Bread Seems Problematic

Baking bread seems to be a challenging task for many people. There are many variables, such as yeast, moisture levels, gluten creation, and lack of gluten creation, all of which contribute to bread not being simple. If you follow some recipes, you must learn a new language with words like autolyze, punch down, and window pane. Worse, several sites feature extravagantly decorated bread that resembles art more than food.

Well, bully for them! That is not us. We have busy lives, need sandwiches or toast, and want something made by hand. That is where this bread recipe came from. This bread does take time, but much of that time is not active, meaning you can walk away. This is also a ‘no-knead’ bread, meaning it doesn’t require a lot of hand or machine work to knead the dough. 

Source callout. This was someone else’s recipe we modified. We wanted a base bread that had the benefits of both bread flour’s gluten and whole wheat nutrition. Next, we prefered a moister bread than the original recipe so we added butter to the mix. We also like a taller loaf for sandwiches, which requires adjustments to the amount of ingredients, pan size, and cook time. Finally, the original recipe had two problematic flaws that some people struggled with, which we simplified and will address.

Many recipe sites provide pictures and videos of the step-by-step process for making something. We won’t do that. Why? Because we feel it buries the most critical steps in a lot of noise. Breaking with tradition, we will provide you with some pointers on the essential steps and key considerations that will help you break this recipe. Also, if you haven’t read it, here is our guide to fixing bread.

First, we are using a less typical 9 x 5 x 3 pan size. We wanted a bigger loaf for larger slices. One of the primary keys to making bread is ensuring the correct pan size. If the pan is too small, the bread will not be supported and will have too much ‘muffin top’. Using a pan that is too large, the bread will not produce the shape we associate with sandwich bread because it cannot rise over the rim.

• Always measure flour by weight or a spoon-and-level method. This is where the issue of having too wet or too dry dough can arise. No matter what you do, every recipe is going to be off based on the unidity of your kitchen. This is why we prefer to show a picture of what a hydrated dough looks like rather than simplify this further.
• Proof your yeast in warm water to ensure it is alive. While some yeast don’t technically need this, it is simple.
• Warm water is defined as 105°F-110°F, which is slightly above body temperature. Yeast dies if the water is too high above that level, and they won’t create lift if it is too low below that level.

Here is what proofing yeast looks like. Good yeast will foam in under a minute when mixed in warm water. 

Water Content

To achieve good bread, you must balance the water content with the structure. This is especially tricky in no-knead breads. Because flours contain moisture, and eyeballing measuring cups full of water is not 100% accurate, you need to tune your dough. If the dough is too sticky, fold in a tablespoon of flour. If the dough is too dry, it won’t rise in the oven, so add a tablespoon of water. You want to see a shaggy dough like this. 

Doubling 

Because yeast bread is made with living organisims, the times in this recipe are approximate. Yeast is unfeeling and cannot be forced to work faster; they do not care about your schedule or timeline. To achieve a good rise in dough, you must allow the yeast to do its work, which takes time. We can encourage them to work faster through warm conditions. For example, we proof the bread in a room at 78°F. If your kitchen is 67°F, it will take more time. If it is 82°F, it will take less time. 

Shaping

 After your bulk or first rise, you shape the dough and place it into a greased and floured pan. You must pull and stretch the dough instead of simply rolling it out like a pie crust. By stretching and folding, the air bubbles are distributed more evenly, resulting in a better rise and a more even crumb. Dusting the dough with flour before the second rise will also help keep the bread from sticking to the tea towel or plastic covering it. 

Now let’s make some bread!

Here is our recipe for a straightforward, simple, yet tasty homemade bread. Remember, being succesful will come down the following points.

• Make sure your yeast is alive.
• Make sure your water is 105-110F
• Adjust the mositure levels based on your kitchen and its humidyt.
• Give the yeast time to do their job.
• Use all the times as guidelines and not hard and fast rules.

Print

Simple ‘No Knead’ Basic Sandwich Loaf

A basic recipe that is easy to follow and fairly foolproof.

