Just Nuke It! 

When at work I have never seen anyone in the company kitchen use anything but 100% power to nuke to oblivion whatever it was they were heating. This was my standard operation of a microwave as well. You select Add a Minute, or whatever time you need, hit go, and wait. After the time elapses, it beeps, and you open the door. If it is hot enough you pull it out and if not you repeat the steps until done. There isn’t a lot of magic there. 

Time and multiple attempts have convinced me that the popcorn setting on microwaves never produces good popcorn. In my opinion, the button needs to be labeled Destroy Popcorn. Let’s face it, you would think there wasn’t that much variation between companies in a standard bag of microwave popcorn but there is. For us using the bag’s advice of listening until popping slows was a far better method than the popcorn button.

Just a quick review of the basics of how a microwave works. If you want to get into the details of how a microwave works you can read about that in depth on other sites. A microwave uses a magnetron to excite water molecules. The more agitated the water gets, the more the heat it produces. The thermal limit of water at sea level is 212℉ before it turns into steam. This upper limit is why microwaves can’t brown food via the Maillard Reaction.   

The key technology used here is the magnetron. The microwave is rated by its power. It is simple enough to understand, that the more power, the faster it can heat food. How fast it heats food has positives and surprisingly some negatives. More power is fine, however, too much power isn’t great at times. It turns out too much power can lead to some overheating with messy results.  

Last, no matter what a manufacturer tells you, a microwave can’t roast or air fry. If the manufacturer states it can do those things, you are buying a hybrid with two separate machines built in. If you do some homework you will see it is simply a traditional oven with a microwave. A magnetron can only excite water not create convection or conduction via the dry heat needed for those cooking types. It is not simply not possible for a magnetron to roast or air fry.

Popcorn, Defrost and Vegetables, Oh My!

If you are like us, then you probably have only played around with all the presets, like popcorn. Let’s face it: We use a microwave to save time. What saves time? Full power!! True as that is, it is generally at the cost of something else. But first, about those preset buttons. 

In an attempt to apply the right power and time to provide the proper heating of your food, manufacturers create those preset buttons. Most microwaves do this through a set of mathematical equations by approximating how much water and mass the food has. With that approximation, the microwave then decides, based on its power output, how much time and power to use. Great because we all know exactly how much our frozen leftover lasagna weighs! No, most of us probably don’t unless we are dialed into how it was made, for what calorie budget, and the portion sizes we cut it into. 

Higher-end microwaves may use humidity, infrared, and sound to monitor cooking.  Oddly enough, popcorn seems to have driven a lot of this innovation.  If you have ever overcooked popcorn in a microwave, you understand why it is so critical not to have that happen. When popcorn is cooked too long in a microwave it will turn to a tar-like material and also produce an acrid smoke and smell. It can be so bad that you may need to replace your microwave. I know this from personal experience.

It’s Not Just About Water, Power, and Time 

All presets and management of cooking in a microwave is still about balancing power and time to increase the temperature of the food through the excitement of water. You will also read that they excite the molecules of fat and sugar. Realize those are mostly composed of water hence why we say water not all three. The last important key is the mass of the food. This is why you will see presets such as defrost by weight or bag size for popcorn. 

In these cases, the microwave adjusts the power and time to make sure it slowly raises the temperature of the food. Why slowly? If you have melted cold butter in a microwave and had it explode you know the reason. The cooking of the food is based on how deep the microwaves penetrate the food, where the water is in the food, and how much water is in the food.

Microwaves actually can only penetrate from one to one and a half inches. That means in small pieces of food they cook from the inside out whereas in large they cook from the outside in. In the case of outside in, the interior is done by conduction from the hot part of the food, not the microwave. This is why it is easy to overcook the outside of food and still have a cold center. 

A Pair of Examples

For example, butter has a lot of water and is small. The microwave cooks the melted butter inside out. As the butter superheats the water flashes to steam at 212F which expands rapidly creating an explosion. If you have made this mistake then you know what it is like to clean butter out of every nook and cranny in your microwave. 

