Spoilers and TL;DR;

This post is longer than we like. Why? Because to understand an economy such as convenience, you have to set some context. If you are looking for the takeaway and how to save on costs, skip down to Our Learnings. If you want to understand how we unpack on this topic, read on. 

Opposing Forces

There’s a saying, “You can have it quick, cheap or done right. Pick any two”. Why do folks say that? Because it is true! Those are three opposing forces all of us consumers face. By consumers I mean any person or thing doing trading goods and services with another person or thing. That is what an economy is; barter of time and materials with another person or business. 

The balance of these three forces is how we determine personal value. If you break your leg, done right and quick, will take precedence over cheap. You will go to the ER, get pain medication, have the leg set correctly, and you are willing to pay a premium for it. Because you are willing to pay almost anything to stop the pain and fix the leg, it is a perfect example of an inelastic demand curve.

In another example, your vehicle may need an oil change. That is not extremely hard to do, but it is time consuming if you include buying parts and getting rid of the waste oil. In this case, it may be cheaper than going to the dealer, and you can do this as well as a technician. Still, there is a tradeoff of your time to do the work. 

Where It Becomes Gray

Let’s face it, sometimes, you just get hungry and want a burger. You absolutely must have one before you become hangry. That makes your overriding priority. Still, you have a choice to make; cheap or right. Ok, that is admittedly, a strange thought. What is ‘right’ when it comes to a burger? Does it need to be wagyu beef on a toasted brioche bun with micro-greens and bacon jam? Or can it be something out of a gas station hot case?

Let’s go back to our oil change example. We can go out, buy factory parts, tools, and spend our time changing our oil. We will need to run the errands of getting those items first, then do the work, then do the clean up. Finally, we take the used oil and hopefully recycle it. That is a lot of trouble, time, and money for one oil change. If we have our vehicle for 5 years, and have only invested in tools once, buy supplies once, in bulk, then it might be more viable. 

Ah, but yes, other places can change the oil in your vehicle as well. They use dealer grade parts and have lower labor rates. But if we chose that option, will it be done right? That depends on how you define being right. Do they save more time? That depends on your schedule and how urgent you need that oil changed. 

The Chains 

First, let’s eliminate the idea of bartering from our conversation. That is a complete economy of its own that needs its post. For our purposes, when we purchase something, we will use money. The work and/or goods we produce determine our income and money. When we pay someone, that is for them, or more importantly, the chain of people and value they add to the thing we are buying. 

Chain of value-adding people is key to the high cost of buying items of convenience. Durable goods such as cars and washing machines are good examples of value adding chains. The goods we buy are sourced from all over the world. At each step, each piece adds cost to the final product. For example, if someone produces the tires for a vehicle, they need to be paid, as do their sources. Every step, every part, has to be made and shipped and assembled. That’s a lot of folks with hands out. 

 Now, let’s pick one that is not so obvious. What about a McDonald’s Big Mac? No, we aren’t picking on them exclusively, but they are so ubiquitous they are relatable for most people. When we buy a Big Mac, we are paying multiple premiums on that food. There is a large chain of people involved in making sure you get your tasty Big Mac promptly. Those toasted sesame seeds on that bun didn’t toast themselves. 

The Obvious

 Every time we make a purchase decision, we are deciding what amount of right and how quickly we are willing to pay for it. We all make those decisions every day. In general, we probably don’t think about them. Many of us don’t think along these lines actively, but we all do process the data we are given as a set of trade-offs. 

When we are in the store, we may choose a high-end brand name product or a less expensive generic. In each case we are actually making a choice of what ‘done right’  is from a product pov. We place a monetary value on that choice.  The monetary decision is based on how much we value something versus how much the rest of society is willing to pay for something. 

Enter Convenience

We are often willing to pay a premium for a quicker reward. The same goes for buying time back. If you are working 45 hours a week, have a couple kids, and hobbies, time is a precious commodity. Time is finite and the demand curve we have for it can be very inelastic. Doing some research yields that an average person splits between 80-90% of their time between work, household work, and human needs, that doesn’t leave a lot of free time.  

A callout on that data. That sample feels skewed but as with all things health related, it is a best guess based on a series of polls. The group sampled was between ages 15 and 64 and may or may not be employed. There is enough common knowledge around sleep, and work life balance, to contradict some of this. That being said, the trade, in many cases, would be an increase in work and commuting at a loss of sleep instead of additional free time, which would lead to the same problem of limited time.

With so little time, many are willing to pay for services that can’t perform or simply don’t have time for. Don’t have time for dinner? Order out! Don’t have time to clean? Hire a cleaning service! Want a date night alone for two? Hire a nanny! But what are the actual trade offs?

Time vs Money Pitfalls 

When we pay money for goods, many times, we are expecting to get time back. That doesn’t always happen. Why? Consider this:

• Our money supply is generated through us spending time earning. 
• Because society considers some skills more valuable than others, we earn different amounts based on our work.
• When we purchase an item, it usually comes with a chain of value adders that drive up its price, making it a premium product relative to what we may be able to do on our own.

Why do these items matter? Because your money is directly tied to your time. That is what money is exchanged for. You have knowledge, goods, or other items you have invested your time in. Sometimes the trade offs work, and sometimes they don’t.

Examples In Numbers

Let’s do some math. Doug makes $40 an hour. Doug has two kids and a domestic partner. We will say if Doug chooses, he can make dinner for 4 in 45 minutes with $15 of ingredients.  The other choice is that Doug picks up food on his way home, which costs him 15 minutes of time and $10 per person plus a $5 tip. 

The cost of each meal is not only in the dollar cost but the time cost. Doug values his time at $40 an hour.  That means if Doug spends 45 minutes making dinner, his time value is equivalent to $30. When you add $15 of ingredients to that cost, you get the meal for 4 being $45 of his time. 

Conversely, if Doug opts to pick up food, it is more expensive. Fifteen minutes is equivalent to $10. That means the meal cost him $55 of his time.  In this case, what looks like a time buy back costs someone more than they value their time at.

Now we look at Ann. Ann has a similar domestic arrangement. She makes $80, which is double the value of time when compared to Doug. That makes the meal made at home worth $75 worth of her time. The meal out would equate to $65 worth of her time. In Ann’s case, she is buying back her time, but really, only $10 worth. If she were to make enough for leftovers, it might still be worth her time to make the meal at home.  

