40aWeek's blog

Shopping at Whole Paycheck

2008-01-08T00:11:24-06:00

Come visit the new Whole Foods here in Oakland with me! I am telling you, it is INSANE in there. I always experienced Whole Foods as an upscale, schmancy place, but I did not know how far they could take it. Look at their bathrooms:

And you know that multi-stone-looking granite-type countertop material is some eco-friendly recycled stuff, too. I think it may even be a green building; up in the TOP parking lot (that's right, they have more than one parking lot) the walls say things about their use of solar power and their carbon offsets and whatnot.

They have outdone themselves. The store is laid out in a circle. You're led through the seafood and produce section around to the "Bistro." I have no idea what the Bistro does, since there's already a prepared foods section and what looks like it may be a cafe. Then past the meat area, where they DRY AGE THEIR BEEF IN A GLASS CABINET RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU. I'm sorry, I got a little excited there. CUSTOM DRY AGED BEEF. For as long as you want, I think. Maybe I am projecting my Dream Beef onto them. I read Jeffrey Steingarten's essay about how wet-aging is cheaper and easier and it's so hard to find dry-aged beef and the ideal beef is dry-aged 6-8 weeks and, well, it's a good thing I don't really eat beef because I would be insufferable about it. Now I have fantasies of ordering beef for them to dry-age and coming to visit it once a week.

Oh, and the produce. The produce! It is not as good as the farmer's market or the Berkeley Bowl. Anywhere that charges some $2.50 for one pesticide-coated pomegranate, in season, is on my shit list. Especially when I saw that right after buying an organic one for about 25 cents at the farmer's market. Please. And could I find organic eggplant? No I could not. But (if you're not actually trying to buy something to eat) they make up for it with the gorgeous layouts. Forests of asparagus:

Walls full of beautifully arranged pre-packaged fruit and vegetable dishes:

What you can't see in that picture - besides the crazy prices - is that when I took it, every single dish was mislabeled. Fun to look at, happy I wasn't buying them.

After you curve past the meat window, you pass by the valley of cheeses, where employees are slicing cheeses for you to taste right there. And, of course, the intimidating chocolate mountain... (more)

'Tis the Season To Let Go Of "Just In Case"

2007-11-12T15:01:30-06:00

Even after I started working on my money issues, I had trouble with overbuying. There were all the things that I didn’t need or want but held on to “just in case”: weird flavors of Top Ramen that I bought out of curiosity, interesting jam that I had no particular use for, cookies or cereal that I didn’t want to eat but didn’t want to throw out in case I woke up with a craving for them one day, canned soups and chilis that I never really wanted to eat because they contained something or other that I didn’t want to eat in my soup - sugar or meat - but would eat if pressed….

“Just in case” is not useful. The reality that I still have trouble accepting sometimes is that if I want those things, I can buy them at that time. Meal planning means that I don’t have to fear the unknown “just in case”s. I don’t need to hang on to those foods on the theory that someday I won’t have any money and will need to eat all the tail ends of whatever I find at the back of the cabinet, or that I am incapable of dealing with a craving for Cinnamon Toast Crunch (when the reality is that such a craving always passes before I even remember I own a mini box of the stuff), or that the second that I let go of that canned cream of celery soup (seriously, EW) I will deeply regret it and cry and cry because I have no canned cream of celery soup. These are all old issues dressing up as dry goods.

The reality is that I can go to the store if I need to buy a craved treat; that I can spend time distinguishing between “I actually want this treat” and “I want something to give me a sense of luxury because I am undersleeping and overworking or freaking out about money or not eating enough”; that when I make a meal plan, I don’t even have time to eat all those tail ends of old hoarded food because all my meals are things I actually want; and that I can decide that I refuse to ever be in a place where I need to subsist on three-year-old frozen sausages that look like scabs, and put my time and energy into saving up and working toward abundance to prevent that from happening.