My nemesis, Lasagna, is on the opposite side of the reheating problem. For us, frozen lasagna is a block of high-moisture frozen food usually stored in a plastic container. It is large enough that it cooks from the outside in. In the past, we would nuke this at high power. As a result of that reheating process, the outside bits got hot enough to destroy plastic containers. 

Back to the Presets

We still shy away from presets and here is why. I want to understand how my food is being cooked so I can use that in other places. If you have a microwave at work that is 800 watts it is not going to behave like your home microwave of 1000 watts. Our guesses and experiences were the ones in our work environment that didn’t have all the bells and whistles as well.   

When we started to understand how to use the microwave more effectively, we wanted to be able to use that knowledge and adapt to other microwaves. Since nothing is standardized we can’t hope the two machines are the same including their presets. Overall though, I am pretty sure we can get close to home if we simply use the same power settings and only change the amount of time we cook.

All Things in Moderation

Since moderation of power and time was key we started our experiments. As with the article on reheating, it doesn’t mean there is going to be an easy button or simple answer. After researching a bit we found Whirlpool puts out a pretty good list to explain power levels, foods, and how they go together.

But turning down the power means cooking longer, correct? It can, however, be more of a trade-off. By turning down the power, and increasing time, we get more predictable cooking times. This leads to being able to walk away from the machine rather than babysit it. For example, for our serving size of Lasagna, we can put it on for 10 minutes at 50% power and walk away. In our previous cooking style, we would microwave for a minute, wait 30 seconds, and repeat until cooked through. That left us babysitting our food for 7 or 8 minutes. 

This is not the case in popcorn which I don’t trust. For me, no matter the preset, sensor, or other dark arts, I babysit it. There are some items like this where full power and babysitting are needed. I will wait until I hear that popping slow down before I stop it. 

Wrapping Up 

In this post, we discussed some ways to use a microwave more successfully. By moderating power and temp you can achieve better cooking and reheating of food. By not using presets you also learn how to adapt to other microwaves that you use. These two points make the microwave an even more powerful tool in the kitchen.

The post How To Make Good Use of a Microwave 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.

Limiting Scope

This post will kick off a series of other more specific posts. Unfortunately, we feel you could write an article per type of food on how to reheat it. That is problematic time-wise and doesn’t run the steel thread of understanding the processes so others can self-help. It also doesn’t take into account a person’s individual calorie budget and serving sizes. We will get to how those change the art of re-heating. 

The Basics

For brevity let’s limit our discussion to some simple ideas that we can expand on later. We would assert that most of our cooking falls into 2 main ways of transferring heat:

• Convection is the transfer of heat from the air to the food such as happens in an oven.
• Conduction is transferring heat to the food by direct contact between the heat source and the food.

  We would also add there are only two ways of applying heat to cook food.

• Dry methods where the cooking process does not rely on a large amount of liquid to transfer heat. These, in our definition, are methods such as sauteing or roasting.
• Wet methods where the primary transfer is based on liquid such as water or oil. This type of cooking is how boiling, frying, and microwaving work.

Mix and Match

Almost all the food you cook will be a mix of these elements. Most cooking is about water management and reaching a safe temperature for the food. Taking that ride from raw to done imparts flavors and textures that please us such as caramelization via the Maillard Reaction. We may concentrate flavors via reductions of water as well such as in, well, a reduction. This method also applies to items like chicken stock or jams.

Where the confusion arises is that most things we cook are hybrids of the four bullet points above. What we want to do is understand what the outcome from our methods produces to reheat it. Did our cooking create something that needs to be reheated vs a dry method or a wet method? This begs the question do we reheat it through convection or conduction?

Hybrid Examples 

Let’s examine two hybrids, lasagna, and fried fish, to understand what we are discussing in terms of methods vs outcomes. We found it easy to ruin both lasagna and fried fish if reheated incorrectly. When we think of lasagna we see it as a dry convection method. For fried fish, it is usually a wet conduction method. The output is a bit different though.

We would classify lasagna as a wet method like a stew. Why such a weird idea? Lasagna cooks by method provided by its water content even though the heat is powered by dry convection. It is the same process that happens when making a casserole or braising meat. Dry heat in an oven raises the temperature of the fluid in the lasagna to cook it through boiling and/or steaming. A microwave is a wet conduction method as it uses the water in the food to heat it. Practically speaking a microwave steams or boils food from the inside out. That makes lasagna a perfect candidate to reheat in a microwave. 