Our Learnings

As we started to re-evaluate many things in our life, we built out a calorie budget. The first outcome from that was we had to stop eating out. We had used restaurants for convenience, thinking they were saving time.  At our cabin, we had to start cooking more as well. We decided to use some discount grocers as they were a one-stop shop in those less urban areas. At the same time, we were tracking our budget looking for what we need for retirement. A funny serendipitous thing happened.

Both the amount we were spending on going out and our groceries went down significantly. By being calorie conscious, we cut our eating out, which led to eating in. Looking at future retirement needs made us look at being more price conscious. This led to a further reduction in cost. Interestingly enough, we didn’t lose time waiting in lines or for someone to prepare a meal for us. Finally, it made us look at other areas where we were paying for convenience. 

Tips And Traps

Finally, we come to some tips and traps from our learnings. Hopefully they will be food for thought for others.

Tips:

• In terms of ‘Done Right’, premium products may not be worth it. Most products have generic or house brands that are just as good or close enough.
• Before making a purchase choice, think about your time and what it is worth. If something is going to be 8 hours of your time, you are saying it is worth a day working to have it.
• By planning, you can cut down the need for urgency, which usually comes with a trade-off of a higher price.
• Look around your home and ask yourself if every product is needed. Many home products are easy to make with items we have on hand, are just as effective as store-bought.
• Block out time to make a menu or craft items on your calendar so you can stay ahead of needs
• Be intentional in how you spend money, meaning know what your time is truly worth. 

Traps:

• What we perceive as time saving may not be when weighed against other trade-offs once we think about the total cost of that item.. 
• Commit to doing things more than once if they require an investment in tools and supplies.  If you don’t, those tools and supplies will make the initial time you do something more expensive than it is probably worth. 
• Not defining ‘good enough’ before we start a project or even eating out can lead us to overspending. 
• Prioritizing ‘Cheap’ for items when we should prioritize ‘Done Right’ can cause us to re-spend the same time and money over and over. 

One Last Musing

One outcome for us from our learnings was in how we approached a more intentional form of spending our time and money. We came to look at some items as challenges to be solved through hobbies. For us, we decided to make things like making hot sauce, beer, sausage, and jerky part of our things that were fun to do. When we do this, the time cost is reduced for both the hobby and what it produces. For example, if you fish, and you eat fish, while not a convenient thing to do, you help fund your meals while enriching your life via those hobbies. 

Wrapping Up

If you are still with us, we thank you for your patience. This is not a simple topic. The takeaway is there is a cost for convenience. There are times that cost makes sense and there are times it does not. By learning to value your time, and understand what is ‘good enough’, you can better address your budgeting. Further, if you can use your hobbies as a way to cut down the need for convenience items, you can reduce your overall spend of both time and money.

The post The True Cost Of The Easy Way first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

There’s No Accounting for Taste

Before we start, let’s recognize and acknowledge ‘There’s no accounting for taste’. It has been a mission of ours for over a year to understand how to be frugal with food without compromising quality. Taste, and quality, are different for different folks. That being said, we have found what works for us and a level of quality of food that we are comfortable with. To produce it, in general, we don’t rely on premium products with a few exceptions. 

Definitions

We will start by giving some definitions for context. These are our definitions and how we approach the tradeoffs we see between money, time, and waste. Waste is an important concept in economies. We will touch on that after we give some definitions.

• The Economics of Scale are places where you can lower costs by buying more. We often see this in membership warehouse stores such as Costco or large-scale retailers such as Walmart. In their cases the volume of buying power allows them to negotiate lower prices.
• The Economics of Time ( also considered Convenience) is how much time a person invests to use, make, or do something. These are usually things like trade-offs between making food and eating out where we weigh the amount of our time to something against the purchase cost.
• The Economics of Zero Waste (or simply Waste) comes from the idea of zero-waste living. For economies of scale and time to be optimized we want to limit waste. If we don’t limit waste, we are losing money and time for items that add no value which negatively impacts economies of scale and time. 

Do You Care?

Maybe? Maybe Not? We found these three concepts are a guiding rubric for balancing budget and life. They lead to feeling better about how we spend our time and money by providing a logical way to gauge purchases. There are times when we have more money than time and vice versa. Everyone has their value systems, and they change over time as our lives change. 

By being conscious of what is important to you, you can save time, money, and waste so they are good to know. That may sound obvious but know it is easy to lose track of goals and focus when life is busy. We will look next at how these three themes affect our personal home economics. 

The Big Three

Scale 

If you choose to make more food at home, you can leverage the economics of scale to your advantage. Many people may know this coming from large families but in general the more you buy, the cheaper the price. In essence, you are mimicking the same idea of purchasing power as any large retailer would but on a personal level.

We are all used to seeing sales where we get 3 steaks for the price of 2 or buy one get one for a dollar more. That is simply marketing to average out a value that entices us to buy more than we usually would. Due to that, you may choose to cook steaks over pork chops that night. Getting a deal is great but buying cooking staples in bulk usually is not the same concept. You may choose to buy 

You can spend less money by weight for items like oil, flour, spices, etc. as you increase the quantity of your purchase. Those are the economies of scale we are discussing.  As the weight increases from say a quart to a gallon, your price will go down per oz.  In many cases, the prices will go down even more. Spices also follow this model. I have paid the same or more for 1.5 ozs of the same spice in a jar as I have for a 14 oz large plastic restaurant container. 

Time and Convenience 

Time, and its partner, convenience is also a critical cost measurement. As in any economy, we are trading specialization and using money as a common way to value our time. The more money we make, the more time we can free up through purchasing time through convenience. This is exactly what happens when we order food regularly. Sometimes makes perfect sense to order out to save some time or as a treat. Ordering out isn’t the only time and convenience vs money trade-off. 

Some recipes are multi-step, and labor-intensive food to produce like lasagna. It is here that we need to start thinking about our time and the outcome of it on a per portion time cost. We can buy a lasagna we like, that is about 85% as good as homemade, and that saves us 2 hours in a kitchen, for about the same cost as homemade for 10 portions. That is not the same as when we make a soup or bread in which we get better quality for 30-60 minutes of active involvement. 

That being said, we struggle when it comes to going out for a sandwich, hamburger, or tacos. Making them at home gives us the ability to control our portions, use items on hand, and have roughly the same outcome as dining out quality-wise. Further, we can make them cheaper and in roughly the same amount of time, we would take to eat out.

