Dinner

Sometimes, I have tomatoes for dinner.

Later, when I get hungry again, I'll have oatmeal.

I'm such a bachelor. Ette.

Except the typical bachelor doesn't grow his own tomatoes.

Recent dishes

If you're wondering what I did with yesterday's harvest, I made ratatouille:

I'd never tasted ratatouille before, much less cooked it, so I was unsure what to expect. I altered the recipe a bit, to suit my tastes and available quantities of ingredients. Verdict: delicious! Seriously, I'm stunned. Lots of good flavors. I think I'm getting the hang of this eating-vegetables-thing. Because it looked like a pile of plants, I tell you; to every fiber of my being, it looked like a pile of plants. But it actually tasted like food. I used the ichiban eggplant (long and thin), and its dark purple skin turned green while cooking. Ratatouille would be great over pasta or rice, but I enjoyed mine plain.

As for my gargantuan zucchini? Oven fried zucchini sticks, just as planned. I used the most basic recipe I could find, based on the ingredients I already had in my kitchen. This was, surprisingly, amazingly delicious. I was concerned, not being the biggest squash fan. I did not peel my zucchini because I do not discriminate against skin, but I must say, the sticks without skin were the best. But the skin did keep the sticks with skin from breaking. Mmmm:

I ate the whole plate.

Salad #1: Russian Beet Salad

I chose my first salad recipe from Mollie Katzen's The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. I've had this cookbook for much longer than I've tolerated vegetables, but these days it's one of my two favorites.

This salad involves beets, vinegar, onions, cucumbers, eggs and dill. Luckily the recipe is already available online so I don't have to type it in (and am concerned about the legality/morality of doing so anyway):

Russian Beet Salad

I opted to not use yogurt. Also, I accidentally left my grocery list in the car so I shopped from memory, and forgot to purchase honey. So I used a little sugar instead. I halved the recipe, so we're only talking about lacking 1/2 - 1 tsp honey.

Also because I forgot my list, I accidentally purchased fennel. Now I need to figure out what to do with it.

Anyway, here's what I thought of Russian beet salad:

Good flavor! This is pretty much my first experience with beets. At least, with a dish focused on beets. It's so beety that the whole salad turned red. Onions, eggs, cukes and all. I was going to take a picture of each salad I make for blogging purposes, but this pretty much looks like a bowl-o'-red.

The proportion of ingredients is perfect. I can taste the onions and cucumbers, a little dill here and there (I was wary of the amount of dill required), and it all has a slight tang of vinegar. Oh yes, and there's taste of egg right there. Really, it's amazing that I can taste all of these things.

So today's lunch is entirely made up of this salad (half the halved recipe, to be precice), and I'm about half finished with it now. The thing about salads is that they can feel pretty filling. Even this one, which must be about 150 calories. But for me, getting full on salad is kind of like pushing a magic "get full" button: my hunger has been wiped out, but it was accomplished without experiencing the pleasure of really eating something. You know, something hot, bready, meaty, savory. I'm left full, but wanting a sandwich. I hope I can learn to truly savor salads.

Dissection of my grocery bill

Now, hold on a second. This only looks like it's going to be straight out of the "of interest only to Jen S." files. But I promise, I have a point.

I just spent nearly $100 at the grocery store for what was supposed to be a quick trip for salad ingredients. Of course, I needed a few other items, since my kitchen is nearly empty. Some yogurt for the dogs (they get a dollop at meal time), food for the reptiles (iguanas and leopard tortoises are vegetarian), and some miscellany like milk, nutrition bars, tissue and fruit.

So here's where all that money went:

Miscellaneous grocery: $36.10
Dog food: $5.98
Reptile food: $18.58
Salad ingredients: $34.82

That last item there? Did you see it -- the thirty-four dollars and eighty-two cents I spent on salad fixins? That is another reason why I shy away from making foods involving a lot of fresh produce. Gah. I just don't know what else to say.

I look forward to learning just how many days of salads that $34.82 bought me. Salad days indeed.

I was even charitable, and kept the minced garlic on the "miscellaneous" tab because even though I bought it for salad (in particular, the dressing I'll make), I will be able to use it for some time. The other stuff, not so much.

I should add that $5.05 of that miscellany was for a plate of sushi that I decided to reward myself with for taking this step into salad-land. So, today I haven't yet had any salad, but I sure did have some yummy salmon rolls for dinner.

Will a salad a day melt my spare pounds away?

