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.

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.

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.

Here are Some Tips:

• When portioning, use a digital scale. Doing this gives you a better way to estimate portion sizes when you go out to a restaurant or attend an event.
• Choose simple recipes with reusable ingredients. You reduce food waste by doing this.
• Read the recipe’s serving size and calories. This way you can adjust the portion size to your calorie needs accordingly.
• Create one-dish meals to start. A meal like Arroz con Pollo can include starch, vegetables, and protein which makes it a very quick win.
• Cool before freezing. Place the extra portions in the fridge for several hours before attempting to freeze. 
• Don’t overdo it. There is a limit to how many extra servings can be made in home equipment. Try to stick to 8-10 portions. 
• Shoot for keeping a 2-3 month rotating menu on hand. This will allow you to get better and keep it fresh.
• Label and keep track of it. We used a magnetic whiteboard before finding apps to do better management.
• Instapots, slow cookers, and Dutch ovens are your friends. These ways of cooking take much less active time and space.
• Take one day a week to meal plan for the week. This allows you to make sure you are going through what you made.

Start With Freezing to Keep it Simple

Most things go wrong in the freezing stage of making your meals. You must cool food down to as close to freezing as you can before it goes into the freezer. If you don’t, the long ride from say room temperature to frozen creates ice crystals that damage the food. The damage results in the food being mushy when reheated. 

Where we started with freezing was using BPA-free meal dishes and takeout containers. As long as your food isn’t in the freezer for more than a couple of months it should be fine. After that, you risk freezer burn with anything in contact with air. We will revisit this idea later when we talk about other storage methods. 

The USDA has a pretty good write-up on freezing to start from. If you are just starting, it is a good read and is a cautious approach. We are well aware that this agency must keep an entire diverse population of the US safe. That means creating an umbrella across all people. That umbrella covers those more readily affected by food problems like the very young and very old. With experience, we have learned our own version of guidelines based on our comfort levels. We expect you will too.

Have Fun With It!

Lastly, make it fun. Some things are NOT going to work out. I accidentally made what turned out to be 24 servings of fish stew that I was none too proud of taste-wise.  I have also spent some quality time with Easy-Off and scrub brush trying to save a pan.  Don’t sweat it if something doesn’t turn out.

Overall, cooking for your calorie budget and eating at home is better for you. Here is why. It puts you in charge of your portions and ingredients. You control your spending is generally less expensive than eating out. It is a positive lifestyle habit. Finally, it also saves time.  As you get better at it it simply becomes part of your weekly todo.

  You should now have some tools to make meal planning easier.  This learning became another catalyst for us in our journey. It eventually led to better budget control, more free time, and a host of other long-term gains we will talk about more later.

The post Some Tips To Make Meal Plans Easy first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

We are constantly bombarded with pseudo-facts and misinformation. As consumers, we care about product tradeoffs so we can make informed decisions. The domain of food is challenging as we can’t compare two items, even with the same name, in terms of calories. In this post, we will give you some ideas on how to compare disparate but similar items. 

First, Were Sticking to Calories

This post does not pick on any company or food choice. Our purpose is to raise awareness of the disparity of claims and perceptions of serving sizes versus what is actually on nutritional data or labels. As a result, we leave debating the nutritional value of any type of food to others. Whether you choose fast or organic vegan or anything in between is up to you.

Incongruencies of Agency Goals

First, let’s note a difference. Nutrition labels use the FDA 2,000 calories a day which was the old standard of measuring the amount of calories the average adult needs. That is the overall generalization for how much the average person needs to consume a day. The USDA is now using MyPlate. You may recognize it to be similar to the BMR work we discussed. The plan also moves away from the food pyramid to what is considered a visualization of what should be on our plates. The issue is the calories don’t match.

Because this is not a post on nutrition, it doesn’t help or hurt what we are going to discuss. We bring it up as another point of how people are set up to fail through packaging. When you read a label and it says serving size containing x, y, and z you expect it to be accurate. If there is 30% of your daily protein in the serving, it should be 30%. If your calorie intake needs to be 2,400 calories, not 2,000, then it is only 24% of your needed protein.

The more we learned, the less trust we had in labels and experts. There were simply too many incongruencies across all of them. All the incongruencies pointed to the same problem. It is about you as a person and your goals and you have to be an informed consumer.