Waste

Waste is where the idea of saving time and money can become casualties. The idea behind economies of zero waste is to reuse, re-purpose, and not throw out anything salvageable. In terms of food, this means when eating out or in. Where this resonates with us is the idea of not wasting just food but time and money. 

When you choose to go out, you are paying a premium in money for your food as it has been created through others’ work. You are usually paying a premium time-wise for those portions. For events, celebrations, etc. that may be the intent. If you then have leftovers and don’t take them home, you are creating additional waste which doubles the effective cost in time and money.

This also occurs in home cooking. If you buy ingredients that are one-off or go bad before you can use them you are creating waste. It means you spent a premium for one meal. Why? If you buy say, fish sauce for $10, use two tablespoons, then let it go bad after a lack of use, you spent $10 on a single part of a single meal. 

Putting It Together 

Let’s try and talk through how this works in practice from what we did. We decided to cook at home more than eat out to control our calorie budget. This initially meant spending more time and was less convenient than eating out. In essence, at first, we lost time however, we immediately saw a decrease in monetary cost and waste. 

We then found portion control to be problematic and stored too much food. This created a different set of wastes for us through freezer burn. The lack of variety also made us stumble and go back to eating out more again which was more wasted time not only in going out but time sunk into making things we didn’t eat. 

Where we landed was understanding, for us, what we did well at home. For example, we will go out for Thai or Chinese as we don’t want to store what are one-off items and ingredients. Further, because we specialize in certain areas, we know what we can buy in bulk.  This has led to optimizing through getting good at a wide variety of things we can produce quickly. It has also kept the cost down as we buy things such as flour, cheese, butter, etc. in quantities that allow us to buy cheaper.

We Aren’t Anti-Local

There is a perception that large retailers such as Walmart, Amazon, etc. destroy local community stores. There are tradeoffs to having them for sure. Our point in this post is not to guide you to them instead of other options. It is the opposite. We use both types of retailers as needed and use them for what they each excel at. 

We see each as a specialist in an area. I see no reason to spend a premium on bulk canola oil at a local grocery store. It’s cooking oil, nothing more and nothing less. Conversely, for example, in our small-town Walmart, there aren’t any specialty meats or local flavors. In those cases, we are always willing to pay the premium to a local business. It’s your conscience and value system so you should do you. That is an economy that deals in personal beliefs we don’t dare touch it.

Wrapping Up

We have discussed several economies and rubrics around their use. By learning what is important for you, you can reduce costs in both time and money while reducing waste. This is only an initial post on this subject. We will tie this into how having chosen to keep items on hand and investing in learning opens more options for cost reductions. 

The post How To Make Your Home Economy Work first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

This post is a work in progress with the intent that we cover what is working for us. It is one step in cataloging all of our staples so that we can understand how to optimize our storage space, time spent cooking, and economies of scale in making purchases. This is part of a larger list I wanted when we first started cooking around how to stock a pantry. Since all our searches came up with nothing that spoke to us or our style and calorie budget, we decided to make our own. 

The ‘plan’ we originally came up with was ambitious. We wanted to be able to bake any time we wanted and only go to the store every other week. We also wanted a way to make sure we had items that were shelf stable or had a decent shelf life in the fridge so we didn’t waste food. Why have such lofty goals? It was an experiment to see how off-grid we could live when we retired as well as how much food we could make ourselves.

We also bought items such as cake flour and mixes even though I believe I have made two cakes in my life. While I thought it would be worth trying I had to force myself to make a sheet cake just to use the mix which was a year past its use-by date. When we started our journey in baking, we could make our own baked goods to create the proper portion sizes for our limited calorie budget. It wasn’t that the mix didn’t allow it, but rather we realized we enjoyed cookies, dessert bread, and homemade candy over cakes. 

We realized though, if we hadn’t started this big, we wouldn’t have figured anything out. By investing money into ingredients we forced ourselves to use things rather than waste them. As a result of the forcing function, we learned what we liked, what we didn’t, how much we could make ourselves, what we couldn’t, etc. 

Where We Landed

It turns out it took fewer one-offs for baking than we thought which was an outcome of a couple of things. First, most of what we needed to bake with we used for general cooking anyway such as AP flour, canola oil, and eggs. We hadn’t sat down and realized how few extra items it took until we started tracking our staples for everyday meals.

We also started to realize that bread is simply water, flour, yeast, and salt prepared in different ways and found America’s Test Kitchen Book ‘Everyday Bread’ is a good read on why.  You only need a couple of types of procedures such as the creaming method to create different cookies as well. We also learned that if we wanted chocolate chip cookies we only needed a handful of ingredients to make multiple types. When we switched to oatmeal the next week, again, only a couple of ingredients changed. 

Further, what we think of as ingredients of baked goods can be used in many other things which makes them more general staples. For example, you may make chocolate cherry cookies or whole wheat bread with pepita and sesame seeds for an extra crunch. Would we consider the dried cherries and pepitas as baking staples? Not at all, because we use them to dress up a boring salad or even coleslaw.

Here is a list of items we keep on hand that play a role in not only baking but are staples for other types of cooking. This is not an inclusive list of all items we keep but rather the ones needed for most of our baked goods.

• Flours and Dry Goods
  • AP Flour
  • Cornstarch (Sometimes called Cornflour) 
  • Buttermilk Powder
  • Corn Meal
  • Old Fashioned Oats
  • Baking Soda
  • Unsweetened Cocoa Powder
• Oils and Fats
  • Canola Oil
  • Olive Oil
  • Butter
• Dairy and Eggs
  • Whole Milk
  • Eggs
• Sugars
  • Light Brown
  • Dark Brown
  • White
  • Molasses 
• Salts
  • Kosher
  • Sea
  • Non-Iodized Table
• Nuts, Seeds and Dried Fruits
  • Raisins
  • Cherries
  • Cranberries
  • Walnuts
  • Pepitas 
  • Sunflour
  • Peanut Butter
• Canned goods
  • Pumpkin
• Spices and Extracts
  • Ginger
  • Cinnamon 
  • Allspice
  • Clove
  • Cayenne 
  • Vanilla 

Baking Staples Add-ons

It turned out, that for us to bake a large percentage of additional items we only need the additional items below. Again, this is not inclusive but they are our most used items to produce roughly 80% of what we make.

