Thought it would be worth posting this before I move. Here are some pictures of the chickens (and bunny) at the house in which I'm currently living in, here in Oakland. I've previously posted about fresh eggs from said chickens. Not only do they produce good food for humans; they also provide hours of entertainment! I will miss them for sure!
In the Seattle area, a region with an average obesity rate of about 20 percent, only about 4 percent of shoppers who filled their carts at Whole Foods Market stores were obese, compared with nearly 40 percent of shoppers at lower-priced Albertsons stores.
That’s likely because people willing to pay $6 for a pound of radicchio are more able to afford healthy diets than people stocking up on $1.88 packs of pizza rolls to feed their kids, the study’s lead author suggested.
“If people wanted a diet to be cheap, they went to one supermarket,” said Adam Drewnowski, a University of Washington epidemiology professor who studies obesity and social class. “If they wanted their diet to be healthy, they went to another supermarket and spent more."
This doesn't surprise me. It's an achievement, in a sense, that food scientists have been able to make calories as cheap as they are, meaning fewer people starve. But those cheap calories make people fat and sick.
But this graf caught me as bizarre:
Instead, he contends it’s because healthy, low-calorie foods cost more money and take more effort to prepare than processed, high-calorie foods. In a separate study two years ago, Drewnowski estimated that a calorie-dense diet cost $3.52 a day compared with $36.32 a day for a low-calorie diet.
$36/day for a "low-calorie" diet? I don't question that cheap calories are as cheap as they claim, but I'd be curious to know what they consider a low calorie diet, and why it costs so much. I contend that it's entirely feasible to eat healthy for $10-20/day, possibly less. That's still prohibitively expensive compared to a calorie-dense diet, but you don't actually have to shop at Whole Foods to not be fat.
UPDATE
I could only track down the report's summary, which doesn't mention how they arrived at their figures for diet costs. However, I did come across this interesting infographic:
But the averages for the higher-end stores is because they carrier more high-end products. How do costs of their low-end products compare to the costs of low-end products at Safeway or Albertson's? In my experience, Safeway tends to be hideously overpriced. But purchasing from the bulk food sections of nicer supermarkets can be very economical for some products.
I'm getting off topic. But glancing at the chart again, notice how, not including Fred Meyer, fruit and vegetables prices don't vary to highly at many of those stores.
On another interesting note, the study also finds evidence that "food desserts" are not necessarily to blame for lack of nutrition. The study reports that people chose a supermarket based on price, not on proximity to where they lived.
This is actually my dinner from a couple nights ago and I have just been late in posting. It is actually pretty simple - I did a pan seared salmon along with a "modern american" fried rice - brown rice, basil, peas, corn and green peppers. Simple and delicious!
The problem I'm having with cooking inside now is the heat. It was 91 in NY yesterday and my apartment does not have AC. I've gotten to the point where the most cooking I can really do is toast bread, otherwise the kitchen feels like it is close to 100 degrees, and it probably is!
I am embarking on a search for easy dinners to make, that don't involve the stove. I do have a grill so I'm going to start to grill more often. Any suggestions?
Pork Glut: FIN. Pork ribs: gone. Sausage: gone. Risotto: gone. Bacon: All but 1 slice, gone.
The past several days have been a success in skillfully eroding away at my leftover cache. For lunch, I finished the risotto by warming it in a small cast iron fry pan over a single layer of thinly sliced Yukon gold potatoes. Covering the pan with a lid, the potatoes became browned and crispy on the bottom, while the risotto was gently heated up to a creamy doneness. I was pleasantly surprised by my clever use of leftovers and pantry ingredients.
For dinner, I was mostly out of leftovers, and instead had to put a meal together out of pantry ingredients. I had plenty of small red and gold potatoes I purchased a week ago, but hadn't used until lunch. I also had an opened bottle of cheap white wine that I had left uncorked on the counter since cooking Friday's dinner. A taste of the wine revealed that it hadn't yet turned, so I looked through Bittman for some ideas to put it to use.
