Cooking: Ecological, Economical, and Better for You...

Cooking has never been one of my passions; it’s more a commitment which follows from liking to eat. This past year I find myself enjoying cooking more, and spending more time at it.  There are a number of contributing, idiosyncratic factors like my new sunny kitchen and its wall-mounted radio, so NPR can keep me company when I’m slicing, stirring, or mixing.  And my new IPad allowing me to easily download and listen to interesting podcasts and living near enough to Weavers Way Food Coop to shop daily. The fact that my children grew up means I both have more time and two fewer picky palates to please, also making the cooking process less stressful.

But there are some way simpler, replicable things which have contributed to making my cooking more efficient, and therefore more gratifying.  I did a budget check and realized how much we were paying to eat in restaurants, often because I just didn’t have the energy to decide what to make for dinner at the end of a long day.  Once I realized it would pay back, it justified my putting more time into meal planning.  I created a simple data base of weeknight menu combinations which we both enjoy eating, including any unusual ingredients and advance prep that facilitates getting the meal to the table.  By doing the thinking in advance and entering it in my google-doc, I can just refer to it, make a menu decision earlier in the day, and plan accordingly.  If it will be chili, I know I need to get the rice started in advance, that sort of thing.  Since I actually finding the menu decision more onerous than the cooking, this has made a huge difference!

A small investment in better cooking utensils has vastly improved the cooking experience.  Better knives, larger frying pans, a sturdy long-handled spatula and new goodies like a roll-up cutting mat have been so much nicer to use.  Purchasing a duplicate set of measuring spoons and measuring cups is an embarrassingly simple upgrade.  If some are in the dishwasher, I don’t need to rummage around to find them.  If I want to prepare two dishes in a row, I don’t need to stop and wash them. Duh!  Why didn’t I think of this 35 years ago?  The cost of this enhancement is paid for by one stay-at-home meal.

The internet has also livened up the cooking process.  Recipes, techniques, cooking blogs, even unusual products – these are all available with one click. If you’re someone with a large cookbook collection, you might want to join EatYourCookbooks, a site which features tens of thousands of indexed cookbooks.  Register the cookbooks you own and use, and when you search by recipe title or ingredient, it will find the recipe and ingredient list.  Where’s that great recipe for pecan lemon pound cake?  This site will locate it. It doesn’t bring up the recipe itself, but will tell you which cookbook it’s in.  The first five cookbooks are free; after that there is an annual fee. 

Eating at home is cheaper and healthier.  Another motivator, on the environmental front: at-home food preparation has a much smaller eco-footprint.  Unless you would walk to the restaurant, you save the round-trip drive.  Restaurants themselves are extremely high consumers of water, electricity, fuel, chemical cleaners, and disposables.  While the diner might focus on wasted food (portions which are ridiculously large, uneaten bread which can’t be reserved, Styrofoam clamshells to take home, double-wrapped in plastic bags) most of the waste is out of the diners’ sight.  There are some greener restaurants which compost, but most generate huge volumes of trash and food waste, none of which is reused or recycled.  Restaurants are not, by law, allowed to serve leftovers!

Frugal City Popcorn

I love popcorn. It's my favorite snack, and if it's not doused in butter, it's quite filling, healthy, and low calorie. Over the years I have used an old-fashioned electric popcorn popper, a skillet, an air-popcorn thing that spit the popcorn out the top, and most recently microwave popcorn. Once single-portion bags became available, it became my staple. As an manic recyler, I was bothered by the excess packaging - it comes in a box, with each coated bag individually wrapped, so there is a lot of waste, most of it non-recyclable. However, the popcorn was really good, so I went with it.
Until last week!  Whoops! I recalled I'd read on someone's frugal site (sorry not to be able to credit my teacher on this one) that you can pop corn in a paper bag in the microwave. So instead of purchasing another box of individual bags, I bought a bottle of gourmet popcorn and have been experimenting.
The results are great, and way less wasteful. Using a lunch-size paper bag (my current bag is from a drug store from some past prescription pick-up) put in about 2 Tablespoons of popcorn. Fold the top over once or twice and pop for 2 minutes on high. (This differs depending on the microwave's power.) Pour the popcorn into a bowl, spray lightly with butter-flavored oil, and salt with popcorn salt. I bought popcorn salt about 15 years ago and the bottle is still mostly full - it's just a finer grained salt. This popcorn is really good, and there is no waste. A higher percentage of kernels fail to pop, and I just dump them back in the bag and repop them the next time, adding another tablespoon or so of kernels. I was always afraid to do that, like unpopped kernels had something wrong with them, but that does not seem to be the case. I have used the same bag maybe 10 times already, and it was reused to begin with. You can be even more sustainable by purchasing organic popcorn. My electricity is wind-generated, so that adds to the sustainability, too. And this is frugal!!