• Flours and Dry Goods
  • Bread Flour
  • Whole Wheat Flour
  • Baking Powder
  • Instant Yeast
• Dairy and Eggs
  • Heavy Cream
• Sugars
  • Confectioners (Powdered Sugar)
• Inclusions
  • Semi-sweet Chocolate Chips
  • Butterscotch Chips
• Seasonings and Extracts
  • Everything Bagel (EBS)
  • Poultry
  • Mint Extract
• Starters
  • Whole Wheat Bittman Bread
  • Sourdough which right now is in progress. 

From the Broad To Specific

When we started to catalog, we saw obvious patterns occur. The patterns we found were a group of items that applied to all cooking and a separate list of baking staples. This helped us understand what we needed to cook, and then add baking which is an important distinction for us. After making recipes that had multiple exotic ingredients that led to waste we wanted to learn what needed and could reuse over and over. 

First, we will look at Everything Bagel Seasoning (EBS) and canned pumpkin. We only use EBS for making bagels or bread. That’s fine since it has a long shelf life and is fairly inexpensive so we don’t mind storing the one-off. While many only use canned pumpkin for pies, we use it more often for Pumpkin Spice Sloppy Joes, making soap, pumpkin soup, pumpkin bread, etc. Yes, there are a lot of uses for it so we keep it on hand even though it may sit for a while, it is a visual reminder to mix things up. 

Yeast and baking powder are a different set of examples. You can not create many baked items without them. If you want leavened baked goods, at least for most recipes to work, you need them. You won’t need them if you aren’t baking. There is no reason to buy and store them then especially since yeast has a somewhat short life expectancy. 

This post discussed some of our mistakes and realizations on our journey. From that, we have given a starter list of ingredients that are used by many in general cooking. We have also added on a minimum, for our tastes and recipes, a set of additional items for making baked goods. With a little observation and forethought, we believe it becomes easier to avoid wasting space, time, and money on ingredients used only once a year or so. 

The post Important Staples You Need To Bake first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Portions Vs Meals

In another post, we discussed the difference between portions and meals. We also discussed what a serving size is and isn’t. Since we know a serving size is something based on what others eat, we want to define a portion as the amount of something you eat based on your calorie budget. For example, you may order a pizza but may only eat two slices of an extra-large pie. Was that a portion or a serving of that pizza?

We are calling that out intentionally as we know there is confusion around the definitions of portions vs servings. This becomes a bit more problematic to talk about in multi-course meals where we have proteins, starches, and usually a vegetable as a main entree plus sides. 

This gets more problematic because when building an a la carte meal, you will need portions that make up all three. When you take home leftovers from a restaurant, you may see all three as one portion of a meal. This portion thing begins to sound a little weird but, no worries, we will clear it up a bit later. 

Portion Planning 

To plan for a month of meals we need to extend the number of items we need to have on hand.  Don’t worry, they don’t necessarily add to our work. Remember we can gain portions from simply cooking a little more or taking home leftovers from a restaurant. Before we get to that, let’s give ourselves a definition and again a little harmless math.

• Number of Diners per Meal (NDpM) which is, you guessed it, the number of people you need to feed.
• A complete Meal we define as a meal that approximates proteins, starches, and vegetables to approximate the USDA MyPlate standard.

Let’s also use the table and definitions we had in the previous post to work through our math.

Running Total of Meals Worksheet

The Math

Let’s assume 4 diners for our NdpM. What we then have for the total number of portions we need to make or have on hand for four weeks is 4 x 84  or 336 individual portions correct? That is not exactly the right number as we had defined a complete meal as containing 3 items. This means our Made To Order, A La Carte, and Snack-style meals all may be constructed of individual items such as a portion of chicken, rice, and say roasted corn. The Made To Order may also be complete as is such as fried rice with pork and vegetables. 

That leaves us with roughly a need for the following minimum and maximum items for a meal. 

Min and Max Items per Meal Worksheet

Putting this all together we would need a minimum and maximum number of meal portions, as shown below.

Combined Totals Worksheet

When we multiply those totals by our NDpM of 4 you will notice that we get absurd numbers of between 352 and 672 portions of food to feed a group of 4 for a month. In our case, we are only two so we get between 176 to 336 portions of food. 

They Are Real Numbers

They are real but not scary. Remember that is how much you need for 4 people for a month. We also need to realize that If you buy a 2lb bag of corn, depending on your and your diner’s calorie budgets, you may get eight 4-ounce portions of vegetables from it. When you cook a 3lb roast, after water loss, you may get ten 4-ounce portions from it. What happens if you throw in some mashed potatoes which are just as easy to create twelve 4-ounce portions?

What happens is that you have just covered a Made To Order meal that covers creating up to two complete meals for four plus extra portions left over to use for another meal. You just knocked out 20 portions in one meal. Wait, it gets better. What about pre-made or takeout? In each of these cases, you may end up with more food than can be eaten in one sitting. Those extra portions can be used to make meals later as well.

Well Duh! 

We spent a lot of time telling you something you already knew….maybe? We all inherently do this type of planning from week to week but maybe not month to month. By being cognizant of how we can plan longer term, and reduce food making to portions we need rather than having not enough or too much. 

As we started to cook at home more, we thought we needed a lot more than we did. We found ourselves cooking and storing too much. We arrived at thinking about portions over serving size or complete meals to help us plan. We also focused on a calorie budget to make sure our meals were appropriately sized. This began to save us time and money over the aggregate. 

This is also a rolling plan meaning after a while, the meals you make help support the extra portions. This happens more naturally as you learn to think about the trade-offs of say doing individual items such as a roast vs a casserole. It also eventually leads to having a larger mix of items you want to eat at home which can reduce dependency on eating out. 

Wrapping Up

In this post, we have discussed the nuances of planning with portions over just meals. At first glance the numbers are scary however they are simply numbers. Once you understand this is a month of food numbers aren’t that absurd.

Further with some lifestyle tweaks, we found we could quickly fill them with very little effort. They do give us an approach to managing our food, shopping, and eating out with a goal of efficiency and reduced waste. Lastly, this approach helps us keep an eye on our calorie budgets whether we want to slim down, maintain, or bulk up. 

