A few more rules

Dude, Kelsey needs to stop living with law students. That last post was extremely law studenty. But basically those rules are good. No boxes whatsoever, but we'll use our common sense with food in a bag/jar/can. Something that is totally unprocessed but happens to be in a bag (say, a bag full of lentils) is probably fine. Frozen veggies and cheese are frowned upon. Some foods in a jar, such as peanut butter and beer, are probably ok. And (this rule really helps Kelsey), we are allowed to eat the food in a box that we already have. Additionally, if someone else buys one of us food in a box, we're allowed to eat it.

Rules v. 1.0

To Ms. Mundt:

Rather than setting down strict rules concerning a foodstuff's packaging, I would advocate for following an approach based upon level of processing.  As noted earlier, rolled oats in a plastic bag are no different than rolled oats from the bulk bin.  In a similar vein, peanut butter in a jar is identical to peanut butter from the fancy-schmancy grinder at Whole Foods.  Yes, I know we've already agreed PB is OK.  Shall we put an absolute restriction on boxes just for the sake of literalism and then interpret other questionable items as needed?  Are both frozen and canned vegetables disallowed?  Or just canned?  Should we outlaw food that complex machinery was involved in?  Pre-Industrial Revolution foods?  We could use Mr. Pollan's "grandmother test" as a metric.

I look forward to hearing your opinion on the matter.

Sincerely,
Ms. Ferguson

P.S. The sriracha sauce on my sweet potato tonight (and my eggs & rice this morning) was *delicious* and I'm sad I just remembered that I have it in the fridge.  I suppose if it's kept for this long, another month won't hurt it.

Why Madeline and I are friends...

Because I spent *my* Saturday night making lentil/pea soup to freeze and eat at work in the coming weeks.  My brownies were a box of cereal.  Mmmmmmm C6H10O5.

Herb-Tomato Legume Soup
{based upon "Gentle Lentil" soup from the Moosewood Cookbook}
2C dried legumes (lentils, peas, dal, whatever you've got), soaked overnight
About 2C each chopped onion, celery, and carrots
4 cloves garlic, chopped
1 big can diced tomatoes
Fresh herbs, about 1/2C chopped - I use rosemary, oregano, and thyme
5 or 6 tbs olive oil
Kale or other greens if you've got them, maybe cabbage
Oh: and salt and pepper!!

• Rinse the lentils, then add about 6C water and bring to a simmer.  Add some salt now.  Simmer for 20 mins or so while you chop the other vegetables.
• Chop the onion, celery, carrots, and garlic into small pieces (helps with freezing)
• Coarsely chop the herbs and one of the garlic cloves and place in the olive oil to sit while the soup cooks
• Add vegetables while legumes are still al dente, about 20 mins in
• When the vegetables and legumes are tender, add the can of tomatoes, the olive oil & herb mixture and the kale or cabbage (chopped into 2-3" long, very narrow strips).  The herbs & greens will cook very slightly in the hot soup while you pop it into jars.
• Add salt and fresh ground pepper to taste.
• Using a canning funnel, pour into freezer-safe Mason jars.  Leave about 1" at the top so that your jar doesn't shatter when the soup expands as it freezes. 

Delicious!  And pretty easy to make, provided you don't chop quite as agonizingly slowly as I do.  I really need to take a "knife skills" class - that or actually sharpen mine.  Regardless, it's a pretty basic soup that's hearty, delicious, and freezes well.  Anyone who's been a co-worker of mine in the past 7 years knows this one well.

Posole

In preparation for Februgality, I'm spending my Saturday night cooking a giant pot of vegetarian posole to eat during the week (at least the rest of the day's been pretty awesome). Also in preparation for Februgality, I went to Whole Foods and bought four of those really overpriced brownies in a bag, all of which I will consume this weekend.

Here's how I make posole. The only box-thing involved is a box of veggie broth. I'm sure I'll want to make it again this month, so I'll have to either improvise, learn how to make vegetable broth myself, or take a penalty (never!). This recipe is adapted from Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian cookbook - one of my favorite cookbooks!

You need:
1 cup dried posole
1 cup beans - white beans are standard but tonight I experimented with vaquero beans
1 pound chilis (poblanos or anaheims)
3 garlic cloves
olive oil - recipe says 3 tablespoons, I think I use more
5-6 tomatillos (google these if they confuse you)
scallions
jalapeño. optional. i left it out this time.
1+ tsp cumin
1 tsp oregano
cilantro
salt to taste
liquid: combo of veggie broth & bean/posole cooking liquids, roughly 5 cups

Cook:
Soak the beans and posole over night. Cook the posole for 2 hours and the beans for about an hour. This is the part that takes a long time, but you don't actually have to do anything. You can clean all the things or something while it cooks. Or do the rest of the prep. I live at 5000 feet so your cooking times at sea level may vary!

