When good foods turn bad pt 1: vegetables

It is the time of year for new year's resolutions. So *ahem* here goes: This year I will resolve to waste less food. True, I do save a lot of food, but there is certainly room for improvement. I have the bad habit of squirreling things away somewhere in the back of the fridge that, weeks later, surprise me in a pungent and colorful fashion . I know that I am not alone in this quandary. In fact, I think that we all share that experience of pulling something out of the fridge, taking a whiff and then looking around to get a second opinion. But which kinds of spoilage are merely cosmetic, and which will make you sick? And how can this experience be avoided? For the home cook concerned with efficiency, these are rather important questions. So I begin a short series on foods of questionable edibility. First stop: vegetables!

At the risk of sounding like your mother, let me interject a brief lesson on food safety. With vegetables, the troublemakers are either dirt, your hands or your cutting board. So always wash your hands, cutting board and knife before you start preparing your food. Second, the best time to wash vegetables is right before you prepare them. Washing veggies damages the skin, and and can lead to them spoiling or drying out faster than unwashed veggies (though I make some exceptions to this rule). If vegetables have areas that are packed with dirt (the root end of onions and leeks, for example) cut these areas off before washing the vegetable, then you're not spreading the dirt around to the inside of the vegetable. All that said, most vegetables pose a very low risk of food born illness, the real challenge is to buy in the right quantities and store in the right way that they don't go bad before you have a chance to eat them up. On to the nitty gritty.

Potatoes & Root Vegetables: Potatoes don't rot in a stinky sort of way, but they have a very colorful number of ways of going awry (what else grows eyes?!) Sprouted potatoes are not just unattractive, they're bad for you. The green portions and the sprouts have unhealthy levels of a naturally occurring toxin called solanine. The best to avoid sprouting is through proper storage. Your ideal storage is in a paper bag or box in a cool place (think garage or basement) and with an apple. The fumes exuded by the apple will extend the lifetime of the potato. The fridge is also an acceptable storage space for potatoes if you need a very long term storage. But you can leave them out at room temperature for around a month, provided you keep them away from the light and use the apple-in-the-bag trick. If you do find with potatoes with eyes, cut away all of the green, and the rest of the potato will be safe to eat. Other root veggies like carrots and beets are fine to eat, even if they get a little dried and limp. If you have a cold, well ventilated garage or basement, this can make a good root cellar, which is really how root vegetables want to be kept. Otherwise the fridge will suffice. If you buy roots with the stems on, remove the stems and store them separately (the stems will still be trying to grow and sapping the roots of some of their goodness).

Garlic & Onions: The garlic and onions that you typically buy in the store are all conditioned to withstand longer storage. The plants are edible in their younger, milder forms (spring garlic & onions), but they are much more perishable. Garlic or onions that have sprouted are still good to eat, but the sprouts have an unpleasant, bitter flavor. For sprouted garlic, cut each clove in half and remove the green sprout. Do the same for onions. If onions have a bruised area, simply cut it away before cooking. To keep your garlic and onions, search for firm garlic and onions and store them in a cool place without light.

Sprouts: I don't use sprouts much. And if you've ever made your own sprouts, you know how specific the conditions for hygienic sprouting are. If sprouts are not kept properly either during their growth or storage, they can harbor some nasty bacteria. So... just be careful with them. Think of fresh sprouts like fish: only buy them from stores you trust and don't buy them more than a day in advance especially if you plan to eat them raw.

