The ultimate (kitchen) goal of a busy mom is to eat healthy, delicious meals that are prepared on a sane schedule and don't require you to take out a bank loan to pay for groceries. This is, for many of us, a pipe dream. Food isn't cheap and gourmet cooking takes effort, not to mention well-trained taste buds. Not every child will cheer for Brussel sprouts. But it can be done.
Or, at least, that's my theory.
My goal for the month of October is to plan out a well-balanced, nutritious menu with old favorites, new foods, meals that can mostly be made ahead, and dinners that can become tomorrow's bento box lunch with very little effort. Really, what I want is Lazy Gourmet on a Rice And Beans Budget.
Impossible? You never know until you try.
The first step is creating a realistic menu. I have a hectic week. Sunday is church, Tuesday is afternoon gymnastics, Wednesday is speech, Friday is equestrian lessons. Baking something for an hour so we can eat dinner means we eat really late, or we're home at least an hour before dinner. I don't always have that luxury. So I need foods that are crock-pot and microwave friendly. Something I can cook in under 15 minutes of actual heating or reheating time.
The other thing I want out of my menu is a well-balanced diet. My family eats meat, but they don't like soups or fish. Pasta dishes are a hard sell around here. I have one kid that hates sauces in all forms and can't stand tomatoes. Things like lasagna and spaghetti get pushed around the plate and left uneaten. To handle my picky eaters I'm planning dinner in five categories: beef, chicken, pasta, vegetarian, and breakfast. Yes, pasta is a hard sell, but it needs to be on the plate if I ever want my kids to learn to love pasta!
Breakfast will be a choice of muffins, cereal with milk, or oatmeal. It's not a wide selection, but breakfast runs from 5am when I get up to 8am when the babies get up and I am not cooking a special meal for everyone. Baking muffins once a week is doable, eggs and sausage every morning cuts into my writing time.
Lunch will be sandwiches most days, but I want to send bento lunches at least twice a week. These are cute, fun, and a little bit healthier than PBJ with a juice box. They also take more planning, and that's why they won't be a daily event.
Now let's discuss the budget... $1.50 per meal per person, or $22.50/day for the family. For two weeks I want the grocery bill to come in around $300 + paper goods (diapers, dog food, ect). This isn't entirely impossible, but it means cutting out a lot of waste. Pre-cut skinless boneless chicken breast is several dollars more than the skin and bone variety.
I'm going to run off and make a menu, I'll report back here on how this experiment goes.
- Liana
Showing posts with label experiment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label experiment. Show all posts
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Fruit and Vegie Box: Contents
As you know, my lovely fruit and vegie box was delivered to my doorstep on Wednesday evening. In the interests of establishing a baseline for the coming weeks, I thought I'd detail the contents of my box here, and give my first impressions :) And because I want to be able to compare value for money, I'm also weighing everything :)
Contents
1 giganti-lettuce (340g)
2 massive navel oranges (863g total)
2 apples that I think are Fujis (277g total)
2 apples, more standard-looking, almost like a red delicious (370g total)
1 pink lady apple (168g)
1 standard pear (272g)
1 packham pear (219g)
3 Imperial mandarins (221g)
1 brown onion (134g)
3 potatos (438g)
1 zucchini/corgette (104g)
1 head of broccoli (289g)
4 bananas (609g)
3 carrots (522g)
cherry tomatoes (255g)
button mushrooms (128g)
As well as that, I also bought 390g of feta, and a 980g loaf of potato and rosemary sourdough which smells DIVINE.
First impressions:
VERY first impression - the bread smells heavenly.
Second impression - hmm, not as much in here as I'd hoped. On further analysis, I think this is because the fruit outweighs the vegetables, and we tend to eat more vegetables than fruit. The website does say that you can email them to negotiate, and I did that because the original list included green capsicum (pepper) and I don't like green; they were happy to switch for me... But note the lack of capsicum in the above list. I also seem to be missing the cucumber they promise on the website list, not that that bothers me, since we don't eat that many salads in winter. And to be fair, the website does say the list is a guide, dependent on availability. So you know.
On closer inspection, I remain ambivalent. The carrots, lettuce and mushrooms appear particularly fresh, although not better than what I've had before from the supermarket. I think the lettuce is crisper, though. Might last longer. The fruit, though, doesn't seem particularly superior to what I've had before - with the exception of the oranges, which are very heavy for their size, boding well. But oranges are good right now, at the peak of their season, so you know.
I'll report back in more detail as each item is consumed, I suppose!
Finally...
Price
The box of fresh food cost me $25. The bread was very expensive, at $6.95, but the smell is tooootally worth it. So you know. The feta was $10.95, which equals about $2.81 per 100g.
