2 posts tagged “cooking”

My brother the doctor insisted I read this book.  It's out of print, but I found a copy at the Indianapolis Public Library.

Let's get the negatives out of the way.  The book is poorly written and poorly organized.  Most of the prose borders on ranting, and many of his assertions are unsupported.  It's ironic that a doctor wrote it; the attitude of the writing oozes the know-it-all-doctor stereotype.  To top it off, the included menus and recipes don't measure up to what you would find in any reputable cookbook.  It's obvious why this book is out of print.  I'm glad I didn't buy it.

Nonetheless, it was well worth spending an hour thumbing through it.  He drives for a vegan diet that minimizes cholesterol and sodium, radically opposess processed food, and strongly discourages dairy.  I agree with his targets, and it inspired me to think about what I can do to get there.

I have to be practical.  The unspoken challenge in these diets is how to prepare food that is low-fat and low-sodium but still tastes good.  My brother's wife is a professional cook and is willing to devote a lot of time to food preparation.  For the rest of us, we have to find a compromise that works.

I feel like I have the family in a pretty good spot already.  I prepare the meals, I push veggies, I don't fry, I avoid salt when I can, etc.  I'm still going after some easy kills to do better.

• Stop buying potato chips and cereal
• Make more bread myself
• Switch to unhomegenized peanut butter
• Introduce nuts
• Increase the fruit and veggies ratio at meals
• Cut back on meat and cheese in routine dishes, e.g., the sausage in my red beans and rice or the cheese in my lentil cassserole

The timing is good.  I've been in a cooking rut for the last year and have needed something to shake me out of it.  I pulled my Moosewood cookbook off the shelf with new eyes yesterday and spent an hour menu planning.  Grocery shopping today should be fun; I'm sure I'll end up at Trader Joe's for some of this stuff.

I saw this post by Daiko on eating cheap at Get Rich Slowly.  I have some tips to add from my years as a graduate student.  I also want to be more concrete than Daiko's post to illustrate the lifestyle.

• Buy bulk at the local co-op.  Rice, oats, flour, sugar, beans, and other nonperishables especially.  Store in tupperware to keep the bugs away.
• Go easy on meat and cheese.  They're both expensive.
• Butter is worth the money on the other hand.
  
• Get a bread maker and make your own bread using the cheap bulk ingredients you bought.  It takes five minutes to start, and you can take a break from coding when it's done to enjoy warm bread (with butter).
  
• Make your own salsa and eat it with a can of tuna.  It's a quick meal so you can get back to writing code.
  
• Beans and rice is a staple.  If it gets bland, start jazzing it with jalapenos and other spices.  Ham bones are cheap; add one or two to mix it up.  Use a rice cooker so that you don't have to think about the rice while coding.

Daiko also has the right perspective on produce.  Buy what's cheap.  Potatos are filling, and they are a great vehicle for cleaning out the fridge.  A little extra broccoli getting old?  Mix with a baked potato.  Last little bit of cheese getting dry?  Mix it with a potato.  Scallions looking wilted?  In it goes.  The best part: it takes about 3 minutes plus cook time to bake potatos, and you can be writing code while they cook.

Buy produce in season too.  In the midwest, corn can be had for $0.10 an ear in early summer.  Bags of apples can get cheap, and while cheap apples are too mealy for me, you can use them with those bulk nonperishables to make tasty treats like apple crisp.  Nothing makes a great break from coding on a 45-degree fall day like warm apple crisp and a cup of coffee in the afternoon.

This brings me to vices.  I said butter is worth the money and for me it is.  Coffee is too.  Admit your weaknesses and budget around it.  Your vices may be different, but they will be there.  Ice cream?  Meat?  Identify them and deal with them.  If you have to eat on $15 a week, you probably have to give them up, but if you can stretch to $25 (about what I spent in grad school), you can enjoy eating a lot more.

Finally, I don't recommend this lifestyle if you have a significant other, roommate, or a family.  Cooking and eating ought to be social.  Yeah, when your roommate has a deadline for theory homework, and you're tracking a bug in your garbage collector, microwaved baked potatos in a #8 tupperware bowl is dinner tonight.  If you can afford an hour, though, it's fun to cook and eat together.  If you have a family, then it's imperative to make at least one meal a day the central focus for the family.  The kids also need to learn to cook (and code).  Shucks, Chloe made her first apple crisp just last night.