If you've been paying attention, you know that as part of my effort to be fit and healthy I've been trying to lose weight. Those of you who know me know I'm not overweight; in fact, I'm nearly smack dab in the middle of the "healthy weight" range for my height on all the charts. But I'm much more physically comfortable when I'm at the lower end of that category, and my clothes fit better. In fact, I'm down to two pairs of pants that fit me. (I just had a denim casualty: a pair of jeans ripped in the butt. RIP, favorite jeans.) So my goal is to lose a pants size, as I have stacks of pants in my closet that I will then be able to wear. All I should need to lose are about 10 pounds to achieve this (though I'd like to lose 15, giving me a little room in the butt so they don't rip).



So I track my daily food intake at FitDay.com, and my daily calorie goal had been 1200-1500 for some time. That amount of food worked for weight loss. I wasn't losing quickly but I was losing consistently, and if I had a "bad" day when I splurged, it didn't even really register. (Thus avoiding the mental setback involved when one "gains" a few pounds overnight.)

But I was always hungry. Not quite as hungry as I was when I tried NutriSystem for several months last year, but hungry enough to notice. It was sometimes hard to concentrate, hard to sleep. And I tended to have more than my fair share of "bad" days.

So a few weeks ago I adjusted my calorie goal. Instead of 1200-1500 calories a day, I started aiming for 1400-1600 calories.

It fixed my hunger problem. As soon as I hit 1500 calories, as long as I spread my food intake out over the entire day, I was in a safe place where I knew I'd make it to bedtime without hunger pangs. It felt good.

But for my first two weeks at that level, I gained weight. This was right before my trip to Hawaii, so you can imagine how put out I was. I had stuck to my diet guidelines (minus one splurge day, which wasn't particularly bad) and exercised 5 days/week, so I really can't figure out what the problem can be other than to say: my metabolism sucks. If I had any disposable income, I'd hire a nutritionist right about now to help me out of this rut. But I don't, so I need to figure something out on my own.

But I'm not going to lower my calorie goal again. Well, I think I'm going to tighten up the range to 1400-1500 calories/day, just to try to get my ass a little more disciplined. But going back to starvation is just not a part of my plan. Instead, I've decided to try replacing some of the calories I've been consuming with different calories.

I eat pretty decently, at least for an American. Cookies, chips, candy, donuts, and even crackers make up a miniscule portion of my diet. I don't ever buy those items when I go grocery shopping, so the only times I have them these days are on a purely opportunistic basis. Such as when I'm at a party, or at a friend's house, or when I'm stuck at work late and the only food available lives in the vending machine. A routine day's diet for me goes something like this:

Breakfast: 2 hard boiled eggs
Morning snacks: 1 banana, 1 nutrition bar (Balance, Zone, etc.)
Lunch: Frozen meal (I know, this isn't high cuisine)
Afternoon snacks: 1 pear, 1 apple
Dinner: This varies drastically from day to day. My only real guidelines are that I won't repeat a frozen meal if I've already had one, and I only have around 400 calories left to play with. Because I'm not cooking for anyone besides myself I don't cook as often as I'd like, so sometimes dinner will be a hodgepodge of things like some yogurt, another nutrition bar, more fruit. Sometimes I'll have a big bowl of oatmeal or Cream of Wheat. Sometimes I'll have some fish. It's a daily puzzle: "What does Jen have in her kitchen that she can put together for 400 calories?"

So I'm thinking: I can't cut calories, and I can't cut junk food. But I can cut processed food and add more natural foods. Namely: vegetables.

If you've been paying attention you also already know that I've been trying to add veggies in to my diet. Looking at my sample day's diet above, you can see that I haven't done a good job. But sometimes I do. It's a matter of good planning. The last time I bought vegetables for myself at the grocery store I wound up spending ungodly amounts of money on several pounds of organic spinach, much of which didn't get eaten, so I went a bit gun-shy after that.

And my vegetable garden is ... not doing well. (That's another post for another day.)

But I figure, I'll cut down on my nutrition bar spending, and use that money toward veggies instead. Then I need to find some good veggie dishes. To start, I'm going to concentrate mainly on salads. The thing is, I don't like salad. Because to most people, "salad" is a tiny plate with a few lettuce leaves, onion slices, tomato wedges, radish bits, and if you're lucky, carrot shavings, and the only good thing about it is that it acts as a dressing delivery vehicle. Yuck. My salad needs are much more sophisticated than that, and much larger. I'll eat my salads out of mixing bowls. On the ingredients front I know where to start, and that's with more interesting greens (spinach, arugula, or at least, for the love of god, baby field greens, NOT just lettuce leaves), avocado, onions, but maybe cooked a little, tomatoes, but sliced thinly so their juices can marinade their neighbors, and ... after that I'm at a loss. At the start, I'm keeping it to veggies-only, so no eggs, meat, nuts, raisins, etc. I'll use tiny amounts of dressing, I'm thinking a little virgin olive oil and extra vinegar. And pepper. Amazingly, this is sounding good right now.