Cuisine American

Keyword Bread

Prep Time 30 minutes minutes

Cook Time 25 minutes minutes

Resting Time 5 hours hours

Total Time 5 hours hours 55 minutes minutes

Servings 12 Slices

Author Pete

Equipment

• 1 Bread Pan 9x5x3
• 1 Bowl
• 1 Bowl Scrapper
• 1 Spatula
• 1 Dish Towel, moistened (or greased plastic wrap)
• Measuring Cups and Spoons
• 1 Dusting wand (handy if you bake a lot but not 100% necessary)
• 1 Digital Thermometer with a fine tip (the best way to check for doneness but not 100% necessary).
• 1 Whisk

Ingredients

• 2 cups bread flour Use the 'spoon and level' technique to fill cup.
• 2 cups whole wheat
• 2 1/4 tsp instant yeast or one packet
• 2 tsp fine salt
• 2 ½ tsp sugar
• 2 cups warm water (at 105-110F)
• 2 tbsp melted butter (cooled to room temp)
• Additional AP or bread flour (for adjusting dough and dusting surfaces)
• 1 tsp canola oil to grease pan (or nuetral flavored oil)

Instructions

• Gather the ingredients.
• In a large mixing bowl, combine flour yeast, salt and sugar.
• Use a whisk or spoon to blend well.
• In a small bowl combine water, butter (or oil).
• Slowly add wet ingredients into dry while mixing Use the bowl scraper (or spatuala) to fold dough onto itself until combined.
• Note: Water content of the flour varies. If the dough is too sticky, dust with small amounts of flour until it becomes workable by hand. If it is too dry, add a teaspoon of water. See photo of shaggy dough above as a guide to correct moisture level
• Cover the bowl with moistened dish towel or greased plastic wrap and set it in a draft-free place to rise for 4 hours.
• When dough has doubled in size, grease a 9-by-5-inch loaf pan with oil then dust with flour.
• Scrape the dough out onto a well-floured surface.
• With floured hands, shape the dough into a rough rectangle about 9 inches by 12 inches.
• Note: You may still need to adjust moisture level here. The dough should be workable without sticking to floured hands.
• Note: This bread doesn't need to be ‘punched down’ like others. Minimize the amount of time you work it to retain as much of the air bubbles as possible.
• Make 2 folds. With the short side facing you, fold 1/3 twards the middle. Fold the other third on top of the previous fold. Pinch seams
• Gently roll into round log and press to make it the square shape of the pan.
• Drop it into the prepared pan and gently push down and into corners to make it even.
• Dust top of loaf with flour
• Cover the pan loosely with a moistened dish towel, and set in a draft-free place for 1 hour, or until it is approximately double in size.
• About 45 minutes before the loaf is done rising, heat the oven to 425F.
• Remove the dish towel and dust the risen loaf with a little more flour.
• Place pan in middle rack of oven.
• Bake the loaf for 25 minutes, until it's a deep golden brown and sounds hollow when tapped. You are looking for an internal temp of 200-205F.
• Note: All ovens cook slightly differently. Use 25 minutes as a guide to start checking for being done. You may need 5-10 minutes more cook time.
• Note: These temps and times are at sea level. You may need adjust your cooking times and temps for your area.
• Remove from the oven and rest for 5 minutes
• Use a dish towel to turn out onto a cooling rack.
• Cool completely (2-3 hours) before slicing.

Wrapping up

We hope this bread works out for you as well as it did for us and that it makes bread more approachable. It doesn’t take rocket science to produce a good loaf. Once you have it set up, you can add to and modify it to fit your needs. You could add seeds for an extra crunch or raisins, cinnamon, and extra sugar for a sweeter dessert bread. The idea is to get something to work and then iterate over it to tune it to your needs. 

The post How To Make A Simple Loaf Of Bread first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Note: Food storage is a complicated topic with many different nuances and techniques to explore. We will begin by talking about the subject iteratively. That approach can provide value while we move from the straightforward to the complex. Our goal is to give the reader something tangible to walk away with knowing this is not an all-encompassing post.

Bad and Spoiled are Different

To begin, let’s start with an understanding of spoilage. Non-shelf stable food is susceptible to spoilage for two hours when left in the danger zone (40-140℉). That is a blanket statement and there are other nuances to this that we can make exceptions for however, let’s stick to what is considered safe for all. Even shelf-stable foods will eventually go bad if not stored correctly. Eventually, even cooking oil can spoil by going rancid. 