And the reality, also, is that as long as I hang onto all my “just in case” foods, I am keeping one foot (or one food, as I originally typed there) in the door of deprivation. I’m still keeping my “out” open - if I don’t want to do this work, or make the food part of my budget a priority, or buy my groceries on time, or cook my meals before I need them, I still have the scab sausages and the canned macaroni and cheese on hand! And that means that it’s always an option to avoid this work and choose to have scab sausages for dinner. And that means that I don’t need to make sure my life is awesome, abundant, and healthy. Or stand up for my boundaries and my priorities ad my needs. Scab sausages are there for me! I don’t need to be there for myself!

Ewww, ew, ew, ew, EW.

And would you look at that - there are all those huge buckets gathering donations of food, at banks and grocery stores and offices all across various lands right about now. The frozen sausages can’t go in there, but maybe somebody who actually LIKES cream of celery soup or oddly sweet vegetarian chili can get the things that have been gathering dust and spiderwebs in my cabinet for years. If I feel sad or scared about giving these things away, I can think about what I like about them and put that into my meal plan for next week!

Maybe that would be a good blog challenge. Unrelated to the Weekend Cookbook Challenge: clear out something in your pantry that you have been hanging onto for too long, give it away, and blog about it, and I’ll link to it and give you lots of shiny props over here. No deadline: any time, any year you do this, just drop me a line.

The Anti-Frugal Post

2007-10-30T11:38:26-05:00

I have noticed that a lot of the resources strewn about the internet around meal planning are... well... frugal. Penny-wise. Thrifty. That is to say: for me, they cross the line between living abundantly within your means and living in deprivation.

Part of that (but just part of it) is attitude. If I go into my weekly meal planning with a lot of fear about how I don't have enough money, or how I could wind up with a financial crisis on my hands again at any time, and so I should be spending as little as possible on food, I'll have no problem spending $40 or less for my meals. In fact, I'll probably spend closer to $20 or $30. And with that food, I'll be gulping down all kinds of wildly inaccurate beliefs about how there isn't enough money in my life, there isn't enough safety, I can't really count on being able to afford my food, I'd better make sure I cut corners everywhere I can....

By contrast, if I am taking care of myself, if I go into my meal planning with a sense of trust in myself, knowing that I have been willing and able to show up for financial crises in the past and find ways to take care of them without living on Top Ramen; if I go into it knowing that $40 a week is not a challenge to spend as little (or as much) as possible, but an amount that I chose because I could reliably spend about that much to get all the food I needed and still eat interesting and healthy meals; if I look at it as an invitation to have adventures in food and eat lavishly without binge-spending as I used to, then along with my food I get to take in a sense of safety, abundance, and excitement.

(Continued....)

November's Weekend Cookbook Challenge

2007-10-29T23:39:43-05:00

I'm hosting a challenge! I am SO excited about this.

Sara of I Like to Cook started the Weekend Cookbook Challenge. I love this addition to the many great foodblogger events out there because it's really easy for me to let my cookbooks gather dust while I work my way through all the inspiring recipes people post around me. The WCC reminds me of all the great cookbooks that I have and gives me a good reason to hit them at least once a month. There are dreams deferred in there, people! Dreams deferred!

So the theme I chose for my WCC, naturally, is $40 a Week! Your challenge, should you choose to accept it: plan a week's worth of meals that cost you US$40 per person or less. Make one thing from your meal plan (or follow the whole plan!) and share it with us.

I'm going to tell you all the stuff that is involved in making a meal plan, and post tips and other information about it all month long. This is a great opportunity to try meal planning if you don't do it normally: I've found that just the act of figuring out what I want to eat over the next week and buying only that food saves me a ton of money, and I save even more if I figure out how much it will cost and try to stick within $40. It can seem like a lot of work if you are not used to it, but it is well worth it!

