Convenience Foods

I like to cook, but sometimes it can be a hassle. Especially since I'm not big on planning out meals in advance. Even though I try to avoid prepacked foods and ingredients, there are some indulgences that I do allow myself:

• Bottled minced garlic
• Minced ginger in squeezable tubes
• Pre-shredded cheese
• Yogurt
• Breaded fish fillets
• Bread for sandwiches
• Breadcrumbs
• Condiments (ketchup, mayo, mustard, Worcestershire, etc.)
• Spaghetti sauce
• Potato or tortilla chips (the baked kind)
• Frozen pizza (in case of emergencies)

Some of these things I would like to make myself eventually, particularly the four items at the bottom of the list. But for now I'm not really that motivated to make myself. all of these items I can either get cheaply from the store, or the store version is much better than anything I can make.

I am much more proud of this list next list. These are all things that I have virtually eliminated from our diet:

• Frozen or boxed dinners
  
• Hot pockets and other frozen lunches
• Frozen snack foods, like pizza rolls
• Frozen breakfast pastries
  
• Cold cereal
  
• Pre-chopped fruits and veggies
• Baking mixes
• Bottled salad dressing
• Canned soup, especially condensed
• Anything packaged in individual servings or slices: oatmeal, yogurt, etc.
• Microwave popcorn
• Minute rice
• Bread from a tube
• Processed cheese
• Carbonated Soda
  

So why did I cut out these things? First, most of them have very high levels of preservatives, especially salt and sugar. Making food from scratch is much healthier than buying ready-made food. Second, most of them use an excessive amount of packaging. Do you really need your pudding divided into individual cups and your fruit snacks in individual bags? Frozen dinners force you to throw away a box, a plastic tray, and the plastic film on top. Tubes of crescent roll dough force you to throw away the cardboard tube. Buying prepackages foods means I am giving extra money to the store and to my city: because I'm paying the store for packaging I don't want, and I'm paying the city to tote that packaging away for me. Third, making food from scratch takes up less space in the kitchen. I have a small pantry and no second freezer. I've found that if I have a box of hamburger helper in the cupboard, all I can make with it is hamburger helper. But if I have a box of noodles in the pantry and various spices in my spice drawer, I can make hamburger helper, or a casserole, or soup, or a million other things.

 

So what do I eat instead of packaged foods?

• For breakfast: whole fruit, toast, eggs, bacon, home baked goods
• For lunch: sandwich, pasta, homemade soup, salad
• For dinner: whole fresh vegetables, pasta, long grain rice, homemade biscuits, baked or braised meats
• On salads: vinegar and oil, homemade buttermilk dressing
• For snacks: hand chopped fruits and vegetables, chips, yogurt, home baked goods

Cooking dinner from scratch takes about thirty minutes of active prep time and thirty minutes of cooking time. That is longer than when you cook with prepared foods, but worth it. For snacks, it only requires a little planning ahead to have something on hand when you want it. I chop veggies, hard-boil eggs, make dips and spreads for crackers, and freeze homemade muffins so that if I want to eat something, it's there. I try to have some sweet snacks, some savory snacks, and some frozen snacks available at all times. I don't have any frozen snacks this week, but I do have homemade pumpkin bread, herbed cheese spread, and pickled red onions.

I am working on being able to update my blog from my Blackberry. This should make it a lot easier for me to post more frequently, although probably with more spelling and grammar errors as well. We'll see, until then my posting schedule is going to remain pretty random.

On Lifehacker today, there was a great post about How to Live Cheap. It is geared toward people who are ready to make a major life change with their finances. Most of the advice is right on target, limiting the social budget, eating frozen food, etc, although judging from the comments many Lifehackers were taken aback by some suggestions. One person essentially said that if you can't go out regularly then you are so poor that you may as well just join the military.

This reminds me of a post I saw several years ago on another blog, I can't remember which one. The blogger gave the standard advice that your monthly housing payments (whether rent or mortgage payments) should cost no more than one third of your monthly income and was bombarded by comments from 20-somethings, all saying that this was an impossible rule to follow since apartments in this price range were too grungy to be worth living in. This was before the current economic crisis - those people are probably all living with their parents now. Always a bad situation for people whose self-worth is dependent upon their lifestyle.

Back on Lifehacker, the main concern was that they would lose friends by switching to more affordable social events. This is completely true - it is sad to think about but if you have been living beyond your means to keep up with your friends, then it is quite possible that changing your budget will cause you to lose those friends.

