Thoughtful Kitchen

Well, hello! No, I did not fall of the face of the earth for the last month (oh dear, I guess it’s actually been almost two!). Yes, I have been busy with getting our house on the market (and keeping it sparkling clean almost every moment since), playing with (and cleaning up after) the kids while my husband did his master’s project, obsessively checking padmapper.com waiting for the perfect home to pop up for rent in our soon-to-be-new city, figuring out preschool options for my son, trying to cook (and eat) all the greens from our farmshare that are taking over my fridge… etc. etc. etc.

And it just occurred to me that I haven’t shared our final decision yet about where we’re moving! We’re going to Seattle! It was a close call (Seattle or Cambridge, MA), but Seattle won out in the end.

Anyhow, back to the food. Our menu plans as well as our eating habits have been a bit substandard in the past couple months, but the last few weeks have been better. Now that our house is on the market, I have to schedule any cooking that will smell up the house (unless it’s cookies), make a big mess or take more than about 45 minutes for after 7pm. It has certainly taken some getting used to, but I feel like we’re finally into the swing of things now. And it helps that we’re not getting a showing every day, too (though it was certainly nice for the house-selling prospects). We’re going for simple, easy and little-mess meals at the moment. I’m taking my chances on Wednesday dinner with roasting chickens and hopefully won’t be foiled by a last-minute house showing.

Do any of you have tips and tricks for keeping the meals frugal and homemade during the process of selling a home? Have you done it yourself? I’d love any suggestions! Continue reading →

I’ve recently been menu planning on Sunday nights instead of Tuesday nights (or, um, really pretty much any day except Tuesday, from the looks of my last months of menu planning). That’s because the amount of produce we’ve been getting from our farmshare over the winter months is drastically less than what we got during summer/autumn (maybe 1/4 to 1/3?), and I can pretty much plan our menus without worrying about needing to use everything up before it goes bad. I’d bet that the baskets will start to get bulkier pretty soon, but for now, it’s usually a few potatoes, a leek, some greens (salad or stir-fry or both), carrots and possibly something else like cabbage or green onions. I hadn’t really planned on the major vegetable quantity difference with our food budget – I just divided the total amount over 12 months and take out the same amount towards the farmshare every month. Consequently, we’ve been over-budget pretty much every month for the last three or so. Thankfully, that’s okay, and we did just get our yearly check from Costco (we use their American Express card) that will go toward the grocery budget.

Speaking of budgets, hunger awareness week is this week. Seattle’s King County United Way is doing a Hunger Challenge, asking participants to feed themselves for $7 a day for a single person or, for our household of four people, $22 a day (this is the maximum food stamp benefit in Washington). I found this interesting because our monthly food budget is $325 for groceries (food only) and $10 for eating out, which is right at $11 a day. Granted, two of the members of our family are children, so maybe we should compare with a family of three, which is $18 a day. Also, we often eat dinner with family once a week, and I have to be very careful about what we buy in order to stick to that number. However, I do buy some organic produce, grass-fed butter and other higher-priced but better-for-you items. If I really needed to reduce our food budget, I certainly could, though I would sacrifice quality.

But the main thing I think is this – I have the equipment, knowledge and time to make almost everything we eat at home. For families where both parents are working to make ends meet, this is most definitely not the case. I can’t really imagine feeding ourselves on $18 a day if both my husband and I were working full-time, especially if either of us had more than one job. And many people don’t know how to make beans or bread or lots of other things from scratch (or even realize that you can, in some cases) that end up saving a lot of money. So this week as we are eating our homemade, fresh and tasty meals, we will thank God for not only the ability to buy the food we’re eating but also for the knowledge and time to prepare it, and we will be thinking of and praying for those who don’t. Continue reading →

I’m feeling a little more inspired this week and better able to function, probably partially since my husband’s last final for the term is Tuesday morning, which gives us over a week and a half for “spring break.” (And thanks to Sharon and Betsy for your encouragement and ideas!) I’ve been cooking quite a few things the past few days and planning to cook more this coming week, including lunches, which is probably as a reaction to eating sandwiches and other simple fare so much in the recent past.

As I was reading about my “personality type” result from an online Meyers-Briggs-like test I took last week (INFJ, but almost exactly between an F and T), I realized that some people, even people who love to cook and cook very well, don’t like to experiment with their food. They aren’t compelled to try out new recipes, experiment with old ones, or, well, change anything. I have to admit that this was just a concept I had never really considered before (though I have the utmost respect for those people just as well). As you might have noticed if you’ve been reading my menu plans for very long, although we do have some staple recipes in our household, I am forever trying new ones. When I’m not over-busy and mentally bogged down (like last week), we try at least two new recipes every week. And usually I don’t follow them exactly. I have probably never purposely made something exactly the same way twice. So, uh, thanks for being along for the ride and being a good sport about seeing something appear on our menu plan never to hear about it again (even if it was fabulous). And as for the recipes I post, although at the time I post them I certainly think they are the best, most well-thought-out and experimented-with version of the recipe, I will not promise not to tinker with it more the next time I make it.

