February | 2018 | Budget Epicurean

Hey y’all! Welcome to the series Weekly Eating.

Here is where I’ll talk about the week’s meal plan versus reality, what we ate for the week, and how we did budget-wise. I hope it gives readers a behind-the-scenes look into our life through the lens of food, and it’s also a way to keep us on track with meal planning and grocery budgeting.

Feel free to share your wins and lessons in the comments below!

February 2nd was #WearRedDay for heart health. Cardiovascular disease is the #1 killer, ahead of car wrecks, diabetes, cancer, and many other seemingly more deadly diseases. More than 600,000 people every year are being killed by their own heart.

And the honest truth that the food and drug industry doesn’t want you to know?

Want in on what many call “the best kept secret in medicine”?

Given the right conditions and fuel, the body can heal itself of almost anything. Seriously.

Don’t believe me? The Cleveland Clinic has an actual “Heart Disease Reversal Program“, which has been proven to take some heart patients from death’s door to healthy and fit in mere months. You can literally reverse heart disease and prevent it from worsening based on what you put in your mouth three times per day.

On a less serious note, here was the popcorn situation last weekend:

Now, if that seems like plenty to you, YOU DON’T KNOW ME. This is a shortage. This is near-panic-level popcorn status.

And then this showed up on our doorstep on Monday. And all was well in the world again.

Monday:

Breakfast – tropical smoothie. I’d gotten a frozen bag of mixed tropical fruit, and it has chunks of coconut in it. I’m weirded out by coconut, and do not like the chewy-ness. But I will soldier through until it’s gone in the name of not wasting food…

Lunch – I meal-prepped a 3-day batch of my famous salmon and couscous salad to have for lunch at work this week. I also repurposed the old “Green Goddess” container to hold my healthier and more delicious recipe 😉

Dinner – Bitter melon & potato curry. Have you heard of bitter melon? Unless you’re Asian or a foodie, probably not. It is a tropical vine fruit, grown throughout Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. And it totally lives up to the name; raw it tastes horrid.

However, despite it’s off-putting taste, it has many redeeming health qualities. “The fruit contains at least three active substances with anti-diabetic properties, including charantin, which has been confirmed to have a blood glucose-lowering effect, vicine and an insulin-like compound known as polypeptide-p.” (source) It also has been shown to have beneficial or reversal effects on obesity and metabolic syndrome. (source)

By generously salting it prior to cooking with it, and then rinsing the salt off, you can remove much of the bitter taste. And it blends right into strongly-flavored dishes like curries. The boy said that in this dish, the bitter melon was actually great and the green beans were the worst part!

Snack – Grapes & 2 cuties

Tuesday:

Breakfast – Over the weekend we went to the thrift store, where I snagged a sweet a$s deal: $0.99 for a waffle maker!! It was pretty dirty, but still worked. It didn’t have a tag, so I took it to the counter and asked the lady what it would cost.

When she quoted me that price, I couldn’t hand over a dollar fast enough! So with it all nice and cleaned up, I made some yummy fresh waffles with a quick (from frozen) blueberry sauce.

Lunch – Salmon & Couscous Salad with Green Goddess

Snack – I’m glad I packed an “extra” lunch today, because I was starving yesterday afternoon. I brought the tiny bit of leftover red lentil dal and rice from last week and nommed it around 2pm.

Dinner – I tried a new recipe for vegan tempeh ‘meatballs’, and they were dang tasty! I absolutely love them.

The boy even said it was good, and I’m allowed to add it to the list of “vegan meals that don’t suck” so that’s a huge win.

Wednesday:

Breakfast – Wheat Sandwich Thin with pears and peanut butter

Lunch – Salmon & Couscous salad, and a bowl of leftover pork & rice soup with collard greens

Dinner – I went out and met a new friend from the Bull City Food Swap at a local Indian restaurant called Sitar. She’s vegetarian, so I was super excited to split the “vegetarian for 2” dinner. It came with 2 appetizers, 3 main courses, and 2 desserts!

It was so much food, and it was all SO GOOD! We both ate our fill, and had enough left over for us both to take home 2 more meals’ worth. I’d say that’s a pretty great value.

Snack – rice cakes & an orange

Thursday:

Breakfast – tropical smoothie

Lunch – leftover Sitar part 1 – naan, basmati rice, vegetable vindaloo and chickpea saag

Snack 1 – trail mix still leftover from our Texas trip (I paid the ridiculous airport prices of 2/$20 because I was dying of starvation and the mix actually was pretty nutritionally sound)

Dinner – After a brutal HIIT workout, I was ravenous and grabbed the first thing I saw in the fridge: leftover bitter melon curry

Snack 2 – later that night after dinner, I was still hungry and desperately needed a post-workout snack, and nommed a few handfuls of Chocolate Peanut Butter Protein Puppy Chow

Annnndddd then I made stovetop popcorn, which I sprinkled with nutritional yeast 🙂

Friday:

Breakfast – another smoothie! I’m bad at remembering to take pictures of smoothies… maybe breakfast is too early, or smoothies just don’t feel like ‘real’ food?

Lunch – the last of the leftover Sitar. Not gonna lie, I was sad that it was all gone now…

Snack – my coworker had been at a conference all week, and brought back some strange chocolates. They were good though.

Dinner – The boy had to fend for himself in the wilderness of the fridge, because Erin from ReachingForFI was in town! And when she’s here, we go ALL IN on AYCE sushi.

This was the appetizer round. In case you haven’t read it yet, here is my review of Rock’n’Rolls sushi in Durham for your enjoyment.