Through some luck, I came across Bittman's recipe for braised potatoes with white wine and bacon, a recipe that couldn't have been more perfect for the situation. I started by crisping the bacon, some garlic (which ended up burning), and the potatoes in the above cast iron pan. After a few minutes, I added in a few ounces of chicken stock I had left in the fridge, and a few glugs of the pleasantly-not-gnarly white wine, along with some salt, pepper, fresh thyme, and mustard. As the liquid cooked down, I added more wine to keep the potatoes submerged. I took the picture above about halfway through the cooking process.
After about 40 minutes, the potatoes were soft and ready to eat, and the liquid had cooked down to a very flavorful (possibly could have used some water instead of all that wine) and thick sauce. Just like lunch, a surprisingly efficient use of my leftover and pantry ingredients that resulted in a satisfying and flavorful meal.
I think I can prepare a pretty mean steak. I've scoured the internet for a variety of methods to create the best steak indoors, as well as on the grill. I have heated my cast iron pan to scorching temperatures to get the perfect sear resulting in my smoke detectors beeping loudly.
One of the things that I have always had trouble with is getting that perfect medium rare doneness in the middle. Sometimes I reach near perfection, other times I cook it a minute too long. I think the natural progression of my cooking leads to sous vide - cooking in vacuum sealed bag in a perfectly controlled water bath. This would allow my steaks to rich that perfect medium rareness I so desire. The drawback, the cheapest sous vide machine is $450, putting out of my budgetary reach. As a result, one day soon, I am going to have to test the poor man's method of using a beer cooler and heated water. I look forward to posting about it.
There always seem to be various holy rules in cooking that you cannot break because tradition says so. And it's so much the way to do things that you cannot even question it. But this sort of conventional wisdom often doesn't hold up to modern, Good Eats-like analysis.
I remember when I was in high school, just starting to learn to cook, when I saw a Good Eats episode in which Alton Brown demonstrated that the quickest way to defrost frozen food was by placing it in a tub of cold water, under running cold water from the faucet. I had up to that point thought that my only options were the microwave's defrost cycle (horrible, horrible method in retrospect), or letting it sit in the fridge (although that would require so much time, that I would always have to resort to the microwave anyway when the frozen food in question was still far from thawed after an overnight stay in the fridge).
Learning to quickly and evenly defrost frozen food changed everything for me during those novice years.
So a few days ago, I was very interested to read Serious Eats' analysis of what is the traditional method to cook pasta. Everyone knows that you have to boil up a ton of water so that the water quickly returns to a boil and the pasta doesn't stick together! That's just how you're supposed to do it.
And of course, at a minimum, the water has to be boiling, right?
Day 1 finished with me chowing on leftovers at various points during the day. Nothing too enthralling, but I began to whittle down my reserves of pork ribs and other various ingredients. Day 2 began with bacon and egg on toast, but then Hannah and I went cherry picking and strawberry picking out in Brentwood. We concluded the venture with my first visit to In N Out Burger and a marathon baking session that left us with a strawberry-cherry-peach crisp and too many cherry muffin varieties to count. So now I still have a pork glut, and now a fresh fruit and baked good glut. We'll see how this plays out.
As for my thoughts on In N Out Burger -- It was good, for sure, but the style and quality of the burger necessitates a comparison to Five Guys, which this Mid-Atlantic East-Coaster thinks is actually better. The fries and In N Out were nice, and surprisingly not-greasy tasting, and the burger was presented with as much class as I've seen in fast food presentation and could be eaten without turning into a giant mess, as is so often the case with Five Guys. But somehow, a messy Five Guys burger and their greasy fries seem more satisfying than my experience at In N Out. Although they still served a fine burger.
This is actually my dinner from a couple nights ago and I have just been late in posting. It is actually pretty simple - I did a pan seared salmon along with a "modern american" fried rice - brown rice, basil, peas, corn and green peppers. Simple and delicious!
Pork Glut: FIN. Pork ribs: gone. Sausage: gone. Risotto: gone. Bacon: All but 1 slice, gone.