My advice: join free clubs and attend community events based around your interests. The people there will share your interests AND your financial situation. New friends! This doesn't mean you have to ditch the old ones though - you can stay in touch online, and periodically throw a party at your house, where you can invite everyone but keep it in your price range.

Friends really can be a cash-drain. You have to be honest with them, and tell them you are trying to save money. If they still insist that hanging out with you isn't worth it unless there are also expensive drinks and entertainment, what does that tell you? Also watch out for the chatty ones - switch to a smaller cell phone package and screen your calls, especially for the friends who call for no reason and want to chat about nothing.

All of this is still true for someone you are thinking of dating. There is no point getting sucked into a relationship that requires excessive spending to maintain. If your girlfriend/boyfriend requires blow-out birthday parties, frequent weekends away, gifts for a different reason every two weeks, etc, it is not a good match for you.

Finding Local Produce

It has been a frustrating few weeks. I've been trying to locate a good source of local fruits and vegetables. Grocery stores offer the same fruits and vegetables year round, which is convenient, but I want to start getting into eating more seasonally. There are two reasons for this. One, it fosters a closer bond with your local environment to eat the things which are produced in your area. Because South Florida does have the same seasons as up north, it can start feeling like every day is Groundhog Day. Two, buying things from outside of your local area means that they sat on a truck for days before getting to you, losing nutrients in the process. According to this article, the average apple for sale at Whole Foods and other grocery stores was picked on average 14 months ago!

Unfortunately, the farmers markets down here are a joke. In the whole market there will be one stand maybe thirty feet long actually selling fresh produce. And that produce is rarely from Florida, let alone South Florida. The majority of the farmers market is always little stands of people selling salsa, hummus, dog biscuits, smoked fish, etc. If I want to buy prepared food, I'll go to the grocery store. I go to farmers markets expecting to find fresh and local raw food.

So, plan B is looking into some of the food buying clubs that operate down here. These are those clubs where pallets of produce are delivered to someone's house, and they divide it into bundles of 15-25 pounds of food, to be picked up by subscribers every other week. Unfortunately the emphasis is on organic food, and they don't always specify whether it is local or not. I emailed one buying club asking how much of each bundle is usually locally grown and got a really snooty reply about how buying organic is the important thing, considering the agricultural run-off into the Everglades, blah blah blah. I can go to the grocery store at my convenience and buy organic food from all over the world. Frozen organic food is a lot healthier than the fresh organic produce that is shipped across the country. If I'm going to deal with the inconvenience of a buying club, it had better be providing me with something I can't find at Publix, i.e. fresh local produce. There is another buying club that I might try, which is local AND organic, but it operates out of Miami so I'd have to drive to Aventura to make the pickups.

Until then, I'll get my produce from my usual market, Brothers Farmers Market. It doesn't specify what is from Florida and what isn't, so I won't be eating seasonally, but it at least has convenient hours and good prices.

Kitchen Experiments

Once or twice a week, I will call Ed to dinner with the warning, "Tonight we are having an experiment." I like to try out new ideas when cooking - sometimes things I've read about in books, sometimes things I've made up. The deal is that Ed tells me honestly what he thinks of it, and if the experiment is a failure then anyone is free to make themselves a sandwich.

Last week I made chicken broth using a standard recipe: a bag of bones from the freezer, a few vegetables, lots of garlic. Anyone who has made chicken broth knows that after you have strained out the liquid you are left with bones and mushy meat and veggies. The bones I tossed out, but the mush I thought maybe could be saved. In meatloaf, perhaps? Worth a try! My meatloaf recipe calls for two pounds of meat, so I decided to use one pound of ground chuck and an equal amount of chicken mush. Bits of bone and grizzle in meatloaf did not sound appetizing, so I decided to strain the mush. After first trying a plastic colander, I used the metal steamer that fits into my saucepan. It took a lot of squishing, but eventually I got it all strained out. I added the now edible mush to the meatloaf and mixed everything up. I baked it in a loaf pan for the usual amount and it seemed to cook through... But remained in its former mushy state. We ate meatloaf for dinner that night, but had to scoop it rather than slice it, and no one has been motivated to consume the leftovers. Before I through them out though, I may try mixing it with some of the broth, and making a thick soup.

Last week I also made a batch of potato bread, and I had about a quarter of the dough left. I've read lots of places that you can make pizza out of potato bread dough, so I figured I'd give it a try. The dough wasn't really spreading on the pizza pan, so I put it into a square glass pan. I thought about making pizza sauce but did not have the energy, so I poured in some pasta sauce. It's almost the same thing, right? We had some leftover ham, so I cut that up for a topping. All that is left is the cheese, and fortunately we have a big bag of...oh. Moldy mozzarella. There was no saving that cheese, so I tossed it out, and threw the baking dish in the oven. When it was done it looked edible, so I put it on plates and served it up. I told Ed, "This is pizza," and I guess he believed me because he ate it. We ate the leftovers the next night too, instead of biscuits.

