I learned to cook in scouts. Start doing a lot of camping and pretty quickly we wanted to eat real food. You get bored of instant oatmeal, pb&j sandwiches, top ramen and canned goods. We started cooking simple stuff like eggs and stew and it all went from there. A few batches of burned eggs and some other weirdly cooked stuff and eventually it got figured out.
This lead to me starting to cook at home a little bit. Using a real stove and having more ingredients helped some and pretty quick I made a wicked breakfast. Pretty quickly when we went to some cabins for trips I was in charge of cooking breakfast. If it can be cooked on a campfire or a dutch oven odds are I can do a B- job at it.
Somewhere along the line I started lifting weights a lot (became a meat head for a few years before I really had to run for work) and started eating a lot of chicken. I wanted that chicken to not taste like bland boiled crap so I started trying different things. I make pretty darn good chicken. Aside from picking up the ability to get the most out of cheap steak (college) and cooking other normal stuff like: tacos, spaghetti, burgers, and other normal stuff. This is the stage of cooking I stayed at until about a year ago.
As my paranoia picked up last year I started wanting to make stuff out of the assorted staples I had stocked up on. Making things with rice is pretty simple, cook the rice and throw a bit of your favorite sauce on it and chow down. Beans were more complicated. I did a few batches in the thermos with varying degrees of success and pretty much gave up. Between getting done with school, getting hitched and starting working I was pretty busy there for awhile.
Once we got here we realized the high cost of pre packaged prepared crap food. My wife got the idea that we need to cook from scratch into her head and has been going at it with a vengeance. We have been eating from scratch for a couple months or so. She makes biscuits, cornbread, bread, hamburger buns, tortillas and all sorts of other stuff. She has figured out the cheapest ways to do just about everything and I have paid a bit of attention. I can cook more stuff then I could before and she can cook a lot.
We eat better than before on far less money. Dinners average 5-7 dollars if they have meat and far less without. That is for a meat of some kind, a starch and some veggies usually with enough for me to eat another meal in leftovers. She buys meat in bigger packaged (5-10 lbs) then it gets cut into more manageable pieces (2-3 pounds) and food saved. This lets her take advantage of sales and we tend to have a decent amount of meat in the freezer. It is nice to be able to cook burgers or pork chops or whatever out of the blue.
There is one big improvements we need to make in terms of our cooking/ food storage plans. The first is that we are not doing a good job of rotating food from the stash. Most of the extra food is in a couple of contico/ rubbermade containers in a very inconvenient location. This just makes it impractical to go grab that can of green beans you know you have instead of just getting another one. Lesson: If it is inconvenient to rotate food you will not do it. The stuff lasts for a long time so it isn't a huge worry but it is something to fix for the next time. Some cansolidator like shelving units will fix this problem. This will happen at the next place we live.
Other then that the next step is to start stocking bulk grains and such. Getting some sort of a grinder to make our own flour will be an adventure. Also the security that will come from having a dozen or so five gallon buckets of bulk grains will be nice. This would happen now but I would not be around long enough to use the grinder for very long before we move again. This also will happen at out next residence.
One of the few benefits of moving all the time is that it makes for an easy timeline to start new projects and such.
Thoughts?
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7 comments:
Sounds to me like a plan - cooking from scratch saves a lot of money over packaged foods and is more healthy because you get to determine EXACTLY what goes inside your body. You can customize your intake as well, exchanging different ingredients for a different taste as well.
Nothing wrong with that.
I know a lot of people who could really give up their kitchen range entirely. A refrigerator and a microwave oven gets 99% of what they want done. Strange, really strange.
When I first started trying to cook from scratch, I had a bad experience with beans. I knew you had to soak them, but I didn't know how long. In an act of incredible stupidity, instead of asking my mother in law, or my wife, I just soaked them for about two days. Bubbles were coming up out of the pot. Then I cooked them and ate them. I damn near died. That's when I bought a book on cooking beans and started asking people how they did it.
I also bought a "Boston Butt Roast" and when we opened it at home, it smelled funky. My wife said to give it to the dogs, but I cooked it. After I cooked it, it didn't smell bad. But when I ate it, I got really, really sick. So if something smells funky, give it to the dogs. They seem to be able to eat any damn thing and not get sick.
If I had to say what the morale of these two stories is, it would be "don't experiment blindly with food." Ask somebody who knows what they are doing the first time you do something, or get a book.
I am still working on those cansolidator like plans. The ones that were sent to me were ok, but not what I wanted. You had to load the thing from the back making it impossible to set up against a wall.
I actually recently bought a manual grain mill, and I'm loving it! I swear my breads and such taste better with the hand-milled flour (maybe it's mental - but who cares!). I highly recommend it - and you don't have to buy a $400 grain mill. Mine cost about $60 (with shipping), and works perfectly fine.
Also, my food storage is my regular pantry - I just have a lot of food in there, which makes it easy to rotate the stock. (As opposed to keeping my food storage separate.) I write the expiration dates on everything that comes in the house so I know where I stand without letting food go bad.
I need to start cooking more at home - I live alone, so it's not always desirable. Maybe I just need to have more people over for dinner. :)
5-7 dollars for two people? If you really learn to do it that's enough for 4 adults and 3 little kids! I do it all the time... One of the biggest secrets to making the meal less costly is that meat is ONLY an additive. When cooking chicken, everyone does not 2 or 3 pieces of chicken. Instead 2 or 3 pieces are cooked and cut up into the main course.... everyone gets enough bites to say they had chicken for dinner, but there is not need to make the meat the entree by itself.
When done properly, the meat is added protein, but not the primary protein.
Pasta is great as a base, and there are about 35 different kinds so it doesn't always seem to be the same.
Alternating sauces, tomato pastes, soups and dressings also allows for a variety of tastes, and everyone feels like they have variety, when you are really just making something similar to last night!
Heard once that there 17,000 products at the grocery store and they are all made from the same basic 17 ingredients. We just need to learn that secret.
Anon, Simpler better ingredients are a good thing.
Hermit, Interesting stories. I have an odd one or two myself. I think it is wise to either consult a recipe book or an experienced person when trying to cook something completely new. Also I would add that if there is any doubt to just toss the food, especially now while food is relatively cheap and plentiful.
Gracie, I agree. For it to work well you need be able to put cans in from the top and get them from the bottom.
Robin, I figured I would start with a mid priced model. We do not have a regular pantry. One of them is definitely something I would love in a future residence and is on the short list for a home.
TMM, Yep. I did not say that is the cheapest we can do dinner for. That isn't the goal. A little bit of meat in a bunch of pasta with sauce and other variants can do that no problem. I like to eat a good sized chunk of decent meat at dinner.
Once the wheat tonnage was in place, I got a Nutrimill and so far so good. Getting a manual mill is on the list, but I'm not expecting the grid to go down next week. Bread comes out great in the solar oven, and so does everything else I've stuck in it. It's sort of like a crock pot. I figure a good hand mill is a key component, so I'm curious to see what people suggest.
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