1) Vegetables and meat are expensive and are generally not in my budget.
2) I don’t like the way I feel after eating meat. I find my thoughts are slower and my stomach feels slightly queasy.
3) Beans take forever to cook. Even if I soak them overnight. Canned beans are expensive.
4) When I buy food, I tend to try to eat as little of it as possible to make it last longer. When I do this with vegetables, they go off and have to be thrown away. But it’s so hard to make myself eat now when I could eat later. I know that I’ll be hungry a few hours after I eat, so longer I go, the longer it’ll be till I get hungry again.
5) Some fruits and vegetables give me bad heart burn. Others don’t taste very good.
6) I’m probably not saving all that much money on food by not eating. It’s just a weird behaviour I can’t break myself of.
7) I’m cooking for one and it’s very hard to cook the tiny portions I require. Or rather, it’s a lot of work and I only get one meal out of it. If I do get two or three meals out of it, I’m get tired of eating it and can’t eat it for a while.
8) I have a small fridge, but no freezer. Frozen vegetables aren’t an option for me unless I use them all at once (and then the portion is too big and half of it goes bad).
9) I have problems washing dishes (and of course cannot afford a dish washer), and sometimes i have to wash a plate on 4 or more consecutive days before it’s clean. (this isn’t /just/ OCD. there really is visible grime on it still after so many washes. i just dont have the arm strength due to the chronic pain.) washing dishes can tire me out to such an extent that i am then unable to cook. cooking and eating tires me out to such an extent that i cant wash the dishes. the best plan i can figure out is to alternate days: eat bread one day and wash dishes. cook the next day and dirty dishes. but the current state of affairs is that all dishes are dirty and have to be washed before each use.
10) most ingredients for cooking don’t keep for more than a day or two, even in the fridge. milk, bread, veggies, leftovers, they all go bad. i think it’s something about the humidity.
Vegetables I like: tomato (heartburn), onion (heartburn), garlic (no problem)
Vegetables I like, but don’t really know what to do with: carrots, lettuce (can’t buy small enough quantities anyway), corn, potatoes
Vegetables I don’t like all that much or at all: peas, string beans, asparagus, brussel sprouts, capsicum, cabbage, eggplant, zucchini
there may exist vegetables that i forgot to mention. i may or may not like them or be able to afford them or know how to prepare them.
I’ve noticed that cheaper food doesn’t keep as long after it’s bought—this is a casual observation, not careful research. It seems plausible that cheaper food hasn’t been given as good care and/or isn’t as fresh to start with.
It’s plausible that the refrigerator is malfunctioning. It’s also plausible that its temperature is set too high, so that should be checked. Look for a dial inside the refrigerator.
A pressure cooker might be helpful with getting beans to cook faster. I don’t know whether one can be found cheap enough and whether an unusually small one would be needed because of portion size/arm strength issues.
You can sometimes buy these second-hand from thrift stores.
Alternatively you can often buy a “slow cooker” from the same places—and they are also good for cooking beans (you set the up in the morning and leave them to run during the day while you’re at work/whatever and dinner is done when you get home).
some cheaper food is cheaper because it is about to expire and the store wants to make at least some profit off of it. other cheaper food is just cheap because it’s cheaper to produce.
the dial on the fridge is labeled in Russian. My Russian is not very good (i can read most of the letters and get a basic idea of what i’m reading, but more than 50% of the words are unknown to me), but i can easily make out МИН “minimum”, ВЬКЛ “medium”, and МАКС “maximum” and have it set to medium. i have no idea what actual temperature this refers to. i have a thermometer but it is only for measuring human body temperatures. i will have to see if i can find a cheap thermometer that could measure the fridge, because I am curious.
i may look into the cost of pressure cookers down the track.
Because I live in a former eastern bloc country (Hungary). My only guess is the fridge is that old. (It’s not mine, but it came with the apartment I live in. The building I live in is Russian built too. :)
I will look again it, to make sure I got the letters right and to make sure it is pointing at what I thought it was. Since my Russian is so bad, when i checked last time what the words said, I was repeating “V soft sign K L” to myself so i wouldnt forget it before i got back to the keyboard. (I was confident i could remember min and maks) so it may have stood out in my head enough that i forgot what it was set to.
But it’s definitely cold in fridge, so it cannot be set to “turn off.”
This time, I take my camera with me :)
.… and discover that it is set to maximum (МАКС).
Here is a picture http://pics.livejournal.com/pthalogreen/pic/0012rat7 . It also has another setting “НОРМ” which im going to assume is the “normal” or “medium” that i was remembering that it had. I think I set it to maks some time ago in attempt to solve the food spoilage problem.
It’s really hard for me to remember выключить because my knowledge of Slavic languages (and understanding of Russian via cognates) comes mostly from southern slavic languages which I have studied, like Serbian, and uključiti in Serbian means “to turn on”.
It’s really hard for me to remember выключить because my knowledge of Slavic languages (and understanding of Russian via cognates) comes mostly from southern slavic languages which I have studied, like Serbian, and uključiti in Serbian means “to turn on”.
Haha, you’ve run into some of the most confusing false friends between any languages there. The Russian cognate of Serbian (and Bosnian/Croatian) uključiti is включить, which if I’m not mistaken means the same thing—not выключить, which means the exact opposite.
To make things even more confusing, the BCS verbal prefix u- normally denotes arrival/entering, whereas in Russian it generally denotes leaving. So you get false friends like ući “to enter” vs. уйти “to go away,” or uletjeti “to fly in” vs. улететь “to fly away.” Generally, if there exists a Russian cognate of a BCS verb with the u- prefix, it will have the prefix в- or во-, not у- or вы-. The former are real etymological cognates, while the latter are not despite the similarity, and often in fact convey the opposite meaning.
Such false friends are even more fun when you see Serbian spelled in Cyrillic, making the false similarities even more prominent. (The first prize, I think, goes to this one, though my great favorite is also право, which is “straight” in Serbian but “right” in Russian when you give directions.)
oh, this is helpful information. I didn’t realise there was a difference. It seems to be the latter case. Things are fine unopened until their expiration date. Things that are opened need to be used very quickly. There are things growing in certain dishes in the fridge (another problem I’m not really up to tackling) but I have had this problem since I moved into this apartment, even during long stretches of time when there were not things growing in the fridge (because I was using the fridge less—wasn’t cooking as much as didn’t have leftovers). It doesn’t seem to matter whether I buy UHT milk or regular. They keep okay unopened most of the time, but opening them means I have to use them quickly. I’ve swtitched to powdered milk, which I wont drink, but a teaspoon of the powder with a little extra water works well for sauces that call for milk.
When I do get round to throwing out things that are growing in dishes (the current ones are covered in plastic wrap), i also take the opportunity to wash the fridge with cleaning supplies and vinegar, in case any of the scary stuff escaped.
in winter, i’ve had some success using the balcony as a fridge/freezer. but it’s summer now.
Get protein from non-meat sources. Consider, in particular, eggs. Monitor the sales at your grocer of choice; if they have a free loyalty program fill out their form and take their junk mail to get in on that.
See above
Buy canned beans in large amounts when they are on sale. Or, consider trying to make a deal with a friend or neighbor where you split batches of beans and only have to do cooking some of the time.
This should admit of self-modification. If you know your food will go off if not eaten, there is no waste or “not lasting longer” associated with eating it before that time. But perhaps you need to work around it instead...
Heartburn can be medicated. If you can’t afford to get that checked out or afford the meds, eat around it...
I really do recommend eating, but would need to know more about the etiology of the habit before I offered advice on breaking it.
Consider sharing meals with friends/neighbors. Or, get a freezer. Freezers are really useful.
If you can’t get a freezer, buy your veggies canned. Many veggies come that way. Cans are smallish.
Consider disposable dishes, or covering your dishes with something like plastic wrap and being careful with your utensils. (Possibly expensive.) Also, note that not every use of dishes requires washing between uses, especially if you are the only user: you can use a water glass for days as long as you don’t leave a lot of water standing in it; you can brush crumbs of relatively dry foods off a plate and use it again; etc. When you do have to wash dishes, soak them overnight with water and dish soap first, or at least rinse them out, to reduce the amount by which things cake on and to help give the grease a head start on dissolving.
Freezers are useful. Like, a lot.
Veggies you did not mention include: miscellaneous greens such as turnip or collard, kale, spinach, green or wax beans, bamboo, peppers, artichokes, beets, water chestnuts. (All of those things exist canned.) Also, celery, celeriac, turnips, rutabagas, parsnips, miscellaneous sprouts, assorted squashes, fennel, leeks, scallions, avocados, cucumbers, broccoli, cauliflower, edamame, radishes, jicama, seaweed of various sorts. I don’t know if these ones are available canned. (Seaweed has the advantage of being available dried. You can reconstitute whatever amount you desire.)
As for what to do with them: Your favorites, tomatoes, onions, garlic, carrots, corn, and potatoes (plus most of what I just mentioned) can all be put in soups, stews, pot pies, sautés and stirfries, kabobs, and curries, or just eaten by themselves cooked or not with the spices/seasonings of your choice. Google is your friend; search for [vegetable] recipe and see what pops up. If you require more specialized help, pick some likely-looking veggies and I will locate or fabricate simple preparation instructions for you!
Get protein from non-meat sources. Consider, in particular, eggs. Monitor the sales at your grocer of choice; if they have a free loyalty program fill out their form and take their junk mail to get in on that.
Also consider protein powder. On a per gram of protein basis, whey protein powder is only slightly more expensive than eggs, but much easier to prepare. (Assuming $25 for 5 pounds of whey protein powder, and $1 for a dozen large eggs, I get $0.0156 per gram of protein for whey, and $0.0132 per gram of protein for eggs.)
I will have a look at one of the health shops that sells protein powder to see what it costs, and will look online to see what I can slip it into without noticing the taste.
9. Consider disposable dishes, or covering your dishes with something like plastic wrap and being careful with your utensils.