Greens: I'll divide greens into three categories: crisp, tender and hearty. Crisp greens (romain, iceberg lettuce) do not keep long, and need to be kept, well, crisp. Crisp greens should be kept in a plastic bag (but not fully sealed) and preferably swaddled with a damp paper towel or two. Tender greens (spinach, arugula, butter lettuce) do not turn limp and brown like the crisp guys. They dissolve into green slime. Moisture is slightly less important for these greens, but aeration is key. Skip the paper towels and just store in an unsealed plastic bag. Hearty greens (cabbage, broccoli, kale) have a much longer holding time and tend to turn yellow or brown as they go bad. These veggies should be stored in an unsealed bag. If they have yellow or brown spots, remove discolored areas or leaves. The good news with all types of greens is that if they have started to go bad, then picking through them, you can typically salvage a lot of the plant. The prevailing wisdom is to not wash these veggies ahead of time, but right before you use them. I ignore this advice for everything but crisp greens. I wash and thoroughly dry my tender and hearty greens and store them in plastic shopping bags. If I don't have to wash and dry them first, I find that I use them up faster, and throw less away. But that's just me.

Mushrooms: I know that there is controversy about this but I don't wash my mushrooms. Mushrooms are like sponges, and washing them introduces a lot of excess water, this absolutely affects the way that they cook. When you wash a mushroom you do wash off the dirt clinging to the outside, but then a portion of that dirty water is absorbed right back into the mushroom. I use a clean cloth to remove all dirty areas and to carefully rub the surface clean. Mushrooms are very delicate, so the best storage advise is to handle them as little as possible. Keep mushrooms that come in a plastic-wrapped carton in their original container. Mushrooms bought in bulk can be stored in an unsealed plastic bag with a damp paper towel. The best place to store mushrooms is not in the fridge-- again, this is a good place for them to pick up moisture. That cold, dark garage or basement is better if you have it. If not, the fridge is a good second option.

Cooking Dried Beans

Dried beans are one of the few food products that are cheap and durable enough to also double as childhood craft supplies. But they are good for more than gluing to your turkey themed collage or for filling tiny sacks of potatoes in your latest diorama; dried beans can and should have a starring role in many a thrifty meal. Did I mention that they are highly nutritious and also quite tasty?

So... all of this begs the question: why don't more people cook dried beans? Well, there are a few pitfalls you can run into: mushy or grainy beans, beans that won't cook no matter how long you boil them. And then we also have, as Harold McGee calls it in On Food and Cooking, "the problem of legumes and flatulence." (At this point in my reading, I could not help but giggle both from childish amusement at the word "flatulence" and out of deep satisfaction that I have a book that directly addresses this issue.) But there are a myriad of ways to combat beans' difficulties: soaking the beans overnight, soaking with baking soda (but not too much or they'll taste soapy and bitter), soaking with salt (but this can make the beans grainy), pressure cooking, long cooking at a low temperature (but be careful if you're at a high altitude). All of this conditional and contradictory advise can be enough to make you reach for what suddenly seems like a very reasonably priced can of beans.

But don't worry, I'm going to try to make some practical sense out of all of this advise, so roll your sleeves up and get ready to cook some beans! I'm going to broadly group beans into four categories and will address each with additional posts, further relevant information and (of course) recipes. Small beans (like lentils) cook relatively quickly and do not need to be soaked ahead of time. The trick to cooking small beans is to fully cook them while not letting them get mushy. Large beans (kidney beans, black eyed peas) need to be soaked and cooked for a longer period of time. The trick with them is to get them cooked all the way through and have a soft, creamy texture. And split beans (such as split peas) are different altogether, with the outer shell of the bean removed they easily dissolve into a puree. Lastly, soy beans could be part of the large bean group, but they are different enough in their preparation and versatility to warrant their own category. So I shall begin a legume themed odyssey and make my way through all four types of beans and try to make some practical sense of how to turn humble beans into delicious foodstuffs.

But first, I'll outline a few of the key techniques and common recommendations of bean cookery that will help you understand how beans cook, and why your recipes call for certain techniques or ingredients.

1. Cooking times. Just a warning: they might be long (like hours) and they might vary, by a lot. It's easy to forget that these dried little suckers are produce. Yes, dried produce, but they are plants nonetheless. And just like your apple pie will taste different from year to year based on the apple crop, your beans might cook differently from batch to batch, based on the crop. Watch out that your beans are not too old, while they might look and smell the same for years very old beans can take much longer to cook. So when you're cooking be prepared to test the beans for doneness, and don't panic if they're not done yet, just add more cooking liquid and increase the cooking time.

