Infuse Part I: Culinary Oils

I have so many ideas for things to share here that I’ve been overwhelmed with where and how to start. Brain gridlock you could say. So I figured I’d start with something simple that also has the potential to become as complex and involved as you personally want to make it. But even this “simple” idea has so many facets that I’ve decided to break it into a series of shorter, more manageable posts.

When you look up the word ‘infuse’ in the good ‘ol Webster there are, as always, several definitions. But my favorite one of the moment is:

            “fill, as with a certain quality…”

This wording, to me, embodies both the literal aspect of infusing as well as the more poetic or metaphorical meanings. You can infuse someone with a thought or an idea, you can infuse a room with scent, or a liquid with a flavor or a medicine… how beautiful.

So let’s start with infusing some delicious oils – a lovely skill to have that will yield something special to add to your culinary repertoire. There are so many possibilities here that will give you a lovely finished product for much cheaper than anything similar at the store. You can add any number of things to olive oil: garlic, sun-dried tomatoes, peppercorns, chilies, rosemary… get creative!

Step 1: Gather your ingredients.

You can use fresh or dried plant material, but unless you plan to use the oil right away you should always use dried herbs and spices. The reason for this is that fresh herbs still have water in them which is a route for contamination and spoilage in your oil. The only exception I make to this rule is garlic because it is so antimicrobial and antibacterial on it’s own that, personally, I think it’s safe (you may find debate about this in other writings, so ultimately you’ll have to decide for yourself. If you’re worried about it you can just put the oil in the refrigerator. Yes, it will solidify, but your risk for botulism will disappear, and you can use solid olive oil like butter!)

Step 2: Infuse.

Place your herb or herbs of choice in a mason jar or nice oil bottle and allow it to sit on the counter for 2-6 weeks (depending on how strong you want the flavor to be and how patient you are!). Shake daily. I like to leave my herbs whole or mostly whole with this method because it’s really pretty.

OR

Grind your herb into a powder in a coffee grinder or with a mortar and pestle (if you don’t have either of these you can simply break it up with your hands a bit), put the powder in a mason jar, Pyrex measuring cup, or double boiler and cover the herbs with oil. You can also use a crock pot by placing your mason jar in water inside the crock pot.  A good ratio for this is around one part herb by weight to 5-10 parts oil by volume (e.g. 1 ounce dried rosemary per 10 ounces of olive oil). Heat until the water is almost to a boil but not quite (this is to make sure that no water bubbles up into your oil), and then reduce the heat to a low simmer. Infuse for around 4 hours, stirring frequently.

OR

Use the sun! Pour the oil over your herbs in a mason jar and seal tightly. Place the jar somewhere it will get 3-4 hours of sun a day and leave for 2-3 weeks, shaking daily. You can either leave your herbs whole or grind them up for this method.

Step 3: Strain (or not).

If you’ve heated your oil on the stove, allow it to cool a bit and the plant material to settle to the bottom. Then strain the herbs out through cheese cloth. Or, if you’ve left your herbs whole, you can leave them in there and just eat them at the end!

Happy experimenting!

Canned beans are for suckers

It may be a testament to my previous years spent as a vegan or the limited number of figures in the checking account but I have found beans to be a very versatile food. Google can tell you about nutritional content, health benefits & recipes; I will instead focus on why you should be cooking your own beans rather than buying them in a can like a sucker.

Let’s take a trip to a store that offers dried goods in bulk and their canned counterparts. Let’s compare dried and canned beans through volume acquired by the amount of money spent. Specifically let’s look at black beans.

Let’s make the following assumptions:

A 15 ounce can of black beans costs around a buck.

16 ounces of dried black beans costs around 2 bucks.

Let’s consider the following:

The 15 ounce can of beans includes water weight.

The dried beans will expand in volume and weight after the soaking/simmering process.

Let’s do the math:

A 15 ounce can of black beans, once drained and rinsed, turns into 8.8 ounces of beans filling a volume of about 1.5 cups. I tried this with two brands of canned beans and reached similar conclusions within 5% (oddly enough the generic brand had less water weight than the name brand).

Six ounces of dried beans, after 2.5 hours of simmering to a good texture, turns into 14.2 ounces of beans, filling 2.5 cups of volume.

