Do you ever find yourself Yelping takeout on the last few minutes of your drive home from work? Do you examine your monthly expenses only to be blown away by how much you spend on food? If so, you may want to check out a new Living Frugally feature from LearnVest.com where they supply a weekly shopping list, five 2-person dinner recipes and a plan: shop on Sunday, spend 90 minutes on prep and then for the rest of the week have dinner ready at a moment's notice - and on the cheap too!

Since I fall into the category described above, this sounded great. I'm following the plan for October to see if it's truly saving me time, money, hassle and maybe even improving the healthiness of my dinner choices.

Week One

You may or may not have heard of LearnVest; in sum, it's similar to other financial tools like Mint.com, but it's specifically for women and its strategy involves frequent communication through email newsletters and short "finance bootcamps" that you join based on your financial goals and weak spots. I don't actually use LearnVest to manage my overall financial picture because I have run into a lot of Beta user interface bugs. These issues extended into the Food for a Month feature, but they've been very responsive to my and other users' comments and already week two has shown a marked improvement.

Week One Shopping List

Suggestions: SmartPhone app (see: Epicurious recipe + shopping list app), easy printable format and sorting by type of ingredient (i.e., where in the store it will be...see: Punchfork recipes) Also, I do not think that the average person considers tahini an "on hand" ingredient (though I did have it patiently waiting in the pantry) and this seems like a trick to keep the price down. Also, the shopping list didn't cover some minor ingredients such as sesame seeds.

LearnVest Price: $27.42

California Whole Foods Price, mostly organic: $49.07 + tax

Price discrepancy is totally reasonable to me, and that's probably less than two take-out dinners in Berkeley. Price = good

Prep instructions are located on the article homepage, but they really need their own clearly delineated section. This was resolved by week two.

Recipes:

Day 1: Roast pork with roasted vegetables
Day 2: Pork pitas with vegetables and dill hummus
Day 3: Pork-fried quinoa with dill and capers
Day 4: Black bean and pork sweet potato salad
Day 5: Roasted vegetable and black bean soup
Snack: Dill hummus with pita chips

Suggestions: Smartphone app, printable. Also, make it clear in both the prep instructions and recipes how much of the material goes in each dish (maybe some sort of recipe grid?) I used all the dill in the hummus because I didn't realize some should be reserved for the Pork Fried Quinoa.

Part of this concept is that all five dishes use a collective set of ingredients with little left to waste at the end. However this set of recipes called for a single carrot. Excuse me? Do they sell single carrots in New York? Because they don't in the Bay Area. Easy solution is to utilize carrots more extensively in the recipes; I grated fresh carrot into the pork & veggie pitas. Alternatively, everyone should invest in a guinea pig as an extremely adorable composting solution.

My own brilliant innovation in this project was to layer the prepped ingredients for each dish in a single storage container in the order in which they would be needed. Remember that this is reverse order from the recipe! In the Day 5 Soup the container has (starting on top): garlic; tomatoes; roast vegetables; black beans; quinoa; pork. For 'fresh' ingredients like spinach I washed and measured the ingredients and then packed them into a seperate ziplock. I opened cans, especially when it was being split between recipes, but left stuff like chicken stock in the package until needed.

Week 1 in Review:

It took me longer to prep than advertised. Probably close to 3 hours, but I wasn't trying to maximize efficiency. However each meal did come together in about 10 minutes the day of. The recipes say they serve two, but if so that would be two hearty portions. I am only cooking for one, and any extra got tossed in the freezer. For week two I plan to use leftovers as lunch, which will further reduce my grocery bill. Also, it's probably important to check your social calendar before doing this. I had already committed to two nights out, and I didn't prep until Monday. The food saw me clear through the weekend in addition to my budding freezer supply, but this is all good in my book.

I am extremely pleased at the healthiness of the recipes in the selection. The theme is a simple one: protein with some vegetables and the occassional grain. I have found that many recipes billed as: simple, easy, weeknight-ready, 30 minutes or less, etc. all end up being heavily reliant on processed foods. Not only do processed foods tend to be higher in sodium and lower in nutrients than fresh food...but they're not actually very cheap. In most situations a seasonally and regionally appropriate fruit or vegetable will be cheaper fresh than canned.