Also worth consideration: Layering a single-ply paper plate over a non-disposable plate. This helps stretch your paper plate supply (most paper plates are something like 3 or 4 ply, for strength; break them apart into 3 or 4 individual ones), allows you to use paper plates for things that are too heavy or wet to usually use them for, and should at least cut down on the amount of effort that it takes to wash the non-disposable plate afterward. (I almost always manage to get sauce or something on the edge of the non-disposable plate when I do this, but cleaning that is a matter of a 5-10 second rinse rather than a full scrub.)
that’s a really good idea. I will have to see where I can buy paper plates. Most places seem to only sell plastic, but they must be available somewhere. This would probably work for paper bowls as well, placed inside a regular one.
i am lukewarm on eggs. I like them enough to eat a few of them, and you can stir certain vegetables into them and add cheese if you have some and salt and pepper and they can taste nice, maybe every few days but then I have to get creative to use the last few eggs in the carton before they go off. if i make a concerted effort, I can eat a carton of 10 eggs in 3 batches spread over 9 days, and they do last longer than that. maybe I could make every day divisible by 3 egg day. Today’s the 179th day of the year (well, now that it’s 2am, it is), so if I went out tomorrow (which will still be the 179th, but it’s tomorrow because i’ll have slept between now and then) to pick some eggs up, I could start tomorrow. If not, I could start on the 182nd.
there’s a store that’s only 1km walk and a bus ride away where I can buy many things very cheaply and the quality is better than anything else in the town. Cans of soup for €1 a piece instead of €4 (hmm, i wonder what their canned beans are priced like. If it were €1 it might be worth it, though when you can get an entire kilogram of dried beans for less, it feels like a waste to spend €1 on one meal). sometimes when I go there I buy sausages. These are more expensive, about €3, but cheaper than I can find elsewhere and the quantity will last me about a week, since I use them sparingly to make them last longer. I shop there when I can, but most days I don’t have the energy to spend a couple hours taking busses and walking with a heavy load (the savings in buying their products vastly outweigh the cost of the bus tickets), so I also shop at places that are nearer to me, where the selection is poorer and the prices are higher. at these stores, i’m careful what I buy and tend to buy things where the price difference is smaller
The cheapest source of vegetables isn’t these foreign stores. It’s the market across the street where the farmers from neighbouring villages come in the morning with carrots that look like they’ve just been pulled out of the ground. You have to get up early if you want to buy anything, and the prices change every day—and if you don’t know the seasons as well as everyone else seems to, they will stop going down and start going up just when you were thinking you’d buy at the next price drop. I don’t know the seasons well, but I could probably find something with googling—except I get a feeling that questions like “when is strawberry season here?” is considered common knowledge. Once, I was playing “guess the fruit” with a six year old, and he was giving me hints for the fruit he’d thought of. The first clue he thought of was not “it is yellow” or “monkeys eat it” but “it’s ripe in winter”. (Bananas, grown in the southern hemisphere, are ripe in our winter. it made sense once I thought about it, but I’d never thought about it.) but maybe I can find a website aimed at slow six year olds who don’t yet know which two weeks are strawberry season, and whether sour cherry season comes before or after black cherry season.
about number 4. i do need to find a way to do some self modification for that. it’s kind of ridiculous. the goal of frugality is living within my means and someday, trying to get to the point where i have 1 months expenses saved up in my bank account so that i have a small cushion if my money’s late or i don’t get paid or an emergency comes up. buying food, eating nothing, letting it go bad, and throwing it away isn’t frugal. Actually, it reminds me of something the Cullens would do (I’m a big fan of Luminosity and Radiance. Never read Twilight, but mom sent me to the DVD since she knows nothing about my tastes heard it was popular, so I downloaded subtitles for it in one of my target languages (Macedonian) so i could watch the gift and call it language practice.)
heartburn can be medicated. i’ve looked up some medications that i can get without a prescription at the local pharmacy. (All medications here have to be bought from a pharmacist, even aspirin, but some don’t need a prescription) I am painfully shy, and having to ask for something by name is a trial for me, but I have been meaning to get down and buy some antacids. it’s probably stress related heart burn anyway. I can afford to spend a few euros on antacids. I am poor, but I actually live more frugally than strictly necessary, because I want to improve my situation and frugality can help with that (though neglecting my health is not frugal in the long run or even in the short run, I know. I need to cut that out.)
6) i’ve done a lot of thinking recently because knowing why is the first step. After my parents divorced, when I was about ten, I was terrified we’d have to go back to living with my father if we failed to make it on our own financially and knew that we were poor, so I tried to do all that I could to prevent that from happening. I knew I was too young to get a job, too young to legally babysit, and I knew I wouldnt have earned much anyway. So, I stopped wanting things. I stopped whining about the toys I saw on tv, I stopped eating breakfast, knowing that my overworked mother would see the opened and partially empty box of cereal and not replace it until it was nearly empty because she would see that I had something to make myself when I got up before going to school. I stopped eating lunch, because the agreement was that I would ask for more money to buy school lunch when I needed it, and I knew she wouldnt remember how recently she’d given me the money. So I kept the money and spent it as infrequently as I could, knowing that the longer i stretched it, the longer my mother would have to go without giving me more. I probably did save her some amount of money this way, but i didnt really have all the facts, and the teacher’s reports that i’d stopped responding to my name and mostly stared off into space all the time led to doctors appointments which definitely costed more than school lunch. Dinner was eaten together when she came home from work. Sometimes I cooked, sometimes she did, and I ate dinner every night. I don’t remember much about that year, but I spent most of it dizzy and spaced out. after a while, my body got used to it and i didnt have much appetite anymore. It was logical in its own way, but i didnt have all the facts, and i was very young. and then as a young adult, i was again scared that if i couldnt make it on my own financially i’d have to go back to living with my mother, so i went back to skimping on food. it’s like an eating disorder, but i don’t obsess about calories and couldn’t care less what I weigh.
freezers are indeed useful. someday, i shall have one.
i already use a piece of paper on a tray to catch crumbs if i’m just eating bread or something. pasta i eat out of the pan (i am cooking for one, after all, why dirty a plate?) my cup is rinsed well the first time i’m going to use it that day. who knows how many flies visited it over night (no fly screens either, and it’s summer), but after that i dont wash it between uses. i’ve used disposable plates and forks in the past, and though i feel guilty about environmental concerns, if i can’t eat any other way, then i can’t. i’d really like to find some paper plates instead of plastic, because the only plastic ones i can find melt in the microwave, which renders them useless to me. when i cook in the oven, i use aluminium foil instead of a pan, if i can get away with it.
dishes: i do rinse them, and then i come back to them a week later and they are slimy. (solution: come back the very next day. i try, and i can succeed for days at a time sometimes, but then something comes up and i’m back to having a sink full of petri dishes.
vegetables you mentioned that I know what they are called here and remember seeing in a store, even if rarely, and think i like or have questions about whether i would like it or not:
spinach - <3 but hard to find out of season
kale—it’s called “kale cabbage” here, which has scared me off it, since i dont like cabbage. does it taste like cabbage? my real problem with cabbage is that it is huge and i cant eat an entire cabbage before it goes bad, and i dont like it pickled. i can tolerate the taste here and there, but ill never be enthusiastic about eating a lot of it at once.
peppers = capsicum. - will eat them, and wil sometimes like them, but am not crazy about them. they do go nice in pasta sometimes.
we don’t have celery here, but we do have celeriac. it is large and hard to use all of it in time, but i do like it. the problem is you only need a tiny bit to get the right flavour.
turnips—are called “white carrots” here and are good in soups, but it is impossible to cook soup for one person and i dont know any other ways of preparing them. can they be eaten raw?
squash—like, but they are usually large, and i dont know whether they can be eaten raw or how to turn them into the tasty mashed stuff (i dont have a masher), or if they can be prepared non-mashed.
leek—is a readily available, mostly green, gigantic, cylindrical onion. i like onions, but do not know if i could consume an entire leek. i imagine that slices of it would be good on just about anything though.
broccoli—is only sold in 500g batches, is hard to find, and somewhat expensive. i love it, but have trouble using up so much of it.
cauliflower -is cheap, white coloured broccoli that is sold by the head. impossible to use an entire head without it going bad if you are only one person.
Do most vegetables go well with each other? (in a stir fry, on top of pasta, etc.)
I like reading recipes online, but sometimes get frustrated when they list ingredients that are unavailable to me (happens more often than not.) but i’ll look around some more.
Websites explaining produce seasons totally exist. I don’t know where you live, but I’m sure you can find the info.
If you leave soapy water standing in your dishes, the soap should cut down on slime growing on them.
Spinach is available canned! Get it that way and season doesn’t matter.
Kale is not like cabbage. It’s a leafy green, sort of like turnip greens or mustard greens.
Celeriac is good roasted and then put in soup. Find smaller roots of it, and when you cut the ugly off, cut a little deeper; if you don’t put much in the soup besides celeriac you should be able to eat it in as little as two sittings.
Turnips don’t look anything like carrots; do you mean parsnips? Wikipedia says you can eat parsnips raw.
Yellow squash comes small. I usually have it with fish, and use half of one in a meal; if I’m having only squash for a meal I can definitely eat a whole one. I like to slice them up thin and then roast them (line pan with foil, coat with olive oil, pop in the oven at 425º for 15-20 minutes).
Leeks are not as much food as they look like. You can roast them (it’s wise to parboil first though), or put them in soup.
Broccoli is amazing roasted, in soup, or with pasta. Cauliflower is good in soups, curries, or casseroles. You really need to find out why your fridge won’t let you keep leftovers for a normal amount of time and fix that; I can easily eat a batch of cream of cauliflower soup that contains an entire head of cauliflower over a few days, but if you can’t keep soup around for a few days you may be in trouble. Cauliflower and broccoli are also edible raw, optionally with dip.
Many but perhaps not most vegetables go well with others. My brain isn’t generating a useful algorithm here but I can give you my best guess/experience regarding any combinations you think look likely.
There is a lot of information available about substitutions online. I am an improvisational cook and can probably help you out if you’re missing something for a recipe (I have good instincts about when you can leave it out, when you can replace it with something else, and when you can’t make the recipe at all without the ingredient).