After I posted this, a reader commented that some of the compounds used to manufacture microwave popcorn have been linked to lung disease in popcorn factory workers. I checked up on this, and while the big manufacturers have started to eliminate the compound from their products, who know what other ill effects just haven't shown up yet. One man who ate many bags of microwave popcorn a day has also turned up with lung disease, dubbed "popcorn lung". This is scary, and all the more reason to go with simple Frugal City popcorn.

I haven't calculated the cost per portion, but it has to be a tiny fraction of the bagged kind. For one thing, I'm not paying for the wasted packaging.
Enjoy your popcorn!

Win-Win Ice Tea

It's hot, and for most that means lugging a lot of heavy drinks home. They consume your schlepping energy, and also since the bottles need to be manufactured and are heavy to transport, a great deal of energy is consumed in manufacturing and transporting them. Then some of the ice teas, for example, are in the refrigerator section of the market, consuming yet more fossil fuel. All so wasteful, really. What's the big deal of making ice tea?
Here is a very simple and delicious version I've served to enthusiastic drinkers. Start with Celestial Seasonings Madagascar Vanilla Red Rooibos tea. It's obviously not local unless you live in Madagascar, but at least you're just transporting the tea, not the plastic bottle and the water.
Use a 2 quart glass pitcher - I do think the old koolaid commercial kind is the best ever....
Plastic pitchers are just not as aesthetically pleasing. Take 2 or 3 teabags (and appreciate that Celestical seasonings doesn't put each tea bag in yet another bag with a string, so it's more resource efficient), and brew the tea in a few inches of hot water. Hot tap water would be fine. Add sweetner at this point, so it dissolves - sugar, honey, or artificial, whichever is your thing.
After it brews about 10 or 15 minutes, remove the tea bags, add room water temperature, and refrigerate. If you have mint in your garden, even prettier.
Celestial Seasonings is a socially responsible company, by the way. So you can enjoy your tea from every angle.

New Knives, a New Cookbook, and A New Soup Concept

I am not a foody, nor have I ever lusted for fancy cookware. However after 33+ years, things wear out, and I am upgrading as I replace them. Buying high quality cookware seems worth it - even my crappy things lasted 30+ years. The longevity of cookware also means that whatever you buy, you will be stuck with for a long time, so why not do it right. (I do try to avoid wishful thinking types of purchases, like a bread machine. As in," if I buy it, I will bake bread". I don't think so.) But I definitely use pots, and the new ones I bought have glass tops, a feature not around in the 1970's. It's fun to see what's cooking, literally. I figure anything that keeps me enthusiastic about cooking is a good investment.

Awhile back, I was sucker-punched into a Cutco demo. These are very high-end knives which are marketed by college students who go through their parents' rolodexes and receive commissions on sales, which are accomplished through one-on-one sales sessions. My Cutco seller was a preppie version of a Stepford wife. Finally after an hour, I purchased an ice cream scoop for $35 (the cheapest item I could imagine using), just to make her go away. That is probably double what I've ever spent on a kitchen tool. What is really funny is that it turns out I love that ice cream scoop. Last summer a new Cutco rep, a family friend, got a pretty nice order from me for knives.

Inspired by Molly Katzen's new book, I've started experimenting with simple soups. I make soup often, but generally it's a hearty, big potful, with loads of ingredients needing prepping. Her idea is small batch soups made of just vegetables and broth. I improvised and created this soup which was great. Having that good knife was crucial. I no longer remember what the knife cost, but its magic carries on!

Sweet Potato, Parsnip and Carrot Soup - vegetarian.

1. In a 2 quart saucepan, saute one chopped onion in olive oil and butter. Throw in some grated ginger, if you have it.
2. While the onion is softening, peel one medium sweet potato and one parsnip. Chop them into 1" chunks. (This is why you need a good knife!). Take about 10 baby carrots and chop them into 2 or 3 pieces each. [I like recipes that give the units, not the measurement. I never have a clue how much "1/2 cup of chopped carrots" is.]
3. Throw this into the saucepan with 2 cups hot water, + 1 T. of powdered vegetable broth powder. I use Israeli Telma. It is high in sodium, so if you add salt, do so sparingly. Add 1 t. of curry.
4. Simmer covered for about 10 or 15 minutes. You can let it cool at this point. Eventually, throw it all in the blender and puree. The great part is that the whole batch fits into the blender.

Reheat. It's even better the next day. Serve it with slivered almonds, croûtons, or minced parsley or cilantro.

Serves 3-4 people. That means the 2 of us got to eat this twice!