lot of articles on this subject recently, but they all seemed to be aimed at families and not practical for the single gal. Can you and your readers help me out with some ideas?
Hungry On A Budget
Dear Budge,
I’ll let the readers suggest any books or links; my advice is to invest in a Costco (or similar) membership, which will let you stock up on staples cheaply, and a crockpot, which will let you huck a bunch of ingredients into a bowl and leave them for the day, then come home to a healthy stew.
Or you can devote one day or evening every two weeks to making a handful of recipes that serve 6-8, splitting up the food into freezable single-serving containers, and popping everything into the freezer until you want it. You can do it with salads as well; just prepare each serving ahead of time and box it up without dressing, then take it out, glop some vinaigrette on it, done.
You can tailor the system to work for you based on your schedule and your culinary tastes, but the key is to have healthy meals ready for you whenever, so you’re not tempted to heat up yet another Lean Cuisine or place yet another pricey takeout order because you’re too tired and hungry to fix a healthy meal.
Dear Sars,
I’m hoping you or the Vine Nation can help me with another mystery book. I’m a librarian, so you’d think I’d be able to find it, but I have very few good keywords to search, and NoveList and Google have let me down.
The book is probably an early YA novel, c. 1983 or so. It’s about two girls who I think are orphans and resemble one another a bit, both with dark hair. They are each on their way to either live with family or go to an orphanage/boarding school, and decide to trade places. Part of this clever ruse involved trading a tam o’shanter hat.
I believe the book mostly follows the rich girl who took the poor girl’s place. Later in life they run into each other and the other girl refuses to acknowledge ever knowing the protagonist. I remember really liking it back in elementary school.
Thanks in advance if anybody recognizes this one!
Kaijsa
Tags: Ask The Readers food popcult
On single-person budget cooking:
1. Invest in a copy of the book “The Pleasures Of Cooking For One”. The book is TAILOR-MADE for single diners, and is sprinkled throughout with great suggestions for “how to use leftovers”. Because — I been there; the problem with being a single diner is more the “this is a family pack of chicken what am I going to do with all of that”. in this book the author will do something like — start with a pork tenderloin. She’ll give you one recipe telling you what to do with some quick cutlets carved from one pork tenderloin, so you can put the rest in the fridge; then the next recipe tells you about how to roast the remaining 2/3rds of the loin and have a roast-pork entree the next night; and the 1/3 of the loin you had left over after that, she tells you how to make a stir-fry out of that. So that’s 3 meals out of one four dollar pork tenderloin.
2. Invest in the cookbook “Moosewood Daily Special”. It is nothing but soups and salads — and some of those salads are grain- or bean-based salads, so you can make a substantial meal out of them. This is how I do my bag lunches for work — I make up a couple soups and salads at the beginning of the week, and then over the course of the week, each day I pick one of the soups and one of the salads, dish out a serving of each, and bang, there’s lunch. The Moosewood cookbooks generally are PACKED with vegetables, and they are all generally flavorful and have a huge variety of stuff; so you will definitely be eating healthy just by default.
On the freezer vacuum pack–you can do a cheap DIY version of those just by mostly closing the seal, using a straw to suck the air out of your filled zip-lock bag through the remaining opening, then closing it up completely.
Ohhhhh Saaaaarrrrrssss….
How fast do you think you could get out to Seattle if I told you I could get you handmade malted milk gelato?
@budge -My two staples are the local farmer’s market and Trader Joes. Good luck — I’ve found eating / cooking right has been a long journey. Take little steps at first, or you’ll never be able to maintain it.
One more tip and then I’ll shut up , I promise: poached chicken.
Boil up the water with some salt and maybe lemon and herbs and when it’s boiling chuck in some skinless chicken breasts or thighs, stick the lid on, turn off the heat and leave for 45mins to an hour. remove, shred, divide into portions and freeze. No oil so it’s very healthy too. As the poster mentioned above with the great mince idea you can than add sauces post hoc: soy and sesame oil, oyster etc for a different flavour
Oh, hells yeah for the poached chicken @Soylent. I like to add a few hearty glugs of cheap white wine to the cooking liquid for added flavor. Add a bay leaf, a few sprigs of whatever herbiness you’ve got on hand (thyme, rosemary, etc.) and a few whole, peeled cloves of garlic and you’re set.
also – Joe Yonan at the Washington Post has been working on a book called Cooking For One (or something like that) – should be out in the reasonably near future and will include about 100 recipes.
Budget – Something I do is make up burger patties and then freeze them in separate bags. When it’s time for dinner, defrost, throw it on the Foreman (or the grill), and cook up a veggie, or some baked fries and make a salad.