Many but perhaps not most vegetables go well with others. My brain isn’t generating a useful algorithm here but I can give you my best guess/experience regarding any combinations you think look likely.
There exists a book about this. I wouldn’t be surprised if there existed a genre of books about it, even.
googling “when is ripe” in hungarian gave me a site with a chart (but not all the fruits and veggies i could think of) as the first link. im sure further links down the google results page would include the missing ones.
i will try making the water soapier. also, evaporation plays a problem if i leave it too long. but i want to get in the habit of cooking often enough that i wont have to worry about that. i remember i used to wash any stray dishes while waiting for water to boil. i have lots of tricks like that i seem to have to rediscover again and again. a couple years ago, i had an epiphany that soapy water made things clean, not soapy, and that helped for a while, until i forgot again. i mean, i never stopped using soap, and i used soap before that point, but there was a moment when i understood at an intrinsic level that the soap applied to a dish could be removed from that dish, and the dirt would be removed along with it, through the application of water, and that all dirty things could be made clean, that nothing was dirty beyond repair. whereas othertimes i remember that i don’t like the taste of soap and i sink into a vague suspicion that i’m just adding soap to the dirt and making soapy dirt and wonder what makes me so sure that adding soap to a spoon will make the food that later comes onto that spoon more edible. The manner in which I wash dishes doesn’t really change, but by mental approach to it changes from disgust at the wrongness on the dishes to delight at the opportunity to right a wrong.
Spinach canned. Hm, so it does. I’ll keep an eye out for it. My mental image of the aisle in the store that sells canned food mostly contains corn, peas, and beans, along with a few types of soup (mostly goulash soup, the one i like best), but googling in hungarian tells me there is indeed such a thing as canned spinach. i’ve seen it frozen, too, in small enough quantities that it could conceivably be eaten in one sitting. and i think frozen spinach would keep for at least a day in the fridge as well.
oh, the english wikipedia page for turnip shows something completely different. the dictionary I was using was wrong. I’m not really familiar with turnips, I guess. What I call white carrot is, according to wikipedia, actually parsley root, which looks somewhat like parsnips, but doesn’t taste like them. it’s not really carroty in flavour either, just shape. you put it in soups and stews, and chicken noodle soup should have at least one of them and at least one carrot as well.
the roasted squash sounds easy and good. i think i have a vague memory involving squash, zucchini, tomato and pasta with a creamy sauce. which sounds easy to make.
i’ll give leek another chance. :)
cream of broccoli soup is wonderful. i tried to make it once, but it wasnt very creamy when i made it, and i used too much broccoli (and therefore too much water and too much of everything else), but it was good.
I remember finding a recipe once online that if I took out everything that I was confused by/didn’t think I could get here/didn’t like, I was left lentils and water. i didnt like lentils and water all by themselves, and realised that anything i could add to it would be something of my own creation, not resembling the original recipe at all. it’s not usually that bad. usually it’s something like “capers” (which seem to be something pickled, but i only like pickled cucumbers) or “cheese-whiz” or takes an english cookbook off the shelf and flips through randomly “parmigiano-reggiano (a small handful)”, “radicchio”, “swiss chard.” The book was a present from my mother, but almost every recipe contains something we don’t have here, or something i don’t like, or something expensive. I’ve mostly given up on the cookbook as useless. :)
Capers are pickled flowerbuds, and can probably be safely left out of virtually anything. Parmigiano-reggiano is a cheese; you can sub parmesan or another hard grated/shredded cheese if you can’t find it. Radicchio and swiss chard are both leaf vegetables and could probably be reasonably substituted for others in that reference class. Cheez whiz is an abomination.
Also, now I want to try parsley root, but Wikipedia indicates it will be hard to find here! Rar!
Thanks for the information. :) I suppose that in general, then, “unheard of leaf vegetable that’s being suggested for a salad” can be replaced with “regular salad leaves” and “unheard of vegetable being suggested for pasta” can be replaced with “vegetable i like in pasta” and “some cheese that i dont know what it tastes like” can be replaced with gouda, which is good on everything.
I wonder if leaf parsley’s roots taste the same as root parsley’s. Wikipedia says they are smaller, since they’re not being grown for the root, but I think since it’s pretty much the same plant, it should taste at least similar. I don’t know if you garden, but if so, you might plant some regular parsley and when the time comes to dig them up see how much root there is. Otherwise, if you shop at farmer’s markets, you might ask the parsley-seller about the roots. Types of carrots (in Hungarian anyway) are sugar beets (called sugar carrot), parsley (called white carrot), and carrot (called orange carrot)
I suppose that in general, then, “unheard of leaf vegetable that’s being suggested for a salad” can be replaced with “regular salad leaves” and “unheard of vegetable being suggested for pasta” can be replaced with “vegetable i like in pasta” and “some cheese that i dont know what it tastes like” can be replaced with gouda, which is good on everything.
maybe I can find a website aimed at slow six year olds who don’t yet know which two weeks are strawberry season, and whether sour cherry season comes before or after black cherry season.
If you tell us where you are, one of us will almost certainly track this down. Most of us like researching things, and this sounds like a fun challenge.
freezers are indeed useful. someday, i shall have one.
You should do the actual math to see how much you will (or won’t) save by having a freezer—it might pay for itself quicker than you think.
You don’t have to get a full-sized refrigerator/freezer unit. I’ve seen small freezers here for less than $100 that would handle one person’s food pretty well, and you might be able to get one for less than half that, secondhand. (Does Craigslist have listings in your area? How about freecycle?)
although it doesn’t list strawberries. for july, it says: sweet cherries, gooseberries, black currant, watermelon, sour cherry, peach, currant, apricot, plum. the ones that are in the middle of their season will be cheapest. the ones just starting or just ending will be expensive. so my bet is that sour cherry is cheapest.
for vegetables: zucchini (meh), kohlrabi, lentils, sunflowers, capsicum (bell pepper), tomato, pattypan squash, pumpkin, green peas, and horseradish.
If I can figure out what’s wrong with the fridge (and whether it has an easy solution), I could make cherry soup http://www.chew.hu/meggyleves.html (recipe in English)
i dont know if they have vanila sugar where you are, but it’s equivalent to a tsp or tbsp (but definitely not a cup) of a vanilla i think. you could just keep adding small amounts of it until it tastes good. :)
on the veggies list, the only things on that list that i’ve cooked with before and would know how to make something edible are: lentils, tomato and capsicum (Both of whom are just starting their season and arent at their cheapest yet)
but there may be other fruits and vegetables not on this list.
There’s a divergence between American English and British English here; in BrE “capsicum” can mean a bell pepper, but in AmE it only means a chilli pepper. (In neither does “capsicum” mean the substance that gives the hot peppers their hotness; that’s called capsaicin, capsicin, or capsicine.)
Hungary (southern plains, specifically, but it’s a small enough country that it doesn’t matter. My city is the one that gets an average of 2000 of sunlight a year, the highest in the country.). I noticed a while ago when strawberry prices stopped going down and started going up that strawberry season must be ending, but I didn’t attach a date to this noticing in my mind, so when next year rolls around, I still won’t know. (Though I remember they never went below 665 HUF/kg (about $3. I would’ve bought if they went down to 565. This information may or may not be useful next year due to inflation)
Just checked Freecycle. There are three in the country, but none in this city. Deliapro (southern classified ads) has people selling stuff used. currently, someone’s selling a gigantic one (230 litres) for about $75, someone else says they’re selling various kitchen appliances for $40 and up. i dont want a large one. I wouldnt have space for it anyway. But I could fit a 30-60L one somewhere. I live in a 1.5 room apartment, and the kitchen is tiny, but there is a space in the pantry where I could fit a small freezer.
The fridge I have is a bar fridge. There is a freezer compartment, but the door broke, so I fixed it with duct tape (which means I can’t open it). Before the door broke, it would fill with snow on a weekly basis and was tiny anyway (it would fit one frozen pizza.) so I gave up on it and just use the fridge.
In re carrying a heavy load: do you have a backpack?
In re kale: I wouldn’t say it tastes like cabbage, but when raw, it does have a flavor which is hard too describe but too bitter for some people.
Squash and turnip can be baked. I can’t remember whether you have an oven.
What you describe about food is what I call poverty-based anorexia—I’ve heard of one other case. I’d be surprised if there aren’t a fairly large number of people who have it.
Specifically regarding protein: You are probably underestimating how much protein is in many foods. Here is a brief list of foods which, if you got all of your calories from them, would give you enough protein:
Any sort of bean, including fast cooking beans such as lentils, lima beans, and peas.
Most nuts
Many dark green vegetables (e.g spinach, kale, broccoli, green cabbage)
Bread. Yes, really—there’s lots of gluten in there.
Pasta. Again, lots of gluten.
Potatoes, so long as you eat the skins. Get red ones, they’re easier to clean and the skins are more tender.
Quinoa (a grain).
Brown rice is close, but not quite there. So you should not worry about eating meat, it’s unnecessary.
One specific dish you should consider is dal. Cooked lentils with spices. Popular in India. Lots of other things you can throw in, too, including onion, tomato, garlic. carrots, and corn. In small quantities the tomato and onion should be less likely to cause heartburn. To keep the cost of the spices down, buy from the bulk section—it can be as little as 1⁄10 the price of bottled spices, and you can get only however much you need. Dried lentils and spices keep for quite a long time, and it only takes 45min to prepare, in one pot (or two if you make a tarka).
When you store vegetables in the fridge, do you keep them in plastic bags? I find that helps for many green veggies in particular. I just use the bags I get them in from the store or my farmshare.
Consider shopping more like a European—buy fresh ingredients every day or every other day instead of doing one big shopping trip once a week. This will minimize your food spoilage problems.
I agree with everyone else that you should check that your fridge is functioning properly. Measure the temperature. It should be between 33 and 38 degrees F. Above 38 and I’d expect fairly high rates of spoilage.