Here are the steps I take to create my meal plan for the week:
1. Check out what ingredients I have lying around that I might want to use.
2. Check out what leftovers I have.
3. Think about what I have been wanting to cook or eat. (Have I been craving comfort foods? Did I see a couple of good recipes on someone's blog that I've been meaning to make? Do I keep swearing that I will go to the farmer's market and do something with figs before the season is over? (Answer to that last one: yes.))
4. Figure out how many meals of leftovers I have and how many meals the different things I want to make will provide. (The way I think about it is that I need 7 breakfasts and 14 lunch-or-dinners in a given week.)
5. Start writing down what ingredients I need to buy for each meal and guesstimating how much each one will cost, overestimating if I am not sure.
6. Fiddle with the list. (Maybe I am way over $40 and I need to switch out a more expensive meal for something I know is cheap. Maybe it costs the right amount, but after making it I realize every single meal is composed almost entirely of cheese. Maybe it was all fine but then I remembered that I'm eating out four times this week, at parties or restaurants, and don't actually need this much food.)
7. Sketch out a plan for when I am eating which meals. (I don't have to stick to this, but it helps me see when I need to cook a given dish in order to have it on hand for eatin', so that I'm not stuck on Monday with a whole mess of ingredients and no actual Food. It also helps me see if I did my math wrong on how many meals I was making, and to be honest with myself about how much food I am actually going to prepare.)
8. Go grocery shopping!

In theory, anyway. In practice, I often leave out step one. I do have noodles and canned soup and tahini and stuff on hand, but it all keeps so I'm not that worried about using it up. It's more often the case that I see a recipe and go "oh, it uses tahini and I already have that! That makes it even more affordable!"

So, your goal is to do all of that, post the meal plan, and post about at least one recipe you make from a cookbook of your choice. I'd most especially love to hear how the process worked for you, though! Did it give you the opportunity to eat more food you wanted, more vegetables, to save money, to spend more than you usually do, to eat out a lot less, to eat on time instead of starting to cook (or order pizza) when you are already hungry?

Oh and by the way: you can totally do this for more than a week at a time. I have found that a week works best for me for two reasons: (1) it is such a pain to figure out what I want to eat for fourteen whole days at a time, and (2) somehow when I focus in on just a week I save even more money. I still don't understand why, but instead of having a hard time fitting it all in at $40 per week I suddenly find myself adding everything up and coming up with a total of $28-$32 dollars a lot of the time.

I used to avoid weekly meal plans because I thought going to the grocery store was too frustrating and time-consuming to do every week, but of course it was frustrating and time-consuming when I was buying two weeks' worth of ingredients! I always had to go to about three different stores because one had much the cheapest cream but everything else was wildly expensive (I am looking at you, Whole Foods) and one had everything else cheap but produce and one had all the produce.... Turns out, when I am just buying what I need for the week, I can often get it all at one store. Like, maybe there's one single thing on the list that I could get cheaper somewhere else, and I can afford to get the more expensive bread or artichokes or what-have-you because it's still under $40 altogether. And because it's just a week's worth of stuff, I can shop so much faster! We have really, really crowded grocery stores around here, too, and shopping for just a short list of ingredients really cuts down on me wanting to kill everyone who is blocking the aisles. Because, you know, I have time.

I'll be posting a lot more information about how meal planning works over the next month, as well as my usual recipes, cooking, and meal plans for myself; watch this space!

Virgin Tuna Cocktail?

2007-10-29T23:37:46-05:00

If you needed any proof that it is possible to eat luxuriously on $40 a week, look no further:

This is a serious splurge dish. What you are seeing is a martini glass filled with cubes of sashimi-grade tombo and salmon roe. An ounce of roe set me back $4; I chose the tombo because it was on sale, so half a pound cost me about the same amount - roughly $4.14.

And all of that went into this dish. That's nearly a quarter of your budget for one meal!

Awesome.

(Continued....)

