Short and simple this week. Here’s what we’re eating (as always, we serve a green salad with lettuce from our garden with dinner):

Sunday: Ribs with side of corn on the cob

Monday: Spinach Ravioli

Tuesday: Leftovers (Spinach Ravioli)

Wednesday: Wednesday Night Farmer’s Market / Eating Out

Thursday: Pork Chops

Friday: Salad + leftovers from earlier in the week

Saturday: Camp out – burgers, dogs, etc.

Instead of a Cinco de Mayo party, we kicked ours out until today (a Seis de Mayo party?). Just a few other families over, but there’s enough food to last for a couple of days. We’re entering a heat wave in our area, so I’m looking for ways to cook outside or not cook at all this week, but also use up some random cupboard items (three grain risotto rice). The party menu is below but first here is our weekly menu: (more…)

My daughter asked when we were getting some chickens this morning. We’ve started to buy eggs from a friend who keeps 6 chickens at her house here in the ‘burbs (she’s trying out eggzy.net, and so far it’s a great way to *notify* us that eggs are available, but not to claim them!) Our town is chicken-friendly but we have a postage-stamp sized yard. My desires coincide with hers – well, not exactly. While she also wants a larger house, I’m content with our 2 bed, 2 bath 100-year old box. It’s solidly built, spacious too my mind, and my husband has made the yard a gardener’s delight.

And yet, the yard could be bigger. There’s no space for a coop – very little space for a child to run. Having lived in NYC for a period, (more…)

After a trip to Costco this weekend, I’ve started re-thinking the value of bulk and big box stores. It’s not that Costco has high prices (they don’t) or quality products (they do), but it really is the volume. I could easily spend my entire week’s grocery budget on a handful of items, tying up my cash.

If I were a start up business, that’s definitely a bad idea. I’d never recommend, for example, to my friend the hair dresser (more…)

The good news is that The Kitchen MBA is around for another year. I’ve just renewed my account with dreamhost, through mid-April 2013 so I’ll just keep rolling with the menus.

An update: the Everyday Food app was corrected and is still working fine. I do find myself bored by the offerings, and the flavor profiles continued to disappoint. But I’m trying to remain (more…)

This menu planning process is getting easier. We’ve discovered a food allergy in the family – a mild sensitivity to most nuts – so we’ve decided to eat down what we’ve got and then the non-allergic members (me) can eat them out / on the go. In fact, I’m also attempting to move us to a gluten-free household but only after we’ve gone through the gluten items in the house (not much, a little cous cous, a few rye crackers, a multi-grain pancake mix, and about a cup each of WW pastry flour and WW flour). I expect to put these items in the rotation in the next month and then start working with alternatives. I’m wary that the alternatives will be more expensive – yet another challenge to the budget.

Sunday (Easter): Grass-fed lamb, asparagus & mashed potatoes (all from the farmer’s market)

Monday: dine out night

Tuesday: Split pea soup with ham and green salad

Wednesday: Leftovers

Thursday (Friends over): Bean chili over cous cous, corn, green salad, home-made rum raisin ice cream (epicurious.com)

Friday: Leftovers

Saturday: Onion and cheese frittata with green salad

Well, the Everyday Food app was a bust in two ways. First, although the recipes are quick to make, they are devoid of FLAVOR. Make sure you use them as guidelines only and keep your salt, pepper, garlic, shallots, vinegars, oils, etc. nearby. Second, the app worked well for the first week and now crashes on every attempt to open it – inexplicably. I’ve done nothing differently. I’ve contacted Martha Stewart / Everyday Food customer support – iTunes help was useless.

In the interim, I’m playing around with the idea of a weekly menu that has one day that is vegan, one day that is vegetarian, etc. That’s two more meatless dinner than we currently make, especially if my husband is involved.

Here’s what is up for this week:

Sunday: Roasted chicken, side of roasted cauliflower and green salad

Monday: Chicken – barley – mushroom soup with green salad

Tuesday: Dine out  – sushi

Wednesday: Leftovers (chicken soup + sushi leftovers) with green salad from our garden

Thursday: Boca burger lettuce wraps and sweet potato fries with with side salad

Friday: Brown rice and eggs with side salad

Saturday: Dinner at friend’s house (steak & grilled veggies)

the iPhone app cost $0.99

We’ve been traveling, having just returned yesterday. In order to make this week easy on myself, I’m trying out a new app from Everyday Food magazine. The app only cost $0.99 on my iPhone and although it is not without bugs, I’m impressed with the ease of searching, the shopping list feature and the dinner suggestions.