2. Flatulence. Beans have lots of good-for-ya proteins and carbohydrates in them. But they've also got a few carbohydrates we humans are not good at digesting. And when we eat them the digestive process can take a comical turn. There are a lot of ways to get rid of these undesirable carbohydrates, but it depends very much on the type of bean and how you're cooking it. Many recipes list salt and baking soda as ways to cut down on the gas, which is only sort of true. They help beans cook faster, and a long cooking will break down the indigestible carbohydrates. In my book the most important thing you can do on this account is to never, never undercook your beans. Trust me on this one.

2. Soaking. There are two reasons to soak beans. First it decreases the cooking time. Second some of the indigestible carbohydrates in beans leach out into the soaking water, then you can toss the water and have less gas-inducing beans. But (as always) the whole picture is not that simple. When you toss out the soaking water, you also toss out lots of good nutrients and flavor. Welcome to the complicated trade-offs to balance while cooking beans. I usually soak, and then cook thoroughly with the soaking liquid.

3. Baking Soda & Salt. Soaking or cooking beans with baking soda decreases their cooking time. But use it sparingly, too much will taste terrible. Salt also decreases the cooking time, but salt also reacts with the proteins in the bean to make them firm. This can be a good thing (and help to keep your lentils from disintegrating) or it can be a bad thing (making your kidney beans have a grainy texture).

4. Acid, Sugar & Calcium. All of these ingredients increase the cooking time of beans. So if you're boiling beans add tomatoes, lemon juice, wine, and vinegar after the beans have reached their desired consistency. Again there's an exception: if you are going to cook beans for a really, really long time (like baked beans) then these ingredients will keep your beans firm, when they would otherwise turn to mush.

Cabbage

Cabbages are wonderful vegetables for the winter.They typically maintain a low price when the popular summer favorites (tomatoes, cucumbers) have either disappeared from the shelves or jumped in price (these out of season crops are shipped from farther away or grown in pricey greenhouses). So cabbage is a great vegetable for these long months after the fall harvest and before you can even start to think of spring vegetables. Cabbages do pose a few challenges, though. The biggest problem is often, well, how big cabbages are--particularly if you often cook for small crowds. So I find it helps to have a couple of easy cabbage recipes on hand, that way you can throw together a quick salad with whatever you have left over, rather than letting half a cabbage wilt and turn gray in the fridge.

To prepare a cabbage, first peel off the first outside leaves and discard. Cut cabbages in half lengthwise and then cut out the center with two slashes, resulting in a v-shaped trench. Then you can slice your cabbage leaves according to the demands of your recipe. Cabbage trimmings are a vegetable excess that does not work well for making vegetable stock--but do save your cabbage hearts-- they can still be but to good use.

Storing and Drying Fresh Herbs

From the window of my "cozy" (read: tiny) Brooklyn apartment I often indulge in wistful daydreams about having a little herb garden. I have intermittently made forays into the world of potted windowsill herbs, with uneven results. So, someday I hope to find myself able to stroll out into the herb garden and pick whatever I need for dinner that evening... but until then I am stuck buying the twist-tied bundles of fresh herbs like everyone else. There are a couple of things that make these little bundles a challenge. First, unless you are making a really herb-intensive dish like pesto, you probably have far more fresh herbs than you can use at one time. I find that with a combination of proper storage of the fresh herbs and preservation of the remainder, I can put the whole packet to good use.

First: to store fresh herbs. You can think of storing fresh herbs like you would fresh flowers. Cut the ends off and place your herb bouquet in a glass of water. Place a plastic bag over the leaves and store the whole thing in your fridge. Change the water every day or two. Most herbs kept in this fashion will last about a week and a half. If you want to further extend the life of delicate leafy herbs then you can pluck the leaves off and arrange them in a single layer between two damp paper towels (remember to save parsley and cilantro stems in your freezer, as they make an excellent addition to vegetable stock). Then you can roll or fold the paper towel packet and place it inside a plastic bag. I find that this method will further extend the life of leafy herbs by as much as a week. You might need to periodically refresh the paper towels, making sure to keep them damp.