I love indian food amd I like lentils and beans. And lentils are supposed to be quicker to cook (I have some really old lentils. I should get newer ones. They aren’t expensive.) The trick seems to be getting them soft but not mush. I used to cook indian more often, but I always made too much. It’s amazing how much food one carrot, one onion, one tomato, and some lentils turns into.
I have some spices—one year for my birthday, I told my mother to get me spices. And small quantities of spies are available quite cheaply—packets containing only a few grams can last me over a year, since I’m only using a pinch of one, a pinch of another. I have most of the common european spices (salt, black pepper, sweet paprika, rosemary, thyme, oregano, dill, basil, sage, etc.) and also I have some curry and garam masala, ground and whole cardamom (which I never knew what to do with). i have chili powder as well, which i add in small quantities to various things for health reasons—i dont like very spicy, but i dont mind it a little.)
I live in Hungary, and I’ve been trying to shop less European, because if I don’t have emergency supplies on hand and I can’t leave the house, then I’m stuck. I try to keep foods on hand that won’t spoil to use as emergency foods (some days I have a migraine and don’t make it outside), but on the days I can go out, I should be a good European and visit the market across the street in the mornings where there’s fresh seaonal produce from surrounding villages, and the bakery just down the street where I can buy 1⁄2 kg of bread for 115 forints (about $0.57). Lately, though, I haven’t been making it outside very often and so I eat into my supplies until I have to buy more.
I don’t know what kind of lentils you’re using, but green or French lentils become less mushy than red ones. (I happen to like them mushy, but if you don’t...)
My preference is a happy medium between the two. My experience vascillates between “chewing little rocks” or “i’m eating baby food” yet I like lentils, despite these problems.
My lentils are labeled in greek (ПΟΛΕМИΔΙΩТНΕ КΥПИАКХ ΦАКН), and my greek is worse than my russian (i can recognise about half of the letters and only those words which English stole and didn’t change very much) but they look red to me and definitely not green. I got them when a friend was moving home to Cyprus and didnt want to lug her pantry back with her. That must have been five years ago. She gave me several bags, and a little lentils go a long way.
the fridge isn’t mine—came with the apartment. and it’s a communist era fridge (complete with Russian labeled dials), so it probably dates back to before the wall came down. i have it on medium setting and will look at acquiring a thermoter to see if that means <5°C like it should or, something ridiculous like 10°C (i think i’d notice if it was warmer than that. it feels cold to me.)
I think the beans in question are just old beans. I add salt to taste at the end.
Based on #2 and #5, if I were you I would experiment to see if you have hypochlorhydria (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypochlorhydria). Symptoms are (ironically) basically the same as GERD. (Note: I’m not a doctor!)
hm, that’s interesting. That doesn’t seem like something I could easily test for at home, but I may ask a doctor the next time I see one.
The symptoms I have are really weird… not like what I’ve seen in adverts about heartburn (no burning pain in the chest, no stomach pains), but they come after eating acidic foods, so I try to avoid those foods. After eating something like chili or pizza, I feel like there’s something ‘stuck’ in my esophagus (the feeling is like when you swallow a pill, and it gets stuck on the way down), but there’s nothing really there. It is accompanied with burping and/or hiccups which last for hours. it hurts to lie down, so i have to stay seated. and it’s a recent development. I never had problems like this before a few months ago. I thought that until I could see a doctor I should just avoid foods that make me feel like this, and googled “alkaline foods” to see what foods might calm my stomach when it does that, if it’s reacting badly somehow to acidic foods. unfortunately, there’s a big pseudoscience diet called alkaline foods which lists foods like “lemon” as being alkaline, not acidic, because of some sort of reasoning that i couldnt quite follow. the signal to noise ratio was so bad that i gave up on googling for this information.
To test: obtain some HCL pills (they’re pretty cheap). Have some regular, calcium type antiacid on hand when you’re ready to experiment. Take an HCL with food that would typically give you symptoms. If you get massive heartburn within 20 minutes or so, then you do not need HCL (and take the antiacid to restore your stomach’s pH to normal). If nothing happens or your symptoms are slightly better, then you probably do have low stomach acid. You can experiment further to find the correct dose.
My understanding is that the valve that allows the contents of the stomach to proceed through the system is triggered by acidity in the stomach. Hence, if the stomach is not acidic enough, food will just hang out there—and will still be plenty acidic to cause heartburn. Also, I understand that as people age, they produce less HCL.
Generally, doctors will give people with those symptoms acid reducers, which will indeed fix the heartburn by lowing acid to almost nothing—an undesirable state of affairs, as you lose some of the sterilization properties of the stomach. Since an acid reducer fixes the symptoms no matter the root cause, it’s obviously a good thing to test it with some variation of the above method.
Once again, I am not a doctor. I do recommend you go see a doctor if something about your body changes unexpectedly; there are less common and less harmless other things that can cause such symptoms. But I will also add that your description of the sensation is pretty much how I would describe it, esp. the “stuck” feeling. I also think the “alkaline foods” thing is probably mostly bogus.
Everything above is my opinion, based off of reading lots of anecdotal data from lots of different places on the internet, plus someone I met IRL once. I’m sparing you the conspiracy theories as to why doctors don’t generally seem to perform this test; I think it’s pretty easy to explain as a failure of rationality. You can google around if you want to read those. Since I don’t have time to hunt down references, to help you judge how seriously (or not) to take this: I think mainstream health advice is probably quite bad, and the people advocating the “paleo diet” are probably much closer to the truth. I’m not aware of anything else I believe that’s non-standard.
eggs: can be kept uncooled for a while, very long shelf life hard-boiled, easy to prepare in small portions.
milk: do you get UHT milk? It has an uncooled shelf life of months and tends to be cheaper than fresher variants.
meat: consider smoked or dried meats (bacon, salami).
pasta: reasonably easy to prepare in smaller portions
Out of interest, where do you live that cigarettes are so much cheaper than food? One pack of cigerattes here (Germany) will buy me 2 days worth of (cheap) food.
i think if i ate eggs once every 3 days ( to keep from getting tired of them. i tire easily of eggs) I could get through a carton (10 eggs) with time to spare before they expire.
milk: i’ve mostly switched to powdered milk (which i wont drink, but can use in cooking and it doesnt go bad). When I want drink milk, I’ve started to buy a half litre of it that I will drink as soon as I get home. The problem with UHT is that once I open it, I have to drink the whole litre in a couple days. I need to figure out what’s wrong with my fridge. I was more using milk as an example of something that I can’t buy and use in the way normal people do because it spoils quicker than it should.
meat: i do like those, and a little can go a long way. There’s a store here (Aldi) that sells 300g Nürnburger Rostbratwurst for ~€3. 300 grams can last me quite a while. -- These don’t seem to go bad in the fridge actually, as long as I use them in a week. I keep them in the original package which I don’t open very far and also wrap that in plastic. I can buy a small amount of minced meat for 1€ and make a stir fry with it that serves one person, but I don’t do this very often.
pasta—yeah, I live off of pasta.
Ungarn :) I live south of Budapest, so food is cheaper here than it is there. The price of tobacco is set at a national level, however. A box of cigarettes costs 560 forints, about €2. However, I have found it is cheaper to buy tobacco directly. A 40g packet of tobacco also costs €2 and will make 50 cigarettes. A box of 200 empty cigarette tubes costs €1. So, the price of 200 cigarettes made by hand is €9. The device that puts the tobacco in the tubes costed €5 and has lasted me over a year so far. It paid for itself very quickly. I smoke about a pack a day, so €0.90. 1 kg of bread costs €1. 10 eggs is a little more than €1. At Aldi I can buy a can of Gulyás soup for €1, but it is €3-4 in stores close to me.
About expiration dates: For many foods (not fresh meats though), these may not be actual expiration dates but generously calculated minimum shelf lives. For me at least, eggs and milk will stay good for weeks beyond their labels.
Eggs are very versatile. Scrambled eggs can be combined with any number of spices, fried vegetables, milk, meats. Before I got into cooking this used to be a staple food of mine. You may also add eggs to soup, noodles, rice.
If you are worried about expiry you can hardboil the otherwise uneaten eggs. These can be kept a long time and eaten alone, on bread, in salads.
Another good source of protein with long shelf life may be parmesan, but perhaps too expensive.
Hol Magyarországon élsz? Tanulok magyarul és megyek augusztusban Pécsen ;)
Akkor rossz a tojás, ha miután feltörtem, furcsán néz ki (homályos, valami nő benne, piros pöttyöket látok), illetve rossz szagú. A tojásokat mindig külön pohárban töröm fel, nehogy az egész ételt rontsam el vele. Miután megnéztem és megszagoltam, nyugodtan beletehetem a serpenyőbe. A barátnőm azt mondja, hogy amelyik úszik a vízben, az már nem jó, de ez csak azt jelenti, hogy már nem a legfrissebb és óvatosan kell bánni vele. Szeretem a rántott tojást és a töltött tojást és a tükör tojást is de az utolsót csak pirított kenyérrel.
Szegeden élek. Ez körülbelül 4 óra busszal Pécstől. Vonattal még hosszabb az út, mert Budapestre kell utazni és ott átszállni. Így Szegedről Pécsre 180 km-t kell utaznom északra, ahhoz hogy délnyugatra menjek. :D A busz egyenesebb útvonalon megy.
Eggs have gone bad if, after opening one, it looks strange (cloudy, something growing in it, I see red spots), or if it has a bad smell. I always break eggs in a separate cup, lest I ruin the whole meal with one. After I’ve looked at it and smelled it, I can safely put it into the frying pan. My girlfriend says that the ones that floatin water are bad, but it just means that they aren’t so fresh any more and need to be treated with care. I like scrambled eggs, deviled eggs, and over easy eggs but the those I only like with toast.
I live in Szeged. It is about 4 hours by bus from Pécs. It is much longer by train, because you have to travel to Budapest and change trains there. So from Szeged to Pécs I have to travel 180 km north in order to go south west. :D The bus goes on a straighter path.
I don’t eat enough vegetables or protein.