The post How To Make Meal Plans With Portions first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

To start thinking about a plan, we needed to break down our meals into some taxonomy so we could talk about how many of each type we would want. As discussed previously in our budget post, this will give us a rough idea of how many of each we want and the trade-offs of making them.  Here is our meal taxonomy:

• Made To Order: Any meal we are preparing to eat when done cooking
• Homemade One Dish: Any meal containing protein, starch, and vegetables in one dish such as Beef Stew.
• Pre-made One Dish: Any meal such as frozen store-bought lasagna or burritos purchased to be cooked by us that contained protein, carbohydrates, and vegetables.
• A La Carte: Individual portions of protein, starch, or vegetable such as roast turkey, mashed potatoes, or corn but not mixed.
• Snack Style: Any meal that is composed of items we think of as snacks like crackers, cheese, smoked fish, etc. 
• Restaurant: Any meal where we plan to go out to eat which can run the gamut from a 3-star Michelin restaurant to the local convenience store hot case.

Why do we need a taxonomy to plan? Because we want to define what we need to store in our fridge, freezer, and pantry in some manner so we can have a known number of things. This classification allowed us to plan how we would use what was stored when we stored it. This eventually led to understanding how much time and money we needed to spend to keep us fully stocked. More on that later.

A La Carte Further Defined

We defined this as a specific way to think about how we stored parts of meals that were interchangeable. The point of a la carte is to have multiple ways to address both our Daily Required Intake (DRI) while attempting to handle ideas covered by MyPlate. Let’s work through an example.

If we have roasted corn as a vegetable side frozen, we can use that corn with many different things. The same for store-bought frozen carrots. We can have them with turkey, steak, or pork tenderloin. They also pair well with starch such as rice, mashed potatoes, and a dinner roll. Due to this mix-and-match form, we stuck to calling it a la carte as each was an individual item to be eaten on its own.

Doing Some math

Okay, we have to do some math here. If that’s not your cup of tea, that’s fine, you can skip ahead to the table. For those feeling a need to understand how we got there, here is the skinny. Also, note we are discussing meal plans first and leave total portions for another part of the post. First some definitions:

• The number of Meals per Day (MpD) and Total Days to budget for (TD) should be self-explanatory. To develop our plan, we will assume most people eat 2-3 meals daily and consider a week 7 days. 
• The Total number of Meals (TnM) is MpD x TD so if you have 3 meals a day for 7 days you will have 3 x 7 =21 meals to plan. 
• Weeks to Plan (WtP) is how many weeks we will be planning for.

Let’s do some math now. We want to plan for 4 weeks of eating 3 meals a day. Based on our math TnM = MpD x TD x WtP. We then get 3 x 7 x 4 = 84 meals. That means from our taxonomy of different meal types we need to decide how to fulfill 84 meals over four weeks. Let’s not let the numbers scare us yet. We will prove that creating that amount of food is easier than it sounds. 

We Figure You Already Know This

There is nothing rocket science here in the math we have discussed so far but we feel we need to start here. Anyone can come up with the above in some shape or form. We started here to set a baseline. As planning grows in complexity, with the number of dinners, calorie budgets, portion planning, etc. we wanted to have some set of initial kick-offs to ground us. Those nuances will follow in additional posts.

Breaking It Down

Let’s put that into a table spread across our meal types. This is our ‘plan’ for what we need. We did this with a spreadsheet but you can visualize this any way you like. This is an example as you may choose different combinations for your needs based on calorie, time, and financial cost of meals.

In this table above, the keywords are running the total needed and we can dig in there a bit harder to explain. 

The running total means the total number of meals we must have in stock for the next four weeks. It doesn’t mean the number of meals we must make for the next four weeks. What this gives us is an idea of how much we need to buy, make, or eat out to satisfy our calorie budget goals for the next month. It is also a predictor of how much we can use in the next four weeks. 

Part of the challenge we faced was overstocking. We want to keep enough meals around to fit our needs without making so many we need a large amount of space to keep them. We found ourselves having too much at times which took forever to use up. Also, we found we would become unbalanced which caused us to spend more time making one-offs than we wanted. 

The totals are not related to the number of meals we have to make from scratch. We can get economies of scale here by making extra portions for a meal, buying multi-portion meals like frozen pizza, or even taking home some leftovers from say our favorite Thai takeout. 

Portions vs Meals 

What we have intentionally avoided discussing portions in this post. We will follow up in another post on how portions play into planning. It is in the portion sizes that the economies of scale start working for us. Since the number of portions needed is a function of how much we make, which style of meals, our calorie budgets, and the number of diners we have, it is best to have it in another post. 

Wrapping Up

In this post, we have discussed how to make a basic plan for the amount of meals you need. This planning helps budget food, storage space, time,e and turnover of items. By doing a little math based on a loose taxonomy of meal types, we can define our needs more accurately. Once this plan is understood, we can look next to how to use it to fulfill our meal and portion needs. 

The post How To Make Usable Meal Plans first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Background

We had learned to cook for ourselves and over time we began to like our food better than the restaurants. It wasn’t that we didn’t enjoy a great taco or fried chicken, but rather, it was no longer an event. Eating out became a thing we needed when we traveled or needed a break from our home kitchen. 

This shift also caused us to rethink some of our social activities. We would often go out with friends rather than stay in. This happened a lot if we gathered at our recreational property. Part of our traditions was to go to a restaurant in town rather than cook. We had seen it as a time saver and fun. Our calorie budget and financial choices changed that for us.

Also, note that this post will introduce many concepts. We will provide more in-depth explanations in later posts. 

The Why of the Budget

We wanted a way to justify eating in or out in a simple way. Whether eating out or in, you have so many ways you can spend money. When eating out you can choose a fine dining venue or the local gas station hot case. When eating in you can choose to cook a high-end brand name or a more generic product. Unfortunately, these are both qualifiers and value judgments. We wanted something more concrete as a value quantifier to take the emotion out of our decisions. 

The What of the Budget

Money may be the root of all evil but it is also a simple quantifier. Time, which waits for no person, is also a simple quantifier. Very few people have unlimited money and nobody has unlimited time. We decided to use these two as our guiding principles when making food choices. These two constrained the overall choices we could make to something logical over emotional.

We decided we needed to factor in the total number of portions. Why factor it in? Because the number of portions is directly related to the investment of time and money in cooking. Many dishes make multiple portions however, some like lasagna come at a high time cost. We will discuss that later on in this article.