Sugar Pie Pumpkin Souffle

2007-10-17T11:34:41-05:00

Sugar Pie
You are making me crazy
I’m in love but I’m lazy
So won’t you please get into my souffle
Doot doot dooo!

When I saw the golden, fluffy picture of this pumpkin and cheese souffle on Tastespotting last week, I knew I had to have it. And I wasn’t going to let a little thing like the recipe being entirely in Italian stop me!

I don’t know if it’s because I speak Spanish and French, or if it’s because I am Italian and it’s in my blood, or some other, stranger reason, but I can read Italian just fine. Here, I googled italiano and I’ll test myself with the first thing I found, apparently some pharmaceutical website....

(continued)

GOOP. DROOL.

2007-09-28T17:46:31-05:00

When I was growing up, I was perfectly clear about what jujubes were. They were those rubbery, chewy, very brightly colored candies that came three or four to a tiny box on Halloween. The ones that left me picking bits of red, green, and yellow out of my molars for hours afterward. They weren’t very good, but they were very pretty. And free!

So when I came upon jujubes at the farmer’s market twenty years later, I was confused and surprised. Those looked like dates! What did they mean, jujubes? There must be a mistake somewhere. Eventually I learned that these brown little ovals were also called “Chinese dates” (ha! I was right about the date thing!) and that they really were also “jujubes.” I bought a bag of them and experimented. They reminded me a little bit of crabapples, only sweet: they had the same light, almost mealy texture when fresh, and the same nearly-apple-y flavors. But when left alone for a while, they become wrinkly and syrupy-sweet.

I was flicking through my “Awesome Recipes” folder just now, looking for inspiration, and I found this recipe for vegetables with jujubes. “Recipe” is a little bit of a stretch, really. It’s just a list of things that blogger Brendon - who, hey! lives in my hometown of Davis - might include in his signature menu. But right in the middle there, look! sauteed green beans, and what look like cherry tomatoes, and jujubes! steaming hot from the wok!

(entry continues at $40 a Week)

Creamy Tomato SCHLOOOOOP!!!

2007-09-14T15:45:22-05:00

Why stop at full meal plans? Especially in summer, there is always the occasional opportunity to grab an extra ingredient or use some leftovers in a totally new and unplanned way. I don’t want to wait until I can place these recipes in the context of a full meal plan, so I was inspired to start also sharing individual recipes that people can use when building their own plans. This one was flavorful, comforting, and satisfying - and EASY - all at once.

I had a great big heirloom tomato just sitting on my table, threatening to get all sulky and wrinkly and moldy any second. And my girlfriend had an awesome bowl of tomato soup. And it occurred to me that tomato + immersion blender + seasonings might just = tomato soup of my very own. (Read more....)

What are your flavors?

2007-09-11T13:54:28-05:00

I realized recently that there are certain foods that I will eat no matter what form they come in. So far, this list includes:

Artichokes. This is what really started the whole idea. See, these are foods that I'll automatically order off a restaurant menu. Like, if I see artichoke fritters, artichoke soup, artichoke frittatas, fried artichokes, artichokes on a pizza, artichoke pancakes... artichoke anything, I automatically want to get it. I don't have to get it, but it always jumps out at me as something I want. It's one of my go-to foods.

Mint. Mint appears in fewer things around here, but I love it. I love mint tea and mint candy and chocolate mint anything. It's a little bit less automatic for me. I can think of mint things I would not eat. Mint oatmeal, for example, would at least give me pause.

But I'd be willing to try it.

Lemon. Oh my god, anything with lemon. I used to have lemon soap that I really loved, when I was nine. It was a little bar shaped like a lemon, clear and yellow and nubbly, and it was just the right size for my hands and I loved it. I will smell anything that smells like lemon. I will rub it all over myself if given the opportunity. I have lemon oil in my living room diffuser right now, and a meyer lemon bush in the backyard. And hey: you can put mint in lemonade and combine these two! (Oddly, that is not my favorite use of either mint or lemon. Maybe it's all the sugar.)

