Meal Plan: February 6, 2010

Hey, Les Ardoises is a year old! How exciting. To celebrate the ardoise made a trip out to the snowy back yard.

Breakfast Roundup: Week 1

No pictures of breakfast from this week, but here’s some fruit we will be having for breakfasts next week (complete Snowpacolypse project #1, a banana cozy).

S had a short week, and I had some leftover oatmeal from last week, so we only had 4 weekday breakfasts to prepare. We each had two days of bagels and cream cheese and strawberry banana smoothies. I’ll evaluate each with this rating system:

**** Great! Easy, delicious, and filling. This is now a staple.
***   Good. There are some issues that may prevent this from being a staple.
**      Meh. It meets some of the criteria, but could take it or leave it. Doubtful we’ll try it again.
*        Never. Again.

Bagels and cream cheese ***
Although delicious, filling, and easy to prepare, the logistics are tough. We don’t have good access to acceptable bagels, and I never did perfect making my own. I also have work issues: cutting and toasting at work are problematic. So while this is probably one of my favorite foods on earth, a good weekday bfast it does not make.

Strawberry Banana Smoothies ****
Four stars with the caveat that cold winter mornings are perhaps not the best time to hold a cold yogurty drink. We used frozen strawberries that were picked over the summer for just this purpose, and they were so delicious. It also transports pretty well for me; I have a small Nalgene bottle that holds a perfect amount to keep me full until lunch. S can actually suck his down during his mad dash out the door. A big downside is cleaning the blender. We don’t run the dishwasher every day, so unless we’re only having one smoothie day a week, someone has to clean it by hand which, although really not that hard, is a huge deterrent.

Food Waste Friday: February 5, 2010

This week we threw out 1/2 a lemon, and I don’t have a picture.

You know, I’m beginning to think that we really don’t waste all that much food. There’s some chicken in the fridge that I don’t see a happy ending for, but otherwise, everything is looking good.

I want to keep this up, because I know we’ll have a bad week sooner or later, but it seems silly to post something so skimpy every Friday. Maybe our food waste wasn’t as bad as we thought? Maybe it was just the holidays that was making us feel so wasteful?

I’ll finish out the month with regular weekly updates. If things still seem manageable, I’ll downgrade to reporting on an as need basis.

February Goal: Breakfast!

February’s goal is breakfast!

I’ve mentioned before that we generally don’t eat breakfast. It’s always been a very generic goal for us, like “exercise more”, but lately it’s become a very specific need for me. Why? I now have regular morning meetings. Never mind that my growling stomach is distracting (and embarrassing), I can’t concentrate!

To tackle this, I want to face and debunk my usual excuses:

1. I don’t have time! Or as S says, “I prefer sleeping”
True, the morning is a dash. True, we spend way too much time on food prep as it is. What’s false is that bfast is time consuming. A store-bought granola bar would suffice. Also, I don’t care if I eat at home or at work, so it’s just a matter of having something ready to throw in the work bag.

2. But my work bag is full
I usually don’t have much room in my bag for extra food, so I have a problem with carting even more tupperware on a daily basis. But who says I need to bring bfast food every day? On Monday I could bring a big bag of fruit, bagels and cream cheese, or other perishables. I could also keep a stock of pantry bfast food that would only need to be replenished periodically.  

3. I’m not hungry!
That used to be true. I certainly remember a time when a cup of coffee and a cigarette was breakfast enough. Over the years I’ve started waking up hungry, and coffee on an empty stomach just makes me feel nauseous. Our appetite has changed, but our habits haven’t kept up.

We’ll need some new strategies to tackle the habit. The first of which is to just plan the new meal. We’re already off to a good start. On Saturdays, I’ll do a weekly roundup of bfast; what we ate, how it went, and whether it kept us going until lunch.

For all of you regular breakfast eaters, what’s your motivation? Or is it just such a habit that you don’t give it another thought?

Meal Plan: January 30, 2010

Food Waste Friday: January 29, 2010

(oh yeah, and there was nothing to throw out this week!)

Eat Now

To help with food waste, we designated the top shelf in the fridge as the Eat Now section. The idea is that all leftovers, scraps, highly perishable foods will go up there so that they don’t get lost in the back of the fridge and go to waste.

As I said at the beginning of the month, the idea came from My Year Without Spending. From what I remember, she has kids and was trying to encourage them to eat leftovers.

For us, I’m not sure this is helping. I think the key to not loosing things in the back of the fridge is keeping the fridge uncluttered. It’s hard to see the things that have to be eaten if they’re being obscured by things that should’ve been thrown out a week ago.

Also, we don’t normally have a ton of leftovers. Th holidays were an exception. So it’s very hard to determine what goes on the Eat Now shelf. Highly perishable? But everything in the fridge is perishable… that’s why it’s in the fridge.

I think our best bet for minimizing food waste is to just clean out the fridge every Wednesday like we’re supposed to (it’s on the Wednesday night cleaning list, but oftentimes gets skipped out of laziness).

The month is almost over… does anyone else have good ideas on how not to waste food?

Meal Plan: January 23, 2010

Now that I have a computer I can post this week’s meal plan without resorting to artistic renderings! So exciting.

With S still in France, I’ve been having another cheeseapalooza. I&J came over to test out our new raclette machine on Saturday, and I’m going to try to write something about it. It was a lot of fun.

Food Waste Friday: January 22, 2010

There’s a small amount of parsley that died while we were in France. Thankfully there was no romaine disaster, and you all have very kindly excused me from reporting our restaurant waste (thanks for voting!), so I have nothing else to report.

Next week is the second full week of the month that we’re in town, so it should be more of a challenge. We’ll see how we do…

Food Waste: France Edition

Neither of us are home, so there’s no home food waste to report, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been wasting food! I swear I’m always hungry when we go out to eat, but it’s impossible for me to finish my plate, especially when there are many courses involved! Sometimes, we just plain order wrong, and no amount of will power can get it down (or keep it there… ask us about the Andouillettes Incident of 2010).

So I have a question for you, dear reader… what do you think about restaurant food waste? Should we include it in our weekly public shaming (aka Food Waste Friday)? Or do you think we’re off the hook when it comes to eating out?