BUT, I don’t make boring burgers! I keep an herb garden on my windowsill, and mix stuff into the meat patties. Various herbs, garlic, chopped mushrooms, shredded carrots, chunks of cheese. Mix in soy sauce, Worcestershire, BBQ sauce, whatever. You can have all different flavors of burgers waiting for you.
When I freeze the patties, I’ll freeze patties of the same kind together in a freezer bag, with a piece of plastic wrap or half a sandwich baggie between them (foil, wax paper, everything else sticks), and then label the bag with what kind of patty it is.
If you want to go healthier, use turkey instead of ground beef. You can also use ground pork (mixed in or alone).
In my freezer right now, I’ve got cilantro and garlic burgers (to be topped with guacamole and jack cheese – TO DIE FOR); Italian burgers (oregano and basil) which are awesome with mozzarella or really anything; and burgers with rosemary and sage, which I suspect will rock with BBQ sauce.
I think feeling homicidal at Costco must be universal. I hate, hate, hate going to Costco in Billings MT. If I must go, it’s better to go right as they open and shop at full speed to beat the idiots to the checkouts.
Budget – I’m in a similar situation, and I’ve learned a few tricks over the past few years.
1. Get the smallest rice cooker you can find. They work like magic. Just throw in the rice, some water, turn it on, and stir fry some veggies and meat while your rice cooks.
2. Stay away from processed foods, especially those that are meant to save time. They don’t save that much time, they’re more expensive, and they usually have a ton of sodium.
3. Shop more than once a week and don’t buy more than you can eat before it spoils.
4. Find something healthy you like to eat for lunch, make it, and pack it. Personally, I hate sandwiches and salads, so for lunch I usually make a veggie lasagna or a veggie chili on Sunday night and eat it for lunch the rest of the week.
5. Ditto on what has been said on buying dried beans and grains in bulk. And explore! Try out bulghur, quinoa, lentils, etc. These are cheap and healthy ingredients that can be delicious with the right spices.
6. If you have a spare windowsill, consider growing your own herbs. Fresh herbs add so much in terms of flavor, but they are crazy expensive.
Good luck!
Budget, this may not work for you, but I use it for my husband and I…http://www.emealz.com. It’s a menu-planning service that lets you download a weekly meal plan with recipes and a shopping list. The version we subscribe to ($15 a quarter) is Low-Fat Cooking for 2, which gives you 5 dinners a week that are sized for 2-3 portions. For us, that gives us dinner every night, plus lunch for me the next day. You could easily tailor the meals to be smaller (i.e. if it calls for 3 chicken breasts, just use 1) and it stops that process of running to the grocery store every other day, which for me, costs me a lot more in the long run than when I plan out a week’s worth of meals and shop once a week. Putting dinner together in the evening takes between 15-25 minutes most nights.
If you don’t want to subscribe to a service like this, I still think the key is planning a weekly menu and shopping less often… Use a web site like allrecipes.com or tasteofhome.com to find recipes, chop down the # of servings, and make a grocery list for a week’s worth at a time.
@my own stupid comment 2 seconds ago. That web address would be http://www.e-mealz.com. ~Hate~ the cutesy misspelling, but the recipes are decent and easy.
@Sars … I bought that giant tub of animal crackers. It’s just me and my husband, and he doesn’t even LIKE animal crackers. I may still be eating animal crackers when the staff at the retirement home invite my great-grandchildren over to celebrate my 103rd birthday.
Just a quick note regarding crock pots. Because of a crackdown by the food safety police, the newer models run hotter. The effect being that there are fewer recipes that really take 8 hours to cook, making it much more difficult to put something on, go to work, and have it be right when you get home. So be aware off the vintage of your recipes. If it’s something out of a new cookbook, the cooking times are more likely to be right for a new crock pot. But if it’s something off an index card that you got from your Mom, your mileage may vary.
Oh, and for mushy or bland, remember that you don’t really lose any liquid during cooking. If it looks like you’ve got enough broth or other cooking liquid, you probably have too much (until you get your eyeballs calibrated for the device). You can almost get by with just the liquid you get from the vegetables and the meat.
Follow-on for the poached chicken reco: fish en papillote (pouch cooking). This is a really easy & healthy baked fish technique where you take a single serving of fish, add acidic liquid, a bit of oil, a pile of herb, an aromatic, optional veg & spices, salt & pepper, wrap it up in parchment paper, and bake in a 400F oven for 6-10 minutes. My usual combo is rainbow trout + lemon juice + lemon slices + olive oil + dill + garlic + sliced shrooms + cayenne + pinch of salt, but the variations are endless. See http://bit.ly/VP0Yb for more; Alton Brown also had a great demo of this on Good Eats & it might be out there somewhere.