We need to differentiate between the concepts of spoiled and bad.  Spoiled is food that is unsafe to eat due to pathogens and other nasties that can make you sick. Bad is a subjective term we use to discuss something that has degraded and has become unpalatable. Here is how we differentiate:

• We don’t think others would argue that when raw chicken sits unrefrigerated at 80℉ for 6 hours it should be considered spoiled. The chicken left out like that has a high probability of pathogens such as salmonella. 
• We would consider raw chicken bad, not spoiled if it has freezer burn. As a result of freezer burn, the chicken may have off flavors or less than pleasing textures. The chicken is still usable in such dishes as soup but may not make great fried chicken if the freezer burn is extensive.
• Brown sugar left open, in a high-humidity environment, will become unusable due to clumping as it is hygroscopic (attracts water). It will taste the same, but it has turned bad in terms of use such as creaming.

We Avoided Spoiled but Not Bad

In this example, some can become very ill from the spoiled chicken as cooking it to a safe temperature alone may not remove all the toxins. In contrast, the freezer-burned chicken and clumped sugar still have culinary possibilities but their potential has been limited. Those are two drastically different concepts. We want to avoid both spoiled and bad and proper storage helps us stop all three cases. 

When we started doing this, we made a lot of mistakes around bad not spoiled. It turns out it is easy to have this happen. Most of us know we don’t leave the chicken out on the patio for hours on end. What we didn’t realize was how to manage our storage at home so things didn’t get stale or become freezer-burned. 

Dividing Storage is About Usage

Let’s break storage into a  few segments and purposes based on what we learned worked for us. These are not guidelines for how long they can or should store something. These are empirical classifications based on what worked for us. In another post, we will discuss the economies of scale this approach offers to limit wasted food, money, and time.

We divided up the storage into 5 primary functions to keep us organized:

• Short-term cold and shelf-stable storage. These were our fridge and kitchen cupboards. We learned to keep a set of ‘staples’ that any time we used, immediately went on a shopping list in our app. 
• Short-term frozen storage: This is the freezer in our kitchen. It holds items like frozen pizzas, ice cream, fish sticks, ice cubes, etc. to have certain highly used or on-demand items at hand in the kitchen.
• Mid-term cold and cooling for freezing. This mini-fridge contains items such as pickles, sauces, eggs, cheese, etc. which must be kept out of the zone. We also use the fridge to prep items for frozen storage.
• Mid-term frozen and shelf-stable storage. This is our second freezer and pantry and is where the differentiators between bad and spoiled show up the most. We will talk about why this happened so often later in the post. Our goal is to use anything we place in this within 3-6 months.
• Deep frozen and shelf-stable storage. This segment of storage differed from our mid-term storage. These areas included our basement where we have shelves dedicated to economy of scale staples such as flour, dried fruits, and oil. We processed items for deep cold storage in a way they could last up to a year.

Intent is Key to Making it Work

Most of us know how to make use of the first 3 storage segments we mentioned. What we added was the intent behind using them to stay organized and not produce waste. By establishing a pattern of use for them, we were able to monitor them through an app and magnetic whiteboard on the fridge/freezer. Being intentional, with a way to check what was going bad, cut our waste dramatically. This mindset also helped us in other ways.

By forcing us to use more at home, it also became the driver for helping us break away from the restaurant problem. Eventually, we would use vacuum sealing, dehydrating, curing, and caning to augment storage life. This is essential in keeping items like homemade granola, candies, and crackers from going bad due to humidity.

The Longer the Storage, The More Learned

The last two bullets are where the hard learnings kicked in. Let’s talk about storage time first. You can technically store items, properly packaged, in deep storage for more than a year. There are lots of people who practice a homestead-like lifestyle and groups like the US military do this. We say homestead-like as the practice of homesteading, which drove the expansion of the US, was outlawed in totality by 1986.