Salmon. Artichokes are the first thing I noticed as a go-to food, but salmon is the first foodstuff that I noticed was good no matter how it was prepared. Smoked, loxed, steamed, barbecued, grilled, moussed, jerked, marinated, raw, faked with seitan - there is literally nothing you can do wrong with salmon. I guess you could rub it with garbage and then spit on it, but that's how far you need to go to make it inedible. (And even then I'd be thinking, "Maybe if you could wash that off....")

Garlic. I will do garlic anytime, anywhere. I have been planning for years to get a head of garlic tattooed on my left bicep. With just a few cloves missing. And then the cloves would be tattooed here and there on my back. I love the garlic festival, but I am always sort of disappointed that they don't have more garlicky foods. The best things I've had there were escargots (oh yum) and of course the garlic ice cream. This year I was sad because they didn't have the escargots and they didn't have whole cones of garlic ice cream - they just had tiny sample cones of garlic soft-serve. I had to have four. It was oddly grainy, but it was good anyway. And it has that hilarious trick where when you first get there it tastes very garlicky, but if you eat some later it just tastes like vanilla! That's sort of my problem with cooking, actually: for a while I put so much garlic in everything that I couldn't even notice the garlic. It was like salt; it just brought the flavor to where I needed it to be without seeming to add anything of its own.

Goat Cheese. This one is a newcomer to my list. Maybe it was the oysters with goat cheese, or the goat cheese souffles. I think the trip to the Cheese Board cemented it. All those goat cheeses to sample! Creamy, fluffy, savory, fruity, so many kinds of goat cheese! What's funny is that cheese itself failed to make the cut. What is it about goat cheese? I think it's a better alternative to cow because so few people seem to raise cows sustainably and they take up so many resources while they produce the milk for that cheese. But it's not like I don't love cheese at large. On the other hand, it is a goat cheese souffle, and then there are the lemony, cheesecake-like chocolate goat cheese truffles I used to make all the time. Soooo good.

Seaweed. I almost forgot seaweed! I will also eat seaweed anytime, anywhere. I like to get dried wakame and kombu and just eat 'em up for a snack. then there's seaweed salad and nori-wrapped sushi and seaweed in soups and... seriously, bring it on.

There are other ones that are hovering just short of being on the list, more because I haven't made a decision about them than because they don't deserve to be on here. Mushrooms should almost certainly be on my list, but I have this unreasoning fear of the "soggy and flavorless" white ones. (But they're so good with a little garlic, butter, and balsalmic vinegar!) Truffles should, but then I hesitate to put them on there because if mushrooms go on the list they're already included in that category. Pomegranate, maybe: hey, I went out of my way to buy it in jelly bean form, I used to want very much to try pomegranate chicken even when I was a vegetarian, lately I've been fantasizing about getting juice and making a pomegranate reduction... I can't think of a kind of pomegranate I wouldn't try.)

And then there are the oddball losers. Like, I think everyone I know would assume chocolate would top my list. But hilariously, no. I love it, but I don't like chocolate cake because it's often a waste of chocolate (not chocolatey enough). And I don't like most milk chocolate. Or those strong but weirdly corn-syruped dark chocolates that horrible Hershey puts out. Plus, even the good stuff leaves a funny tannic flavor in my mouth afterward. And I'll admit it: sometimes, lately, I wonder if I even like chocolate all that much. Shocking!

The funny thing is that almost all of the things on my list are Mediterranean flavors. When I was struggling with being a vegetarian but craving sashimi constantly, a friend of mine suggested that maybe it was genetic, because I'm Italian and therefore from a fish-eating coastal country. This struck me as, well, extremely fishy itself, but I liked the excuse. But now, look at this! Garlic and salmon and garlic and lemon and garlic and artichokes and garlic. All I need is tomatoes and pasta on there. (They're not going on there, by the way, at least not pasta and not now. There are too many other fantastic foods for me to rely on pasta. It is pretty deliciously filling though.....)

