Kitchen Prep/Baking Day

I’m not very organized with a lot of things, but over the last six months I’ve forced myself to make a weekly menu plan, stick to my grocery list (I’ve always made one, just never stuck to it), figure out what prep work is involved in the week’s food, and set aside time once or twice each week for food preparation.  If I don’t do these things, I find that we not only spend more money on food and create more food waste, but we also don’t eat as healthfully. 

 

I make no claims to having it “all figured out,” but having a few hours each week dedicated to kitchen prep has been such a blessing.  Here are some things typically involved in some of my kitchen prep days:

 

- First, make sure all the ingredients are on hand and locate all necessary storage containers.  This is important because it really sucks to go through all this effort just to find you don’t have a way to properly store everything.  I use three-cup sized plastic storage bowls (yeah, plastic is bad, but I can’t afford anything else right now) for darn near everything, so I usually have to sweep the kitchen beforehand to locate bowls that are holding things that could really be kept in a smaller container.  I never seem to have enough three-cup containers!

 

- Chop vegetables that won’t turn within three days.  I have two prep days during the week, so I only need to do enough work on each one to last half the week.  This usually involves chopping a couple onions, some celery, carrot, and bell pepper.  I don’t prepare garlic way ahead of time because it loses too much potency.  Also, when I buy celery, I dice the whole thing the first time I need some and store it in the freezer – I only ever use to sauté into a soup base or  to add to a roast, so I don’t need the crunch.  The vegetable scraps are saved for making vegetable stock or to add to a bone broth.

 

- Pull any items out of the freezer that I will need to use in the next three days.  I have to make a conscious effort to do this, or else it will be late afternoon before I realize the chicken or whatever isn’t thawed.  This is mainly because I prefer frozen items to thaw slowly in the refrigerator; meat that has been “quick-thawed” doesn’t taste right to me.

 

- Roast a whole chicken for dinner.  Prepping a chicken (or leg of lamb, pork roast, etc.) to roast in the oven is quick work and ensures a hot meal will be ready when you’re worn out after all the kitchen prep you’re doing.  It also guarantees you’ll have the raw materials for making a large batch of bone broth afterwards.

 

- Start soaking beans, seeds, etc. for cooking or sprouting.  Sprouting is new for me – I only started doing this a month ago – but it’s so easy!  I’ve sprouted chickpeas and lentils so far, and I’m going to try almonds or chia seeds next.  But that’s another post…

 

- Portion out and season meat for the freezer.  Sometimes I find really good deals on grass-fed ground beef, so I buy lots of it and separate it into ¾ pound portions or make hamburger patties.  For the hamburgers, I season them appropriately, shape them, and place them all in a freezer storage bag separated by wax paper.  Very convenient!

 

I’ve also been trying to establish a baking day – or at least add it into my general kitchen prep time.  Right now I just bake whenever I have the whim or whenever we run out of bread.  Last weekend I really had the baking bee in my bonnet, though, because I made two batches (that’s ten loaves, y’all) of freshly-milled wheat-spelt sandwich bread and a batch of banana muffins.  It’s kind of hard to reconcile baking with the general kitchen prep, though, because this is how my kitchen looks after an intense baking session:

 

 

 

What do you do in the way of kitchen prep?  I’d love to hear any suggestions!

Part of the Real Food Wednesdays blog carnival at Kelly the Kitchen Kop and Works-for-me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family.

Reading and Writing Goals in 2009

I’m still not feeling like cooking, or even writing about cooking, because dinner has become such a fiasco lately.  My orange chicken is super easy, but a clingy son and a daughter who is egging on said son make for an extremely irritated mother.  So I’ll share my recipe the next time I make it.

 

Let’s change the subject and talk about books.  Not bestsellers, but dusty old texts that are sometimes referenced in popular culture but actually only read by a few people during the high school or college years.  Classics.  These are the sorts of books I love, even if I slog through them sometimes.  For the last three years, it’s been hard to find a lot of time to read, and when I do, I end up reading nonfiction about some aspect of food.  Now, don’t get me wrong – I love me some Michael Pollan – but I need to lighten things up a bit.  For me, that means revisiting the Aeneid and reading Don Quixote for the first time.  I realize this is not what most people think of as light reading, but it’s a much-needed departure from the serious issues at hand.   In a year’s time, I’m sure I can squeeze both of those in.