It takes equipment, time, learning, long-term planning, organization, and a lot of extra space to make use of these techniques successfully. We decided this wasn’t going to work for us except on a few special occasions. Instead, we put a cap of 1 year on all raw items with a maximum of 3 months for extra portions and store-bought pre-packaged food.

We recognized one of the keys to making extra portions was finding ways to store them. There were also the ingredients that needed long-term storage. The first obvious choice was to freeze both the portions and any non-shelf-stable ingredients. It wasn’t as easy as it seemed. To that end, we will do another post on freezing ‘how to’ but first we will talk about our learnings.

Bad Comes From Air

We immediately learned any items exposed to air in a freezer, except liquids, can exhibit freezer burn in as little as 2 months. Being exposed to air didn’t mean storing in BPA-free plastic containers was safe. Any exposure to air, be it air in a container or out of it, had the same effect. In the beginning, this limited us to only freezing items like soups, pasta sauces and dishes, rice, and cooked vegetables. Cooked and raw meats, poultry, and fish all needed extra protection if the goal was storage over a couple of months.

As mentioned before, this meant some sort of vacuum sealing or other protection method. We learned this was very easy and freed up a lot of space but due to the density of the information, requires its post to explain. Vacuum sealing something dry and hardy like cooked sausage is not hard. Vacuum sealing soft or wet items like bread and raw fish is problematic. Again, that is another post that we will link here after it becomes available

It’s All About Management

The key here was managing stock and using what we had efficiently. It turned out to be no different than managing a home project or budget but with some twists. The primary difference with the management of these items was because they were out of sight, they were out of mind.

Tips for Managing Storage:

• Find an app or other way of documenting what is in mid to long-term storage and keep it up to date with the expiration date you need to use it by.
• Set up a reminder on your phone or calendar to meal plan twice a week. Write the menu for 3-4 days’ worth of meals on an information radiator such as a small whiteboard or Google calendar.
• Use your meal planning to ‘drain’ your reserves. This way you begin figuring out how fast things are moving through storage.
• Once a week, set up a cooking schedule to replenish your reserves from your frozen raw ingredients and pantry. 
• Keep some store-bought items such as pasta, sauce, frozen pizza, and lunch meats in the mix as needed to relieve the pressure to cook when life gets too busy.
• Label everything that goes into deep cold storage and keep it up to date. Empirically, we feel we have a better chance of finding Amelia Airheart, D. B. Cooper, or Jimmy Hoffa than something buried, un-labeled in the back of a full freezer. 
• Try to have your meal planning make use of all currently stored in a 2-3 month period which means don’t over-create dishes for mid to long-term storage. 

It’s Been a Long Post!

This has been a long post and if you are still with us thank you and we hope it has been of some help. We will break down items here in more detail in future posts. There are many nuances we didn’t speak to here due to that. We found optimizing storage and planning are not easy subjects to learn. It is at this point you are becoming what we define as a chef by helping the home restaurant run efficiently and at scale.  It is a learning curve. 

The post Better Ways To Store Food By Usage first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Chefs, Cooks, and Celebrities…Oh My!

Chefs make their living creating food and running restaurants. In many countries, they are also stars in the media. Some teach Master Classes. Others will tell you their tale of how they spent their lives in pursuit of certain foods and cuisines. For others, they are entertainers and show people who have reached a pinnacle in their career to the point of making it an art form. The takeaway is that they are all in the business of selling something, whether a lifestyle or an experience. That isn’t always helpful to the home cook on a calorie or financial budget. 

The role of a chef in the restaurant industry is different than that of a cook. A chef is an executive-level position in a restaurant while a cook is a person who follows recipes. That doesn’t mean a chef doesn’t cook or a cook doesn’t help manage a budget or create new dishes. In a small restaurant, the owner may do both. Then of course the question becomes why did we bring this up distinction?

Become a Great Cook First

Over our journey, we stopped trying to play chef and learned to cook. We then became our own ‘chefs’ as our knowledge grew about the economies and management of our home kitchen. When we tried to learn everything at once, we bought things we didn’t use. We created waste due to food spoilage or a lack of understanding of things like use-by dates. By focussing on cooking, we learned to make it easy, what we wanted, and then learned to create economies of scale in doing it.