So, now let's assume that you've chosen the right methods to store your fresh herbs, but you still have more than you can use. A lot of herbs retain their flavor pretty well when they are dried-- rosemary, sage, dill, oregano and thyme come to mind. I will be the first to say that there is a change in the flavor of dried herbs, but the dried herb is not necessarily inferior. And by drying them you are turning your herbs into a useful food product where they might otherwise wilt or degenerate into muck in your fridge. Hang these herbs upside down until they are fully dried. Then store in an airtight container for later use.

Thoughts on Spam and Confit

When my sisters and I were girls, my dad would try to trick us into eating Spam. He would cleverly try to slip it into something that cloaked its bright pink hue like, say, an omelet. But the pink chunks were not the biggest giveaway that something was awry, it was that devilish look on my dad's face, watching with just a tad too much relish as I suspiciously poked at the mysterious omelet. In my family you should never, never relax and dig in if someone is giving you that look (just ask me about the pickle juice incident if you need further proof). The question that I have looking back is: where did I get this spam-hating bias from? Why did I already think that spam was something to look down my little nose at, and my dad thought spam was a perfectly edible, if a bit nostalgic* food?

The New York Times article about Spam in this week's dining section seemed like just the inspiration I needed to delve into a subject which has been on my mind since starting this blog-- that is the fickle nature of food snobbery. It is (obviously) nothing new that the type of food you eat/like/have access to can be a potent status symbol. And it's also nothing new that people often want to emulate the styles of the upper classes. So: not so surprising then, that in the last-- say-- ten year eruption of food magazines, television and blogs there has emerged a food lexicon that permits almost no mention of cost. It is as if everyone has unlimited food budgets. The only times that I can recall seeing cost mentioned in a piece of food writing are to exalt the qualities of some exotic and expensive ingredient like kobe beef or saffron. I, for one, think that leaves contemporary food writing missing a very important point.

Food products can be evaluated entirely separately on different criteria: cost and taste. It is the status symbol territory that conflates the two, and often in a very flimsy way. There are gads of historical examples where one particular food item, due to its exclusivity, carried a high social status and once the economic factors shifted and that food product became cheaper, it's reputation plummeted. Take black pepper: in the early middle ages when pepper was hard to come by, it was prized as a seasoning. As pepper became cheaper, it was seen as an inferior seasoning-- used only if you could not afford the "better" spices. The cheap, everyday oranges and bananas in lunchboxes across America were exotic luxuries to colonial Americans. Oh, and a sad inverse example: truffles in ancient Rome were apparently cheap and plentiful enough that even households of modest means could use them with abandon. The formula seems to be rareness equals exclusiveness equals desirability. And as far as I can see, all of that has only a tenuous (if any) relation to taste.

And this brings me to confit- what is now considered a very fancy, exclusive delicacy was once a way to --ahem-- cheaply preserve meat from the autumn slaughter through the winter. Meat (mostly fowl now, but by all accounts preserving ham in this manner goes back even farther) is salted, slowly cooked in fat, dried and then immersed in fat for storage. With the addition of a few preservatives (yes, nitrite is traditional) the meat would then keep for several months, eventually developing an ever-so-slight rancidity which, I am assured, is part of its charm. Have you figured out where I'm going with this?- cheap meat, preserved with salt and nitrite with a unique "acquired taste", looked down upon by food snobs... not so different from the decidedly proletariat cans of Spam. Now, let me say, I am not arguing that there is no qualitative difference between Spam and confit (there are definitely unique chemical changes that happen to meat when preserved as a confit), but I think that it is a good illustration of how the perfume of exclusivity sways the way that we talk, write and think about food.