So 1 cup of cooked beans from the can cost $0.66 and from the dried bulk source cost $0.30. While halving the cost of your beans may seem impressive the annual difference, even if you eat a cup of beans a week, is about twenty bucks. There are, however, more subtle benefits:

1 – You cut out a middle-man: the canner. You removed the energy required by canning from the process of food to table.

2 – You saved a can from the recycling bin. From an energy standpoint recycling is generally preferred to production but by avoiding the can all together you also avoid the energy spent to recycle it.

3 – You are now planning your meals rather than just reacting to hunger and making them. After all, what the hell are you going to do with a cup of beans a week? You’ll figure it out but the clock is ticking: I have kept them in the fridge, sealed of course, for at least 10 days and didn’t notice a degradation in flavor.

4 – The cooking process generates a lot of latent heat to the kitchen. This is a good opportunity to raise some bread, drop a tea kettle on top of the simmering pot or even turn off the heating element to your house.

This is admittedly a small step to reducing the money you spend, your reliance on others, and the energy you spend. However, that is the point. Start with yourself and start small.

Update on the food budget

Back in September I decided to try to save money on food each month by allowing myself $15 a day, whether I spent it on groceries or eating out (see original post). It's time to check in about that experiment.

The plan went well September-November...with a minor hiccup due to buying a couple friends dinner. But for the most I stayed within my food budget. What was interesting though is that after a couple months I found myself craving food from the supermarket, so I gradually began to buy more groceries and eat out less frequently. The general principle of spending $15 a day, however, remained intact.

December went...not so well. Which is to say that I spent almost my entire food budget in the first ten days of the month (I blame the cookie decorating party) and then had to live off of cans of soup and whatever else I could scrounge up until I went to my mom's for the holidays, where, fortunately, I ate for free right up until payday came around again.

In late December I started seeing a Naturopathic Doctor. All of a sudden I'm supposed to eat breakfast, take flax seed oil, take a daily vitamin, and eat red meat twice a week. Seriously?? My whole $15 a day thing pretty much hinged on only having coffee for breakfast. And have you seen how expensive flax seed oil is?!? Outrageous.

Oddly enough, though, I came in significantly under budget in January ($11.90/day) and only slightly over budget in February ($15.89/day). Could this actually be working??

It appears so. Hurrah! Here are a few tricks that I think have contributed to success:

• Chunking my budget. Instead of thinking I have $450 this month for food, I'm thinking I have $15 today, or $100 this week.
• Offsetting "splurge." I spent too much in early December, and the trade-off was cheap meals the rest of the month. If I go grocery shopping, I have to subtract what I spend at the store from my weekly allowance. The added expenses of breakfast, flax seed oil and red meat are offset by eating cheaper meals a few times a week. And if I decide to treat myself to sushi at Miyamoto, I know that means a few nights of very cheap dinners--black beans and rice, for example. Or a can of tomato soup.
• Dealing in cash. Whether I take $100 out of the ATM at the beginning of the week and use it to pay for groceries as well as meals out or whether I get $40 cash back when paying for groceries with a debit card, I've found it enormously helpful to deal in cash as a way of tracking my spending each week. There's an immediate, tangible consequence to spending cash: once it's gone, I'm done spending money on food that week. End of story.

Free Time

When you’re on a budget your free time can be a mixed bag of emotions. On the one hand, “woohoo, it’s the weekend!” on the other hand, “agh, my friends will all want to meet out at a favorite restaurant or bar and my choices are ordering water and gnawing on free breadsticks or feeling guilty about spending too much money and wishing that I had just ordered water and gnawed on free breadsticks.” It’s frustrating to have the desire to engage, enjoy your city, connect with friends, and explore new places when your salary doesn’t seem to support your cravings.

But, what if you didn’t have to choose between breadsticks and guilt?

Sometimes there’s no substitution to ordering a delicious sounding meal and having the server bring out some perfectly presented entrée that meets or exceeds all of your expectations. But, there may be something more interesting and certainly more creative about skipping the bars, cafes, and restaurants and making your own free or nearly free fun. In fact, making your own fun allows you to get more acquainted with your friends and especially your city.