The How of the Budget

We tracked both our spending on eating out and eating in via our bank accounts. Many banks have budget tracking as part of their offering so this was simple. Each month, we looked at our accounts and saw what we had spent. We did build in some padding around alcohol since our bank’s tracking didn’t differentiate between groceries and alcohol. Overall we were able to start to understand what we were spending per portion. 

Portion size was critical in understanding both our food and eating out. If you eat at a casual dining restaurant like fast food, you get one portion of something like a Whopper or Big Mac. A meal at dinner or family-style restaurant can contain 2-3 portions. When you bring home leftovers the money you spent is now for two or more meals, not one.

Let’s compare with some numbers. You can go to a restaurant and spend $15 for a single portion of a meal in which you eat the whole entre. Alternatively, you can go to a restaurant and spend $22 for a large or family-style meal that you take home the extra portion. The meal costing $22 is going to cost you less per portion due to the extra portion you had left over.

We also gathered our empirical evidence of time. When we cooked we decided to occasionally time ourselves to see how long it took. We did the same estimation of eating out from getting in the car to finishing the meal. It isn’t obvious until you really think about it. When you go out, you may get in your car, drive 10 minutes, spend 10 minutes waiting in line to order and get your food, and then drive 10 minutes home, which is 30 minutes of your time spent.

The Budget as a Rubric

We are going to be honest here. This is a guide, not perfection. Figuring out all the nuances of cooking at home versus eating out strictly by numbers is never going to be perfect. There are way too many variables. When you cook at home, you have energy costs. The same occurs when you drive to a restaurant. Your cookware costs money that is amortized over time. When you eat out, there is no energy used to wash the dishes but there can be costs associated with wasted food. Due to all that, we think of this as a rubric rather than a hard and fast formula to prove one is better than the other. 

The Budget

We came up with a couple of guidelines for ourselves. To keep it simple, we limited how much nuance went into each. We broke it down into eating in vs. out. The numbers are based on our lifestyle and financial values. This simple guide can be adapted to your needs just as simply.

Eating In

• A maximum cost of $5 per person per meal that includes the appropriate portion sizes needed for our DRI. That includes everything from protein to carbohydrates 
• A maximum active time investment, including clean up of 1.5  hours per meal per day. 

Eating Out

• A maximum cost of $10 per person per meal portion including gratuity.
• A maximum time investment of 45 minutes from the point we get in the car to the point we are home. 

Hold Up, There’s a Change Up

Yes, we did change the language a bit. The word meal snuck in there as did the word active. The reason is eating out vs in is two different things and isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. When we eat out we are generally served a meal. When we eat we are building a meal out of building blocks described by MyPlate. At the end of the day, both are about portion sizes but we switched the language to call out the differences. 

We also used the word active. Many recipes have times when you have to do nothing. If you make bread, it may take 24 hours to fully rise. Your active time, which doesn’t include cleanup, may only be 25 minutes. That is the time you spend actively engaged in making the bread from mixing to mixing to kneading. 

We will keep this post brief by addressing both those concepts in depth in later posts. If we don’t take that approach this post becomes too barque to be of value.  

How It Shakes Out

When we eat, no matter how many dinners we have, we want to spend only 1.5 hours per day actively preparing food. We also want to keep meals to a fixed budget per portion. This means a couple of things. 

• We can prepare food on other days as 1.5 hours a day yields 10.5 hours a week for preparing food. There is no reason we can’t spend 30 minutes making biscuits two days before we use them.
• It is easy to trade off the complexity of a meal by making one item easy to balance out with more active cooking of other portions. A side of coleslaw that takes 5 minutes to make and can easily offset the complexity of frying fish and the clean-up after it.
• You can easily scale up portions to feed more people. In this model, we may pay for more ingredients but economies of scale work for us if we are cooking from scratch. We will talk about this in another post.
• Additional portions can be used later to offset time and money costs for a later meal.

This leaves eating out to be focused on more time management than strictly food costs. By limiting the amount of time we are willing to use for eating out, we gain back time for cooking. Why? Because our criteria are strict enough to force us to eat on a low-time budget. In many cases, we will simply combine a stop-to-eat with other errands when we are already out. 

The Curious Case Of Lasagna

We learned some of these rules the hard way. Lasagna was where we realized time and cost were the most important factors. Let’s explore this tale of woe. 

Lasagna seems simple and it is. Lasganas is cheese, sauce, noodles, and in our case meat. It makes many portions and is essentially a one-pot meal. It contains protein, carbs, fats, and vegetables. Ok, tomatoes are technically fruits but we aren’t going there and we will consider them vegetables. You can pre-make it and cook it when friends are over so you have time to chat. What an amazing dish! What a terrible time and money suck!

It was after making two dishes for friends that we started to realize this. As we began to bring our change of habits into our social circle we did some experiments. It turns out I can make twelve pork chops in gravy with biscuits and a side of corn in the time it takes me just to make a meat sauce for lasagna. I can also make them cheaper than the lasagna. Why?

Read The Fine Print

Making a lasagna is a multi-step process with multiple ingredients. You have to buy many ingredients which drives the per portion cost up. At a minimum, you will need 3 types of cheese, meat, vegetables, noodles, eggs, and sauce. Many of these ingredients are higher-cost ingredients because they are value-added products like sausage and cheese. 

Lasagna isn’t time-friendly either. You make a sauce or augment a store-bought one with meat and spices. Then, you have to make a cheese mixture. Depending on how you do yours, you have to boil noodles. On top of this, you have to assemble everything. After that, you have to bake it in two different steps. It has to then cool. The clean up after all of this is arduous as each step produces dirty dishes and don’t get me started on the baking dish clean up.

Pork chops were a quick sear in a pan and inexpensive proteins. Frozen corn is ubiquitous. Gravy is broth, spices, fat, and a thickener and when done, the pork chops simmer in them. Biscuits take 20 minutes if you are experienced in making them and come from cheap ingredients. The clean-up time for all of the above is less than 20 minutes. Tl;dr: it’s all about active time and cost and you have to read the recipe closely to understand where the true costs are. 

Wrapping Up

We have discussed several different concepts here. At the core is the idea of the time and money cost of what we eat. These are rubrics we came up with to guide us. We will eat out at a more expensive restaurant again sometime and we will probably make another lasagna. These guidelines help us frame our decision points to make better choices in how we spend our money and time.