So of these two experiments - chicken stock mush meatloaf and cheese-less potato bread pizza - was either one a horrible failure? Not really. Neither one turned out the way I wanted them to, but I still had the fun of trying something new. The food turned out well enough that we didn't have to resort to sandwiches for dinner. I hate experimenting with expensive food, but when it is cheap food that you were thinking about throwing out anyway, why not?

Cucumber-Starfruit Salad

Tonight I wanted to use up the starfruit that have been ripening all week. Starfruit, or carambola, is a tropical fruit that has a very thin rind and peculiar shape. It can be sweet or tart, depending on how ripe it is. I like to wait until there is a bit of brown on their edges. At that stage they are as sweet as cantaloupe, but are slightly crunchy. Starfuit can be eaten on its own, on cereal or yogurt, in whipped cream for dessert, or in salads. They cost about 50 cents each when they are in season. I decided to use the starfruit in a salad by pairing it with cucumber.

There isn't much prep for starfruit. You just slice them up! There are seeds in them, but they are usually soft, like cucumber seeds. After slicing them up, you can see how they got their name. I sliced each star into a few pieces and tossed them with cucumber cubes. To bind the flavors together, I drizzled on olive oil and added a sprinkle of salt and a squirt of lemon juice. Every bite of this salad is full of flavor and cool juices. It is a great summer salad. I still have two more starfruit that I didn't cut up. Tomorrow night, they going into a fruit salad with fresh mango and orange segments.

I made hamburgers to go with tonight's starfruit salad. Hamburgers only take about ten minutes to shape and cook on the stove, which is much cooler and more convenient than prepping the barbeque. I had some bread dough in the fridge, so I shaped some hamburger buns and cooked them at 375 degrees for about twenty minutes. It was my first experiment with baking my own hamburger buns. I probably should have made them a bit flatter, but they tasted great.

Rainy Days

We've had a lot of really rainy afternoons lately. No hurricanes or tropical storms, just afternoon showers that don't know when to quit. Yesterday rain was blown under my front door, making a puddle about four feet wide. I didn't notice at the time because I was trying to quickly finish a spreadsheet on my laptop, which required ignoring very loud lightning strikes. Did you know that Florida is the #1 state for lightning related deaths? And not just by a little bit either - almost triple the deaths of the runner-up. (Take that, Texas!) I was just glad that I was able to finish the report and send it in without losing power. In most neighborhoods all the power lines are above ground on lines, so the lights will wink on and off until the storm passes. 

After the storms ended yesterday, our local road was a lake, as usual. You can see that the flooding covered half of my lawn and half of the neighbor's lawn across the street. We don't have a sewer system, so this happens after every intense rain. All this water was dumped in about an hour and a half. But two hours later it was all gone. The water sinks into the soil and eventually makes it down to the Biscayne Aquifer. Streams of bubbles rise up from the sidewalk seams and cracks in the asphalt. The water is filtered by the limestone of the aquifer, and becomes a part of the drinking supply.

I had to go out in the evening and although the roads were no longer flooded everything was still pretty soggy. People in Florida tend to wear sandals all the time. You could try to hide from the rain with a trench coat and galoshes, but you would just get sweaty in five minutes. It is much more convenient to just let the rain get you. I keep an old towel in my car and a handkerchief in my purse. If I get splashed in my sandals, I just kick them off, wipe off the water, and I'm perfectly comfortable again.

Meals for a Month (almost)

Yesterday morning, before our wonderful beach day that resulted in only a slight sunburn, I did what is (roughly) a month's worth of grocery shopping. Altogether I spent about $150. Here is how I did it:

Rather than go to Whole Foods or Publix or Winn-Dixie or any of the other grocery stores down here, I go to the Brothers Farmers Market. It isn't your usual farmer's market. It is indoors, open daily, and has canned and refrigerated goods too. But I mostly go for the produce, which is mostly organic and very affordable. I bought all this for $25, and I didn't even shop the overripe produce rack this time! The potatoes, romaine, and celery are all organic. This produce won't last us the whole month, but it will last us a good week or two anyway. I'll probably make another fruit and veggie run later.