Here’s the plan for this week featuring 2 recipes from the app:

Monday* – Leftovers from Chinese food takeout

Tuesday – Light Sesame Chicken from Everyday Food (more…)

Even while we’re traveling, I try to keep up my planning and preparing our meals. This week my daughter is on Spring Break, and we’re staying with family, but the grocery shopping still has to be done and the dinners made, even if I’m not the only one making them.

Day 1: Grilled chicken with veggies

Day 2: Rigatoni with meat sauce and salad

Day 3: Dine out

Day 4: Cheese quiche and asparagus

Day 5: Lentil soup and salad

Day 6: Roasted veggies and rice

Day 7: Leftovers

After a particularly binge-ful month of celebrations starting with good news for friends who bought a house and culminating with my daughter’s birthday and a superbowl party, I decided to attempt a cleanse I had seen in Whole Living magazine. The idea is that you get rid of white flour, white sugar, meat, alcohol and caffeine for a little while, and see how you do. I made it for 6 days and decided that I liked experience.

On the plus side, I only experienced caffeine withdrawal headaches for one afternoon and I dropped a few pounds. I am still drinking 8 cups of water a day, and on most days, I’m a vegan for breakfast and lunch*, in addition to avoiding white flour and white sugar. I’m also a new fan of rutabagas and kale salad and I prefer a delicious dessert concoction of dried fruit and nuts to almost anything else these days. Kale chips, trail mix, and salads are a new source of delight. Anything too sweet makes my head hurt and I feel all swollen and out of sorts the next day.

The other benefit? Eating primarily fruit and veggies and nuts saves money, especially if you are able to grow/garden and prep everything yourself. I was able to but back on meat since I only needed to buy meat and dairy for my husband and daughter. My best estimate is that I saved about 15-20% of our normal weekly budget. (It would have been more if I could figure out how to make my own kale chips.)

*Incidentally, the New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman has written a couple of books called Food Matters wherein he outlines this exact kind of eating plan.

Although it has been quiet on The Kitchen MBA blog, rest assured that it has not been quiet in the kitchen or at my desk. The muse has been feeding, is fed, but hopefully not put to bed, and now I look forward sharing my new savings insights as learned during my tough knocks at graduate school. I’m wishing each of you a prosperous and healthy new year. Let the new year begin!

An old friend recently wrote to me to ask, “How does one economize when one is running a gluten-free household?” Her daughter has celiac disease, and for the last 18 months their family has been living gluten-free. GF foods are often double or triple the price of other items, and nor do they freeze well. It’s a challenge for many families, and my friend reports that other countries will give an allowance to families coping with the high-cost of this special needs diet.

Another friend has a son with severe peanut allergies, and here is another instance where finding foods that are not made in a facility that processes peanuts, is a time consuming and expensive endeavor.

Then there’s a family member who has been on the South Beach diet for years (high on animal proteins, low carbohydrates) – if you eat meat, you know the cost is tres cher.

What’s the family budgeter / shopper to do?

Here are my thoughts in order of how they occurred to me:

1. Eat as fresh and raw and in season as possible. All fresh and frozen fruit and vegetables (without sauce or any other additions) are gluten-free. Buy fresh and preserve as much as you by freezing it yourself. Particularly look for bargains as season wind-down, as farmer’s markets close-up for the day, as neighbors permit gleaning, as much as you can produce yourself in your own garden. The DIY movement is catching on precisely because there are significant savings, but you do have to put in the time.
2. Bind together with others in a similar situation and buy in bulk – then split the cost and the goods when you get home. That way you both enjoy the savings. I know it’s an extra step, but co-ops have long found that uniting saves money. In fact, feel free to approach your grocery store and find out what quantities will earn discounts. (I know GF don’t often freeze well, so you’d have to have at least another family in your network to make this work approach work for you.)
3. Keep in mind that some of your savings can be from how you cook. “Cook once, eat twice” I always say, so that way you are only using the stove and other appliances once. Also, consider trading nights with other families – I have a girlfriend and we try to alternate Wednesday nights so that I can count on a couple nights off a month, at least. Think about where your expenses come in cooking: we have a gas stove with a baking stone in it which allows me to heat up the stove and then turn it off, meanwhile the stone stays hot and I can continue cooking or warming foods. Another example: I once read an article in the NYT about cooking pasta by bringing the water to boiling, adding the pasta, and then shutting off the heat, allowing the pasta to just sit around and cook. This method works beautifully.
4. For quite some time, I’ve been meaning to write about whether the cost of warehouse retailer is worth it, especially for small families, but I’ll go on record and tell you right now that they are a wonderful resource when trying to reduce your grocery budget. Our local Costco has proven to be a great source of affordable and organic quinoa, rice, eggs, milk, meat, nuts and beans and fruit and vegetables, and we keep a lot of the these items in the *freezer* (note, that we have a chest freezer to accommodate all of our frozen items) to extend their shelf life. The other great thing I learned is that each Costco store manager has some leeway in what they carry (in addition to where it is placed in the store), and Costco in the past has gone on record as uniformly maintaining a 17% markup on all items. You can rest assured that you are getting a decent price. Again, feel free to approach a store manager and make your request; you will a greater chance of success if you have a list of “ready” buyers, or at least statistics on the growing population of people eating a GF diet.
5. Just a little reminder: make sure that your family tries hard to reduce grocery waste. Most American families allow food to spoil or simply throw out perfectly good food. In some studies, the amounts measured have been staggering and in my own case, we found we were throwing out hundreds of dollars each month. This may mean keeping one crumb, it may mean be trying to resuscitate a failed dish, getting creative with a spare leek. I find myself baking and cooking a lot more than I thought I ever would, so much so that I consider it the equivalent of a part time job.

My heart goes out to all kids on special diets, the kids with the epi pens in their mothers’ purses, the kids with the life-threatening allergies. I wish I had a magic bullet that would take the time and expense out of cooking without gluten, or without peanuts, etc. I would encourage all families to keep their own recipe book and price book, a suggestion I first came across in my home economics bible, The Tightwad Gazette, so that you are able to confident when a dish works, or tweak it until it does, and satisfied when you’ve found a good price on your staples. In this case, I think you have to use every tool in your toolbox (coupons, gardening, eliminating waste, freezing, trading with neighbors and friends, asking for discounts, cooking / baking yourself, investigating co-ops, meat buying clubs, and so on) in order to keep your budget within your means.

Note: this article first appeared in 2009 on an old blog of mine called The Toddler Who Ate Everything, edited by my friend Jen Oatham-Jones. I have made a few updates and edits for The Kitchen MBA.

Our sparkling water bills have been skyrocketing ever since Monkey (our nickname from our daughter) caught the bug from her father.  We have friends who have invested in some of the various systems out there, so we undertook a highly unscientific taste test and study of whether we find a home carbonator system palatable.

In this tasting, we put Crystal Geyser, Lauretana and some home-brewed sparkling using the very portable iSi system to the test.  The big surprise was that each water could be enjoyed, and while we had grown accustomed to the big bubbles of the big brands like Crystal Geyser and San Pelligrino, the iSi delivered a very nice quality, delicate sparkling. We were convinced that this could be done at home.

We were initially attracted to the iSi (pictured above) with its handsome design, the fact that you simply add one cartridge to the canister, pump it, and you’re done.  There is no appliance to set out on the counter and my friends were able to carry their system to our house.  A quick check on the Web confirmed that the price was right, too.  We weren’t completely sold, however, since we’d learned to prefer a really powerful carbonated water and with the iSi, your choice is one cartridge or two.  There is no ability to customize the water, if you will.

Soon thereafter we were able to see The Penguin demonstrated at another friend’s place.  The Penguin does require a ‘machine’ to house one huge container of CO2- another something to set out on your counter.  However, the advantage of this system is that you get to control the amount of CO2 going into your carafe.  The Penguin comes with attractive glass carafes.  The initial investment is more steep than the iSi, but at this point it gets difficult to do a true cost comparison, because it depends on how much CO2 per liter you add to each bottle.  We were sold, though.  Not only is our daughter occasionally picky, but her father can be a stickler about what he drinks.  We decided on the SodaStream, the stripped down version of The Penguin.