Check back over the next three weeks to see how Food for a Month is progressing. If you try it out, I've love to hear you thoughts or suggestions -- though make sure you pass them along to LearnVest as well and hopefully we'll see this feature develop even more.

PoP: Brief shoutout to my PoP writers, even though I'm a day late and a...well, you can see the blog title. Powell has been extremely dilligent since joining us, and his bright bursts of pop culture critique guilt me every time they show up promptly on schedule. Cathy managed a celebratory post after her long hiatus due to a blog virus. Who even gets those? But I've killed it, so I expect some forthcoming posts about music that will make me feel like the cultural cretin that I am.

Sarah, Heather...quiescence is so 2007. Time to start back up!

It often feels really challenging to eat healthy on a budget. For the past 14 months I've kept very detailed track of where my money goes and that's really helped me bring down my food cost from as high as $200 a week to a much more reasonable $50-75. Even this price range may seem high since I'm cooking for one these days, and it is high -- much higher than if I didn't try and buy healthy and environmentally responsible foods and products. Budgeting requires a prioritization of desires, as does dieting, so these two projects actually go together well even if they often have an inverse relationship.

I don't diet in the traditional sense, but I really like the approach that's laid out in The Full Plate Diet. One of the first important things to know about this plan, is that the eBook is available for free from their website. They also have a pretty cool mailing list with recipes, short stories and ideas for success. I don't think their approach revolutionary, in fact why I like it is that it jives with most of the other ideas in which I believe. Eat mostly plants, some meat, but everything in moderation (note: Americans eat an average of 8oz of meat per day -- which is double the global average). Eat carbohydrates that are providing you with plenty of fiber (they recommend 40g per day) and not that much sugar. Never get hungry, never get full.

The best way for me to eat healthy AND cheap is to have a plan. As much as I love making elaborate meals they often require one-off ingredients and I'll eat more than I should since it's really challenging to make single portion meals from scratch. So I've settled into a routine the past few weeks that hasn't helped with my blogging goals, but will hopefully help with my health and budget goals!

One of my very favorite bloggers ever is Ms. Bitchcakes. I have learned so much more from her than I ever did from actually attending Weight Watchers. If you check her out, you'll see why I see her as partial inspiration for this style of post.

 

Breakfast

Kashi GOLEAN Crips! Toasted Berry Crumble  

I've really been able to embrace Kashi cereal since they introduced this one with some freaking sweetener. This cereal is actually a case where budgeting helps me be healthy. Kashi retails for $3.75 in Tampa and I only want to buy one box per week. Left to my own devices I would fill my cereal bowl to the point where I got 4 servings out of a box. But to keep to one box a week I make each bowl slightly smaller and tada! a week's worth of breakfast.

My Serving: 288 cal / 5.6g fat / 56g carbs / 12.8g dietary fiber / 14.4g protein

 

Publix Organic 2% Milk

While all private brand organic milk currently gets two cows from the Cornucopia Institute due to lack of survey response, Publix has my price point of $5.49/gal figure out. Plus, much like Google, Publix has totally suckered me into loving and trusting their brand.

My Serving: 130 cal / 5g fat / 13g carbs / 9g protein

 

The Fiber Splurge: In-season blueberries are two pints for $5, which comes out to about 3g fiber per $1. Sure, the Kashi is 17g per $1 but considering how sweet and crisp and delicious these little suckers are, it's totally a good value. Blueberries also come packed with lots of other health benefits. And did I mention delicious? With about 2oz of blueberries on top of my cereal I feel like I'm eating dessert for breakfast.

My Serving: 21 cal / 0g fat/ 5.25g carbs / 1g fiber / 0g protein

 

Total Breakfast Cost (per serving): $1.60

Nutritional Value (per serving): 440 cal / 10.6g fat / 75g carbs / 14 g fiber / 23 g protein

 

 

 

PoP: Look at me posting on the right day. Way to go, me! Sarah hasn't posted yet tonight, which hopefully means it was a full house at the lodge tonight. CiaoSlacker has a computer virus so I'll give her a slight pass, but she needs to get her butt in gear. PUBLISH OR PERISH!!!