We start here because we feel others like us want to be a celebrity chef when all we need to do is learn to cook. One of the biggest complaints we hear from people is that nothing turns out right. Through learning to cook the other parts will follow. Don’t get upset if something doesn’t work out and the dish you are creating doesn’t come out like a celebrity chef. Reading recipes and understanding cooking jargon is hard enough.

It’s Like Learning a New Language

Disclaimer: Instead of posting a list of everything in our post, we will just link what has been done by others. We don’t necessarily agree or disagree with the brand of products selected for them. The range of information is what we feel is important to create a viable working kitchen from the ground up. 

Like many things we looked into, getting alignment on terminology was difficult. Ok, so the recipe says blanch. What does that mean? Sometimes the instructions in recipes are typos or simply wrong. We had to learn what was correct and what wasn’t. Reading recipes can be so challenging that it does need its own blog post. This is a small to large list of terminology to start with as it is good to know. 

Some Light Reading

• The Basics
• A Little More Info
• The Big List For You Cooking School Folks

Buying Into A Lifestyle Versus Just Buying Tools

Before we present this next set of lists, a caution and call out, we have no problem shelling out large sums of money for good or necessary equipment. We also have no problem being as frugal as possible to save money. Our blog is about making things simple and solving problems. This is one area where we feel that paying high prices for a name on a pot handle, range or blender may not be worth it. Try to start with being as simple as possible.

Your budget and life are yours but buying top-dollar equipment doesn’t necessarily mean you will produce better food. There are also exceptions where you will want a name brand and high-end for durability, warranty, or ease of use. You don’t need to buy the hype or endorsement of a lifestyle to produce quality food at home. The principle of caveat emptor applies in purchasing any equipment and tools.  Do your homework and read the reviews to save time, money, and frustration. 

Look to the Pros, Not at the Labels

If you look at the back of the house in a restaurant we very much doubt you will see high-end home equipment. What you will see are tools of the trade that get used and abused every day. Over time we learned we could get a lot of what we needed from restaurant stores instead of high-end merchants. Do your homework and you will save money and frustration. In contrast, you can take away my Kitchen Aid Stand Mixer when you pry it from my cold dead hands as it was worth every penny to us.

Some Resources

• The Basics
• Another Good Essential List
• More than a Starter Starter List

Don’t Commit Before You Are Sure

Beyond this, there are specialty items you will want. Before you commit to the specialty items, ask yourself if you will really use them. For example, our dehydrator is an essential piece of equipment for us. We rarely used the bread machine we owned for over 10 years before we realized it was just much easier to make bread by hand. You may enjoy an air fryer, or it may just sit there. what we learned is it is really easy to get up in the romanticism that you will use something versus learning the hard way you won’t.

Oh, There Will Be Questions

These starter lists lead us to other questions. As we started to learn more, we started to ask ourselves about processes in recipes. What is a slow rolling boil vs a simmer? What is cooking using medium-high heat when the heating elements or burners are all different sizes? We will address that in another post to keep this one to basics. 

A Specific Callout; Knives

One last note on knives. Knives are very personal and usually one of the biggest expenses in setting up a working kitchen. Find what fits your hand, is good quality holds an edge, and will last. We all have different hand sizes and dexterity. Make sure you are buying something you can use. Just because a super chef endorsed it, it’s a specific brand or type of steel doesn’t mean it will work in your hand. Your knives are one of the most important and most used tools in the kitchen. We found it is worth spending some extra money on if needed as fit and longevity are really important.

Wrapping Up

In this post, we have covered some terminology and basic equipment. We hope it is both just enough to get started with and just enough to prompt further questions. Cooking your good food from scratch is not always easy. It is however rewarding, can save you money, and help you with a calorie budget for better portion control. Getting set up to do it should not be complicated or budget-breaking.

The post On How To Get Started Cooking Better first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

We hear all sorts of advice about making sure we eat enough protein. Previously, we discussed it as a key building block of the body. In this post, we will ask what is enough and give you some tools to answer what enough is for you. As with all things human, we found there isn’t a single answer. What is worse is that not all proteins are complete. By the end of this post, we hope to give you the tools you need to come to your own conclusion on what is enough. 

