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!

The produce in California is amazing, and every weekend at the Grand Lake Farmer's Market is a taste, smell and opportunity overload.

Even better, it seems like everyone grows something in their backyard; rooftop terrace; tiny, sunny nook. I'm working on my own nook but in the meantime I was recently the recipient of about 30 Lisbon or Eureka lemons (aka, regular lemons.)

Aside: It seems like everyone on the Internet is koo-koo for Myers Improved Lemons. I loove me some citrus but I feel like I have a dark, shameful secret: I don't like Myers! At first I thought maybe it was shipping time to Florida. Then maybe it was my sister's under-nourished tree. But immediately following the Lemonapolooza that I'm about to describe I was gifted with another six or so Meyers from a kind gentlemen in my neighborhood produce swap. I made these raspberry-topped lemon muffins and ended up throwing most of them out. Horrible, inconsistent lemon flavor. I just don't like Myers.

I briefly considered picking out my precious raspberries before tossing the muffins. I mean, can you blame me?

Read the rest of this post »

Tiny clafoutis made with raspberries, blueberries and apricots. These were made primarily for the baby, so they only have 1 Tb of agave nectar instead of honey. I used almond flour, and added a tsp of almond extract. I prefer it with cherries, as in the original recipe, but the texture is amazing.

Recipe: http://www.tarteletteblog.com/2011/06/recipes-gluten-free-cherry-clafoutis.html

Over Easter weekend I co-hosted my sister's baby shower. The first lesson I learned from this is not to host 60 person parties from across the country. The second lesson was to ALWAYS get the pre-cut fruit platter, even if it's cheaper to cut your own fruit.

 

I spent a lot of time running around finalizing things so I had to delegate food shots to someone with a disposable, but here's what I have plus a recipe roundup.

 

 

I made 60 plain vanilla cupcakes. I've tried Magnolia and I've tried Martha and neither really wow me, so I tried out Billy's. I still don't have a favorite. The only flavor request I could squeeze out of the Mom-to-be was something with mint, so I visited my (re-opened!!!) favorite for interesting flavors, Cupcake Bakeshop, and followed Chockylit's recipe for Mint Cream Filled Cupcakes with Raspberry Mousse Frosting. Once I reassured everyone that it was really ok to dig in, these were definitately the crowd favorite.

 

Also from Cupcake Bakeshop I made Lavendar Cream Filled Cupcake with Citrus Cream Cheese Frosting. Someone posited that people were intimidated by the purple frosting, but whatever the reason these came in second best. This often happens when I make two flavors. A cupcake that would have been enjoyed on a different day gets outshone by a really awesome flavor combo.

A little bit of backstory -- on my way out to California, knowing I would bite off more than I could chew (see: 2 recipes worth of homemade brioche, a Tomato & Onion Tart and a giant Jicama-Citrus Salad...also a huge crowd pleaser, plus shopping, decorations, setup etc. all in 36 hours) I baked the cupcakes ahead of time. I showed up in California with a single carry-on roller and a netbook case. The carry-on had all 60 cupcakes, frozen before leaving and wrapped thouroughly in plastic and foil and packed in some giant tupperware I own. I also got insulated grocery bags and wrapped those around the cases. Since it was snowing in Salt Lake as I connected through there, I felt pretty good about the cupcakes staying fresh.

 

So on the way back, I froze and packed up frosting! I had a huge amount of the raspberry mousse left over (4-5 cups?) and since it's one of the best frostings I'd ever had, I certainly didn't want to toss it. So I put it in a ziploc, froze it, wrapped it in foil, tossed it in the insulated bag and flew it back home. I had to check it because I'm pretty sure frosting counts as a gel, and I really didn't want to fight with TSA over the whole issue.

 

I attended a Preakness Party this evening. Usually I love events like this with a theme, and of course I volunteered to bring dessert. Smith Island Cake seemed obvious, but it doesn't really seem all the appealing to me and as tired as I am of cupcakes, it's hard to get people to dig into cake during a party setting. Lady Baltimore seemed too fussy for this party, and peaches haven't really come into season yet for a Baltimore Peach Cake. So I decided to go with something classic and easy, using stuff I had on hand...including the fabulous raspberry mousse!

 

I used Cook's Illustrated's Ultimate Chocolate Cupcakes with Ganache Filling (sorry you'll need a membership to see the recipe, but it is SO worth the money -- I reference them for everything). I love "stuffed" cupcakes and usually follow the "cone" method but giving them ganache centers saves so much time because you just plop in a teaspoon of ganache before baking and it all works itself out in the oven. My only addition to their recipe was that I doubled it to make 24 (no problems) and I simmered some chopped mint in my cream before making the ganache, so that it would be mint chocolate. Oh, and because I'm old-fashioned I made my ganache on the oven instead of the microwave. I know it works (most of the time) but I really don't trust microwaves + chocolate. Then I topped the cupcakes with my raspberry mousse which was slightly less firm after being frozen (or maybe it's just being in 80 degree humid Florida instead of 60 degree dry California) but otherwise none the worse for the wear. These also dissapeared quickly, and I would make all parts of the recipe again - together and seperate.

 

I also re-used the cupcake stands you can see from the baby shower -- I broke them apart and packed them for the flight home, and then re-assembled them here. You can see a great tutorial on how to make you own here, and I highly recommend it. So much cheaper than traditional cake stands and you can personalize them for your occassion, style and needs.