Reality Sets In

On Sunday, I mentioned that the 20-minutes-a-day cooking plan was actually true to its name. Unfortunately, today I have other news to report.

My cooking session yesterday which consisted of pasta with sauce to accompany went much longer than planned. Despite the helpful suggestion that pasta cooked in little water can be cooked more quickly, I still ended up spending a full hour in the kitchen.

This didn't even include the time I spent to cook the broccoli, though this only took about 10 minutes, so it could have easily been squeezed in to the same cooking session. Though I intended to have fresh broccoli to eat, apparently I escaped from Open Harvest without picking it up and I ended up using frozen broccoli that I had left over in my freezer. This fits in well with the plan, since the 20-minute-a-day starter plan is not meant to provide all of your meals, but allows you to use up what remaining items are in your pantry while learning new menu items from the book.

This also didn't include the nearly 2 hours I spent trying to make yogurt.

I don't even usually buy yogurt for myself, but the idea of making something that I usually have to pay money for so intrigues me that I have to rise to the challenge. Because of this, I learned how to make cottage cheese. Apparently if you boil milk you can make yogurt. Boil it for too long though, and the milk begins to curd, giving you cottage cheese. The trick lies in being able to identify when it just starts to boil, which I obviously found quite difficult. I got it right on the second try though, and I have two jars of (hopefully) yogurt in my refrigerator now that I am looking forward to trying.

The yogurt brings up an important issue with the starter plan though, it includes a recipe which calls for yogurt, despite an absence of yogurt in the other cooking plans. A small complaint, but it's worth noting that yogurt is needed for one of the recipes.

Not so Wildly Affordable Organic

After a long hiatus, I've decided to commit to writing on this blog again. This is, of course, against my better judgment because as a Grad. Student I have very little free time, and it most likely should not be devoted to ramblings on the Internet.

In any case, I have decided to start blogging again to document my slow spiral of descent into hippie land. That's right, today I bought my year's worth of membership to Open Harvest Grocery in Lincoln. What is Open Harvest, well it's exactly what it sounds like, an organic centric grocery store that has sky-high prices and a pretentious atmosphere. Why would I pay to be a part of such a place? Well, because I've got mad cash and a pretentious air about myself that I think could really contribute to the place. Or maybe there's something else. Yeah, it's definitely something else.

I've always been a fan of maintaining a proper diet (not eating copious amount of junk food and trying to limit fats) and being responsible to the environment (which can be particularly difficult in Lincoln, since they don't have a pick-up garbage service). I've also always been a fan of saving money. Unfortunately, saving money, being friendly to the environment, and eating a proper diet are often at odds with each other. Because of this conflict I was thrilled to hear about a book that seemed to solve all those problems. The book is called Wildly Affordable Organic by Linda Watson, and it claims that you can eat in a healthy and environmentally friendly way for under $5 a day. I put it on my list of things that I want but don't feel the immediate need to spend money on (my wish list) and was thrilled when my mother purchased it for me for Christmas.

Now I've began the process of assimilating the book's knowledge into my life. There is a convenient, cook-for-only-20-minutes-a-day starter plan that I've put into motion. I'll talk more about it in the coming days, but for now, I want to just raise a couple of my primary joys and concerns with the book.

1. In the starter plan, lunch is sometimes scheduled to be celery sticks or green bell pepper sticks. That's it. A fascicle of peppers. I realize that my appetite is probably different than most people's but I don't know anyone that would be satisfied with that for a meal.

2. After my first trip to the store, it became abundantly clear that $5 a day was a generously low figure. In my first trip to the store, I far exceeded that amount. Some of the prices the book quoted for items were 2 or 3 times more expensive in the store. I could have made another trip to a supermarket to get some lower prices, but that takes a lot of another valuable resource that I have, time. I wonder if Mrs. Watson took this into account when she wrote her book. Now that I've got that out of my system, I will clarify that I might not have gone over the budget. Yes, I spent more than $150 at the grocery store, but I might have more than 30 days of meals in my cart, as many of the recipes will serve more than one person.

3. I'm excited to make my own yogurt. I've already created a nest where my milk can culture.

4. The reported 20-minutes-a-day cook time has so far held up. The cooking schedule for the first day fell well within this range, even though I had never made the recipes before. I'm mildly impressed. I have a batch of chocolate pudding and a vinaigrette dressing prepared for the week and the chocolate pudding was quite delicious.