The good news is that when we went online, we learned the manufacturer of The Penguin, Sodastream, has a more lightweight and less expensive model called The Fountain Jet.  We were familiar with the system, so we purchased a starter kit and have been delighted with the results.  We do require more CO2 than is demonstrated or recommended in the company’s promotional materials, so we are probably not saving as much money as suggested elsewhere, but we have already made our investment back.  The system is extremely popular, though, so our only complaint was the initial wait while the company worked through its backlog.  It’s been two months and we’re still using our first CO2 cartridge.  Our daughter loves her sparkling water (has to have it before bed every night) and the rest of us are drinking more water.

We’ve been able to reduce our grocery bill by stocking our pantry with the basics. It’s a fool’s mission to try to tell you what should be in your cupboards (although lots of people do*), but I can share what’s in ours and how those items help us make it through the month.

I’ve got our non-refrigerator items grouped roughly by veggies and treats at the bottom of the cupboard. Those include: (more…)

Just when I said I wouldn’t be posting as often …. A friend stopped by last night and we got to talking about meal planning. It really is the easiest and best way to save money on your groceries: if you know what you’ll be eating during the week, you know what to buy, and you won’t end up with lots of extraneous items in your cart. Some people don’t like to commit – but take it in small steps and don’t be a slave to your calendar. I routinely change up things in the middle of the week depending up on what’s holding on and what is rapidly rotting.

My Approach

(more…)

I’ve been away for a couple of weeks on vacation, but it’s time to check in.

• We’re on schedule to be within our grocery budget for the month, and that is after including a small dinner party to celebrate my 40th (here’s the recipe for the chicken that was served). We’re set for the rest of this week, and then we’ll have about $50 in the envelope to last that last 1/2 week to August 31.
• We’ve been raking in the garden goodies: about 2 lbs. of green beans, countless strawberries, cherry tomatoes and carrots that the we just pick and eat at random, as well as some kale, pattypan squash, one ear of corn (too funny!), zucchini, cucumbers, and some bell peppers.
• Picked up this bit of wisdom from my father-in-law who retired from the navy twice. He said that in the mess hall in the subs, there was a sign posted along the lines of “You take what you get, and you get what you take.” In his eyes, that had to do with minimizing waste. In other words, only take what you can eat, and eat what you take.

But most importantly, was the 40th birthday. I didn’t expect or want to make any huge revelations but despite my equanimity towards the big 4-0, there have been a few realizations.

1. It is imperative to learn to say “no”.
2. ALWAYS have something with you to read.
3. ALWAYS have something with you for your kid to play with.
4. Only shop at one store! Anything else is a waste of time.

I’m sure that there will be more along the way but this is a good start.

In addition, I have revised my blog publishing schedule to reflect my continued and increasing focus on my fiction writing. My plan is to contribute to the Kitchen MBA only when “there is something important to say” (as my dear friend My once reminded me.)  I expect that to be about 1x/month.

Is this really worth $145 per month?

It was with many doubts that I signed up for a voice, cable TV & Internet combined package 2 years ago. We had a basic cable TV for a couple of years – enough to get the local news & PBS – and that’s all we wanted, but I was sold on the combined bill and the fact that I’d be paying less for each item individually.

What I didn’t know is that taxes end up being an additional 30% (more…)

Blueberry picking: are there any left?

The berries are here! The berries are here! If you are not going to jam or preserve your blackberries, blueberries or raspberries, here’s how to freeze those berries and use them in smoothies, baking, etc.

1. Clean and dry the berries
2. Place them in a single layer on a baking sheet (more…)

DIY Frog Hollow Granola

Please help me: I have an addiction to Frog Hollow granola. For those of you not familiar with Frog Hollow, they are a Central Valley farm (CA) that specializes in the most ripest of ripe, the juiciest of juicy, and the most flavorful of flavor-packed, peaches and apricots. (In fact, I once had dinner at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, and chose a Frog Hollow peach as my dessert from their dessert menu. It was perfect.) And for those of you not familiar with their granola, let me tell you that it is nutty and honey-sweet, with nice sized clumps as well as the right proportion of individual toasted oats. It’s NOT a trail mix. This is a granola you put in your yogurt or eat with milk.

But …. it’s not widely available, (more…)

Okay, guys, here’s the dinner menu plan for the week beginning Friday, July 22  and ending Thursday July 28. Note, I don’t plan breakfasts or lunch because a) it’s exactly what you think of for breakfast: oatmeal (see my earlier post), cereal, eggs, smoothies, etc. and b) my daughter and my husband eat out for lunch, she at school and he at work. For lunch, I eat the leftovers or salad or kale chips. (more…)