Not all Proteins are the Same

First off, not all proteins are the same. There are two basic types; complete and in-complete. To be complete the protein must contain all nine essential amino acids. What is an essential amino acid? An essential amino acid is something your body needs but cannot synthesize out of other nutrients. 

We bring protein up completeness as an FYI. Completeness will become more important to understand later as many things like nuts and legumes don’t supply a complete protein. Many people feel uncomfortable with consuming meat and dairy. If you do, it is best to know about complete vs incomplete proteins so that you can choose a balanced approach. This is a reason that vegetarian and vegan diets can be more complex to maintain. 

TL; DR; Let’s Talk About How Much

Yes, but what do I need for protein? Guess what, like all things health it changes with age, weight, activity, and other factors like pregnancy. This all sounds similar to our post on BMR which uses BMI. The general formula for adults in the US is 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight or 0.36 grams per pound.

That 0.8 is close to the 0.75 grams recommended by the British Heart Foundation. Like BMR, the devil is in the details. The good news is that the USDA has a Dietary Reference Intakes (DRI) calculator you can use. The even better news is that the calculator also shows things like carbohydrates and fiber. That’s correct, we are now talking about macronutrients. 

Back to Logging

If you read our post on being honest with calories, we discussed logging your meals in an app. If you have done that work, you can probably see the macronutrient breakdown. Some apps sell this functionality as an add-on. The important takeaway is that when you log your food, you should pick from verified sources or use the barcode. By doing that, you will allow yourself to see your macronutrients to have the data to answer if you are lining up or not with guidelines and/or your goals. 

Yes, we did say earlier we will stay away from nutrition in this blog. We just used the words nutrients. Worse still, we said macronutrients. What’s going on? After we researched calories, we realized we were no longer willing to take the nutrition labels for granted anymore. While we don’t make any assumptions about your needs or goals, we want to understand if we could remain balanced in our approach to food. The only way to know if we were getting enough was to track it so we are being as transparent as possible.

But I Want to Gain?

But this begs the question but what about those wanting to gain muscle mass? If you spend any time around time around sports training programs or gyms you will hear protein is where it is at. Mass Bingham General recommends that to gain muscle mass you may need to increase from 0.8 grams to 1.2 to 1.7 grams per kilogram of body weight. That increase roughs out to between 0.45 to 0.76 grams per pound.

Which is right for you? We feel this is where things descend into confusion. That depends on your goals. Do you want to increase or decrease your weight? We didn’t say gain muscle and lose fat in the same sentence. Of course, we all want to do that. Why is that so hard for many people? We will do another post on that later because that is called body recomposition which is complicated. It is complicated because it is applying two different processes which are contradictory. 

Let’s Stick to the Basics For Now

If we stick to DRI, we get from it a recommendation of protein. Now to figure out how to get it into our diet. Eat more steak? What about more fish and chicken? Maybe some jerky and peanuts would work. We can even substitute it with a protein shake! Each of these comes with a cost either financial or health related. That is another subject for another post.

Researching included here helped us reset our thoughts on protein. We will pause here as we, and you, now have the tools to at least determine what we all need. From here we can use these tools to help us towards our goals. We have discussed the types of proteins and some of the confusion in this area of how much is needed. We still need to address how to get them and the costs associated with them but both of those can wait for another post after more research.  

The post How To Establish Basic Protein Need 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.

We used to like going out to eat. It was convenient, it was fun and it was entertainment. We also travel by car often which requires either carrying pre-made food or eating out. We generally opted for eating out. Over time we learned this was problematic for our calorie budget. In this post, we will talk about the problem we faced and some tricks to deal with it.

As our life became busy we learned to depend on eating out more and more. Being only two of us, it didn’t seem that expensive. It also made sense with our on-the-go lifestyle. As we started to look at our calorie needs, things changed. While our goals were primarily weight loss, the same problem occurs for people adding weight. We started to realize that portion sizes and ingredients are completely unpredictable. 

Restaurants are Business Competing for Your Dollar

The draw of a restaurant is not just about food. A restaurant is an experience. It is a place where we hang out with friends. We go there to have something unique we may not be able to make at home. We may need a place on the road to grab something. It may also be a place to flaunt some extra cash or reward someone. It’s part of our culture in the US and around the world. 