What I'm trying to do with my recipes for this blog is provide a ratio: taste as a function of value. While I'm not going to start cracking open a can of spam any time soon (neither will I be eating confit, incidentally), I'm glad that other people are doing so in a spirit of exploration; making something beautiful out of something downmarket. This type of creative reexamining of cheap, maligned foods is good for everyone. So, Dad, it's a few years late, but I hereby raise my glass in salute to the strange canned, pink meat of your boyhood: Spam.

*I know that my dad is not alone in his nostalgia for the tinned boyscout fare of his childhood. In fact, I was intrigued to learn that Korean baby boomers have a huge nostalgia for spam (just look for the kimbap rolls in your local Korean restaurant, they might just have little slices of spam tucked in).

Labne (Yogurt Cheese)

Cutting back on my budget has, inevitably, meant cutting back on cheese. Cheese really ought to be an expensive product. To get a little perspective on food costs, I'll often think of all of the steps it takes to produce a particular food product. Cheese gets very involved: first feed must be grown to nourish the animals, the animals themselves must be cared for and milked, then that milk is condensed to produce the cheese curds, and finally the cheese has to be carefully aged. It makes sense that such a labor intensive product like cheese should be relatively expensive. But it is lovely isn’t it?

Lately I’ve been making a lot of labne to fill my cheese cravings. I can buy a quart of yogurt for just over three dollars, even though the finished volume will be about half of what you started with-- for a good quality soft cheese, that’s still a steal of a deal. All that is required to make labne is yogurt, a strainer and a piece of clean cloth. (A double layer of cheesecloth would do fine, I have a small square of linen reserved for this purpose.) Simply line your strainer with fabric, pour in your yogurt and let it stand in your refrigerator to strain for 1-2 days. The longer you strain the yogurt the more dense your yogurt cheese will be. I typically let mine sit for 2 days. This leaves you with a soft, spreadable, delicious cheese. Remember, though, that the finished cheese is only going to be as good as the yogurt you buy-- I like yogurts with a distinct lactose tang. You can also make different tasting yogurt cheeses with different yogurts (I’m looking forward to experimenting with goat labne). Labne can be used for either sweet or savory applications, so I’ll post a recipe for each. But I don't want to give the impression that you need to fuss too much to make labne palatable. It is also wonderful served very simply, either dressed with olive oil and sprinkled with salt or drizzled with a little honey.

Ten Ways to Stretch Your Food Budget

I’ve been living on my self-imposed food budget for just over a month now, and I have so far managed to avoid scurvy, night blindness, and violent fits of chocolate envy. Between pouring over the comparative prices of bulk grains and turning my leftovers into soup, I have dutifully been scribbling notes to myself. What works? What takes a lot of time? What cuts out the most waste? Through my haphazard ruminations, some patterns emerged. The result was a handful of concrete, practical strategies: a few things to add to your culinary repertoire, a few places to look for waste, and some organizational strategies. The list seemed to round out nicely at ten, so here they are: the ten techniques I think will serve you best in stretching your kitchen budget.


Cook your own grains. Nearly every cuisine has a cereal grain for a backbone (though on occasion tubers will take on this starchy role). Western Europe has wheat; Eastern Europe, rye. Most of Asia depends on rice (though millet has even older roots in Asia). South America has corn. It matters little, in terms of saving money, what grain you’re cooking; what does make a difference is that you are cooking your own grains. The basic product that you buy (flour, milled grains) is almost always pretty cheap. What costs more money is processing. When you invest the time to cook your own rice or bake your own bread, your food budget is directly converted to the staple of your diet.

I find it much easier to manage a diet when I stick to one central grain. Right now I’m working with a wheat-centered diet, but that doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally cook a rice- or corn- centered dish. Sticking to one grain, there are just fewer things to manage -- I can easily judge if I have enough bread for the rest of the week or if I’ll need to do some more baking. That calculation is a bit more tricky when measuring a half dozen different grains and leftovers. No matter if it’s bread, millet, quinoa, rice, cous cous or dried pasta, when you cook your own grains your money is efficiently spent.

