Week 34

Farmers Market: $80.50
Whole Foods: $6851
Safeway: $24.59

Sunday
Dinner
Slow Baked Whole Red Snapper

• ~40 minutes of cooking time, no prep nec
• from A New Way to Cook

Cucumber Raita

• from A New Way to Cook

Fresh Corn

Monday
Dinner
Roasted Brocoli w/ Lemons and Olives

• 30 minutes, somewhat involved
• from Cooks Illustrated, Feb '08

Pasta w/ Cherry Tomato-Ricotta Salata Sauce

• 30 min, not difficult
• modification of Eggplant Penne recipe from Chez Panise Vegetables, use pasta cooking water to stretch sauce, LOTS of fresh herbs

Tuesday
Breakfast
A - Oatmeal w/ rasins and heavy cream; M - grapenuts; J - wheat flakes

Lunch
A - shredded cheddar, leftover pasta, cucumber slices, plum
M - tomato sandwich, monday's leftovers
J - Roti Mediterranean Grill

Dinner
Potatoes boiled w/ dill

• NYT Recipe
• ~15 min

Greenbean and cherry tomato salad

• from Chez Panise Vegetables
• ~ 20 min

Desert

Vanilla ice cream w/ Maple syrup

Wednesday

Breakfast

A - multigrain cheerios w/ milk and cantolope

M - yogurt and grapenuts

J - tomato sandwich

Lunch

A - scrambled eggs w/ cheese & scallions, couscous, plum

M - potato chips, tomato sandwich, yogurt

Dinner

Pumpkin Polenta and Manchego Stuffed Poblano Peppers

• 1.5 hrs (quicker if you use canned black beans)
• Caras Cravings

Green Salad

Thursday
Dinner
Carrot ginger soup

• from Mediterranean Cooking in Alaska

Arugula Salad

Friday
Dinner
something with meat?

Housekeeping
Vegetable stock
Parmesan (italian) stock?
Pumpkin Bread

New Direction for a New Life

In the five years since I set out traveling, I've gotten some ideas on what I want to work on, added some amazing people to my family, and am happy to be back in the city I left to start my travels.  

With a new small person to feed, and a tight budget while I attempt to finish a thesis while running herd on a one year old (complete failure so far, but I have grand hopes for tomorrow . . . ), the most useful thing for me is to keep track of how we spend our food money.  Why?

• Unlike most Americans, we have a food budget problem.  Almost 25% of our disposable income goes to eating.  And paper towels.  But since we buy paper towels about once a month, I think most of it goes to the trifecta of Safeway-Whole Foods-Farmers Market.  Utterly ridiculous, and an expense we might have to think about cutting back on.  In an effort to at least justify the expense with good food and not letting anything rot, I need to start planning out the meals for the week based on our haul from the farmers market/what's looking good at the grocery store that week.
• This article http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/dining/planning-your-menu-with-some-help.html?src=dayp implies that there's some un-met demand for menu planning.  While I love a good recipe blog, I think the day to day minutae of how to keep everyone fed for a week is the flip side of recipes, that often gets very short shrift.  Home economics training, anyone?
• My partner has expressed some concerns about how much time we spend cooking.  We need an index of the recipes we find fast and tasty.  Hopefully, this blog can become that searchable database.

I plan to post the weeks (rough) menu on Sunday, along with what we've spent at the markets/stores.  Then, I'll update as the week goes on to reflect reality, making notes about what ingredients were good/bad, which recipes are worth doing again, any additional things we needed to buy, and what we actually ate!

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