So what are your flavors? What are you willing to eat in virtually any form? What do you automatically order on a menu, or put in everything you make? (I like to check whether I would eat it in a dessert. I'd try an artichoke ice cream. Even salmon. I mean, it's good in cream cheese, right?)

Three more questions to use in planning meals

2007-09-11T13:51:52-05:00

I was a Livejournal devotee for many years. I still use it for personal blogging, because nobody else (that I know of) has friends lists, pages where I can easily read everything that all my friends have posted at once. And I admit that I also avoided WordPress for years because I dated a dickweed who was obsessed with it. But now that I've given it a shot for this blog, I have to say, I love it. Especially for my very favorite feature: it tells me when people link to me and talk about my blog!

Recently, that led me to awesome new blogging ideas from Claire at CookThink. She shares some of her concerns when planning meals....

"What have I got around the house? I’m getting ready to move into a new apartment. Even though it’s only a few blocks from my current place, I’m still hoping to use up some odds and ends from my fridge, like those frozen artichoke hearts I’ve had forever, or the peach I bought at the farmers market and need to eat right now.

"Will I be eating out at all? For the past week, I’ve been craving pizza from a place near my house. I don’t think I’ll get away with not having it soon. So that goes into the mix too.

"When will I really not have time to cook? I have a class Wednesday evenings, so that was definitely a no-cook, eat-an-apple-on-the-way-out-the-door day."

These are questions I consider too, and I realized that I haven't brought them up here. Somehow I think that if I introduce these ideas it will make it impossible for anyone to use the meal plans I share here. After all, you're probably not going to your mom's house and getting tons of leftovers, or traveling to Chicago this weekend, or trying to eat up all the food your roommate left when she moved out. But then again, the point of this blog isn't to dictate to people what to eat when; it's to demonstrate how to take all these things into consideration so that we can plan ahead in a way that makes sense for each of us, so we can save money and take care of ourselves.

So, I thought I should share how I use each of these questions in planning my meals too, at least a little bit!

What have I got around the house? Often my meal plans make more than I expect, so I have meals available for part of the next week too. But it's also been helpful to me to glance through the cupboards and fridge and see what I have just lying around. Right now that includes dry pasta, jars of cherries, miso paste, and tinned olives, just off the top of my head. The tinned olives might have gone bad by now, but if not, I should find a way to use them. Maybe that great tuna pasta salad from a few weeks ago! Longer-lasting items can save me money on my grocery bill but don't have to be used up immediately. Even better, they can inspire me to dig up recipes I've never thought of, to get exciting creative meals out of things that normally wouldn't interest me.

Will I be eating out at all? This is the one I leave out the most. Often I don't know if I will be eating out or when, but I know that I generally buy food out at least once a week. Sometimes it's brunch or dinner in a restaurant, but often it's just that I didn't plan my time to match my meal plan and I have to grab food somewhere because I am hungry and not headed home. This will decrease when I work more on my undereating issues; I often tend to put off my meals or not make a point of having food to eat wherever I am going and then "have to" buy food somewhere to make up for it.

When will I really not have time to cook? This is less of an issue for me nowadays, because I work at home and I don't have a lot of evening commitments. But it does come up sometimes when I am planning when to cook my meals, because that's usually around the weekends and those do get busy. I guess more to the point is that if I plan when to cook my meals, I get to say "okay, I can throw these both in the oven on Friday and then I'll have enough to not cook more until Monday sometime," but if I don't think that through then I end up just making one meal at a time until I can plan better, or putting off my big cooking for the week until I don't have any food left OR time left to cook in! Planning is such a great tool!