But before I do any shopping I need to scour my cookbooks for some firm ideas. I don't want to waste any more vegetables. If you have a recipe for a good salad, please share it here!

To sum: I hope to replace one meal a day with a big, honkin' salad of comparable calories. Because I can't cut my calories any further, and I already exercise about 5 days/week, so I don't know what else to do.

The incredible, edible frittata

The amazing thing about the above photo is clearly not its award-worthy composition, lighting, or focus.

The amazing thing about the photo is that what you see contains only two eggs.

I could have scrambled up a couple eggs for dinner, sure. But scramble two eggs and you get a few spoonfuls of mush. Oh, I really enjoy a scrambled egg. But they don't go far.

But take a few eggs and throw in some spinach, onions, and red peppers, and suddenly you have an overflowing panful of frittata goodness.

And this just goes to prove that you don't have to be anybody resembling a good cook to make a good frittata. Here's what I did:

In a 12" pan, I heated some oil. I added half a yellow onion (chopped), and waited about 5 minutes for them to soften. Then I added about a half bunch of spinach, and maybe half a jar of roasted red peppers. Because I don't know anything about flavoring with spices, I added a dash of paprika, cumin, cayenne pepper, and even nutmeg. I stirred it up, covered it, and let it simmer until the spinach cooked down to nearly nothing (as spinach does). Meanwhile, I beat 4 eggs and salted them liberally. Then I added the eggs to the pan. Stirred again, and then poured it all into a little 8" frying pan, coated with Pam. Covered it and let it cook for about 12 minutes.

And I then had a 4-egg frittata sitting there, sure as the day is long. So I cut it in half, ate that half blob of fluffy egg-n-veggie goodness, and that was dinner. And since it was 2 eggs and some veggies, we're talking about 200-something calories and some fiber and vitamins.

Even the spices were OK. I overdid the cayenne a little, but I did like its effect. Probably the cumin and cayenne were most prominent, and they worked.

Goodbye, parsley. I always loved you.

I can not grow parsley.

I have tried before, many times.

I will not try again.

Strawberries vs. chicken fingers: the cost of calories

The cost of healthy food is a pretty hot topic lately. Even ignoring current economic issues (which is hard to do: it's tough to pick up a newspaper without reading about how the cost of ingredients and gas are making food prices skyrocket), fresh foods are simply more expensive than processed foods. If you stick to buying the healthiest stuff at your supermarket: fresh fruits, vegetables, fish, eggs, cheese, meats, that is, the stuff that the store displays on its outside walls, your grocery bill will be higher than if you select your items from within the aisles.

This is a much more involved issue than most people realize. Much of it goes back to the farm bill and subsidization to corn farmers. If you google for a moment you'll find articles in sources ranging from random bloggers like myself to the New York Times that focus on how Americans are so obese because a bag of chips (whose ingredients are heavy on corn) is so much less expensive, dollar-per-calorie, than healthier foods like fresh produce.

On a shallow level, I absolutely agree with that argument. People like my dad will say that chips are expensive. "$4 for a bag of snack food! How is that cheap?" But compare the number of calories in that $4 bag of chips (often over 1000) to the number of calories you'll get if you spend $4 on pears (200-400, depending on the season) and it's really obvious that the argument is valid.

But on a deeper level we should see that the argument, presented as I did above, isn't comparing apples to apples. The choice that lower-income families face isn't (or shouldn't be) pears vs. chips. There are numerous other aisles in the supermarket containing cheap pastas, beans, and other more convenient foods. People trying to save their earnings while staying healthy sure aren't taking a bunch of asparagus in one hand and a box of Oreos in the other hand and thinking, "Well, asparagus is far more nutritious, but dollar-per-calorie, I'm gonna have to go with the Oreos...." The contents of prepared pastas and boxed rice dishes aren't as pure as those in fresh produce, but there really is enough good stuff available to raise any growing boy without making him one of America's obese children.

And with that in mind, I am going to begin a series of articles comparing the cost of calories in different foods. My recent healthy eating kick has really opened my eyes to how expensive it is to live on foods like spinach, and I find myself looking back fondly at the days when I came closer to living on Banquet frozen foods, perpetually available at Jewel for $1 each. (Recently the discount went even deeper, to $0.88 each. Convenience food nirvana, let me tell you.)

This idea recently hit me hard when I was surprised by the nutritional information I entered for a couple of my meals (on fitday.com). Those two meals were: One pound of fresh strawberries (more like a big snack than a meal) and Banquet Chicken Fingers.

