Eastside Hippie

I just posted the breakdown of today’s cooking on Seattle Metblogs (direct link) but wanted to expand a bit more on the personal level here on my blog. On United Way’s blog, they quote Eric Rivera take on how he is conducting this challenge. It’s similar to what we are doing: eating similar to how we normally eat and how it’s not the point to go out and buy frozen pizzas, Top Ramen, and eat off the value menu at McDonald’s. The point, in which I am in agreement, is to eat a healthy and varied diet.

Today, we did fairly well, but definitely did not eat as many vegetables as we should/could have, and no fruit at all. I have spent just a smidge over half our food budget for the week (which is $60) and we can afford, at this stage, to add some fresh vegetables to our diet. Eric also points out that it really helps to know your way around the kitchen in order to create healthy meals. This morning’s example is perfect to demonstrate what I mean by this. I woke up early, panicking about how we didn’t have lunch to take to work/school. In about 30 minutes, I had cooked up a batch of simple lentil soup. If I haven’t had experience in trying out different types of lentil soups, I may not have been able to sleepily grab what was on hand (as allowed by the Hunger Challenge) and put this together. Healthy cooking is for those who have the time and enthusiasm to learn it, there is no doubt about this.

All in all, the hardest part has been not just grabbing any old thing out of the fridge to snack on when I got home from school. I have some leftover brioche (that may very well go bad before the week is up) that looked mighty tempting, but there is no way I could afford to spare enough money in the food budget to make this now. Brioche requires 2 sticks of butter, and I’d rather save our money to perhaps splurge on splitting 22oz beer on Friday instead. Tempted to make cookies? The ingredient list adds up. PB&J? Jam is fairly expensive, at least the jam that isn’t packed full of sugar and preservatives. Cream for our coffee? Forget it! While 1/2 and 1/2 is still cheaper than those liquid margarine knockoffs Coffee Mate and other non-dairy creamers, it’s still expensive. Chicken? The price of chicken on Capitol Hill runs almost $8lb at most of the nearby stores. It’s ridiculous. I can make it stretch for a long time by using it sparingly and for flavor, but still!

I better go make dinner now.

Carl and I are participating in United Way’s Hunger Challenge. The idea: to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner for $7 per day for 5 days (or $12 a day for two people). It starts on Monday and I will be blogging about it each day here and on Seattle Metblogs. My personal goal is to avoid eating Top Ramen and other similar foods, to eat a balanced and healthy (if not slightly limited) diet.

I’ve been writing down meal ideas w/ ingredient lists and today I scoped out prices at Madison Market. If we use leftovers for most lunches, we should be able to pull this off w/out resorting to Top Ramen.

Breakfast: rolled oats for oatmeal (less than $1.00 each), or an egg, slice of homemade bread, 1/2 an apple, and a slice of bacon (roughly $1.29 each).

Lunch/Dinner ideas include Megadarra (lentil, brown rice, and caramelized onions w/salt, pepper, and oil, red beans and rice (kidney beans, jalapenos, carrots, celery, onion, brown rice, cumin, salt, pepper, garlic), lentils w/kale or chard (green lentils, chard/kale, carrots, cumin, salt, pepper, onion, bacon), stir fry (broccoli, carrot, celery, onion, brown rice, oil, soy sauce**). I can also make a pretty cheap soup using onion, celery, carrot, potatoes, garlic, rice, beans, and a slice of bacon.

We’re trying to figure out if we can afford enough coffee for 5 days. The cheapest coffee at Madison Market runs at $7.99lb, so half a pound would likely last us that long, but that would cost us $4, plus the cost of sugar/cream if we used them. I am not a huge fan of black coffee.

I found some pork for $2.89lb, and could use 1/2 lb in one meal fairly easily.

Here’s a list of some of the prices:
**Soy sauce: $2.40lb (in bulk section)
Pork: $2.89b
Coffee: $7.99lb
Kale/Chard: $2.49-$3.99 a bunch (can likely split a bunch into two meals, w/stems)
Yellow onions: $0.59lb on sale (picked up 2.69lbs for the week already)
Eggs: $0.19 each (bulk section)
Flour: $1.39lb (need 14oz to make a loaf of bread)
Yeast: $4.29lb (need 0.25oz to make a loaf of bread=$0.07)
Olive oil: $6.29lb (in bulk section)
Safflower oil: $2.88lb (in bulk section, will likely skip olive oil and use this instead)
Rolled oats: $0.89lb
Wheat berries: $0.99lb
Fuji apples: $0.79lb
Broccoli: $1.99lb (can use stalks too)
Winter squash: $1.99lb)

Debating whether to buy sugar. We would only use it in the oatmeal, stir fry, and coffee. Also I would love some butter, and I can buy a single stick if I wanted to, but I didn’t grab the price of that.

Homemade no-knead artisan bread costs an entire $1.02 to make.

I heard it said last night that this was the first time some of these kids felt proud to wave the flag in public.  People were hugging strangers on the street, sharing drinks, crowd surfing, chanting, watching fireworks…it was amazing.  3200 folks flooded the streets to celebrate Barack Obama’s victory, and afterwards, they apparently cleaned up the streets (to the amusement of the police watching nearby).  No one was arrested, no one was hurt (except for some mighty big hangovers I’m sure), and the entire evening was a peaceful celebration 8 years in the making…

HoorayObama, originally uploaded by ~wesa~.

Yes we has! We’ve opened the champagne, terrorist fist-jabbed a dozen times, and now we’re celebrating! There are folks storming the streets of Seattle chanting “OBAMA! OBAMA!” Life is looking very good right now.

It is possible that we will have a President who not only will speak in full, complete sentences, but who will do so in a manner that is eloquent, and who will also be articulate and eloquent in delivering words he is intelligent enough to know, understand, and use in a speech he is capable of writing himself. (full text)

Castro resigns.

Americans spent one in seven of their take-home dollars on debt payments last year.

Amanda Sanchez, a 29-year-old working mother of two, is a self-professed Diet Coke junkie. “It’s my water. It keeps me going. It’s the fluid that keeps me alive,” Sanchez said. “I really think I am addicted. I really think it would be very hard for me to stop.” She drinks more than a case of Diet Coke a day, or 12 cans, almost one for every hour she is awake.

Paper vs Plastic (an answer to a question from earlier this week):
Another factor to consider is water pollution. The making of paper, whether virgin or recycled, uses many thousands of gallons of clean water that can soon become polluted in the papermaking process. Virgin paper creates 35 percent more water pollution than recycled paper. Recycled paper also creates 74 percent less air pollution than virgin paper. However, both types of paper can contribute to contaminating area waters. Full article and more facts here.

Goodbye Lighthouse, Goodbye St. Simon! The release of two loggerhead turtles.

LOL Safeco resignation letter.

When you’ve just made it sound like the Queen is more than 200 years old, there may be a few ways of recovering from the gaffe.

But turning to her and giving her a sly wink is probably not included in any book of royal etiquette.

Is he winking at One? The President turns to the Queen and winks after his slip-up.

The Queen received the wink with a frosty glare.

A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington named Adam Drewnowski ventured into the supermarket to solve a mystery. He wanted to figure out why it is that the most reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person’s wealth. For most of history, after all, the poor have typically suffered from a shortage of calories, not a surfeit. So how is it that today the people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?

Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods — dairy, meat, fish and produce — line the perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.

Full article by Michael Pollan