Have you ever tried to microwave fried fish or fries? They turn out pretty nasty in our opinion but why? They are both technically cooked as wet methods of conducting cooking. The outcome of frying food is to drive most of the moisture out of the exterior of the food and create a crust locking moisture in. If that moisture is then released as steam, you get soggy fries and fish. What does a microwave do, well, it produces steam. That is why those foods need dry convection heat to reheat them

Two Other Variables

There are two other variables in our reheating discussion. They are the concepts of thermal capacity and safety. Most of us want to reheat food to preserve its original quality. In concept our matrix of methods above accounts for most items. Thermal capacity and food safety get in the way of that at times so we will set up how to deal with them here. First, let’s identify them

• The USDA states that all leftovers should be reheated to 165℉ to be considered safe.
• The surface-to-mass ratio of the food dictates how much thermal capacity it has and how long heating it thoroughly will take.

The first thing you will notice is that 165℉ is above what some foods are initially cooked to. Let’s talk about that one a little more in-depth

Is It Done?

The USDA has to deal with a broad population which means groups like the very old very young and everyone in between. That means they must put out safety information that others may not suit all. They also must account for all different parts of the food chain from the field where the cow is raised to re-heating leftover roast. That is a lot of places for bad things to happen and bugs to grow.

To us, if a steak is over 135℉ it is overcooked. That is us, not others. We sometimes go as low as 125F for a roast. That is what you will find many people consider rare and is a common way of cooking it.  Personally, fish over 145℉-150℉, unless deep fried where we don’t notice, is overdone. Won’t reheating leftovers push it past the point we like it? That being our pre-packaged hamburger and chicken is getting pushed to 165℉ because we can’t trust it.

We take a ‘let’s be reasonable’ approach and use the USDA as guidelines. We buy food from known sources. When we prep and cook, we have a clean kitchen that gets cleaned regularly. We store food in the fridge or freezer properly. Nothing gets left in the zone for long unless it is intentional. Simply put, we don’t take a lot of chances so we can cook to whatever temperature we are comfortable with. You need to do you, but when you push the temps up, you aren’t re-heating, you are re-cooking. 

Mass to Surface Area

This is one of the most misunderstood variables and one of the most important in heating. Here are the two axioms to know

• The larger something is, the more time it takes to cook. 
• How fast it absorbs heat is directly related to its surface area where it contacts the heat. 

One caveat to that is the microwave but let’s stick to the general for now. Based on these two axioms, we want to reheat food up to temp as quickly as possible without re-cooking it. What isn’t obvious is that it creates conditions where we want to use the lowest heat possible so we don’t overcook the outer part of the food before the interior reaches temp. 

Important Temps to Know

One last piece of the reheating puzzle is two important temperatures. At sea level water boils and turns to steam at 212℉. The Maillard Reaction, or browning of food begins at anywhere from 280℉ to 330℉. Depending on what sugars are present, caramelization follows the Maillard reaction. Eventually, you end up in the burnt stage of Pyrolysis which, in short form, means burnt. 

Why are these temps important? They are important to know so we get what we want from reheating. Do we care about a crust? Then we don’t want to create steam via a wet method. What if we want to raise the temp of something without further browning? In that case, we want to stay under 280℉ 

Back to the Examples

Our serving size of lasagna has a high mass-to-surface ratio. To cook it without further caramelizing, we need to reheat it at a low temp. Because we don’t want to overcook the outside before the inside is warm, we want to take our time but we also want to eat. That is a perfect case for a slow-wet method of cooking so we boil it correct? No, but close.

A microwave, when used correctly, provides a wet method of cooking that steams the lasagna from the inside out. Oddly enough, as water is removed from tomato sauce it is capable of creating a temperature higher than the boiling point of water. Those temps can cause caramelization and overcooking to occur. Yes, we have burned lasagna and melted plastic in a microwave when not careful. For that reason, we want to slowly heat our food at 212℉. For our portion size of 4-6 oz, that usually means a microwave on half power for 10 minutes in a lightly sealed container to hold in the steam.