Eat Dried Beans. I know. There really isn’t anything sexy about dried beans. I don’t know what has done the most harm to the reputation of beans, their propensity to induce flatulence or the very long-standing, rather snobbish verdict that beans are lower-class food. But I adore them. I really think that our little friends in the pulse family are about as close to a superfood as anyone could ask for. Impossibly cheap. Nutritious. Capable of being stored just about indefinitely. Oh, and they are also delicious. Ok, so now the bad news. They do require specific (though not difficult) preparation (properly preparing dried beans can also minimize their wind-generating properties). It’s true that canned cooked beans are a pretty cheap source of protein too, but I think beans are so much better when you cook them yourself. It’s more than just my queasiness about the disturbingly viscous liquid canned beans are suspended in. When you cook your own beans you can add other ingredients to punch up the flavor (garlic, broth, bay leaves, spices). I promise to follow with a post detailing my tips for turning various beans into tasty dishes.

It might be a cliché that rice and beans are the staple foods of the cost-conscious. But there is real wisdom behind this trope; grains and beans are cheap and nutritious. Making them the center of your everyday meals is an easy, effective way to trim down your food budget.


Produce is really important. The concern is not just achieving the right balance of foods for a healthy diet (which does need a lot of plant foods), produce is also essential in making your daily meals satisfying, varied, and interesting. But produce can also be tricky. It is often expensive. It’s unpredictable. It goes bad. I’ve found this to be such a critical area of concern that the next four tips largely address how to buy produce in a cost-effective manner and use it before it goes bad-- though many of the same principles apply for meat and dairy.


Juggle fewer balls. Sometimes maintaining produce feels impossibly complicated. Bananas, pears, kale, potatoes, tomatoes, avocados somehow make their way into your fruit bowl or vegetable drawer, looking so innocent and promising. But then they unexpectedly turn on you. The avocados and bananas are not ripe when you need them, and overnight they turn into something brown and sticky, like clay. Kale turns yellow and bitter while spinach dissolves into a slimy green sludge. It is really, really hard (even for experienced professionals) to gauge exactly when fruits and vegetables will be ripe, and for exactly how long they will last. I think that the easiest thing you can do is to simplify the equation for yourself. Do not buy a lot of produce that has a narrow window of time when it is palatable (fresh greens, avocados, bananas, pears, berries, stone fruits). All of these foods make their own schedule; you have to be ready to act when they are in their prime. If you’re buying too many types of demanding produce at once, you are setting yourself an unpredictable culinary obstacle course. The solution? Buy less, (particularly less types at once). You can also simplify your tasks by buying fruits and vegetables with longer hold times (apples, citrus fruits, root vegetables, onions, winter squash). Buying in this manner does mean that you might have to go to the store a bit more frequently to supplement your fruit or salad greens, but I think it is a worthwhile trade-off for not throwing out your priceless plant foods.

Buy Seasonally. This tip gets bandied about quite a bit in discussions about eating ecologically. Again, it is one of those tips that makes some rational sense -- when less of your dollar is spent on shipping costs (and all of the involved processes to grow and transport produce out of season) your dollar is converted more directly into food. Depending on your source, seasonality can also apply to meat and seafood.

Make your own preserves. A dear friend of mine recently confided to me her childhood memories of canning. It was an all-day affair. In the heat of summer, endless sweaty hours were spent boiling jars, and pitting, skinning and cooking the pounds of slick, wet fruit. It was an activity that left the whole family distinctly cranky.

Let me first say that this is not the type of preserves that I am talking about. In fact, I use the term preserves rather loosely. I would include freezing extra vegetables and simply cooking fruits or vegetables to store in the refrigerator -- anything that extends the life of your produce is some type of preservation. And some of these techniques are phenomenally easy. Tossing cooked or raw vegetables in a simple brine at least triples how long they will last in your fridge (you don’t have to sterilize jars if you’re just making pickles in your fridge!) And if you cook fruit with sugar you can similarly extend its life span. Of course, I’m not arguing against canning your own peaches, but making preserves doesn’t have to be a complicated, intimidating project. And some of the simple things means of making preserves can save you a lot of money by avoiding spoiled produce.