How to make a meal plan

2007-08-14T20:57:08-05:00

I make meal plans in advance now, which is something I picked up from a friend's sponsee and realized would help me too. She does it in OA because knowing what you're going to eat helps you not overeat. I figured last year that it would help me not undereat and it would help me to know what I was going to spend on food. (I assume they do it in programs like ABA too.)

It is so awesome. Like, when I'm not doing this, even when I know more or less what I want to buy, I tend to go to the grocery store and buy a bunch of extra things that just look good, that I think I will want to eat. When I'm making a meal plan, I start doing that and then I realize... when am I going to eat this? I already have enough food here for two weeks' worth of meals! There's no room for $10 worth of fake sausage patties! If I really want it, sometimes I switch out what I am going to make. Or make a note to put it in the next two weeks' meal plan.

It is SO awesome. At first, I was pretty much just guessing what things would cost, trying to overestimate if I wasn't sure, so that I wouldn't get to the store and find out that my nice $100 list cost $200 or something. But now I have a pretty good idea of what everything I like (or that I eyeball in longing) costs, so I can make really good guesses about how much my food will cost for two weeks. And you know, I still overguess and get to buy extra ingredients or the extra-good kind of the ingredients as I go, and end up with more food than I needed, so I have leftovers, so I have a few extra days before I have to buy food. But that's fine. But guess what?

A few months ago I went back to doing this. And I only had enough money right that second to buy one week's worth of food instead of two. And the universe had been heavily hinting in the past that it would be great if I could do the food shopping once a week instead of planning for two weeks out. It would make it so much easier than trying to guess what I would want to eat in two weeks or figure out how to pattern the meals so I don't get tired of them. (Which is a sad thing to worry about because I really don't get tired of them too quickly, and in reality I can switch them around if I want to anyway.) So this time, I just planned my meals for one week, and it was so fast! AND... it ONLY COST ME $21.29!

I had been allowing myself $75 for two weeks, and I had been planning to increase it to $100 once I got a full-time job. Because I've been trying to make fancier food for breakfast ('cause normally I avoid breakfasts) and that costs more than just making a shitload of muffins, and also because I need to start figuring afternoon snacks into the plan because I KNOW I need to eat about every 3 hours but I don't plan for it. But this one-week food plan has grilled cheese sandwiches on cheesy garlicky bread, and meyer lemon risotto with barley, and garlicky home fries with eggs, and then organic tangerines and also seaweed (cooked like greens) and also whole milk yogurt with blueberries for a snack. Some of that is food I already have, but it always is.

So that is awesome! I will now show you how I do it!

First I think of things I want to eat. It is amazing to me that I can eat anything I want! Like, I had already made a note to myself that I wanted to try that risotto recipe, and that I wanted more of the sammiches. And that I wanted to get yogurt for the blueberries I have. And I had a ton of home fry fixings left over, so I just made a shitload of those and decided to get eggs to have with them.

Then I make a note of how many meals I think each of those things will make:

Grilled cheese 6

Sauteed seaweed (leftovers) 6

Meyer lemon risotto 6

Yogurt w/blueberries 4

Homefries w/egg 6

And then I separate out the breakfasts because I see breakfast food as different, or because I want it to be different. So in one week, I need 7 breakfasts. I have 6 servings of home fries for it, and I know that there will be leftover eggs and suspect that the home fries will last more than 6 servings, so that's okay.

Then I need 7 lunches and 7 dinners = 14 non-breakfast meals. I have 6 sammiches there - the seaweed is a side so I don't count it - and 6 servings of risotto - and I suspect, again, that I will have more than I need in reality. If not, I can always buy another something for dinner. In fact, I was going to buy a treat of those weird chicken taquito kind of things that Trader Joe's has now that are reallllly good; maybe I will get them anyway and make it a whopping $24.29.

And snacks, which I am just learning to include in this: I don't ALWAYS have a snack, and I have a lot of tangerines already on hand and some seaweed for snacking on, so I think that 4 servings of yogurt and the easily 4 servings of tangerines on hand and the 2 or 3 servings of seaweed will be more than enough.