Our fish is the exact opposite as they are usually high surface-to-mass pieces. We add it to a preheated toaster oven that is running at 275℉ degrees for approximately 10 minutes. This low dry heat helps preserve the crust without causing more browning. The fish is small enough it heats quickly without being over cooked. 

Wrapping up

In this post, we have discussed some of the basic physics and chemistry involved in cooking. By recognizing how the food was created, and what it has become, you can decide how to reheat it. Truly, no one wants to eat leftovers that don’t feel close to the original food they were. If we can get them close, we can save ourselves time and energy in making one-off meals. We can also control how much we waste when we overcook.

The post How To Better Reheat Leftover food first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

We travel a lot on weekends. For us, it was normal to eat home-prepared meals all week, and then eat out on the road. That was a simple tradeoff for us. We couldn’t or didn’t want to maintain a specific schedule or may have no way to heat something we made on the road. Let’s face it, road food was also a treat.

We also tracked our weight every week. If you are traveling, scales weren’t always in the picture for weekends. What we noticed would be Friday we would be at weight X. On Monday morning we would be up 2-4 lbs. By Tuesday or Wednesday, we will be back at X. Maddening to see what happens every week. When we decided to start tracking our calories, we started to see an obvious trend. 

On the weekends our calorie intake went up. Yay! We found our smoking gun. It turns out not so much. Since we know the 1000-calorie rule has lost favor, we knew weight gain wasn’t that instantaneous. Ok, maybe you would gain a couple of ounces but not up to 4 lbs from having some extra calories over a weekend.   

The Bigger Picture

It would be easy to simply place the gain on the additional food. We did that at first and tried lowering our calorie intake because math is math. After a bit of time with no changes, we saw no differences. We decided there had to be more at work than just food. After thinking about it we realized our weekly routine was drastically different from our weekend routine.  Some things we noticed the differences and changes:

• Water intake was lower.
• Physical exertion was higher.
• We drank more alcohol on weekends. 
• Sleep patterns were disrupted. 
• We ate food that was higher in fat and salt. 
• As physical exertion increased so did hunger which pushed our calorie intake higher.
• A completely sedentary pattern of traveling for 3-5 hours either via car, plane, etc.

How this happens is pretty easy and it isn’t always obvious. Let’s say we get up early for a raft trip. We spend a day in hot weather and probably don’t drink as much water as we should to compensate. For food, we bring some salty snacks like jerky or nuts that can survive the warm day. Getting in and out of the boat, going down the river, etc. uses muscles in ways we don’t usually use them. That’s just the day. 

After the trip, we stop at the local restaurant and wolf down a huge burger to compensate for the light eating day. That night we would sit out late on the deck have an extra glass of wine or beer and reminisce about the day. The next day we would be starving as our bodies are now repairing muscle on food that probably isn’t balanced. Let’s face it, it wasn’t the kale chips we would be reaching for at that time.

We tried changing up our food to be ‘healthier’ but it didn’t help. Ordering a chicken footlong from Subway instead of a big burger didn’t help. Oddly enough, we noticed lower weekend gains when we ate fried chicken and jo-jos as an emergency meal from a gas station hot case than we did trying to eat healthy choices. For us, it still was about controlling portion size and finding hidden calories such as are in sports drinks.

As we monitored our weight bumps, we would occasionally see the opposite result. There were weekends when we would have the exact opposite result. We would start the weekend high, and then, magically, find our weight the same or lower after the weekend. As we dug through our data we found the weekends we stayed with smaller portions, we had less dramatic fluctuations. There was more to it, however.

At first, we thought it was the extra calories which included more salt and fat. We also theorized it was due to additional calories. Sometimes we thought it was the extra physical exertion putting our bodies in ‘threat’ mode to store calories.  In some ways, we felt these were all contributors however not any one of these on their own seemed like a true ‘smoking gun’ to point at as a cause.

Want an Answer?

We do too and we have a theory but no simple answer. While not doctors or dieticians we were pretty sure it wasn’t simply the calories we ate. We did some experimentation and research and found a correlation between keeping our calorie intake moderated to what we have during the week and the weekend. Shocker, correct? Not really. It didn’t tell the full story and we still had some fairly large swings in weight despite modifying our eating habits.