Totally unrelated, tonight I baked two rhubarb pies to celebrate Pi Day tomorrow. Yes, we are math-loving nerds in this household. I blame it on my husband doing a PhD in statistics and both of our Caltech undergraduate upbringings, where our whole dorm/house gathered to eat pie at 1:59 in the morning on March 14th every year. And yes, we were (and are) weird. Continue reading →

Life at the moment is a bit of a whirlwind. My parents visited last week, we’re visiting Seattle this weekend, and my best friend from college and her three kids are visiting (briefly) at the beginning of next week. In the middle of that, my husband and I have been busily thinking about and researching the two cities we could choose to move to in August – Seattle, Washington or Cambridge, Massachusetts. That all makes for some inconsistent blogging here and some less-than-routine “weekly” menu planning for our family. (Thanks for your patience!)

So, here’s our menu from last Saturday through the beginning of our trip to Seattle. We’re not having any trouble using up our farmshare vegetables any more, first because the volume is significantly less during the winter and second because we have two more adults and another baby in the house to help eat it all. It’s a nice break, really, because as much as I’ve loved the fact that the weekly vegetables force me to be creative, I don’t have a lot of extra brain energy to be creative with at the moment. It’s also fun having other people  sharing new meal ideas and helping with cooking and cleanup. Continue reading →

We are back at the menu planning again! And maybe we’ll even have a nice recipe post around here sometime soon (though no promises). Since our friends moved in on Saturday, we’re now menu planning for four adults and three children (dinners only, one child is allergic to peanuts, dairy and eggs), but we get to share the cooking responsibilities (and clean-up, too!). We’ve really enjoyed the first couple 7-person “family dinners” so far and are looking forward to this month of sharing meals and our lives. Continue reading →

Today is the second day of our sugar-free challenge, and I have to say it feels pretty normal. I’ve felt like eating something sweet a few times, but so far I’ve realized that I what I really want isn’t sugar – it’s is either that I need water or that I want to sit down and relax for a few minutes. And we’ve had plenty of yummy fruit around for snacking on, including some amazing grapefruit, which is really a treat for us. We did get off to a little bit of a wobbly start yesterday because I got mastitis Saturday night and wasn’t capable of doing much of anything Sunday, when I had planned to clean out the fridge and pantry of anything sugar or white flour-related (really just hide the stuff in the back) and mix up some dough for bread this week. So, Monday we did eat our normal whole wheat bread (Dave’s!) and some turkey bacon-like stuff (ick, won’t be buying that again) that both had added sugar, but I didn’t want those things to go to waste (and didn’t have any bread replacement) so I decided it was okay.

Also, I wanted to share the list of snack-type foods I have on hand this week so we have something easy for eating between meals (especially the kids): mozzarella cheese sticks, cheddar cheese, mixed nuts, peanuts, plain (whole milk) yogurt, applesauce (made of apples only, no extra sugar or even “apple juice concentrate”), fresh fruit, dried unsweetened fruit (raisins, mangoes, prunes), homemade flax crackers, tortilla chips (a treat!). Continue reading →

We got our first basket of CSA vegetables in almost a month today! December’s schedule was already planned differently, and then last week the ground was too frozen for digging anything out. I’m excited to have them again, though I am really not sure (yet again) what I’m going to do with the gigantic, beautiful head of cabbage.

When I saw a few days ago that Kimi at The Nourishing Gourmet is hosting a sugar-free challenge, I was excited but a little hesitant to join because I wasn’t sure what everyone else around here would think about it. After convincing my husband that it’ll be no big deal since it’s *only* seven days, I signed us up. We’re challenging ourselves to remove all sweeteners, both refined and natural, from our diet (though not fresh or dried fruit) for January 17-23 (this is the “moderate” level on Kimi’s site). I’m interested to see if we notice a difference in how we feel, especially me since I tend to notice sugar’s influence on my energy level and digestive health most in our family. If you decide to join, too, let me know in the comments! I’d love to know how it turns out for you.

I promised an update about the crock pot brown rice pudding – I did actually end up making it, and it was not bad, though I added an extra 2 cups of milk and some sugar to the recipe and it was still super stiff – definitely not creamy like the “pudding” I had imagined. I had the brilliant idea of mixing in a little coconut milk (we had some left over in the fridge) in our serving bowls and it went from decent to excellent. I think I will make it again, but next time I’m going to try adding 1/2 cup of dried coconut in with the rice, increasing the milk by at least 2 cups, using whole instead of 1% milk and adding an additional 2-3 cups of coconut milk. And then, if it’s good, I’ll post the recipe here.

Last but not least, we made chili tonight using the beef liver in our freezer (instead of ground beef, since we didn’t have any). It tasted fine, though I definitely prefer the ground beef. However, my stomach is pretty unhappy tonight (though there are quite a few options for reasons) and the thought of eating it again isn’t so great at the moment. Everyone else thought it was good, though, and I think my three-year-old and baby might have liked it most. Continue reading →