Next, I drove to Supersaver Supermarket. I have found that there are several grocery stores with this name, all very different from one another. My Supersaver Supermarket is smaller than most, but has a lot of international goods. Plus, I can get a ton of meat there super cheap, because while everything is FDA approved, it isn't FDA graded, which is a process that adds to the cost of the meat. I don't shop here for meat every month, because the Brothers Farmers Market is right next door to a really good butcher shop. The meat there is hormone-free, but it is also pricier. So every few months I go to Supersaver and stock up on meat. I spent roughly $40 on meat yesterday, which will be enough for 21 dinners for two. We have one or two meatless meals per week, and go out to eat occasionally, so this will last us a while.Supersaver is also great for stocking up on other grocery items. I spent $85 in the rest of the store. The big ticket items were a 12-pack of toilet paper, eight bags of frozen veggies, two liters of olive oil, 1 gallon of cooking wine, and 12oz evaporated milk. No coupons were used on this trip.

When I got home, before I put everything away I made a list of all the meat, veggies, and starches on hand, to help with meal planning. I write down how many two-person meals of each item we have. This means that I don't have to start planning what to eat until an hour or so before dinner time - I just pick one thing from each category. Any leftovers get added to the convenience food list. I drove maybe 15 miles round trip to shop at both stores, rather than going to the Publix that is half a mile away, but saved a lot of money and didn't get distracted by impulse buys.

Happy Labor Day!!

After fighting a cold since Friday, it was so nice to get out of the house today! Ed and I went to the Hollywood Beach broadwalk, which usually is not very crowded. But of course today it was packed. Parking was $10 for the day, and both garages were full. We don't mind walking a ways if it gets us away from the crowd, so we were able to find a nice stretch of beach where we weren't elbow to elbow with people. The temperature was around 90 degrees all day, and we just soaked in as much sun as we could through multiple layers of sun screen.

Ed dozed and I read my book, but between chapters I saw half a dozen brown pelicans diving for fish, homicidal kite flyers, a bunch of twelve year old boys get slammed by a beach umbrella that smacked them from behind, old ladies sacked out under palm trees, and multiple naked babies who did not want to be washed. The late afternoon storms passed north of us, missing us completely! 

Finally at 5pm we packed things up for dinner at home: ham steak cooked in sofrito (which I use from a jar), mashed potatoes with garlic, and romaine/tomato salad with vinegar and oil dressing. Dessert: limeade with a shot of Jose Cuervo.

South Florida Housekeeping

Trying to practice good housekeeping in South Florida is a frustrating endeavor. I love watching cooking and DIY shows on TV, but most of them feature seasonal content that is not practical down here in the tropics. From my Fort Lauderdale home I battle problems that go unacknowledged among all the basic cable programs and glossy magazines from the rest of the country. Here are my thirteen differences between home and garden maintenance in South Florida versus the rest of the US.

1.       Growing seasons

Cooking magazines love to make July their strawberry issue. But our strawberries were ripe back in February, just in time for Valentine’s Day. If I go along with Martha Stewart’s calendar and wait until April or May to plant my garden, everything will fry in the ground by June. Up north, gardens are mostly dormant from November through February, the coldest months. Here, the dormant season is roughly June through August, the hottest months.

2.       No winter

Hot mulled wine? Hearty stews? When it is finally down to seventy degrees? No thanks! Our winter season is prime barbequing time. The crockpot casseroles that northerners like in the dead of winter are cooked in the middle of August in South Florida – when it is too hot to go outside or to turn on the oven. Our winter holidays celebrations do not involve a cozy fire, snow angels, or road salt. We just go to the beach.

3.       Kudzu

Like most of the South, Florida is perpetually draped in Kudzu. These vines grow terrifyingly fast, pulling down trees and jeopardizing electrical lines. Particularly during the rainy season, it is necessary to go on yard patrol at least once a week and pull Kudzu out of the ground, or else you’ll find that your hedges and fences are suddenly covered.

4.       Saint Augustine Grass

Every time my dad comes to visit, he loves to make fun of our grass. Saint Augustine grass has blades like grass up north, but grows by sending out runners. “We call that crab grass! It’s not grass, it’s a weed!” It is not crab grass and it is not a weed. It is a moderately drought resistant form of lawn cover. “Normal” grass would die down here in about two weeks, and Saint Augustine grass must be cared for differently or else you will end up with…

5.       Sandy soil

A better way to think of this is that we have no soil. In South Florida, if you pull up your Saint Augustine grass or are misfortunate enough to have it die on you, you will not find earth or clay. Just dry, silty, ashy white sand. For this reason, most gardens in South Florida are in raised beds, and have to have organic matter added constantly.

