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.

Summer is here in its fruitful abundance and I am thouroughly taking advantage of stone fruit season right now. Plums have been my drug of choice lately, but when I got a King Arthur Flour email with a new recipe for cherry clafouti...well, let's just say there was no arm twisting involved. I first learned of clafoutis from Tartelette, but my favorite recipe comes from the Joy of Baking. Part of the allure of this dish is how delightfully simple it is, just ripe cherries baked in an a firm, eggy custard. Of course, leave it to me to make it complicated.

I made several alterations to the KAF recipe. The biggest one, in my opinion, is that I do not pit the cherries. I actually have a cherry pitter and kind of enjoy the task, but even better I delight in the almondy essense that comes out during baking. It makes eating slightly complicated, but not more than eating bone-in fish.

I wanted to make three slight variations, so I doubled the amount of cherries and made 1.5 of the recipe. It came out like this:

 

Ingredients

6 small-medium eggs (farm fresh, and thus smaller than grocery store eggs)

1.5 cups lukewarm milk

3 T unsalted melted butter

1.5 t vanilla extract

1/2 t almond extract

1 1/4 t salt

1 cup sugar (oops, this should have been 3/4 cup)

3/4 cup almond flour

1/2 cup KAF all-purpose flour

 

For chocolate variation:

1 T dutch process cocoa 

1/4 c milk chocolate chips

 

Variation One

Follow KAF instructions, except as noted above (cherry pits, almond flour mixed in)

 

Variation Two

Same as above, but I carmelized the cherries ahead of time. To do this, melt one tablespoon butter in a skillet or large saucepan and toss cherries in over low-medium heat. Stir frequently as the juices come out of the cherries. When carmelized, pour into bottom of baking pan.

 

Variation Three

What goes really, really well with cherries? Chocolate! It seems like kind of a bastardization, but I decided to venture out. I added 1 T cocoa powder to the last 1/3 of batter, and then poured it over the cherries. I also sprinkled a handful of milk chocolate chips over the whole thing so there would be little globs of chocolate in the mix.

 

The batter looks like something unfit for polite society, so instead I'll show you the clip I attached to the bag of chocolate chips. This little guy and a set of his friends came in a recent care package from my sister.

 

The Verdict? TBC....after breakfast!

 

PUBLISH OR PERISH: I have to applaud Sarah at Chef In The Sticks who has held down PoP summer while Cathy and I flagged a little. She's got a write-up on Asheville this week that I am looking forwards to reading (I wonder if she visited the cheesecake place that uses real cheeses like cheddar in their pies...eating there was a disturbing moment in my life). Cathy told me she was working on something this afternoon, but so far nothing new at CiaoCatherine. I'm already 30 minutes into Tuesday, so we'll see if she has a rabbit in her hat at some point. EDIT: Cathy pointed me to her review of Jimmy Gnecco's The Heart published on VenusZine. Pssh, like being published on a real media outlet is any excuse for missing PoP!

It's a Monday. The weekend was great, but I never made it to the store. Anything for breakfast? Nope, out of everything. So what's a girl to do?

Dining in the drive-through is a perilous task. If I'm eating breakfast on the run, but favorite is a bagel or smoothie shop, but these places rarely have a drive-through. I think slow(ish) food is great, but if I'm so pressed for time I can't make breakfast at home then I also can't wait 20 minutes with the parking and the queuing and the unparking.

I tried McDonalds this morning, since it's one of the closest things to my house, and only a slight detour on my way. Last time I was in a breakfast pinch I tried Starbucks' Reduced-Fat Turkey Bacon with Egg Whites on English Muffin. It beat out water and tofu as blandest food on earth. At 340 calories it still packs quite the punch (10 g Fat, 47g Carbs [3g Fiber] and 22g Protein) but healthy or no I don't want to pay $5 for shoe leather.

After scanning the menu at MacDo I settled on the Fruit 'n Yogurt Parfait as my best bet. I added it to a Bacon, Egg & Cheese Biscuit (later to find this is the WORST thing on the menu...but I am a sucker for their biscuits!) and it was only a $1. That was a good start. I opened it up, sprinkled in the tiny packet of Nature's Valley granola and stirred. I did a double-take on the first bite. I usually buy vanilla yogurt, so I'm no stranger to sweet, but this stuff tasted like a thinned out version of canned cake frosting. Some of the berries in the mix tasted like pancake topping (meaning they'd been macerated in sugar syrup) though the blueberries felt fresh. Wow. No wonder they categorize it as a dessert option in their nutritional profile.

I wanted to take a look at see how this parfait stacks up against other commercial varieties, as well as against what you could make at home. Here is what I found:

My first question mark is why the Fruit 'n Yogurt is listed as 7oz but the serving size is 5.3oz. The McDonalds nutrition facts doesn't say how many servings per container...so which is it? 7 or 5.3? 5.3 ounces in a 7ounce container? It just doesn't make sense. Each parfait has different components, but if you're heading to Panera be aware that it looks like they're using full fat yogurt. The Dannon product comes in pretty trim, probably because people can eyeball the facts BEFORE they buy, unlike at most fast food establishments. The Kashi parfait (which is what I'm most likely to make at home) compares nicely but why so much sodium?!

