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.

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.

It’s All About Heat Transfer

What we learned was that it came down to a few things such as:

• Volume and surface area of the item we were cooking.
• The amount of BTUs or heat your cooktop can produce.
• The amount of cooling you could apply through methods like an ice bath.

Here is where the bullets above come from. Only certain things can be cooked in large quantities at home. We caveat that your tastes may be different but recreating some recipes in the large is just not easy. The volume and surface area of the food combined with the type of cooking method you can apply is the limiting factor. The size of the surface area is what makes temperature management problematic. These issues are due to the thermodynamics concept of specific heat capacity which you can take our word about for now or read more here, here, and one more here.  

A Couple Examples

Let’s talk about a couple of examples. This will be some nerd speak but is necessary to understand why some things do and don’t scale. 

It is easy to increase a roast in volume from 4 lbs. to 6 lbs. The cooking method or cooling doesn’t need to be modified to work. Roasting is a slower cooking method designed for high volume-to-surface area ratios. If you increase the roast by 2 lbs. from 4 to 6 the result will still be close enough no changes are needed other than a bit more time in the oven.

Rather fry up some extra chicken or fish? These items have the opposite volume-to-surface area ratios as a roast. Frying, searing, and sauteing all are high-heat, fast cooking methods. When you add too much volume, most home equipment can’t provide the required BTUs to cook the food. The cooking method has to be modified to allow for batches that require more time.

What Worked and What Didn’t

 Worked:

• Roasting meats, fish, and poultry scales well. It is just as easy to make ten pork chops as it is two. 
• One-dish items such as Lasagna, Meatloaf, Casseroles,  Stews, Sauces, Soups, and Chili all scale well with a caveat (see below, Didn’t Work)
• Vegetables, meats, and potatoes on the grill. 
• Instant pots, Slow Cookers, and Dutch ovens all work well to scale up portions without increasing labor. 
• Same-sized baked goods such as rolls, crackers, and granola bars were easy to scale up. 
• Items that could be cooked on a griddle like pancakes and toaster biscuits (aka English Muffins)

 Didn’t Work:

• Sauces and soups containing pasta or noodles.
• Rice other than minute rice.
• Increasing the size of baked goods like muffins or other quick breads.
• High-temperature dishes that require sauteing or searing. 
• Pan frying or deep fat frying due to having to work in batches.
• Items that take up a lot of cooking area such as tortillas and pancakes due to the need to work in batches. 

Why didn’t some of these work? The answer is that they either didn’t save time, had to be modified extensively or just plain didn’t turn out. Time savings was a large part of what didn’t work for some. Our premise in our other post is that for this to work effectively, it should save time. Some recipes are just too labor intensive when scaled up to be worth the time cost of extra portions.

Starches In Liquids Create Unique Problems

We also ran into some specifics with starches. Items like rice and soup with noodles are problematic enough to require a separate post. What confounded us was that some rice like Minute Rice or Basmati created completely different results than say Jasmine or Wild Rice. Here it is TL;DR; for now.

• Due to soups and sauces being mostly hot liquid, adding noodles to them will result in overcooking. This is because the larger the volume of soup or sauce, the harder it is to cool it to stop the cooking process
• Rice can be problematic at scale with standard pots and pans due to thermal transference. What ends up happening is part of the rice will undercook and part will overcook.

A Few Tips From Lessons Learned

Here are some tips to help when scaling up:

• Don’t increase the recipe yield by more than 4-6 extra servings.
• When possible, keep the same size baking dishes but use two to scale up. This keeps cooking times and methods consistent. 
• Portion soups and sauces immediately into separate containers.
• Meats will be easier to slice if cooled in the refrigerator. Serve what you need, and place the remaining in the refrigerator before portioning. 
• Before you make it, think about how it will be reheated. Microwaving soup will result in a good outcome but won’t be so great for fried fish.

Lastly, make sure it tastes ok, the recipe is ok and it will be ok after reheating before you scale up your portions. This was one of our hard lessons. If you make 20 portions of baked beans and the recipe doesn’t work, you are out all that labor. When you make 16 portions of something with a cream sauce, realize it may be a pain to keep it from separating when reheated. We will cover how we handle that in another post of sodium citrate. 

The Take Away

Creating additional portions of food is not always as simple as adding more ingredients. In this post, we have covered only part of some of what we learned. In this post, we have discussed what has worked, and what hasn’t, and some reasons behind each. We hope it helps you ask yourself some great questions before starting to do this. Our additional hope it will help cut down wasted food while providing a better time management tool for working with your calorie budget.

The post Tips To Easily Make Extra Portions 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.

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