I worked as an unpaid intern in New York City the summer before I graduated college and in that summer became an expert at free fun….people and bird watching in Central Park, walking the Brooklyn Bridge, a free ride or two on the Staten Island Ferry to catch an up close glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, sitting on park benches in Riverside Park, exploring China Town, free museum evenings, and spotting stars in the East Village (I saw Ralph Fiennes and Matthew Broderick on one beautiful afternoon – hubba hubba). Doing it on the free or for the cost of a subway ticket has an almost romantic feel to it and the discoveries are worth far more than the adventures you can read in a brochure.

Have you explored all of the parks and secret gardens in your city? I recently moved back to the Twin Cities and I’m rediscovering the parks from an adult perspective. My friends and I go for hikes along the Mississippi instead of going for Sunday brunch. Last Saturday was unseasonably warm and I hung out with a really cute boy on a soft, sandy Mississippi beach with the sun on our faces, watching icebergs float down the river.

On your next day off, try something new....break out your town’s map or pull it up on Google Maps and resolve to visit the green spaces. Grab a friend and snacks…heck, if you’re in Portland bring a six pack of beer, a blanket, your sketch book, and a camera to Laurelhurst Park and chill for an afternoon. Another fun idea -- and this really works -- is to visit your chamber of commerce website as if you’re a tourist. There will be plenty of free or nearly free ideas there. Check them out, see your city from a new perspective and perhaps fall in love all over again.

The food budget

My whole adult life I’ve struggled to live within my means. The main challenge to my success seems to be my love of eating out.

Eating out affords me many luxuries: a variety of foods can be bought and consumed without having to think too far ahead; on any given day I can decide that I want Mexican or Chinese or Thai or sushi, a hamburger or a hummus plate, salad or french fries; I can buy foods that I haven’t the first idea how to make in addition to pretty much anything I do know how to make (with the exception, perhaps, of a few dishes no one outside my family has heard of).

But eating out tends to be expensive and less healthy. The going rate for a dinner entrée in my town is around $12, whereas I can feed myself at home for as little as $3 a meal. I also tend to eat richer, more fattening foods when I go out. I mean, what’s the point in spending all that money if I just get something healthy and don’t really enjoy it? I’m sure that one can find reasonably priced, healthy food in restaurants, but I haven’t had a habit of doing so.

Historically, then, every time I go over budget and have to find a way to cut back, one of the first things I look at is the money I spend on eating out. As my fellow blogger Jackie notes, meal planning and eating at home can save a lot of money. “I just have to be more disciplined,” I tell myself. “I’ll just have to buckle down, do the grocery shopping, pack my lunches every day, and get my spending under control.” And you know what? I always fail.

Even though I have the best intentions and feel ultra-determined, I always fall off the wagon. Maybe the first week I’ll do okay, but the second week I’ll forget to go grocery shopping and end up buying lunches and eating snack food and pasta for dinner. The third week I’ll try to get back on track and go grocery shopping again, buying a bunch of food that ends up sitting in the fridge until it rots because I don't leave time in the morning to pack a lunch and I don’t have the energy to cook when I get home. The result: $300 a month on groceries that rotted and $400 a month on eating out, for a ridiculous grand total of about $700 a month on food. Outrageous.

The reason I keep failing, I’ve realized, is because the difference between eating out and cooking at home is a lot more than just money. Yeah, I can save money by making my meals at home, but you know what I lose? Loads of time and energy: spent planning my meals for the week, going grocery shopping, getting up early to pack a lunch, cooking and—worst of all—cleaning up after myself. That stuff takes hours! By the time I get home from work, cook, eat, and clean up, it’s pretty much time for bed, and I’ve spent most of my time at home doing things I consider to be chores.

So the last time I got serious about cutting back on spending I tried to think of something different. Something that would be cheaper, but which also didn't take up too much time or energy. Because although money is essential to my idea of quality of life, it’s certainly not the only factor, and I don’t want it to always be the deciding one. I came up with a new idea, a brilliant idea! All this time I’d been trying to cut back on eating out and do more cooking at home. But what if I stopped grocery shopping and only ate out?

I did some quick calculations and discovered, much to my joy and amazement, that allowing myself $15 a day would result in spending far less money per month on food than I had been spending when trying to be good. And $15 a day, while modest as a restaurant budget, actually seemed do-able. Since I usually just have coffee with creamer for breakfast (one of the few things I’d still go to the grocery store for) my breakfast budget wouldn’t need to be big, say $3, which would leave $6 for lunch and $6 for dinner.