1) Vegetables and meat are expensive and are generally not in my budget.
2) I don’t like the way I feel after eating meat. I find my thoughts are slower and my stomach feels slightly queasy.
3) Beans take forever to cook. Even if I soak them overnight. Canned beans are expensive.
4) When I buy food, I tend to try to eat as little of it as possible to make it last longer. When I do this with vegetables, they go off and have to be thrown away. But it’s so hard to make myself eat now when I could eat later. I know that I’ll be hungry a few hours after I eat, so longer I go, the longer it’ll be till I get hungry again.
5) Some fruits and vegetables give me bad heart burn. Others don’t taste very good.
6) I’m probably not saving all that much money on food by not eating. It’s just a weird behaviour I can’t break myself of.
7) I’m cooking for one and it’s very hard to cook the tiny portions I require. Or rather, it’s a lot of work and I only get one meal out of it. If I do get two or three meals out of it, I’m get tired of eating it and can’t eat it for a while.
8) I have a small fridge, but no freezer. Frozen vegetables aren’t an option for me unless I use them all at once (and then the portion is too big and half of it goes bad).
9) I have problems washing dishes (and of course cannot afford a dish washer), and sometimes i have to wash a plate on 4 or more consecutive days before it’s clean. (this isn’t /just/ OCD. there really is visible grime on it still after so many washes. i just dont have the arm strength due to the chronic pain.) washing dishes can tire me out to such an extent that i am then unable to cook. cooking and eating tires me out to such an extent that i cant wash the dishes. the best plan i can figure out is to alternate days: eat bread one day and wash dishes. cook the next day and dirty dishes. but the current state of affairs is that all dishes are dirty and have to be washed before each use.
10) most ingredients for cooking don’t keep for more than a day or two, even in the fridge. milk, bread, veggies, leftovers, they all go bad. i think it’s something about the humidity.
Vegetables I like: tomato (heartburn), onion (heartburn), garlic (no problem)
Vegetables I like, but don’t really know what to do with: carrots, lettuce (can’t buy small enough quantities anyway), corn, potatoes
Vegetables I don’t like all that much or at all: peas, string beans, asparagus, brussel sprouts, capsicum, cabbage, eggplant, zucchini
there may exist vegetables that i forgot to mention. i may or may not like them or be able to afford them or know how to prepare them.
If milk goes bad after a day or two no matter when you open it, you might have a malfunctioning refrigerator.
If milk is OK until a day or two after you open it, you might have a dangerously elevated level of airborne microorganisms.
I’ve noticed that cheaper food doesn’t keep as long after it’s bought—this is a casual observation, not careful research. It seems plausible that cheaper food hasn’t been given as good care and/or isn’t as fresh to start with.
It’s plausible that the refrigerator is malfunctioning. It’s also plausible that its temperature is set too high, so that should be checked. Look for a dial inside the refrigerator.
A pressure cooker might be helpful with getting beans to cook faster. I don’t know whether one can be found cheap enough and whether an unusually small one would be needed because of portion size/arm strength issues.
You can sometimes buy these second-hand from thrift stores. Alternatively you can often buy a “slow cooker” from the same places—and they are also good for cooking beans (you set the up in the morning and leave them to run during the day while you’re at work/whatever and dinner is done when you get home).
i’ll look around. it sounds like a nice way of cooking.
some cheaper food is cheaper because it is about to expire and the store wants to make at least some profit off of it. other cheaper food is just cheap because it’s cheaper to produce.
the dial on the fridge is labeled in Russian. My Russian is not very good (i can read most of the letters and get a basic idea of what i’m reading, but more than 50% of the words are unknown to me), but i can easily make out МИН “minimum”, ВЬКЛ “medium”, and МАКС “maximum” and have it set to medium. i have no idea what actual temperature this refers to. i have a thermometer but it is only for measuring human body temperatures. i will have to see if i can find a cheap thermometer that could measure the fridge, because I am curious.
i may look into the cost of pressure cookers down the track.
My Russian is pretty good… ВЬКЛ = выключить = turn off, not “medium”. Why do you have a Russian fridge anyway??
Because I live in a former eastern bloc country (Hungary). My only guess is the fridge is that old. (It’s not mine, but it came with the apartment I live in. The building I live in is Russian built too. :)
I will look again it, to make sure I got the letters right and to make sure it is pointing at what I thought it was. Since my Russian is so bad, when i checked last time what the words said, I was repeating “V soft sign K L” to myself so i wouldnt forget it before i got back to the keyboard. (I was confident i could remember min and maks) so it may have stood out in my head enough that i forgot what it was set to.
But it’s definitely cold in fridge, so it cannot be set to “turn off.”
This time, I take my camera with me :)
.… and discover that it is set to maximum (МАКС).
Here is a picture http://pics.livejournal.com/pthalogreen/pic/0012rat7 . It also has another setting “НОРМ” which im going to assume is the “normal” or “medium” that i was remembering that it had. I think I set it to maks some time ago in attempt to solve the food spoilage problem.
It’s really hard for me to remember выключить because my knowledge of Slavic languages (and understanding of Russian via cognates) comes mostly from southern slavic languages which I have studied, like Serbian, and uključiti in Serbian means “to turn on”.
Haha, you’ve run into some of the most confusing false friends between any languages there. The Russian cognate of Serbian (and Bosnian/Croatian) uključiti is включить, which if I’m not mistaken means the same thing—not выключить, which means the exact opposite.
To make things even more confusing, the BCS verbal prefix u- normally denotes arrival/entering, whereas in Russian it generally denotes leaving. So you get false friends like ući “to enter” vs. уйти “to go away,” or uletjeti “to fly in” vs. улететь “to fly away.” Generally, if there exists a Russian cognate of a BCS verb with the u- prefix, it will have the prefix в- or во-, not у- or вы-. The former are real etymological cognates, while the latter are not despite the similarity, and often in fact convey the opposite meaning.
Such false friends are even more fun when you see Serbian spelled in Cyrillic, making the false similarities even more prominent. (The first prize, I think, goes to this one, though my great favorite is also право, which is “straight” in Serbian but “right” in Russian when you give directions.)
Native Russian speaker here.
That is correct.
btw. ь and ы are distinct letters.
Спасибо for the correction.
oh, this is helpful information. I didn’t realise there was a difference. It seems to be the latter case. Things are fine unopened until their expiration date. Things that are opened need to be used very quickly. There are things growing in certain dishes in the fridge (another problem I’m not really up to tackling) but I have had this problem since I moved into this apartment, even during long stretches of time when there were not things growing in the fridge (because I was using the fridge less—wasn’t cooking as much as didn’t have leftovers). It doesn’t seem to matter whether I buy UHT milk or regular. They keep okay unopened most of the time, but opening them means I have to use them quickly. I’ve swtitched to powdered milk, which I wont drink, but a teaspoon of the powder with a little extra water works well for sauces that call for milk.
When I do get round to throwing out things that are growing in dishes (the current ones are covered in plastic wrap), i also take the opportunity to wash the fridge with cleaning supplies and vinegar, in case any of the scary stuff escaped.
in winter, i’ve had some success using the balcony as a fridge/freezer. but it’s summer now.
Get protein from non-meat sources. Consider, in particular, eggs. Monitor the sales at your grocer of choice; if they have a free loyalty program fill out their form and take their junk mail to get in on that.
See above
Buy canned beans in large amounts when they are on sale. Or, consider trying to make a deal with a friend or neighbor where you split batches of beans and only have to do cooking some of the time.
This should admit of self-modification. If you know your food will go off if not eaten, there is no waste or “not lasting longer” associated with eating it before that time. But perhaps you need to work around it instead...
Heartburn can be medicated. If you can’t afford to get that checked out or afford the meds, eat around it...
I really do recommend eating, but would need to know more about the etiology of the habit before I offered advice on breaking it.
Consider sharing meals with friends/neighbors. Or, get a freezer. Freezers are really useful.
If you can’t get a freezer, buy your veggies canned. Many veggies come that way. Cans are smallish.
Consider disposable dishes, or covering your dishes with something like plastic wrap and being careful with your utensils. (Possibly expensive.) Also, note that not every use of dishes requires washing between uses, especially if you are the only user: you can use a water glass for days as long as you don’t leave a lot of water standing in it; you can brush crumbs of relatively dry foods off a plate and use it again; etc. When you do have to wash dishes, soak them overnight with water and dish soap first, or at least rinse them out, to reduce the amount by which things cake on and to help give the grease a head start on dissolving.
Freezers are useful. Like, a lot.
Veggies you did not mention include: miscellaneous greens such as turnip or collard, kale, spinach, green or wax beans, bamboo, peppers, artichokes, beets, water chestnuts. (All of those things exist canned.) Also, celery, celeriac, turnips, rutabagas, parsnips, miscellaneous sprouts, assorted squashes, fennel, leeks, scallions, avocados, cucumbers, broccoli, cauliflower, edamame, radishes, jicama, seaweed of various sorts. I don’t know if these ones are available canned. (Seaweed has the advantage of being available dried. You can reconstitute whatever amount you desire.)
As for what to do with them: Your favorites, tomatoes, onions, garlic, carrots, corn, and potatoes (plus most of what I just mentioned) can all be put in soups, stews, pot pies, sautés and stirfries, kabobs, and curries, or just eaten by themselves cooked or not with the spices/seasonings of your choice. Google is your friend; search for [vegetable] recipe and see what pops up. If you require more specialized help, pick some likely-looking veggies and I will locate or fabricate simple preparation instructions for you!
Also consider protein powder. On a per gram of protein basis, whey protein powder is only slightly more expensive than eggs, but much easier to prepare. (Assuming $25 for 5 pounds of whey protein powder, and $1 for a dozen large eggs, I get $0.0156 per gram of protein for whey, and $0.0132 per gram of protein for eggs.)
I will have a look at one of the health shops that sells protein powder to see what it costs, and will look online to see what I can slip it into without noticing the taste.