 

My writing goal – 500 words per day – is not writing for this blog, necessarily, but I’m sure some of it will end up on here.  Every year I try to do NaNoWriMo but fail miserably.  I finally realized that my failure was due to a) not writing on a regular basis (and I called myself a writer!) and b) only sporadically writing more than a few paragraphs at a time.  This should be an easy goal for me, since I currently write at least 300 words per day, so I’m hoping to bump this up sometime in the middle of the year.

 

What are you reading this year?

Kitchen Equipment: A Retrospective

A recent discussion about the purpose of stick blenders has inspired me to share some thoughts on home kitchen essentials.  This will, by no means, even scratch the surface on such a broad topic, but I’d like to pass along my observations about what kinds of blending and mixing equipment have worked best in my kitchen.

 

When I got married six years ago, I registered for a whole slew of things I deemed necessary for wedded cooking bliss.  The stainless steel Oster blender and the hand mixer were among the more useful items, but that restaurant-style fajita platter — never been used.  It just didn’t occur to us at the time that the griddle and wooden trivet setup was for presentation purposes only.  But back to mixing equipment…

 

I never registered for a stand mixer, because chocolate chip cookies are about the only thing I ever dreamed of baking.  It wasn’t until recently when I got interested in baking my own bread that I even thought to buy one.  This turned out to be a blessing, since most stores just sell Kitchen Aid and Cuisinart, which don’t work as well for making large batches of bread from freshly milled grain.  (I’ve heard reports of the Kitchen Aid trying to wobble off the counter during kneading and of a shortened life of the mixer in general because the motor wears out — this isn’t to knock these brands, but if kneading large batches of dough made with home-milled flour is your thing, then this is not the best option.)  This is why I bought a Bosch Universal!

 

Another cool thing abut the Bosch is that in addition to having a powerful motor (this is the same company that makes power tools), it also has a blender attachment.  This means you can use one machine for mixing AND blending.  So I recently gave away my beautiful Oster blender so I could save counter space!  I like the idea of having just a few multi-use appliances (read: Alton Brown) rather than a bunch of monotasking gadgets, so this is really cool to me.

 

When my 80s-era food processor finally goes out, I’ll purchase the food processing attachment, as well.  The blender attachment came with the mixer, so I didn’t spend any extra money for it.  This seems like the most economical way to simplify my kitchen, anyway.  There are also attachments for:

- citrus juicer

- food/meat grinder

- fruit and berry press

- nut and cheese grater

- sausage stuffer

- pasta maker

…just to name the ones I’d be interested in.  So now that I’ve done an advertisement for this thing, I’ll be waiting for that check in the mail from Bosch or Pleasant Hill Grain. 

 

The stick blender came along later (a hand-me-down from Mom), but I’m beginning to think it’s indispensable, too.  Mine does the job I need it to — it blends things directly in the bowl or in a pot on the stove — and it cleans up easily.  Mine is by Braun, but since it’s at least ten years old, I don’t know if they’re still made by that brand.  Kimi at The Nourishing Gourmet has a whole article on the Kitchen Aid immersion blender, so that may be the better way to go.

 

As for the hand mixer: totally unneccessary, but I think it’s pretty obvious by now as to why.  The stick blender is just as portable and easier to clean, plus you don’t have to go searching for attachments.

 

So the lesson here is: you don’t always know right now what you’ll end up using/preferring later on.  I wasn’t much of a cook when I got married – even though I thought I was — and I’ve learned so much more about nutrition in the last few years.

Etc.

I intentionally started my expense-tracking experiment during the holiday season so I could get a high-end estimate of our spending, but I’m quickly regretting that decision.  So I’m going to extend my observation period to go through the end of January, instead of just through the end of the year.  In the me

 

This week has been uncharacteristically busy for us with the election, doctor’s appointments, etc., and not a lot has gotten done.  We’re hoping to get back into the swing of things today, so we’re having our simple pork roast dinner tonight.  I’m behind on a lot of things (we’ve been out of bread for two days!) so I will have to catch up before I can write more.  I hope you’re having a good week!

Tracking Expenses: A Month-long Experiment

I’m pretty organized when it comes to finances — I keep a spreadsheet with our budgeted monthly expenses, which includes columns for each month’s actual expenses, plus a column for how much money I’ve budgeted for each particular item.  The part where the organization falls apart is in tracking our food spending. 