If I splurged and bought a dinner that cost $12 or $13, I would exercise restraint and just eat half, leaving the other half for another meal. This would encourage me not to overeat in the first place, thereby contributing to my health goal, while keeping me on target financially.

After thinking about it a little more, I decided I wouldn’t forbid myself from grocery shopping either. I’d allow myself to buy food at the grocery store, so long as I didn’t overspend my weekly food allowance. In order to make sure that was the case, I’d use cash rather than debit so I could keep a closer eye on how much I was spending.

I’ve been trying this out since September and I am delighted to say that for the first time in my adult life I’m actually spending less on food than what I’ve budgeted for. In terms of time, money, and energy saved, it’s working out beautifully.

The down side, of course, is that there are only so many options for $6 a meal that aren’t junk food. I’m not eating many fruits or veggies, and I’ve taken to eating fast food more often, facts which are not in alignment with my health goals. These, however, do not seem like insurmountable obstacles, especially since there’s a fancy grocery store close to my work where I can hit the salad bar for a little under $4, and since it has meat, kidney beans and bleu cheese dressing, it’s filling too.

It's an experiment-in-progress. I'll let you know how it goes.

Intentional Eating

I totally get it. I love take out too. Last minute dinner decisions like Vietnamese and Chinese food or a deliciously warm and comforting sandwich from the Jewish deli across the street are one of the many joys to my single life. Moreover, I luxuriate in the idea of a cozy booth, a warm fireplace, veggie burgers and Ruebens, the smell of a wood fire grill, and conversation as rich and delicious as the meal itself. In fact, in the middle of a Minnesota December, there's nothing I crave more. But, with limited funds and competing financial priorities, I needed to find a way to resist these types of temptations.

I learned a long time ago that denying myself joyful experiences leaves me feeling lonely, left out, and anxious – as if life is passing me by. I have this recurring anxious feeling that I should be doing more, doing it better, and maximizing all of my experiences on this planet, which directly conflicts with my financial need to resist dining out experiences.

That’s where menu planning comes into play. It’s a fantastic way to trick the psyche, save money, eat healthier, and feel really good about the times you let someone else do the cooking. It could just as easily be called intentional eating because you’re going into every meal with clear intentions, whether it’s to truly enjoy that cozy booth at Sweeney’s Bar and Grill or to feel really good about the healthy meal you’ve prepared for yourself at home, which ultimately leads to saving you beaucoup bucks.

Menu planning is ridiculously simple and obvious…but I’m guessing most people are not currently engaging in menu planning. All menu planning consists of is knowing yourself and budgeting time in your schedule to plan your weekly meals.

Are you up for the challenge of one week of menu planning?

What do you like to eat? What types of veggies get you jazzed? Or, if you’re like my friend Sione, and the thought of leafy greens gives you heart palpitations, then what types of cheeses excite you? Or breads? Or spreads? What cuisine do you most often crave? Mexican, Thai, or Mediterranean?

Next step, what’s on this week’s menu? You get complete creative control. I always go with a pasta evening (or two). I like to have a soup evening in the winter months. Sandwich night, salad night, cheese and crackers night? Hey, it’s your restaurant.

Make a list of everything you’ll need for each meal. Really think this one through because it’s a pain in the butt when you get home and you’ve forgotten the Swiss cheese for your tempeh Rueben. Now go shopping!

One last step to intentional eating (I just officially changed the name from menu planning to intentional eating...it sounds more zen) is to upgrade one or two purchases at the grocery store. My friend Sarah, who delights in grocery shopping and eating at home, taught me this trick. When you know that you’ll be making most of your meals, treat yourself to something fun -- a fancier brand of cheese or perhaps the expensive version of [fill in the blank]? Treat yourself to something that’s going to bring you joy when you’re putting away the groceries. This practice trains you to recognize joy in the small and simple. You’ll see!

Intentional eating is not for everyone, and it may be slightly symptomatic of a control freak personality, but if it sounds more appealing than appalling, give it a try. If it’s something you take to, it's guaranteed to save you boatloads of money and free up your funds for intentional dining experiences or whatever your pleasure!