Also worth consideration: Layering a single-ply paper plate over a non-disposable plate. This helps stretch your paper plate supply (most paper plates are something like 3 or 4 ply, for strength; break them apart into 3 or 4 individual ones), allows you to use paper plates for things that are too heavy or wet to usually use them for, and should at least cut down on the amount of effort that it takes to wash the non-disposable plate afterward. (I almost always manage to get sauce or something on the edge of the non-disposable plate when I do this, but cleaning that is a matter of a 5-10 second rinse rather than a full scrub.)
that’s a really good idea. I will have to see where I can buy paper plates. Most places seem to only sell plastic, but they must be available somewhere. This would probably work for paper bowls as well, placed inside a regular one.
i am lukewarm on eggs. I like them enough to eat a few of them, and you can stir certain vegetables into them and add cheese if you have some and salt and pepper and they can taste nice, maybe every few days but then I have to get creative to use the last few eggs in the carton before they go off. if i make a concerted effort, I can eat a carton of 10 eggs in 3 batches spread over 9 days, and they do last longer than that. maybe I could make every day divisible by 3 egg day. Today’s the 179th day of the year (well, now that it’s 2am, it is), so if I went out tomorrow (which will still be the 179th, but it’s tomorrow because i’ll have slept between now and then) to pick some eggs up, I could start tomorrow. If not, I could start on the 182nd.
there’s a store that’s only 1km walk and a bus ride away where I can buy many things very cheaply and the quality is better than anything else in the town. Cans of soup for €1 a piece instead of €4 (hmm, i wonder what their canned beans are priced like. If it were €1 it might be worth it, though when you can get an entire kilogram of dried beans for less, it feels like a waste to spend €1 on one meal). sometimes when I go there I buy sausages. These are more expensive, about €3, but cheaper than I can find elsewhere and the quantity will last me about a week, since I use them sparingly to make them last longer. I shop there when I can, but most days I don’t have the energy to spend a couple hours taking busses and walking with a heavy load (the savings in buying their products vastly outweigh the cost of the bus tickets), so I also shop at places that are nearer to me, where the selection is poorer and the prices are higher. at these stores, i’m careful what I buy and tend to buy things where the price difference is smaller
The cheapest source of vegetables isn’t these foreign stores. It’s the market across the street where the farmers from neighbouring villages come in the morning with carrots that look like they’ve just been pulled out of the ground. You have to get up early if you want to buy anything, and the prices change every day—and if you don’t know the seasons as well as everyone else seems to, they will stop going down and start going up just when you were thinking you’d buy at the next price drop. I don’t know the seasons well, but I could probably find something with googling—except I get a feeling that questions like “when is strawberry season here?” is considered common knowledge. Once, I was playing “guess the fruit” with a six year old, and he was giving me hints for the fruit he’d thought of. The first clue he thought of was not “it is yellow” or “monkeys eat it” but “it’s ripe in winter”. (Bananas, grown in the southern hemisphere, are ripe in our winter. it made sense once I thought about it, but I’d never thought about it.) but maybe I can find a website aimed at slow six year olds who don’t yet know which two weeks are strawberry season, and whether sour cherry season comes before or after black cherry season.
about number 4. i do need to find a way to do some self modification for that. it’s kind of ridiculous. the goal of frugality is living within my means and someday, trying to get to the point where i have 1 months expenses saved up in my bank account so that i have a small cushion if my money’s late or i don’t get paid or an emergency comes up. buying food, eating nothing, letting it go bad, and throwing it away isn’t frugal. Actually, it reminds me of something the Cullens would do (I’m a big fan of Luminosity and Radiance. Never read Twilight, but mom sent me to the DVD since she knows nothing about my tastes heard it was popular, so I downloaded subtitles for it in one of my target languages (Macedonian) so i could watch the gift and call it language practice.)
heartburn can be medicated. i’ve looked up some medications that i can get without a prescription at the local pharmacy. (All medications here have to be bought from a pharmacist, even aspirin, but some don’t need a prescription) I am painfully shy, and having to ask for something by name is a trial for me, but I have been meaning to get down and buy some antacids. it’s probably stress related heart burn anyway. I can afford to spend a few euros on antacids. I am poor, but I actually live more frugally than strictly necessary, because I want to improve my situation and frugality can help with that (though neglecting my health is not frugal in the long run or even in the short run, I know. I need to cut that out.)
6) i’ve done a lot of thinking recently because knowing why is the first step. After my parents divorced, when I was about ten, I was terrified we’d have to go back to living with my father if we failed to make it on our own financially and knew that we were poor, so I tried to do all that I could to prevent that from happening. I knew I was too young to get a job, too young to legally babysit, and I knew I wouldnt have earned much anyway. So, I stopped wanting things. I stopped whining about the toys I saw on tv, I stopped eating breakfast, knowing that my overworked mother would see the opened and partially empty box of cereal and not replace it until it was nearly empty because she would see that I had something to make myself when I got up before going to school. I stopped eating lunch, because the agreement was that I would ask for more money to buy school lunch when I needed it, and I knew she wouldnt remember how recently she’d given me the money. So I kept the money and spent it as infrequently as I could, knowing that the longer i stretched it, the longer my mother would have to go without giving me more. I probably did save her some amount of money this way, but i didnt really have all the facts, and the teacher’s reports that i’d stopped responding to my name and mostly stared off into space all the time led to doctors appointments which definitely costed more than school lunch. Dinner was eaten together when she came home from work. Sometimes I cooked, sometimes she did, and I ate dinner every night. I don’t remember much about that year, but I spent most of it dizzy and spaced out. after a while, my body got used to it and i didnt have much appetite anymore. It was logical in its own way, but i didnt have all the facts, and i was very young. and then as a young adult, i was again scared that if i couldnt make it on my own financially i’d have to go back to living with my mother, so i went back to skimping on food. it’s like an eating disorder, but i don’t obsess about calories and couldn’t care less what I weigh.
freezers are indeed useful. someday, i shall have one.
i already use a piece of paper on a tray to catch crumbs if i’m just eating bread or something. pasta i eat out of the pan (i am cooking for one, after all, why dirty a plate?) my cup is rinsed well the first time i’m going to use it that day. who knows how many flies visited it over night (no fly screens either, and it’s summer), but after that i dont wash it between uses. i’ve used disposable plates and forks in the past, and though i feel guilty about environmental concerns, if i can’t eat any other way, then i can’t. i’d really like to find some paper plates instead of plastic, because the only plastic ones i can find melt in the microwave, which renders them useless to me. when i cook in the oven, i use aluminium foil instead of a pan, if i can get away with it.
dishes: i do rinse them, and then i come back to them a week later and they are slimy. (solution: come back the very next day. i try, and i can succeed for days at a time sometimes, but then something comes up and i’m back to having a sink full of petri dishes.
vegetables you mentioned that I know what they are called here and remember seeing in a store, even if rarely, and think i like or have questions about whether i would like it or not:
spinach - <3 but hard to find out of season
kale—it’s called “kale cabbage” here, which has scared me off it, since i dont like cabbage. does it taste like cabbage? my real problem with cabbage is that it is huge and i cant eat an entire cabbage before it goes bad, and i dont like it pickled. i can tolerate the taste here and there, but ill never be enthusiastic about eating a lot of it at once.
peppers = capsicum. - will eat them, and wil sometimes like them, but am not crazy about them. they do go nice in pasta sometimes.
we don’t have celery here, but we do have celeriac. it is large and hard to use all of it in time, but i do like it. the problem is you only need a tiny bit to get the right flavour.
turnips—are called “white carrots” here and are good in soups, but it is impossible to cook soup for one person and i dont know any other ways of preparing them. can they be eaten raw?
squash—like, but they are usually large, and i dont know whether they can be eaten raw or how to turn them into the tasty mashed stuff (i dont have a masher), or if they can be prepared non-mashed.
leek—is a readily available, mostly green, gigantic, cylindrical onion. i like onions, but do not know if i could consume an entire leek. i imagine that slices of it would be good on just about anything though.
broccoli—is only sold in 500g batches, is hard to find, and somewhat expensive. i love it, but have trouble using up so much of it.
cauliflower -is cheap, white coloured broccoli that is sold by the head. impossible to use an entire head without it going bad if you are only one person.
Do most vegetables go well with each other? (in a stir fry, on top of pasta, etc.)
I like reading recipes online, but sometimes get frustrated when they list ingredients that are unavailable to me (happens more often than not.) but i’ll look around some more.
Websites explaining produce seasons totally exist. I don’t know where you live, but I’m sure you can find the info.
If you leave soapy water standing in your dishes, the soap should cut down on slime growing on them.
Spinach is available canned! Get it that way and season doesn’t matter.
Kale is not like cabbage. It’s a leafy green, sort of like turnip greens or mustard greens.
Celeriac is good roasted and then put in soup. Find smaller roots of it, and when you cut the ugly off, cut a little deeper; if you don’t put much in the soup besides celeriac you should be able to eat it in as little as two sittings.
Turnips don’t look anything like carrots; do you mean parsnips? Wikipedia says you can eat parsnips raw.
Yellow squash comes small. I usually have it with fish, and use half of one in a meal; if I’m having only squash for a meal I can definitely eat a whole one. I like to slice them up thin and then roast them (line pan with foil, coat with olive oil, pop in the oven at 425º for 15-20 minutes).
Leeks are not as much food as they look like. You can roast them (it’s wise to parboil first though), or put them in soup.
Broccoli is amazing roasted, in soup, or with pasta. Cauliflower is good in soups, curries, or casseroles. You really need to find out why your fridge won’t let you keep leftovers for a normal amount of time and fix that; I can easily eat a batch of cream of cauliflower soup that contains an entire head of cauliflower over a few days, but if you can’t keep soup around for a few days you may be in trouble. Cauliflower and broccoli are also edible raw, optionally with dip.
Many but perhaps not most vegetables go well with others. My brain isn’t generating a useful algorithm here but I can give you my best guess/experience regarding any combinations you think look likely.
There is a lot of information available about substitutions online. I am an improvisational cook and can probably help you out if you’re missing something for a recipe (I have good instincts about when you can leave it out, when you can replace it with something else, and when you can’t make the recipe at all without the ingredient).