Contents
1 giganti-lettuce (340g)
2 massive navel oranges (863g total)
2 apples that I think are Fujis (277g total)
2 apples, more standard-looking, almost like a red delicious (370g total)
1 pink lady apple (168g)
1 standard pear (272g)
1 packham pear (219g)
3 Imperial mandarins (221g)
1 brown onion (134g)
3 potatos (438g)
1 zucchini/corgette (104g)
1 head of broccoli (289g)
4 bananas (609g)
3 carrots (522g)
cherry tomatoes (255g)
button mushrooms (128g)
As well as that, I also bought 390g of feta, and a 980g loaf of potato and rosemary sourdough which smells DIVINE.
First impressions:
VERY first impression - the bread smells heavenly.
Second impression - hmm, not as much in here as I'd hoped. On further analysis, I think this is because the fruit outweighs the vegetables, and we tend to eat more vegetables than fruit. The website does say that you can email them to negotiate, and I did that because the original list included green capsicum (pepper) and I don't like green; they were happy to switch for me... But note the lack of capsicum in the above list. I also seem to be missing the cucumber they promise on the website list, not that that bothers me, since we don't eat that many salads in winter. And to be fair, the website does say the list is a guide, dependent on availability. So you know.
On closer inspection, I remain ambivalent. The carrots, lettuce and mushrooms appear particularly fresh, although not better than what I've had before from the supermarket. I think the lettuce is crisper, though. Might last longer. The fruit, though, doesn't seem particularly superior to what I've had before - with the exception of the oranges, which are very heavy for their size, boding well. But oranges are good right now, at the peak of their season, so you know.
I'll report back in more detail as each item is consumed, I suppose!
Finally...
Price
The box of fresh food cost me $25. The bread was very expensive, at $6.95, but the smell is tooootally worth it. So you know. The feta was $10.95, which equals about $2.81 per 100g.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Fruit and Vegies: An Experiment
I'm tremendously excited. Last week a flyer came in the mail, announcing the opening of a new company that will deliver fruit and vegetables as fresh from the farm as possible to my doorstep. I like the idea of buying farm-fresh a lot; not only is the quality and the nutritional content better, but the money goes more directly to where it's needed. So this idea really appealed to me.
I did a bit of market research, and found that this company doesn't have much competition; there are only one or two other services in my area, and they're either more expensive and commercial, or specialise in fruit. Now, I'm all for fruit, but we do eat a lot more vegetables in our house than fruit.
Tonight, the box of goodies arrived on my doorstep. As well as the standard small fruit and vegie box, which claims to be sufficient for 2-3 people for about a week, I also ordered some feta cheese (which is indeed straight from the farm), and some gourmet sourdough, sourced from a local independent bakery.
In order to decide whether or not this box of goodness is actually worth it or not, my husband and I are going to do an experiment over the next few weeks. We're going to consciously test out fresh food sourced from this fruit delivery place (delivered to the door), from the local supermarket chain (5 mins away), from the discount supermarket (3 mins away), and from the Sunday food markets (30 mins away).
While cost is definitely an important factor, it won't be the be-all and the end-all. Taste and quality are important, too, as is the ability of presumably fresher food to keep for longer than not-so-fresh food. Each week, I'll make a list of the produce we have, and I'll note how long it lasts - both in terms of before it spoils, and before it runs out! And at the end of the four weeks, hopefully we should have a better understanding of where we can go in our area for really great food.
After all, don't we all want to eat really great food? :)
I did a bit of market research, and found that this company doesn't have much competition; there are only one or two other services in my area, and they're either more expensive and commercial, or specialise in fruit. Now, I'm all for fruit, but we do eat a lot more vegetables in our house than fruit.
Tonight, the box of goodies arrived on my doorstep. As well as the standard small fruit and vegie box, which claims to be sufficient for 2-3 people for about a week, I also ordered some feta cheese (which is indeed straight from the farm), and some gourmet sourdough, sourced from a local independent bakery.
In order to decide whether or not this box of goodness is actually worth it or not, my husband and I are going to do an experiment over the next few weeks. We're going to consciously test out fresh food sourced from this fruit delivery place (delivered to the door), from the local supermarket chain (5 mins away), from the discount supermarket (3 mins away), and from the Sunday food markets (30 mins away).
While cost is definitely an important factor, it won't be the be-all and the end-all. Taste and quality are important, too, as is the ability of presumably fresher food to keep for longer than not-so-fresh food. Each week, I'll make a list of the produce we have, and I'll note how long it lasts - both in terms of before it spoils, and before it runs out! And at the end of the four weeks, hopefully we should have a better understanding of where we can go in our area for really great food.
After all, don't we all want to eat really great food? :)
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