The post How To Make A Personal Food Budget first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Impulse Buying Wasn’t The Answer

First, we will talk about what we did wrong that we learned the hard way. We found is there was no ‘easy’ button to help new cooks create a pantry of items they need. We had hoped we could find a series of top 20 lists of what people stocked in their short, mid, and long-term storage. The more we searched we could find some here and there but nothing that fit us. There wasn’t one and for good reason. The reason is because everyone has different calorie budgets, family sizes, tastes, etc. It was the same problem with understanding portion sizes.

When we started, I decided to go all in. In my mind, I came up with all the things I wanted to make and started buying and storing them. That includes things like cake flour, multiple types of dried fruit for granola bars, four types of pasta noodles, and multiple cans of tuna. It was a big mistake. I, realized, well, I have only baked one cake in my life. It wasn’t like we were packing for the Oregon Trail where there wouldn’t be any grocery store for the next 2,000+ miles. It was a wastefully impulsive way to start but it did create change.

Impulse did Enforce a Change

While it did force us to cook more at home to use up what I had bought. This helped us start to produce more at home. there are better ways to approach this. We learned we had to think about food from a storage point of view. It also made us realize just how many meals we needed to keep on hand and didn’t. Out of our experiments, we realized that our food had to be segmented by usage time.

Breaking It Down Isn’t Hard

What we wanted to have on hand:

• Fresh items to use within 5-10 days. These include meats, dairy, vegetables, etc. These are your most perishable items. They are all ingredients in the meals we intend to prepare.
• Intermediate life items that we needed on hand to create meals. These items we wanted to use up in 2 weeks to 3 months. The items range from cheeses to condiments like mayonnaise as well as pre-cooked frozen chicken. 
• Intermediate life items were fresh homemade meal substitutes such as canned chili, soups, and frozen pizzas. These are the buffer foods that keep us from going out by giving us something quick that is on hand when life goes sideways.
• Long-life items that will last up to a year such as condiments such as ketchup to items such as flour, sugar, and salt. In this category also go bulk spices, and dried meals such as macaroni and cheese.

Notice nothing on this list has anything to do with extra portions or meals we made ourselves. To produce meals or augment meals we needed these ingredients which we considered staples. Meals and shelf-stable items like home canned goods are another part of the items we keep on hand but are complex enough to need their own write-up.

Getting to the right mix:

We can’t tell you what will work for you. That is a function of how much space you have, how much you cook, and what you make the most of. We can give you two rubrics to help you decide how much to store and what.

• The more you have on hand the more you will be able to make.
• The longer an item is stored the less likely it will be used.

It is the second bullet point that is the gotcha. We are not homesteaders or preppers. Our goal was not a year’s or more worth of food on hand. Shelf-stable foods such as Mac and Cheese (Boxed Dinners) and canned soups can be stored for a year or more. Due to this extended shelf life, there was never pressure to use them before they spoiled. We had to learn to enforce our own rules to use them within 2-3 months of purchase.

Getting Started is Easy:

You are probably already doing much of the leg work to do this. Yes, that’s correct, it’s your weekly shopping list. By adding a couple more intentional aspects to it, you can take advantage of the work you are already doing. Here’s an approach we eventually found worked and what didn’t.

Things that help:

• Identify what staples are for your calorie budget, portions, and cooking needs. It will be the items you are buying most frequently.
• Think of at least two or three uses for something before you buy in quantity. An example of this is flour tortillas. Tortillas are a blank slate that can be used as a wrap, baked as a cracker, or even made as a quick quesadilla. 
• Remember staples include all types of food from condiments like ketchup and mustard to pre-packaged meals such as soup. 
• Choose package sizes to fit your needs but also your space. We bake all the time but we will never buy a 10 lb sack of flour even though we may go through all of it before it goes bad. This is simply a trade-off for storage space. 
• Staples also includes items that give you flexibility. Having frozen vegetables, fruits, or even frozen pre-cooked chicken on hand gives you easy ways to augment meals and dishes on an as-needed basis.
• Only buy two to three types of things in categories such as rice and pasta until you start to run out of them. Most of us don’t need extensive supplies of different noodles such as Spaghetti, Fettuccine, Elbows, Shells, etc. Having two or three on hand leaves a lot of creativity while keeping storage space maximized. 

Things that didn’t help:

• Buying food out of cooking ideas that aren’t actionable. It is very easy to think you will use a more exotic item but we have found, until you see it on the grocery list a couple of times, it’s probably not a staple.
• Using sale prices as the only motivator to increase the amount you buy may or may not produce the desired outcome. Sales come and go but what is in your fridge or pantry has a date and is taking up space. 
• Overstocking of staples can lead to accidentally hiding items. This problem leads to buying more of the items you already have and don’t need.
• Staples mean things you use over and over again. These are not items to buy in quantity if you are not sure how much you will like them. 

Wrapping Up

In this post, we have discussed how to start planning for a pantry and storage for staples. By watching your grocery list you can start to fill out what are staples for you. Once your staples are identified you can start purchasing items in bulk and take advantage of economies of scale. As discussed, this will also help eliminate waste on guessing what will work versus knowing what you use all the time. We will follow up this post with some thoughts on those economies of scale at a later date. 

The post How To Sort Out Kitchen Staples first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

TBH, Meal Planning Takes a Bit of Learning

Preparing meals in a larger number of serving sizes isn’t hard but it does change how you look at what you are creating. Keeping it interesting can feel problematic. When we started we learned only certain things that freeze well. Learning how to reheat food so it is palatable was also an area we had to learn.

For example, freezing homemade soup with noodles in it comes out terrible when reheated. You can make and freeze deep-fried fish but you have to reheat it correctly or it will be soggy. It also can’t just be thrown into a 425 F oven as it may burn before thawing. We learned that 20 minutes at 300 F and it will be perfect. All of this sounds complicated however it isn’t if someone has already learned those lessons so you don’t have to. We will cover those lessons later in another post.  

Interestingly enough you already know what meals freeze well. You have probably known for years. Your local grocery store has at least one if not more isles dedicated to them. Next time you are buying groceries take a look at the variety. Most of the frozen section is completely repeatable at home. It’s learning the freezing and reheating techniques that are problematic at first.

Let’s Start Where We Started

Before we get into nuances of thawing let’s talk about some basics. What we learned is to carve out a chunk of time for cooking. We then would prepare 10 servings of 3-4 dishes and freeze them. Learning what will be ok when it comes out of the freezer was a bit hit or miss at first. We would eventually come up with better preservation techniques but this was the start.