There exists a book about this. I wouldn’t be surprised if there existed a genre of books about it, even.
neat
googling “when is ripe” in hungarian gave me a site with a chart (but not all the fruits and veggies i could think of) as the first link. im sure further links down the google results page would include the missing ones.
i will try making the water soapier. also, evaporation plays a problem if i leave it too long. but i want to get in the habit of cooking often enough that i wont have to worry about that. i remember i used to wash any stray dishes while waiting for water to boil. i have lots of tricks like that i seem to have to rediscover again and again. a couple years ago, i had an epiphany that soapy water made things clean, not soapy, and that helped for a while, until i forgot again. i mean, i never stopped using soap, and i used soap before that point, but there was a moment when i understood at an intrinsic level that the soap applied to a dish could be removed from that dish, and the dirt would be removed along with it, through the application of water, and that all dirty things could be made clean, that nothing was dirty beyond repair. whereas othertimes i remember that i don’t like the taste of soap and i sink into a vague suspicion that i’m just adding soap to the dirt and making soapy dirt and wonder what makes me so sure that adding soap to a spoon will make the food that later comes onto that spoon more edible. The manner in which I wash dishes doesn’t really change, but by mental approach to it changes from disgust at the wrongness on the dishes to delight at the opportunity to right a wrong.
Spinach canned. Hm, so it does. I’ll keep an eye out for it. My mental image of the aisle in the store that sells canned food mostly contains corn, peas, and beans, along with a few types of soup (mostly goulash soup, the one i like best), but googling in hungarian tells me there is indeed such a thing as canned spinach. i’ve seen it frozen, too, in small enough quantities that it could conceivably be eaten in one sitting. and i think frozen spinach would keep for at least a day in the fridge as well.
oh, the english wikipedia page for turnip shows something completely different. the dictionary I was using was wrong. I’m not really familiar with turnips, I guess. What I call white carrot is, according to wikipedia, actually parsley root, which looks somewhat like parsnips, but doesn’t taste like them. it’s not really carroty in flavour either, just shape. you put it in soups and stews, and chicken noodle soup should have at least one of them and at least one carrot as well.
the roasted squash sounds easy and good. i think i have a vague memory involving squash, zucchini, tomato and pasta with a creamy sauce. which sounds easy to make.
i’ll give leek another chance. :)
cream of broccoli soup is wonderful. i tried to make it once, but it wasnt very creamy when i made it, and i used too much broccoli (and therefore too much water and too much of everything else), but it was good.
I remember finding a recipe once online that if I took out everything that I was confused by/didn’t think I could get here/didn’t like, I was left lentils and water. i didnt like lentils and water all by themselves, and realised that anything i could add to it would be something of my own creation, not resembling the original recipe at all. it’s not usually that bad. usually it’s something like “capers” (which seem to be something pickled, but i only like pickled cucumbers) or “cheese-whiz” or takes an english cookbook off the shelf and flips through randomly “parmigiano-reggiano (a small handful)”, “radicchio”, “swiss chard.” The book was a present from my mother, but almost every recipe contains something we don’t have here, or something i don’t like, or something expensive. I’ve mostly given up on the cookbook as useless. :)
Capers are pickled flowerbuds, and can probably be safely left out of virtually anything. Parmigiano-reggiano is a cheese; you can sub parmesan or another hard grated/shredded cheese if you can’t find it. Radicchio and swiss chard are both leaf vegetables and could probably be reasonably substituted for others in that reference class. Cheez whiz is an abomination.
Also, now I want to try parsley root, but Wikipedia indicates it will be hard to find here! Rar!
Thanks for the information. :) I suppose that in general, then, “unheard of leaf vegetable that’s being suggested for a salad” can be replaced with “regular salad leaves” and “unheard of vegetable being suggested for pasta” can be replaced with “vegetable i like in pasta” and “some cheese that i dont know what it tastes like” can be replaced with gouda, which is good on everything.
I wonder if leaf parsley’s roots taste the same as root parsley’s. Wikipedia says they are smaller, since they’re not being grown for the root, but I think since it’s pretty much the same plant, it should taste at least similar. I don’t know if you garden, but if so, you might plant some regular parsley and when the time comes to dig them up see how much root there is. Otherwise, if you shop at farmer’s markets, you might ask the parsley-seller about the roots. Types of carrots (in Hungarian anyway) are sugar beets (called sugar carrot), parsley (called white carrot), and carrot (called orange carrot)
Yes, this.
If you tell us where you are, one of us will almost certainly track this down. Most of us like researching things, and this sounds like a fun challenge.
You should do the actual math to see how much you will (or won’t) save by having a freezer—it might pay for itself quicker than you think.
You don’t have to get a full-sized refrigerator/freezer unit. I’ve seen small freezers here for less than $100 that would handle one person’s food pretty well, and you might be able to get one for less than half that, secondhand. (Does Craigslist have listings in your area? How about freecycle?)
Anyway, a quick googling of “mikor érik” (when is ripe) got me to this page: http://www.hazipatika.com/topics/zoldseg_gyumolcs/seasonality (warning, not in english)
although it doesn’t list strawberries. for july, it says: sweet cherries, gooseberries, black currant, watermelon, sour cherry, peach, currant, apricot, plum. the ones that are in the middle of their season will be cheapest. the ones just starting or just ending will be expensive. so my bet is that sour cherry is cheapest.
for vegetables: zucchini (meh), kohlrabi, lentils, sunflowers, capsicum (bell pepper), tomato, pattypan squash, pumpkin, green peas, and horseradish.
If I can figure out what’s wrong with the fridge (and whether it has an easy solution), I could make cherry soup http://www.chew.hu/meggyleves.html (recipe in English)
i dont know if they have vanila sugar where you are, but it’s equivalent to a tsp or tbsp (but definitely not a cup) of a vanilla i think. you could just keep adding small amounts of it until it tastes good. :)
on the veggies list, the only things on that list that i’ve cooked with before and would know how to make something edible are: lentils, tomato and capsicum (Both of whom are just starting their season and arent at their cheapest yet)
but there may be other fruits and vegetables not on this list.
In English, capsicum is what makes hot peppers hot. The large peppers that aren’t hot are called peppers, sweet peppers or bell peppers.
There’s a divergence between American English and British English here; in BrE “capsicum” can mean a bell pepper, but in AmE it only means a chilli pepper. (In neither does “capsicum” mean the substance that gives the hot peppers their hotness; that’s called capsaicin, capsicin, or capsicine.)
Capsaicin is the chemical that makes peppers hot; capsicum is a genus.
Hungary (southern plains, specifically, but it’s a small enough country that it doesn’t matter. My city is the one that gets an average of 2000 of sunlight a year, the highest in the country.). I noticed a while ago when strawberry prices stopped going down and started going up that strawberry season must be ending, but I didn’t attach a date to this noticing in my mind, so when next year rolls around, I still won’t know. (Though I remember they never went below 665 HUF/kg (about $3. I would’ve bought if they went down to 565. This information may or may not be useful next year due to inflation)
Just checked Freecycle. There are three in the country, but none in this city. Deliapro (southern classified ads) has people selling stuff used. currently, someone’s selling a gigantic one (230 litres) for about $75, someone else says they’re selling various kitchen appliances for $40 and up. i dont want a large one. I wouldnt have space for it anyway. But I could fit a 30-60L one somewhere. I live in a 1.5 room apartment, and the kitchen is tiny, but there is a space in the pantry where I could fit a small freezer.
The fridge I have is a bar fridge. There is a freezer compartment, but the door broke, so I fixed it with duct tape (which means I can’t open it). Before the door broke, it would fill with snow on a weekly basis and was tiny anyway (it would fit one frozen pizza.) so I gave up on it and just use the fridge.
In re carrying a heavy load: do you have a backpack?
In re kale: I wouldn’t say it tastes like cabbage, but when raw, it does have a flavor which is hard too describe but too bitter for some people.
Squash and turnip can be baked. I can’t remember whether you have an oven.
What you describe about food is what I call poverty-based anorexia—I’ve heard of one other case. I’d be surprised if there aren’t a fairly large number of people who have it.
A handheld steam cleaner like this can remove food from dishes with almost no effort, and costs a lot less than a dishwasher.
Specifically regarding protein: You are probably underestimating how much protein is in many foods. Here is a brief list of foods which, if you got all of your calories from them, would give you enough protein:
Any sort of bean, including fast cooking beans such as lentils, lima beans, and peas.
Most nuts
Many dark green vegetables (e.g spinach, kale, broccoli, green cabbage)
Bread. Yes, really—there’s lots of gluten in there.
Pasta. Again, lots of gluten.
Potatoes, so long as you eat the skins. Get red ones, they’re easier to clean and the skins are more tender.
Quinoa (a grain).
Brown rice is close, but not quite there. So you should not worry about eating meat, it’s unnecessary.
One specific dish you should consider is dal. Cooked lentils with spices. Popular in India. Lots of other things you can throw in, too, including onion, tomato, garlic. carrots, and corn. In small quantities the tomato and onion should be less likely to cause heartburn. To keep the cost of the spices down, buy from the bulk section—it can be as little as 1⁄10 the price of bottled spices, and you can get only however much you need. Dried lentils and spices keep for quite a long time, and it only takes 45min to prepare, in one pot (or two if you make a tarka).
When you store vegetables in the fridge, do you keep them in plastic bags? I find that helps for many green veggies in particular. I just use the bags I get them in from the store or my farmshare.
Consider shopping more like a European—buy fresh ingredients every day or every other day instead of doing one big shopping trip once a week. This will minimize your food spoilage problems.
I agree with everyone else that you should check that your fridge is functioning properly. Measure the temperature. It should be between 33 and 38 degrees F. Above 38 and I’d expect fairly high rates of spoilage.
I love indian food amd I like lentils and beans. And lentils are supposed to be quicker to cook (I have some really old lentils. I should get newer ones. They aren’t expensive.) The trick seems to be getting them soft but not mush. I used to cook indian more often, but I always made too much. It’s amazing how much food one carrot, one onion, one tomato, and some lentils turns into.