VS

Strawberries:
I buy strawberries when they are on sale. The sale is usually two pounds for the price of one (or, when the season is really high, four pounds for the price of two). Regardless, a half-price strawberry is a good find, if you can eat them fast enough. So one day I brought a pound-sized carton of strawberries with me to work. I ate the whole thing in one sitting. A pound of strawberries is more filling than I thought it would be. Fruits and vegetables are not very filling for me as a rule, which is one reason I've avoided them over the years. But strawberries did not disappoint. After being positive I screwed the pooch by eating the whole thing at once, I looked up the nutritional content of strawberries on nutritiondata.com and was surprised and somewhat alarmed to learn that one pound of strawberries contains only 144 calories. That pound of strawberries effectively cost me $2.50, so this large snack cost me $0.0174 per calorie. That's about one and three-fourths pennies.

Banquet Chicken Fingers:
Even during my current health food kick, I still consume a frozen meal about every other day. I prepare almost all of my food one way or another (as opposed to picking up food at a deli or McDonald's) so in order to eat all day long I have to resort to convenience foods at least once a day. For me, convenience foods mostly mean frozen meals, boxed pastas, and nutrition bars. Healthy Choice is my favorite frozen food brand but Banquet is the cheapest, so I stock both. (I should note that both brands are owned by ConAgra, so there is no violence in my freezer between the two related, not strictly competing, brands.) And when I grab a frozen meal out of the freezer, my mental calculator dishes up a caloric content between 300 and 400 calories, because that's what they tend to be. So you can imagine how shocked I was when I looked at the nutritional information on the package and learned that Banquet's Chicken Fingers boast a whopping 550 calories per serving. 550 calories! For $1! (I don't remember if I got this particular box for 88 cents, but that was a once-in-a-lifetime event so I'm going with the $1 figure.) The math tells me that this meal cost $0.002 per calorie. That's two-tenths of one cent. That is one cheap calorie.

The calorie deathmatch data:

Strawberries, one pound Calories: 144 Price: $2.50 Dollars-per-calorie: $0.0174 (1.74 cents)

Banquet Chicken Fingers meal Calories: 550 Price: $1 Dollars-per-calorie: $0.002 (1/5 of one cent)

To summarize: Banquet Chicken Fingers calories are so much cheaper than strawberry calories that you can buy 8.7 times the number of Chicken Finger calories as strawberry calories for the same amount of money.

Want it even more simply?

Spending the same amount of money*, you could live on strawberries for about one day, while you could live on Banquet Chicken Fingers for nearly nine days.
*In this case, that amount would be about $35, based on a 2,000-calorie diet.

Get it? Talking about fractions of pennies might not be as clear, but the above statement should hit you. The strawberry calorie, she is an expensive one.

This, my first article in the calorie deathmatch series, isn't necessarily comparing apples to apples either. But I think it's at least a little bit more relevant than comparing fresh produce to corn chips.

Cooking with vegetables

As I blogged about a couple weeks ago and as I will continue to blog about, I've been getting into vegetables lately. As I mentioned in that first blog entry, there was a time when I wouldn't get anywhere near a vegetable, much less get into one.

So when I took a look at everything I purchased at the grocery store today:



I couldn't help but think to myself, but in all caps, "What the fuck?"

Sorry about the f-bomb. I considered creating two versions of this entry; one PG and one f-bomb laden. Because when I think about these changes I'm witnessing in myself, it makes me want to drop a bunch of them. One after the next. Because of all the f-bombing things I ever thought I'd be f-bombing cooking, and then eating, it sure the f-bomb wasn't anything that looks like this:



That is Garbanzos Kon Spinaka, Sephardic Spinach with Chick-Peas from Greece, that I found in my copy of The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook by Nancy Harmon Jenkins. The recipe involves spinach, onions, chick-peas, dill, and lemon juice. Served over steamed white rice, the dish is pretty good. But I must say, the more rice, the better. Of the recipes that I've tried in this cookbook so far, about half have come up on the side of too bland. This is one of them. I'm still learning what magic I can create with spices to improve blander dishes.

Setbacks like the odd bland dish don't discourage me. There are plenty more vegetarian dishes to taste, and I've already found some winners that I'll be cooking again. Some aren't strictly vegetarian, either; my goal is not actually to remove meat from my diet. The goal is just to seriously UP the veggies. And I've found that the more front-and-center vegetables are in the dishes I prepare, the more I learn to appreciate them. A filet mignon with a side of green beans just does not do the trick. Though it is tasty. Much tastier than Garbanzos Kon Spinaka.