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.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 20th, 2009 at 6:38 pm and is filed under Carl and Wesa, Food, Home Life, Human Behaviour, Links, Politics, Soapbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.