Save useful scraps. A lot of the trimmings of vegetables and fruits are useful ingredients in their own right. This is such a rich topic that I’m making it an ongoing discussion/exploration. I will follow with posts about what scraps are useful to save as well as how to use them. It is surprising how much goodness you can wring out of leftover trimmings. The calculation on this one is obvious: turning scraps that you would normally throw away into delicious food is as close as you can get to making something from nothing.


Consume luxury foods sparingly. I’ll admit that this is the one that scared me. I am fully guilty of making food purchases in the thrall of an exotic or unknown ingredient -- I have bought sapodillas and cold-pressed pumpkin seed oil without the slightest idea as to what I was going to do with them. So it was with some amount of trepidation that I weighed and calculated the cost of ground espresso that it takes to make my morning latte (a habit which I have cut back on, but not eliminated). I would term “luxury” anything that has to either travel from a long distance, or is a highly concentrated product. Wine, beer, liquor, cheese, cream, chocolate, coffee: these are all goods with truly unique qualities but they are made precious by either the great mass of care (and sometimes a lot of raw food matter) that goes into their production, or their unique origin. So far, though, cutting back on the expensive foods hasn’t really bothered me. After my first two-week budget, I had enough money left over to buy myself a cheap, but enjoyable bottle of red wine (thank you, Trader Joe’s for your well-selected, affordable wines) and a bar of good chocolate. Consuming these items sparingly has, for me, actually made them a bit more enjoyable. Call me crazy, but spreading a thick pat of pasture-raised butter on my morning toast or nibbling on a small square of dark chocolate with my afternoon tea leaves me feeling that I eat very richly indeed.


Minimize Processed Food. This is a tough one. So much has been done by all parts of the food industry to make prepared foods convenient and appealing. Often we’re just trying desperately to keep up with overburdened schedules; adding extra culinary tasks seems like an impossibility. I don’t have any easy fix. The calculation is simple though: if you turn basic ingredients into food yourself, you pay for the ingredients. If you buy a food that is processed, you pay for the ingredients plus the processing plus the packaging and marketing. Making food in your own kitchen is just more economical. There are a few products that particularly kill me with the markup. For instance cereal and crackers are fairly basic, grain-based products; the cost of the raw materials in them is very low. The pre-made packaged varieties, however, are not so cheap. Some of these items are pretty easy to make at home (I promise to follow up with my recipes for crackers and granola soon). The absolute worst culprit in this regard, though, has to be soft drinks. Really, any bottled drink. The cost is particularly egregious when you consider that you are getting almost no nutritional value for your money.


Make allowances for your eating and cooking habits. I’m betting that most people have some eating or cooking foible. I need to have a snack in the afternoon. If I don’t then I get hungry and surly, and when I get home from work I eat a big snack and spoil my dinner. For a while I tried to work around it -- maybe I should eat lunch later? drink more water? Sometimes this would work, but all too often I found myself popping out of the office to grab a snack or reverting to my cranky, dinner-spoiling habits. So for me the solution is simply that I need a little snack. By planning for this, I can make sure to bring my own snack rather than buy some expensive, not-very-nutritious tidbit. Your allowances need to meet you wherever your foible lies. Perhaps you need to always have a soup or pasta in the freezer for when you are just too tired to cook what you had planned. If you’re having a tough time keeping up with your cooking, then it is worth taking a good hard look at where and when you turn to prepared foods or take-out. Anticipating this ahead of time can keep you from needing to turn to these more expensive options.