We noticed we could eat more and still not have our weekend ‘bump’ sometimes. On those weekends we consumed extra fiber and made sure we consumed water. Hotter weather and alcohol seem to also contribute to the bump. The paradox was we were expending more calories, eating only a little more, and gaining 2-4 lbs. It didn’t make sense. 

Your GI Tract

Our GI tract is responsible for moving everything we eat and drink from inlet to outlet so to speak. Most of us have heard it takes anywhere from 6-24 hours to process our food. We know this to be true since we get hungry sometimes fairly soon after we eat a meal. If you have ever had food poisoning or the 24-hour flu, you know symptoms show up rather quickly. Those numbers are both less than a weekend correct? Yes, but what we think of as digestion is only part of the process. 

For some people, the full food ride from the fork to the bathroom can take between 14 and 73 hours according to Healthline.  That means whatever you have eaten may stay with you for up to 3 days. Like any machine, when we are operating routinely, with known inputs, we expect known outputs. If we change that routine on the weekend by increasing load (eating more) while decreasing lubrication (water and fiber) we can’t expect the routine processing times. 

That is our Empirical Theory

Let’s play our raft adventure back and see how this can happen. In our example, hotter temps and lower water intake can increase digestion time. Having salty snacks that are low in fiber, high fat, and protein can cause digestion to take longer. The use of alcohol can cause dehydration as well. All of this can slow digestion. We then add more calories in the form of a burger and fries than we are used to processing. All of that can cause our GI Tract to come under additional pressure and slow down. 

If you are carrying extra weight on Monday and Tuesday after a weekend binge this is one plausible cause. As we started to see this pattern we became more focused on how to stay hydrated and eat more appropriately when on the road or out doing our sports. We tried to keep as much of our routine, well, routine as we could. Most importantly, we learned to keep hydrated and get more fiber to help mitigate the ‘weekend bump’.

This is still an ongoing experiment for us. When we can come up with more concrete findings we plan on updating this post. Until we do, do your experiments and research. At worst, you will find what is causing you that weekend weight gain in your situation.

Ewww…gross

We are biological creatures with biological processes. It is neither gross nor pretty. What we are talking about is something that is part of being human, animal, and most other living organisms. Digestion is simply the breakdown and separation of food into what we need and what we don’t. Sometimes, you have to simply be ok talking about it so you can understand its effects on us. 

Wrapping up

We talked about how the GI Tract is impacted by changes in routines. We have also drawn an empirical correlation between GI Tract health, changes in routine, and weekend weight gain. In the articles we have linked, there are many steps on how to avoid the ‘bump’ so we won’t re-iterate them. While there is no quick answer, this post has given some insight into one possible cause of our weekend weight gain. Do your research to decide if that is what is affecting you. 

The post Do We Really Get Big On The Weekend 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.

A Little History:

As with all things food, the flour tortilla’s origin is somewhat contested. While corn tortillas aren’t as disputed as corn originated in Mexico, flour and its uses are a little harder to trace. Some believe these came from Mexico, and some think of them as Tex-Mex. There is even some idea that they are by-products of Catholic, Jewish, and Moorish immigration in the Northern Mexico / SW US area. 

Do we care where it came from? Probably not but it’s fun to ruminate on its origin stories.  Even more interesting is that all of the above cultures and religions have some form of unleavened bread or flatbread. The tortilla is one of those breads that can be either or. What does that make it? That makes it a great stand-in for other breads!

The Calorie Budget Conscience And Consistent

We won’t argue that mass-produced tortillas are great. That said, we also won’t make the argument that mass-produced bread is great. Mass-produced tortillas are simply practical and predictable. There are times when that wins out over homemade especially when considering pantry staples.

For most of our items, we use Mission flour Fajita Tortillas because they are the best! Not exactly. We use them because they are ubiquitous, inexpensive, consistent, and have a decent shelf life. No matter the grocery store, we can generally find them.  They are 110 calories a piece. This is perfect for our calorie budget. By the time we get done adding toppings and or other ingredients, their meal comes in at around 200-250 calories per tortilla-based item. 