A restaurant is a business. To keep its customers happy it must provide great service, good food, and most importantly; value. Value is subjective. What many people see as value is quantity; how much did I get for my money? Don’t believe me? Ask yourself why menus have sizes and quantities on items like steaks and prawns and not broccoli. They aren’t there for accounting purposes. The reason they are there is so you know the cost of the additional spend on protein.

  Restaurants have been in their own arms race around portion size for years. We have been somewhat trained to want more. You can read about things like Big Mac vs Whopper here. According to the History Channel, Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas also invented 3 sizes of hamburgers just to get people to buy the middle size more often than the small one which increased his revenue. 

Cool Story, so What?

  Why is this a problem for people on a calorie budget? 

• We found portion sizes were completely unpredictable. 
• Understanding the calories of the meal was hard since we didn’t know how it was made

  Coming from families that chastised people for wasting food, we also ran into the problem of not feeling good about leaving food on the table. We will discuss this in another post as a different problem to be addressed. The point is the usual advice you receive is to save half for later. When traveling it wasn’t possible to take home leftovers due to spoilage dangers of being in the zone too long.

It was More than the Calories We were Wasting

As an aside, remember you are paying for a restaurant experience. That includes the server, food, experience, etc. As a result, you are also paying a premium for the calories you are eating. We don’t buy a gallon of milk if we only need a pint. Why? We don’t want to throw our money away on things we don’t use. Ask yourself then, why would you pay for the extra calories you don’t need? 

Hidden in this little epiphany that we were paying for calories sparked some very large changes for us in our lives. It became something more fundamental than weight. We will discuss this in another post but do ponder what your costs are here.  

Some Tips to Help

 The answer you expect when discussing calorie goals and eating out is the normal draconian battle cry Stop Eating Out! That just isn’t sustainable for most in our society. We had to account for our eating out occasionally. Here is how we approached it.

• Review the restaurant online and look at the pictures people took. You can get a good idea of the portion sizes from those pictures.
• While you are seated glance around at plate sizes. The portions will match the plate size. 
• Wait to order until you see someone’s meal delivered. You will get an idea of portion sizes from what you see brought from the kitchen.
• Ask the server for the sizes. Some servers will simply tell you the plate can feed two. 
• Read the menu. When you order a burger realize that portion size follows patty size. There will be a difference in overall plate size of a ¼ lb hamburger and a ½ lb burger.
• Control portion sizes through appetizers. There have been a few times we have decided to split some wings and mozzarella sticks over a full-blown entree.
• Split the plate with someone. This allows you to control how much you are getting. 
• Ask them to leave off or replace a side. I don’t need buttered bread with my hashbrowns. 
• Make only one meal when ordering a combo at a restaurant. We often share a side of fries and drinks at the local fast food and roadside burger joints. 
• Ask for a take-out container immediately if something is too big. This gives you a chance to split the plate for later.
• Leave food on the table if needed. While we both hate doing this, our other goals come first.

But I Want to Gain

This post only seemingly addresses portion sizes that are too large. For people trying to add weight, this may not be a problem. A basic search of Google will show that 100g of home-prepared fries are about half the calories of 100g of restaurant fries. The reality is, you don’t know until you look it up or try to log it in a food app. 100 grams is roughly 3.5 ounces which generally doesn’t cover those portions at many restaurants. Make that 7 oz of fries and cup of gravy such as an order of Poutine and you may hit 800 calories.

We are not nutritionists or medical professionals and don’t feel right discussing nutrition with other people. Still, we think most people would agree that those calories aren’t exactly balanced and you may want to make a different choice.

This post didn’t fully address the problem of travel and restaurants. We will discuss where fast food, food trucks, and gas station hot cases can help when on the road. We have found there is a time and place for them.

The portion problem is real for a lot of us. This post should have given you some tools on how to eat out but maintain a calorie budget. You don’t need to stop eating out. By doing some planning and observations, you can help maintain your goals more easily. Simply being cognizant of the portion problem will help you.

The post Practical Ways To Use Restaurants first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.