A Serving May Only be Part of a Package

Serving size is where many hidden calories lie. You will see a package advertising that says only 100 or 150 calories per serving. But what is the serving size? Bags of chips, crackers, and individually packed items are usually the foods you see this on. In one package of Milton crackers we like, the serving size was only 2 crackers for 70 calories.  Comparing this with Gardetos we also like, it was 150 calories for a 1/2 cup.

You may ask why does that matter and what point are we making? By logging our calories we quickly learned our expectations of portion sizes were way off. When we buy a small bag of chips, rarely do we eat half and leave the rest for another day. I don’t think I have ever eaten just 2 crackers. As the Lay’s potatoes chip commercial used to claim ‘I bet you can’t eat just one’. We found truth in that statement.

What you Drink Impacts your Calories

Similarly, let’s talk about alcohol. We like to drink beer so we budget it into our calories. Calories from beer are based on the alcohol content of that beer. When we choose a can of Coors Light or Bud Light, that is roughly 100-120 calories per can. If we go out to a pub or restaurant and have a pint of something like an IPA that may jump to 300 or more.  If I enjoy 3 IPAs by the fire some Saturday night that could be 900 calories. Realizing that you can choose which is best for your calorie budget. 

Reading the Tea Leaves of Menus

You may ask, why a meal at a restaurant may range from 600-1200 calories. The reason is that it includes all the possible combinations of sizes, sides, sauces, or drink choices. Let’s look at two well-known chains. Both of them do a great job of having nutrition labels available but they also both can be confusing. Understanding the total calories of what you have eaten is challenging.

Breaking it Down

By Ingredients

  A Subway Chicken Bacon Ranch 6” on multi-grain bread in 530 calories. Let’s add Pepper Jack cheese and some Creamy Sriracha dressing to it. That bumps the 6” to  620 calories. Bread is all within 10-20 calories of each other so we can have it on anything we like with it. Eat the whole thing like I used to? That would be roughly 1240 calories excluding drinks, chips, cookies, or anything else. Great if you have the budget for it, bad if you don’t.

By Meal Choices

 In contrast, a McDonald’s Big Mac, Medium Fries, and Medium Coke weigh in at roughly 1130 calories when you include ketchup. Switch that to small fries and Diet Coke and we are at 830 calories. That is 210 more than the Subway 6” but less than the 410 less than the 12”. What this starts to show is how important portion size is in setting a calorie budget. We will touch on that in a later post as well.

But They are Consistent

 While fast food has been villainized by many, the reality is, their whole goal is consistency. What you order at one restaurant will be the same as another calorie-wise. Consistency is an advantage of eating these places which we will discuss in another post. In terms of nutrition and taste, well, those are not the subject of this blog. Our goal is strictly around weight management for now. 

But We Only Eat ‘Healthy’ Food

Of course, we are all health conscious so many turn away from processed foods. We want fruit juice and a healthy snack like pistachios instead of all this booze and fast food. Maybe we can add in half a cup of  2% cottage cheese. Based on calories sourced through Google, a cup of OJ is roughly 140 calories. We also found a cup of pistachios is roughly 690 and the cottage cheese is 100 calories. At 930 calories that is about on par with our Big Mac Meal. Whether it is healthier or a better choice is up to others.

Learning this made me grumpy because I love nuts. Pistachios, walnuts, almonds, peanuts (yes, not a true nut, but close enough). I could go eat them all day. To meet my personal goals I had to change how many I ate. I didn’t stop eating them, just the amount and frequency. An aside to think about. Candy bars were marketed as a meal replacement during the Depression. Nutritionally maybe not but you can see it from a pure calorie point of view. Mr. Goodbar, which contained peanuts was marketed as a cheap ‘protein-rich’ meal.

One more for you salad enthusiasts.  A Caesar salad with 4 oz of grilled chicken and a roll can come in at a hefty 760 calories. The salad can be as high as 470 calories, the chicken 170, and a roll of roughly 120. Add butter to that roll and we are in the range of a Big Mac Meal.

Don’t Take Anything at Face Value

The takeaway here is to trust nothing. There is a lot of misinformation out there. Managing your weight is more about understanding what calories come from what. You are the person empowered to make changes in your eating habits. Just because someone says it’s only 100 calories per serving or is ‘healthy’ doesn’t mean it is what you think it is. 

 The realization of where these hidden calories were was ultimately life-changing for us. It was frustrating to learn we had been wrong in our approach to our calorie budget. It is this type of information that allows us to stay on track through informed decisions. That is why we feel it is so important to share these types of things with others.

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