I have some spices—one year for my birthday, I told my mother to get me spices. And small quantities of spies are available quite cheaply—packets containing only a few grams can last me over a year, since I’m only using a pinch of one, a pinch of another. I have most of the common european spices (salt, black pepper, sweet paprika, rosemary, thyme, oregano, dill, basil, sage, etc.) and also I have some curry and garam masala, ground and whole cardamom (which I never knew what to do with). i have chili powder as well, which i add in small quantities to various things for health reasons—i dont like very spicy, but i dont mind it a little.)
I live in Hungary, and I’ve been trying to shop less European, because if I don’t have emergency supplies on hand and I can’t leave the house, then I’m stuck. I try to keep foods on hand that won’t spoil to use as emergency foods (some days I have a migraine and don’t make it outside), but on the days I can go out, I should be a good European and visit the market across the street in the mornings where there’s fresh seaonal produce from surrounding villages, and the bakery just down the street where I can buy 1⁄2 kg of bread for 115 forints (about $0.57). Lately, though, I haven’t been making it outside very often and so I eat into my supplies until I have to buy more.
I don’t know what kind of lentils you’re using, but green or French lentils become less mushy than red ones. (I happen to like them mushy, but if you don’t...)
My preference is a happy medium between the two. My experience vascillates between “chewing little rocks” or “i’m eating baby food” yet I like lentils, despite these problems.
My lentils are labeled in greek (ПΟΛΕМИΔΙΩТНΕ КΥПИАКХ ΦАКН), and my greek is worse than my russian (i can recognise about half of the letters and only those words which English stole and didn’t change very much) but they look red to me and definitely not green. I got them when a friend was moving home to Cyprus and didnt want to lug her pantry back with her. That must have been five years ago. She gave me several bags, and a little lentils go a long way.
If your beans are taking forever to cook, are you adding salt? Adding salt will keep beans hard—wait to add it until the beans are fully cooked.
Also, I second the suggestion to either make your fridge colder, or replace it.
the fridge isn’t mine—came with the apartment. and it’s a communist era fridge (complete with Russian labeled dials), so it probably dates back to before the wall came down. i have it on medium setting and will look at acquiring a thermoter to see if that means <5°C like it should or, something ridiculous like 10°C (i think i’d notice if it was warmer than that. it feels cold to me.)
I think the beans in question are just old beans. I add salt to taste at the end.
Based on #2 and #5, if I were you I would experiment to see if you have hypochlorhydria (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypochlorhydria). Symptoms are (ironically) basically the same as GERD. (Note: I’m not a doctor!)
hm, that’s interesting. That doesn’t seem like something I could easily test for at home, but I may ask a doctor the next time I see one.
The symptoms I have are really weird… not like what I’ve seen in adverts about heartburn (no burning pain in the chest, no stomach pains), but they come after eating acidic foods, so I try to avoid those foods. After eating something like chili or pizza, I feel like there’s something ‘stuck’ in my esophagus (the feeling is like when you swallow a pill, and it gets stuck on the way down), but there’s nothing really there. It is accompanied with burping and/or hiccups which last for hours. it hurts to lie down, so i have to stay seated. and it’s a recent development. I never had problems like this before a few months ago. I thought that until I could see a doctor I should just avoid foods that make me feel like this, and googled “alkaline foods” to see what foods might calm my stomach when it does that, if it’s reacting badly somehow to acidic foods. unfortunately, there’s a big pseudoscience diet called alkaline foods which lists foods like “lemon” as being alkaline, not acidic, because of some sort of reasoning that i couldnt quite follow. the signal to noise ratio was so bad that i gave up on googling for this information.
To test: obtain some HCL pills (they’re pretty cheap). Have some regular, calcium type antiacid on hand when you’re ready to experiment. Take an HCL with food that would typically give you symptoms. If you get massive heartburn within 20 minutes or so, then you do not need HCL (and take the antiacid to restore your stomach’s pH to normal). If nothing happens or your symptoms are slightly better, then you probably do have low stomach acid. You can experiment further to find the correct dose.
My understanding is that the valve that allows the contents of the stomach to proceed through the system is triggered by acidity in the stomach. Hence, if the stomach is not acidic enough, food will just hang out there—and will still be plenty acidic to cause heartburn. Also, I understand that as people age, they produce less HCL.
Generally, doctors will give people with those symptoms acid reducers, which will indeed fix the heartburn by lowing acid to almost nothing—an undesirable state of affairs, as you lose some of the sterilization properties of the stomach. Since an acid reducer fixes the symptoms no matter the root cause, it’s obviously a good thing to test it with some variation of the above method.
Once again, I am not a doctor. I do recommend you go see a doctor if something about your body changes unexpectedly; there are less common and less harmless other things that can cause such symptoms. But I will also add that your description of the sensation is pretty much how I would describe it, esp. the “stuck” feeling. I also think the “alkaline foods” thing is probably mostly bogus.
Everything above is my opinion, based off of reading lots of anecdotal data from lots of different places on the internet, plus someone I met IRL once. I’m sparing you the conspiracy theories as to why doctors don’t generally seem to perform this test; I think it’s pretty easy to explain as a failure of rationality. You can google around if you want to read those. Since I don’t have time to hunt down references, to help you judge how seriously (or not) to take this: I think mainstream health advice is probably quite bad, and the people advocating the “paleo diet” are probably much closer to the truth. I’m not aware of anything else I believe that’s non-standard.
Here’s a list of food pH values.
10)
eggs: can be kept uncooled for a while, very long shelf life hard-boiled, easy to prepare in small portions.
milk: do you get UHT milk? It has an uncooled shelf life of months and tends to be cheaper than fresher variants.
meat: consider smoked or dried meats (bacon, salami).
pasta: reasonably easy to prepare in smaller portions
Out of interest, where do you live that cigarettes are so much cheaper than food? One pack of cigerattes here (Germany) will buy me 2 days worth of (cheap) food.
i think if i ate eggs once every 3 days ( to keep from getting tired of them. i tire easily of eggs) I could get through a carton (10 eggs) with time to spare before they expire.
milk: i’ve mostly switched to powdered milk (which i wont drink, but can use in cooking and it doesnt go bad). When I want drink milk, I’ve started to buy a half litre of it that I will drink as soon as I get home. The problem with UHT is that once I open it, I have to drink the whole litre in a couple days. I need to figure out what’s wrong with my fridge. I was more using milk as an example of something that I can’t buy and use in the way normal people do because it spoils quicker than it should.
meat: i do like those, and a little can go a long way. There’s a store here (Aldi) that sells 300g Nürnburger Rostbratwurst for ~€3. 300 grams can last me quite a while. -- These don’t seem to go bad in the fridge actually, as long as I use them in a week. I keep them in the original package which I don’t open very far and also wrap that in plastic. I can buy a small amount of minced meat for 1€ and make a stir fry with it that serves one person, but I don’t do this very often.
pasta—yeah, I live off of pasta.
Ungarn :) I live south of Budapest, so food is cheaper here than it is there. The price of tobacco is set at a national level, however. A box of cigarettes costs 560 forints, about €2. However, I have found it is cheaper to buy tobacco directly. A 40g packet of tobacco also costs €2 and will make 50 cigarettes. A box of 200 empty cigarette tubes costs €1. So, the price of 200 cigarettes made by hand is €9. The device that puts the tobacco in the tubes costed €5 and has lasted me over a year so far. It paid for itself very quickly. I smoke about a pack a day, so €0.90. 1 kg of bread costs €1. 10 eggs is a little more than €1. At Aldi I can buy a can of Gulyás soup for €1, but it is €3-4 in stores close to me.
About expiration dates: For many foods (not fresh meats though), these may not be actual expiration dates but generously calculated minimum shelf lives. For me at least, eggs and milk will stay good for weeks beyond their labels.
Eggs are very versatile. Scrambled eggs can be combined with any number of spices, fried vegetables, milk, meats. Before I got into cooking this used to be a staple food of mine. You may also add eggs to soup, noodles, rice. If you are worried about expiry you can hardboil the otherwise uneaten eggs. These can be kept a long time and eaten alone, on bread, in salads.
Another good source of protein with long shelf life may be parmesan, but perhaps too expensive.
Hol Magyarországon élsz? Tanulok magyarul és megyek augusztusban Pécsen ;)
For practice:
Akkor rossz a tojás, ha miután feltörtem, furcsán néz ki (homályos, valami nő benne, piros pöttyöket látok), illetve rossz szagú. A tojásokat mindig külön pohárban töröm fel, nehogy az egész ételt rontsam el vele. Miután megnéztem és megszagoltam, nyugodtan beletehetem a serpenyőbe. A barátnőm azt mondja, hogy amelyik úszik a vízben, az már nem jó, de ez csak azt jelenti, hogy már nem a legfrissebb és óvatosan kell bánni vele. Szeretem a rántott tojást és a töltött tojást és a tükör tojást is de az utolsót csak pirított kenyérrel.
Szegeden élek. Ez körülbelül 4 óra busszal Pécstől. Vonattal még hosszabb az út, mert Budapestre kell utazni és ott átszállni. Így Szegedről Pécsre 180 km-t kell utaznom északra, ahhoz hogy délnyugatra menjek. :D A busz egyenesebb útvonalon megy.
Eggs have gone bad if, after opening one, it looks strange (cloudy, something growing in it, I see red spots), or if it has a bad smell. I always break eggs in a separate cup, lest I ruin the whole meal with one. After I’ve looked at it and smelled it, I can safely put it into the frying pan. My girlfriend says that the ones that floatin water are bad, but it just means that they aren’t so fresh any more and need to be treated with care. I like scrambled eggs, deviled eggs, and over easy eggs but the those I only like with toast.
I live in Szeged. It is about 4 hours by bus from Pécs. It is much longer by train, because you have to travel to Budapest and change trains there. So from Szeged to Pécs I have to travel 180 km north in order to go south west. :D The bus goes on a straighter path.