 

Since we moved to Georgia, I’ve budgeted $600 per month for household, food (grocery AND eating out), gasoline, health, and baby expenses.  It’s supposed to break down to $125 per week (with the extra $100 covering the occasional fifth week), but three years and two children later, this number seems like it’s way off.  Part of the problem is that I’m not saving my receipts and keeping track of every penny I spend on these things.  As a result, I’m sure that the actual number is way above the budgeted amount.  I also realize that I’m very disorganized when it comes to finding ways to be frugal with the shopping, so this month I’m committing to tracking our spending in this category.

 

Well, four days into the month, I’ve already spent $250!  How does that happen?  $80 of it is the battery my car desperately needed, and $60 can be accounted for by a large purchase of Coca-Cola (for Husband), two boxes of diapers, a Costco-sized pack of toilet paper, and my daughter’s calcium and vitamin D supplement.  That leaves $110, which still seems like way too much money to spend for a week of groceries and gas.  Both of our cars are high MPG Japanese compacts, so we spend way less than other people we know on gas (maybe $40 per week?), so let’s just say that $70 is going to groceries.  I would like to get that number even lower, but without sacrificing highly nourishing foods or safe cleaning products. 

 

Is this possible?

 

I believe it is.  Over the next few weeks, I’m going to examine every meal, every household chore, and every purchase, taking notes on anything I can change.  I may not implement an immediate change, since some of it may require a larger investment of capital than I have on hand, but I’m hoping to put together some kind of timeline for these changes.  Along the way, if you have any ideas, please pass them along!  Any changes I make in spending have to follow these criteria:

 

1)  Food spending can ONLY move in the direction of being more local, seasonal, and whole, as opposed to searching out processed alternatives. 

 

I know people who STILL believe that processed foods are a better value, but I disagree on both the frugality and the nutritionality of that statement.  I think I can prove this as I move toward expelling even more of the processed foods out of our weekly shopping. 

 

2) Cheaper personal and household cleaning products can only be substituted if they are less toxic than the ones I use now.

 

This means I might have to experiment with making my own.  I have some friends who make their own cleaners, so I will be consulting them in this area!

 

That’s not an impressive list of criteria, but I’m sure it will become more specific as I delve into this experiment more.  More on this later!

Food Storage and My Overactive Imagination

The much-awaited Nutrimill and Bosch mixer arrived last Friday, so a good friend and I made our first batch (four loaves) of bread on Saturday with freshly milled flour.  Our giddiness at the sight of the grain mill turning wheat berries into flour is almost too embarrasing to admit — I’m pretty sure we jumped up and down with silly grins on our faces at the sight of our first milled wheat.  We got a little nervous once we started adding the flour into the mixer for kneading, but we still ended up with a pretty good first batch of bread.

 

So now that we know we can do this, there is the issue of buying and storing a large quantity of wheat berries.  It’s not so hard to find a place to store one 6-gallon bucket, but already I’m dreaming about buying MANY 6-gallon buckets of various grains — oats (mainly for breakfast, not bread-making), quinoa, amaranth, etc.  I guess I really won’t have to worry about finding a place for all of these things for a while, since each bucket is at least half of my grocery budget for a week, but I still want to plan space for it in my kitchen.  My small pantry is already bursting at the seams, and I have a lot of open space in my kitchen, but perhaps there is another place in my house that would be good for food storage.  For now, I need to get the image of my kitchen looking like an 1800s mercantile out of my head.

Will this work?

I have this crazy idea for comparing prices on stuff I buy a lot…

 

If I could find a cheap (or ideally, free) address book — nothing fancy or leatherbound, paperback would be fine — then I could use the alphabet tabs to list the product (e.g. baby wipes — file under “B”), the stores I would buy them at (e.g. Costco, Target, Wal Mart), and the price per unit (per baby wipe, in this case) for my preferred brand at that store.  It’s just so hard to keep track of prices in my head for so many products, and packaging is so deceptive when it comes to how much actual product you are getting.

 

This would probably be much easier if I had some fancy electronic device, but I’m a bit Amish when it comes to Blackberries and such.  We’ll see if this actually comes to fruition; I have yet to find a cheap enough address book to make this worthwhile.