If I don't have enough meals with what I have listed, I grab some cookbooks (or websites) and get some ideas. When I'm done, or as I'm going, I make a list of the ingredients I need that I don't have on hand, and about how much I think they will cost. Every so often, I stop and add it up and adjust what I'm making if necessary to fit into the amount I want to spend on food. When first starting out, it is good to just pay attention to what you're spending on food and see if that amount works for you or if there's something you need to change - like if you're spending a ton but you are still eating out a lot and not taking that into consideration. Over time, I decide whether the amount is working for me or if I need to raise or lower it.

Then, often, I write out a meal plan. I don't always pay attention to it, but when I do it helps me make sure that I use everything. (Last time, I ignored it completely and ended up not using a bunch of things, and then I was all, "artichokes???" In fact, I was going to use artichokes this time too. D'oh! Maybe I'll get a couple instead of the taquitos. Or I could do it as well as, since my budget for food for a week was $37.50.) Also, more importantly, it lets me know when to make food so that I always have something prepared at a meal time. And it means that I can always have at least one thing I know I can eat at a given meal, because not having anything that I know I can eat and not knowing what to eat is a big cause of undereating for me. I end up being all, "I am too hungry to think and I have nothing to make and nothing is ready aaaaaa!"

So it might look like this:
fri. 2/16 home fries / pasta primavera / grilled cheese and seaweed
sat. 2/17 home fries, egg, toast / grilled cheese & seaweed / yogurt / risotto, artichoke
s. 2/18 home fries, egg / grilled cheese sandwich & artichoke / yogurt / risotto & seaweed
m 2/19 home fries, egg / meyer lemon risotto & seaweed / tangerines / grilled cheese & miso soup
t 2/20 home fries, egg / grilled cheese & seaweed / yogurt / meyer lemon risotto
w 2/21 home fries, egg / grilled cheese & tangerine / yogurt / meyer lemon risotto
t 2/22 home fries, egg / grilled cheese & risotto / tangerines / seaweed and risotto
f 2/23 home fries, egg / taquitos & tangerine / crunchy seaweed / taquitos and miso soup

And probably not all those breakfasts will be the same. Like, maybe some will be two eggs or an omelette by itself. Also, some of the servings are smaller in my mind - like, "grilled cheese & risotto" will be a small grilled cheese and a little bit of risotto to round it out. And you can see me planning for things sort of - I added "toast" to saturday's breakfast cause I will then go meet with one of my sponsees at Bittersweet and I don't want to waste my limited money on chocolate this week - I want to be full enough that I won't be all, "Hmm, I could use some hot chocolate...."

Here is the short version:

1. What do I want to eat for the next ______?

2. How many meals will that make?

2a. What else can I make? Is that enough meals yet?

3. What ingredients do I need to make these things?

4. About how much will those ingredients cost? (adjust as desired, without tripping out or sacrificing any of your needs)

5. When do I want to eat each of these things?

Regularly creating a meal plan helps me stick to my spending plan, save money, and eat really awesome things. It gives me a structure within which I can work to explore cooking and nutrition. I can look at it and think "wow, I am avoiding vegetables lately," or "let's see what happens if I only eat foods that are green!" Nowadays I do work full-time and I have raised my grocery money to a whopping $40 a week.

The best thing about it is that when I actually follow the meal plan, I generally don't undereat. I don't have the opportunity to put off eating because I don't know what to make, and then get too hungry to think. I can notice when I'm hungry and go get the food that I have already made. I sometimes put off the grocery shopping or cooking parts of it for too long, but it quickly becomes obvious that that leads to binge-spending on restaurant food as well as dangerously low blood sugar in between. With a meal plan and the willingness to take care of my needs and work with it, I get to have great food and cooking skills as well, often, as extra treats and extra cash. It's a great deal.