While the stuff is cooking, roast the chilis in the oven under your broiler until they look burned on the outside. Turn them over from time to time. It's good to poke them with a knife too...otherwise they might explode in your oven (not that I speak from personal experience of exploding vegetables or anything). Let them cool, then peel them (the cookbook says to seed them too, but I never do). Discard the peels and chop the rest up.

See, burn the peppers.

Ok, now the beans and posole are done cooking. Good job. Drain them but keep the liquid around so you can use it in the soup. Fry the garlic till it sizzles then put in the chopped up tomatillos, scallions, and optional jalapeño. Cook for 7 minutes or so. Then add the chilis and cumin and cook for just a minute. Next, add all the other stuff: posole, beans, oregano, salt, mix of liquids. Simmer covered for 1 and 1/4 hours, stirring every once in a while.

This freezes really well, and it also keeps in the fridge nicely. It seems to get spicier and spicier as you leave it in the fridge, though.

Meet the challenger!

So Madeline knows me well enough to realize that the best way to ensure my participation in anything is to make it a contest.  Hence our past experience with the "Mileage Challenge" - who could put the fewest miles on their car in a given time period a few years ago.  See below for why I'm an excellent candidate for this particular contest.  My motivation may be a little less about not buying food-in-a-box and more about eating the non-perishables I have on hand!  On the plus side, if there's an earthquake it'll take quite a while for me to starve.

As you can see, there are many items in boxes/bags.  I hope that I'll eat more fruits & vegetables if I stop buying carbohydrate-based snacks-in-a-box - something I should be doing anyway.

I've been a vegetarian for more than ten years and my Achilles' heel has always been blank carbohydrates.  I find that unless I make a concerted effort to eat something of substance like beans, tofu, or yogurt I am nearly always hungry and I want to eat bread.  Forget chocolate - give me bread products.  So giving up crunchy bread snacks is going to sting a little. 

An added challenge for me is that I will start my first job as an RN beginning in early February.  Packing food for a 12-hour shift, during which you have limited time to eat (at best), is challenging enough when I *do* resort to food that comes in a wrapper.  I am used to spending time on food prep but I will definitely have to be more creative about snacks on the job.

As we make the rules, we have to think about our intentions and also where we want to draw lines - is peanut butter in a jar OK?  Beer?  Our goal seems to be the intersection of frugality and health - i.e. is is possible to eat mostly produce and whole/fresh foods on a budget?  Living in an area of the city near many grocery stores and farmer's markets makes it much easier.  Even in Seattle there are areas where it is difficult to get good produce without transportation, so I know that I'm lucky to have the means and the access to eat as well as I do already.

Next week we'll hammer out some rules and figure out a way to compare our expenditures to our own baseline monthly food budgets and to the budget level of the Washington Basic Food Program or the Nevada equivalent.  It feels a little elitist to do this as an experiment or a lark - I've never had to worry about whether I'll have enough money to buy food.  Hopefully we'll learn more about the realities of trying to eat healthfully on a tight budget while eating more produce and perhaps saving some money.

Februgality!

When I was at the grocery store the other day, I started thinking about my whole food to food-in-a-box ratio. Although most of the groceries I buy are vegetables, fruit, grains/legumes from the bulk food bins, and reasonably unprocessed dairy products like plain yogurt, I think that the majority of what I spend goes to what I call "food-in-a-box." Prepared frozen and/or microwavable meals, snacks in a bag inside a box (double penalty!), energy bars, convenience foods like cut up fruit, olives in a jar, fancy cheese from Whole Foods, ice cream sandwiches...etc. I like to eat healthy, which to me means minimal food-in-a-box, so I think I probably eat less packaged foods than the average consumer...but I still spend quite a bit of money on that sort of thing.

To address this, I decided to challenge myself to NO FOOD IN A BOX for the month of February. To keep myself honest, I am:

1. Starting this blog
2. Making my friend Kelsey do this challenge with me - it's a contest! And it will be a joint blog. Kelsey's an awesome blogger.
3. Telling my friend Erin, who is about to successfully complete a month-long gluten-free food-blogger challenge.

There are a lot of food-blogger challenges along these lines out there, actually...but they all seem to revolve around eating healthier, rather than around frugality. I don't want to eat healthier (I eat plenty healthy without going to extremes, thanks). I just want to know how little money it is possible to spend on groceries by eating only unpackaged foods (which tend to be very cheap).

As I do this challenge, I'm also interested in investigating how issues of privilege and inequality affect the food choices we have available to us, and in highlighting the barriers that exist to eating and shopping this way long-term. Specifically I'm concerned with things like food deserts, access to unprocessed foods, time and transportation issues...even seemingly innocuous but actually privilege-related issues like the fact that I happen to have internet access (which allows me to easily find new cheap easy whole-food recipes) and a whole shelf full of cookbooks (which also cut down on the lentils-and-rice-are-boring factor). Kelsey doesn't have to do this part...though she can probably chime in with barriers one encounters when working a crazy nurse-schedule. 

Next we will follow up with The Rules...once we make The Rules. We also tell of the first Madeline Kelsey Frugality Challenge (which I won).