 

It's hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison because the amounts on the labels get rounded up and down, or will increase in different proportions based on which part of the ingredients you add more of (more yogurt is more protein, but also more fat; more fruit is more fiber, but more sugar as well). With that caveat, here are the facts at the 1 oz level.

So it turns out that I probably made a good choice going to McDonalds for a parfait, rather than Starbucks. It actually compares rather favorably to the Kashi parfait as well. I get less fiber, but also fewer calories and lot less sodium. I still can't help feeling it wasn't a healthy breakfast though. There is something intuitive in my body that feels like real fresh fruit and more crunchy, fibrous bits would have made my breakfast more well-rounded. I'll hit the store after work tonight and try for better breakfasts the rest of this week.

 

SIMILAR ARTICLES:
Serious Eats: Fast-Food Yogurt Parfaits
The Tippy Toe Diet: Food Fight! Yogurt Parfaits

SOURCES:
http://www.kashi.com/recipes/192
http://www.livestrong.com/thedailyplate/nutrition-calories/food/starbucks/fruit-and-yogurt-parfait/
http://www.peertrainer.com/DFcaloriecounterB.aspx?id=8347
http://www.peertrainer.com/DFcaloriecounterB.aspx?id=6887
http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts/fast-foods-generic/9407/2
http://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en/food/food_quality/nutrition_choices.html
http://www.panerabread.com/pdf/nutr-guide.pdf

PUBLISH OR PERISH:
Sarah is probably in the car on the way back home, but she's been doing really well publishing on non-Mondays, so I think she deserves a slide. Or she might be her normal amazing self and pull it off before midnight. On the other hand, I think Catherine has probably forgotten it's Monday so I will need to be on her her to publish. OR PERISH!

With great power comes great responsibility. And with great baking comes the responsibility to bake for the various special occasions that come up for family members. For Leo's family this is actually really easy. His mother and youngest son are sugar addicts; they want their sugar pure and unadulterated. In fact I just take the sugar, heat it up in a spoon, apply a tourniquet and shoot it up (ok, I only do that for his mom. I just pour the sugar into Connor's mouth...kids are so innocent.) His older son is a bit of a harder sell, so when he requested Red Velvet cake for his birthday I was happy to comply, despite disliking the flavor.

 

Perhaps I should back-track a little bit and explain my history with red velvet. The first time I can remember trying it wasn't that long ago. I spent much of my early college years baking treats as a form of social currency, a way of ingratiating myself with the older boys I tended to have class with, and thus half-formed crushes on. My first three newspaper editors were all of the older and male variety, though the first was a schizophrenic and the second a compulsive liar. So when the third one was just mildly depressed and had good taste in music, he got a birthday cake. In what was possibly the only instance of reciprocal baking I've ever experienced, the week of my birthday he presented me with a 9x9 casserole pan, inside of which appeared to be some sort of cake-like food. A thick schmear of canned frosting topped the creation, obscuring any hint as to the innards. When I cut into the concoction little bubbles of a viscous red fluid oozed out onto the frosting, creating pink arterial trees. This was, of course, a red velvet cake. I worked my way through a piece, as did some of my more adventurous friends. Then it got put into the dorm fridge. And was never pulled out, because no one was ever that hungry. A week later and it migrated to the bathroom sink to receive last rights. Except the priest never showed up. There wasn't much about it that seemed likely to degrade, but still when time rolled around to go home for Thanksgiving I deemed it should go back into the fridge during my absence. I didn't want it attacking a hand towel.

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I sign-up for all the marketing emails that I can as a form of research in my field. I like them to be targeted though, and so I end up with a lot of food and recipe based emails. One such email recently included a quick recipe for an apple melt sandwich (though I think they used an english muffin). I liked the idea, but they suggested jam which is kind of an unhealthy load of sugar in my book, so I came up with my own variation. I've had probably close to six in the past 10 days, and I converted Leo to them today. I even switched it up and used mango as my fruit, but apple remains champion. So without further ado, here are the ingredients and steps for an incredibly simple but delicious sandwich.

 

 

Ingredients:

 1 slice whole wheat bread
1 T stoneground/horseradish or other fancy mustard
1/3 apple, sliced thinly with core cut out where necessary
1-2 sliced turkey sandwich meat
6 thin slices White Cheddar (I used Cabot Seriously Sharp)

Directions:
Toast the bread by itself. Let cool slightly, then cover with thick layer of mustard. Layer first turkey, then apple slices, then cheese slices. Place on foil-covered tray on toaster oven and broil until the cheese is ripping and boiling and has caramelized over the entire top. Remain vigilant that it doesn't burn, but I recommend you let the cheese get good and toasty - it really adds another level of flavor.

Makes one sandwich. You'll probably want two.

 

 

PUBLISH OR PERISH BLOGROLL: Cathy seems to have taken the holiday seriously (I swear, it's Washington DC rubbing off on her) but Sarah has a comical post on white squirrels up today. I never knew such a creature existed.