Improvise. I think the truest measure of a good cook is how they react when something goes awry. And there will always be unpredictability in a kitchen. Ingredients will be missing. Unexpected bushels of zucchini and eggplant will materialize. Guests will show up unannounced. To make the most of these opportunities, you need to be nimble. I find that flexibility comes from equal parts expertise and gusto. So, yes, it is absolutely important to bone up on your culinary knowledge. Read and talk endlessly about food -- many of my best ideas have sprung from meandering discussions. But I can’t overstate how important it is to experiment. Be a little reckless. It is easy to feel pitted into one of the cook stereotypes: either you are some sort of domestic prodigy-- effortlessly turning out four course dinners served on time around a tasteful hand-made centerpiece, or you are the buffoon-- instantly all thumbs whenever there is a knife in hand. Neither of these images is very helpful. Anyone can learn to cook; but it does take practice. And a little fortitude. The biggest barrier to improvising in the kitchen seems often to be a lack of confidence, not a lack of culinary ability. And the only reply I have is to just dive in. Take on bigger, more involved projects. Try new techniques that you’re unsure about. Having a broader set of skills will serve you well when you inevitably have to deal with something unexpected. It seems my final suggestion has turned into something of an argument for home cooking. I can stand behind that. Cooking at home is likely the best single move you can make to get good food for less money. Cook at home to save money. Cook for sustenance. Cook for pleasure. Cook unapologetically. But do, do cook.

Saving Scraps

If you are cutting your vegetables in a very formal, French manner, there is a prescribed, unvarying system. Your cutting station contains three bowls: the first bowl contains the whole, unmanipulated plant matter; the last bowl contains the finished, geometrically cut product; the middle bowl contains everything you have scraped, cut and peeled away in the process. Savvy cooks know that there is a lot of useful stuff that gets thrown in that middle bowl (and usually subsequently into the trash.) Turning those scraps into useful and delicious food is a really easy and rewarding way to stretch your food budget. It certainly gives me the feeling that I have performed some feat of wizardry- making something delightful from nothing. So this is the beginning of what will be an evolving list of useful scraps to save, accompanied with recipes and tips about how best to use them.

Initial Thoughts

I most often decide what to eat haphazardly; there is rarely any narrative, only emotion. I feel like Sushi. Tamales. Pasta. Or, if I'm feeling lazy, just a reliably satisfying hunk of cheese. Being trained in food doesn't help limit my stream of consciousness -- actually, it throws a wrench in. I inevitably have a long mental list of recipes and ingredients that I'd like to try out, which usually doesn't help out the coherence of my meals. In The Omnivore's Dillemma, Michael Pollan eloquently describes this aimless eating as a uniquely American culinary identity crisis. Without a strong culinary tradition, the poor American cook is vulnerable to innumerable trends, hype, fear and insecurity. Preparing such meandering meals also produces a lot of waste. Because there is not a core group of ingredients, little snippits are left to languish, forgotten, and irrelevant to the dinner of the next day. Every time I clean out my fridge I find myself awash with guilt as I uncover scraps of leftover tofu, a handful of slimy spinach that I forgot about and sometimes the tragedy of an avocado half which has turned to mud.

Being financially conservative is certainly practical and relevant (and timely given the much talked about ballooning of food prices), but it is not the only reason this experiment is interesting to me. Using your ingredients well and fully is arguably the highest respect that you can bestow on them. It is a different level of intimacy with your ingredients. I am learning to gauge how much flour per week I will need to make bread, when that is my primary source of starch. Ingredients suddenly have heft. Their mass is relevant. Kitchen management feels a bit like shepherding the flow of ingredients as they pass through this strange kitchen/human beast. The various elements must be put to good use, and at the right time. Wheat enters the kitchen, then is turned into bread. The bread keeps for 4 days, then the crust must be removed from the remainder and frozen for croutons or allowed to dry for use in other dishes. Produce is the trickiest. Pears that are verging on overripening must be cooked before they go bad. A gift of garden-fresh cucumbers must be eaten within a few days, or else pickled. Kitchen management is a much more complex task than just producing a good meal. And the product of kitchen management is much more than just a tasty dish, it is a dynamic process. A tricky, interesting process.