But What Can You Do With Them?

You could write an entire book on using tortillas other than in Tex-Mex and Mexican dishes. They can be substituted for just about any flat or unleavened bread. We use them for everything from our Doritos to pizzas. We don’t have time for a book so instead we will focus on cooking styles and examples. 

The Out Of Package

• Wraps of meats, cheese, and veggies.
• Folded sandwiches.
• A side for soups and chilis. 

The Baked Flat

• In impromptu personal pizza using pizza sauce, cheese, and other toppings.
• The above folded for a calzone.
• Covered with olive oil,  garlic, rosemary, and sea salt like Focaccia. 
• Covered with buttered, garlic and zaatar similar to Naan.
• Spiced with seasonings, cut into wedges, and baked like Dorritos.
• Spiced with sugar and cinnamon and butter like cinnamon toast. 

The Baked Or Microwaved Rolled

• Meat and cheese wraps to create melts.  
• Mini-calzones and pizza rolls. 
• Breakfast roll-ups with eggs, meat, and veggies.

A note on cooking methods. Baking and frying them will create a crispy tortilla. The higher the heat, the more likely it is to brown or burn. Microwaves will cook them but will create a chewier result. This is also why they are so versatile to have around. You can be creative with textures by simply changing the heating method.

And yes you can deep fry them, pan fry them, and even fill them with seafood. They are a blank slate. That is the point. If we keep frozen chicken, ham, cheddar, mozzarella, salami, pizza sauce, and some basic spices, we can easily make multiple combinations of food. They also give us more flexibility so we can easily use up leftovers creatively. And one more point, they freeze well if you put wax paper between them before freezing.

Here are the wins

• Save money by using one basic staple that is cheap in multiple ways.
• Always have a starch on hand for when you need something impromptu.
• Give them a purpose past Taco Tuesday where there are usually some left over. 
• Save time as many of the above take no time to make. 

What? No Recipes? 

No, we aren’t providing them because in many ways they already exist. Ok, maybe one for the Doritos. The goal of this post is really to call attention to how a single staple can create so many different meals. There are very talented people out there who I use the recipes of all the time. When it comes to the ingredient list, we may substitute a tortilla on hand for one of the recipe’s ingredients. That is why we focused on getting information on how to simplify things like meal planning and cooking. 

In this specific case, we also feel like each of the items discussed is a formula. The actual ingredients you use are based on your taste. If you like cheesy pesto pizzas tortillas instead of pepperoni and red sauce, you do you. And let’s face it, this is not a meal item that is going to be on the next Iron Chef America. This is a meal item to simplify making food within a calorie and time budget.

Wrapping Up

In this post, we discussed how useful the tortilla can be as a staple in the kitchen. By keeping these types of basic, blank canvas staples around, you give yourself meal flexibility. With that flexibility also comes calorie consistency and time savings. This simple example is how we started to recognize what we need to keep on hand and really, what we didn’t to avoid eating out more often.

The post Get More Out Of A Simple Tortilla first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Big Meals Can Mean Big Calories

As we looked to reduce our calorie intake we faced a big challenge in our three full meals a-day diet. When growing up, we were trained to eat what were known as three square meals (considered high-calorie and hardy). While in decline, we still have a cultural norm around it. Remember, food isn’t just about the intake of calories. For some, it is also a time for family and socialization. 

Not Everyone Does It

The reality is not all cultures share this type of meal. In other cultures, the day’s main meal may historically be mid-day. This was the case with the Canadian half of our family. Other cultures such as Greek and Spanish may share later meals or multiple smaller meals.  Our mention of that is to point out that there is variance in our world in styles and times of eating.  

Getting Past Old Habits

For our goals, we started to question what a full meal was and how to create a similar nutrition profile with items that many consider snacks. For us raised where a meal has a main dish and sides that shift can be hard to break through mentally. A meal could be a ham sandwich and chips with pickles or a steak with green beans and baked potato. This differs from what we would call snack items such as cheese, trail mix, and even beef sticks. In the snacks as a meal model, there is no primary entree to build the meal around. There is only the balance of items such as those recommended in the USDA’s MyPlate. 