Not everyone has a lot of freezer space. This is where we started so we will start here. There are other options like canning, vacuum sealing, etc. to explore. In a worst-case scenario, you can buy an inexpensive mini-freezer fairly cheaply. All of these belong in another series of posts.

Here’s our rubric. We cook a meal that we can portion out into 8-10 servings. That gives us one meal right done fresh, one meal within 3 days as another meal, and can freeze the remaining. If we are dedicating a day to stock up, we may do 3-4 meals of 8-10 portions. Even if it is not used that day, we generally can reheat it and use it twice in the next 3 days.

Ok, Isn’t This a Thing Already?

Let’s pause here for a moment and ruminate. In a previous post, we discussed how this creates a known calorie count and food quantity. We didn’t invent this. If you stop and think about weight loss meal replacement programs like Jenny Craig, what are they? They are balanced nutrition and quantifiable portion size. You are paying for guidance and convenience. For us, and we feel for many, the prices were just unsustainable. We assert by using them you aren’t learning to help yourself and change your life habits. They also are targeted at weight loss, not management or gain.

It’s a Time Tradeoff, not More Time

Here is where everyone tells us it’s too much time. Let’s examine that with some data. Consider that cooking 1 meal may take 45 actively engaged minutes to cook. Active time reheating food is about 2-5 minutes. We will say two people are eating. For 10 servings, if you cook 5 times, that would be 45 minutes multiplied by 5 or roughly 3 hours and 45 minutes. When we cook 10 servings it is 45 minutes + 5 times reheating at 5 minutes. It is a huge time saver.

Not convinced? Here is what we also realized. Even at the fastest food fast food change it takes ~20 minutes to get food. By the time you get in your car, go sit in the drive-through, order, pay, and get home, you are into it at least 20 minutes. You don’t realize it because you are actively doing something. Got to a sit-down restaurant and it’s even more time. 

Wrapping Up

Not only does this process save time, it allows us to create the portion sizes we want. Much of what we found in stores was simply way too many calories or way too few. We also found much of the ultra-processed food was way too high in sodium or saturated fat as well. You are not us so maybe you will be ok with those things.

This post has given you a different way to look at meal preparation. It has also offered a way to think about how you invest your time and money in food. We have discussed the time savings of doing meal prep. In later posts, we will talk about other benefits of preparing meals like this.

The post You Can Make Ten As Quickly As Two first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Cooking Only Once in a While was Wastefull

We have always cooked our meals in some fashion or another. When younger it was simply a necessity. As time went by, it was more about food as fun. This change led us to attempt impractical recipes and to a lot of waste of ingredients. Even using one of my favorite magazines, Cooks Illustrated, we had a lot of wasted ingredients. We started to find we had a ¼ jar of this and ½ a jar of that left over from recipes. The more we saw of this, the less practical cooking ourselves became. As a result, if we wanted something special we went out. 

Both wastefully cooking at home and eating out had the same effects on us. They both blew up our calorie budget. Each was also costing us a lot of money. The latter one we will dig into more in another post. As I said in the earlier post the portion problem was such an epiphany, this is why. 

Cooking a Few more Portions Saves Time and Money

We decided to re-learn how to cook and plan. Why? We realized it takes roughly the same time to produce 10 servings of something as it does two. It’s that simple. We would go on to realize once we got good at it, it took about the same time to go out for a meal.

Don’t think it was easy giving up eating at restaurants. Eating out was another dopamine hit for us. It is for many people. Most people will also feel that they can’t cook or make restaurant-quality food. We learned the opposite. I can make a decent bowl of ramen and also can make some mean corn dogs. It took a while to get there but, hopefully, we can shorten the journey for some.

Would You Pay for a Horse You Can’t Ride?

We also started to look at this through a completely different lens. In our case, we were paying for calories we didn’t want. Most of us realize there is a cost to calories. We associate that cost with weight gain or loss. What most don’t equate is the cost of those calories you pay for but don’t eat. 

When you buy food at a restaurant you are paying a premium for the calories. The reason it is a premium is that the food is created for you by others. Would you pay for someone to paint your house and your deck if you didn’t have a deck? Of course not! Then why pay for food you aren’t going to eat?

At the Core of the Issue was Waste

We started to identify both of these issues. Ultimately our calorie budget made us use restaurants as little as possible. We recognized that the cost of the calories we were wasting was very high. As a result, we started to think we should invest our money in ourselves. We decided to get some decent kitchen equipment and start to cook at home more consistently.

Truth be told, it wasn’t just the calories or unpredictable portion sizes of restaurants. We learned quickly that counting calories was a pain. What made it worse was never knowing what was in the food. How much butter was in those mashed potatoes? Was that 4 or 5 ounces of fries? Not only was counting calories becoming more tedious, but it was also becoming completely unreliable.

Our Solution Was Imitating MREs and TV Dinners…Sort Of

Loving or hating the military is up to you. We feel we can learn from anyone. The one thing the military knows is logistics and the importance of food. The MRE or Meal Ready to Eat was the US evolution of food rations. It is designed to be stored for a long time and then used in the field. It has a description of everything in it nutrition-wise. What a brilliant idea for counting calories! Supposedly not too bad tasting as well? You know what, they weren’t too far from a civilian TV dinner either.

Now I’ve never had an MRE but I will make a huge assumption my food was better than a standard MRE. I know what I cook is way better than the TV dinners. We know the idea of an MRE doesn’t sound great to some. To be clear, we weren’t out to re-create them, we only wanted to use the concept.

We started creating our meals and storing them. This was a great way for us to create portions we wanted. We froze most things. The microwave was elevated in importance in our daily routine. They were easy to take to work. We also could put the dish in an app and not have to enter a guess for what we were eating. Because we made it ourselves, we could create it as a meal in our apps, and calorie counting became as easy as selecting it.

Wrapping Up

We had begun solving the problems of waste, and portion size, and making counting calories easier. This led to performing meal planning and learning a system for it. We will discuss how we worked through that in a post that follows.

Hopefully, at the end of this post, you can understand some of the challenges of eating out. It becomes an issue of control of calories and waste. While our previous post details come of the ways to work in eating out, overall, it wasn’t sustainable on a daily or even a few times a week. By re-learning to cook and package our meals we gained back money, time, and predictability. All of this helped us stay on track for our goals.

The post Cooking Simple For Better Control first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.