6.       Humidity

When you land in South Florida and exit the climate controlled airport, you immediately walk into a wall of wet air. After five minutes, your palms are damp with condensation and your hair starts to either curl or droop. The humidity here is 60-80%, year round. This takes some getting used to, but after twelve years living daily in intense humidity I find it hard to breathe air that isn’t mostly water. The tricky part is what it does to your possessions. If you turn off down the air conditioner too much, you will get mold in the fabric of your furniture, in your carpets, or in your walls. And you can’t store anything that might rust in outdoor sheds or attic spaces without air conditioning, if you ever want to use it again.

7.       Rainfall

For about half the year, South Florida is in the rainy season – from the beginning of June to Labor Day. Around 1pm the sky gets very dark and rain comes down in buckets until around rush hour. Sometimes we get little showers at other times during the day. Every day there is a 50% chance of showers around the clock, so you don’t bother trying to plan your errands around the weather reports. All this rain would make you think that we have more than enough water, but actually we are perpetually in drought. Up until fifty years ago or so, we had two large thunderstorms per day during the rainy season. Now, due to encroachments on the Everglades, we just have one.

8.       Hurricanes

Hurricanes are no big deal to most Floridians. I lived most of my life in the Midwest, and I can tell you that hurricane season is MUCH less scary than tornado season. A category five hurricane is only equal to about a category three tornado, and we can see hurricanes coming on the radar system days in advance. Hurricanes are really dangerous only for people in trailer parks, who get hit by the little wussy tornadoes that spin off of hurricanes, and people who live along the coast and have to worry about flooding. For the rest of us, you just stock up on water and booze and board games and you are set. (Stores won’t sell alcohol if there are streets without power in the area.)

9.       Citrus based economy

Florida gets its money from two main sources: tourism and citrus. Although it is nice to be able to grow your own little orange or lemon tree, you have to keep in mind that the major citrus producers view your cute little trees with fear and suspicion. If there is an outbreak of citrus canker, the government show up with a wood chipper and grind up your trees, even if they don’t show any signs of the canker. This is because the citrus canker is an airborne disease, and your trees could spread it if they should become infected. While citrus canker does not kill trees or render fruit inedible, it does cause trees to yield less fruit, and a year of poor citrus crops can have a terrible effect on the economy.

10.   Cinderblock construction

Most homes in Florida, from your basic family home to the McMansions on the beach, are built with cinderblock construction. After the foundation is poured, cinderblocks are stacked and mortared to form the exterior walls. This helps keep bugs out and a comfortable climate in, and stands up to high winds well. However, it also means that putting just one screw into exterior walls is a labor-intensive ordeal. You have to use a special drill bit and LEAN really hard on the drill, and even then it can take several minutes to get one screw in. Hanging window treatments is a nightmare, and it is best to just not hang pictures on those walls.

11.   No basements

One reason for the lack of basements in South Florida is coral bedrock. If you dig a few feet down, past all the sand, you will hit fossilized coral so dense that the only way through it is with explosives. And even if you did get the coral removed, the other reason against having a basement is that we are so close to sea level that it would just flood constantly anyway. Not being able to use basements or attics or sheds means that storage at home in South Florida is a problem. A lot of people just buy storage lockers, which is a big business down here.

12.   Termites, flies, maggots, ants, roaches, palmetto bugs…

In the tropics, insect life flourishes. A contract with a termite inspection and prevention service is a must. Although termites won’t eat your cinderblock walls, they will eat your roof, which will then leak and destroy your house from the inside out. Taking the trash from the backdoor down to the curb can be a disgusting experience if you just pitch whatever into the can. If you are hooked up to a city sewer system, roaches and palmetto bugs will crawl out of the drain at night if you don’t leave the plug in. Palmetto bugs are giant cockroaches, that hold their bodies up off the ground to run, and will fly at your face if they get a chance. If you have a septic tank, little flies will breed in it and fly up out of your drain at all hours of the day. Fire ants will make you leery of every walking around outside barefooted. Although bug life cannot be eliminated completely, it can be controlled.

13.   Lizards and toads

Lizards are everywhere in South Florida, including inside my house. Some lose their tails when you catch them, some have translucent skin and bulging eyes, and some have a throat flap that flares out red when they want to find a mate. Outside the house there are iguanas sunning themselves on fences, or running across the road. At night, toads and frogs come out – including the bufo frog from Big Trouble. Lizards and frogs don’t do much harm, but they can make you jump until you get used to them.

Don't get me wrong, I love living in South Florida! It has many positive attributes, and I plan to highlight many of them in upcoming posts. But sometimes the home and garden coverage from the rest of the country does leave me feeling left out.