Do we need to have a full meal main and side dish prepared by ourselves or others? More and more people are saying no, however, the 3 a day is a simple way to break up caloric intake evenly over our waking hours. More importantly, how we change our perception about meals can have a large impact on our calorie budget. As America has become more of a snack culture, the challenge has become that those snacks are not healthy choices. 

Change the Portion, Not the Balance

This is where snacks get a bad name but they don’t have to be. We aren’t saying to eat chips, candy, and soda as a meal replacement. If we revisit the idea of a meal with sides its origin was a balanced plate. This is not different from the idea of tapas or the USDA’s MyPlate. We can drive that need for the big three in a diet through snacks without the challenging portion sizes.

Why is this concept important? How do snacks as meals benefit us?  When homemade or created from from foods we already have on hand they can:

• Allow flexibility in meal schedules.
• Use existing staples such as cheese, nuts, fruits, and crackers already on hand.
• Align our intake of food to our nutrition needs and calorie budgets. 
• Help manage hunger spikes without over-eating.

Snacks Aren’t Evil, Choices Can Be

What foods are we talking about? Are we talking potato chips, clam dip, and pizza rolls? No. But you do you if that is what you like, is in your calorie budget, and fits your nutrient needs. Our guess is they won’t. What we are talking about is more about balanced food created or on hand at home. Here are a few examples of meals:

• Tuna salad, crackers, pickles and cheese.
• Jerky, trail mix, dehydrated broccoli florets, yogurt.
• Beef sticks, granola bars, fresh vegetables such as carrots or cucumbers.
• Hard-boiled eggs, tortillas, cheese and salsa.
• Smoked fish, crackers, cottage cheese, celery.   

Each of the above has a mix of items that contain the big 3 and can be kept readily on hand. Are they healthy? Healthy is a subjective term based on your needs and life choices. Many of the items discussed can be produced at home to have better control over ingredients.  The more important thing is that they can all be created from items that can be kept on hand, and are mostly shelf-stable or refrigerate/freezer-friendly. 

Are We Saying Eat UHP Foods?

We understand that items such as beef sticks, jerky, and even fruit-flavored yogurt are now considered Ultra-High Processed Food. These new guidelines include granola bars, ham, ice cream, and candy. Our approach to dealing with these guidelines is to keep all things in moderation. We know that there is mercury in Tuna therefore, not being in an at-risk group, we may only have it twice a month. 

We also produce items like jerky, bread, and granola bars so we can control much more of our food supply. You do you because it’s your body. You will make me give up my homemade jerky, ice cream, and candies when you pull them from my cold dead hands.  We want to live simply and still eat better more often than not.

We’re Deconstructing a Meal

In truth, all of the above are very similar in concept to deconstructed meals.  Let’s take the first one with tuna. Isn’t this simply a tuna melt which is tuna salad, bread (a starch, but we use crackers), pickles, and cheese (which makes it a melt)? Doesn’t the one with hard-boiled eggs and tortillas seem a lot like Hueveo Rancheros? That is the point. 

By using a snack approach to balanced meals we can reduce the amount of time we spend cooking. To do this look at a meal and break it down. Can you substitute different parts of the meal for other items? If you can’t then can you use the ingredients on hand together as a full meal? Balance is the key.

Many of us have one-off items such as grabbing an apple as a snack. The challenge is balance. This is not to say we don’t enjoy a bag of chips or cookies once and a while. Our blog’s premise is not about right or wrong or healthy or not. We want to reduce the barriers to simplifying getting to your goals by pointing out alternate ways of getting your Daily Required Intake or DRI. When we hear snacks there is a perception it isn’t healthy. 

Wrapping Up

We have discussed many aspects of snacks as meal replacements. As with all health and food-related topics, it is your choice. We assert that eating 3 big meals a day, even if homemade, can be outside our caloric needs. The timing of the meals may or may not be the best for your body and lifestyle. Rather than sitting down to a full plate of food, it may help to just grab some roast deli chicken crackers, cheese, and some trail mix instead. 

The post The Best Meals Can Be Simple Snacks first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.