Unfortunately, it seems too many people HAVE read it, because there was a line out the door! Good thing there was only 2 of us and we were more than happy to sit at the bar. After a little less than an hour, this was the aftermath.

They now have a bunch of fried options, including spring rolls, crab rangoon (mostly cream cheese, let’s be real), and gyoza dumplings, as well as a few more specialty rolls.

The Weekend

This weekend is the “Big Game”, I guess, but we couldn’t care less. If you want ideas, though, I’ve written plenty about it:

Our plans include reading, writing, and video games. With a chance of brunch on Sunday 🙂

Food Total: $140.54

Ugh, I broke two of my own cardinal rules: never shop while hungry, and never shop without a list!

I did great at the Spice Bazaar, picking up only some fresh produce staples and a few things I wanted to try (looking at you, bitter melon) and the only impulse was a 10lb bag of basmati rice that was on sale.

Staples	$10.48	Fruit/Veg	$10.36
10lb basmati rice	7.99	Frozen bitter melon	2.99
tamarind paste	2.49	cauliflower head	2.99
		ginger root	0.5
		turmeric root	0.6
		fresh bitter melon 1	0.79
		3lb red onions	2.49

But, I went to ALDI right after, and it was past lunch time for me by then. I’m a sucker for ALDI on my best day, and I hadn’t been since the store had evidently been remodeled! It was huge, and bright, and packed with great deals. Y’all, I lost my mind a little bit. I admit it.

Dairy	$5.57	Staples	$38.00	Fruit/Veg	$40.52	Extras	$35.19
organic soymilk	2.19	olive oil mayonnaise	3.45	tomato juice	1.39	seltzer 1L x2	1.18
cage free eggs 12	2.29	coconut water	2.89	frozen berries/mango	4.18	frozen pizzas 2	3.98
1/2 gal whole milk	1.09	plum cherry juice	2.69	frozen edamame 2	3.38
		org blue corn tortilla chips	1.89	1lb green beans	0.99	Winking owl syrah	2.89
		org wheat spaghetti	2.18	bix box org spring mix	3.79	Winking owl red 3L	10.89
		olive oil cooking spray	2.98	celery	0.95	German lager	5.99
		green enchilada sauce	1.89	cara cara oranges 6	3.95	Amber ale 6pk	6.49
		Coffee	4.79	Avocado 4	1.96
		spinach wraps 8	1.99	Org Pears 8	3.49	tax	3.77
		shelled pistachios 7oz	4.49	Pineapple	1.29
		fresh pico de gallo	4.79	Sweet potatoes	1.29
		Pasta sauce	1.98	Bananas 11	1.95
		2lb dry northern beans	1.99	Broccoli crowns 3	1.49
				green grapes 2lb	2.61
				greens trio	1.99
				cranberries	0.99
				Artichoke hearts	2.49
				Cucumber	0.45
				mission figs	1.89

I also let myself restock on wine & beer, which I had been trying to go all of January without buying more alcohol. But COME ON, their 3L box of “house red” for under eleven bucks?!? And the specials this month were a German lager and an amber ale, my two favorite beer types. Sigh…

Lessons Learned

My only defense is that at least I bought a sh&t-ton of produce, and we should be able to make it through at least 2 weeks in a row of not buying groceries now. The majority of the spending was on super healthy stuff, which we should be eating anyhow (please ignore the frozen pizzas. The boy needs ’emergency foods’ for when he has no leftovers left).

How about you guys? Did you have a learning week or an awesome week of wins?

With 3 decades of life and experience under my belt now, it’s a time to look back and reflect, and to look ahead and hope.

I’ve gone through several large life changes, including moving across the country from Ohio to Colorado for a PhD program, leaving said PhD program after 2 years of soul searching and deciding it wasn’t for me, making a leap to a new and exciting career field, hiking 6 “fourteeners“, moving across the country again to Connecticut for the hubs job, moving up from $14/hour to 50K+ per year in salary, getting engaged, getting married, buying a house from 1000 miles away, and moving YET AGAIN to my dream state of North Carolina.

Gosh, that’s a long list.

It’s weird to see it all put together like that. But honestly, that is sort of how I always imagined my life would play out. As a kid, I was known as “the gypsy” because I loved going new places. I loved visiting my grandparents, my aunt, and traveling. I loved sleep overs and flea markets and vacations. When I sat still, I sat the hell still and read books for 8 hours. But when I wanted to move, I was gone.

There are many things in my life that I definitely do not regret.

I’m glad I moved around so much, lived in over 30 different houses and apartments, met many many people, tried different courses and careers, and had tons of great experiences. I’m thankful my parents taught me a lot about money, to pay yourself first, and to be on guard against predatory credit card lending (I did get a few free t-shirts, for sure, but I never carried a balance).

At the same time, there are many things I regret too. Like not opening a Roth IRA the second I was legally allowed to, going on several expensive vacations that could have been put towards paying off loans faster, and not negotiating any of my salaries.

People love to give advice, but like Baz Luhrman said:“Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth”.

So without further ado, here is some of my past, wiped off and ugly parts painted over, hopefully for your education and amusement:

Life is all about progress, not perfection
This too shall pass
Change can be scary but it is so worth it
You’ll regret the risks you don’t take more than the ones you do
“Marry your best friend” isn’t trite, it’s true
Relationships are everything
You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar. (Unless we’re talking about fruit flies. They LOVE apple cider vinegar)
Any # of dollars is more than zero dollars in investments
Flattery will get you everywhere
Balance in all things, including balance
GET MOVING, start a regular exercise plan ASAP
Your mom knows what’s up: eat your damn veggies
That which isn’t tracked and measured cannot be improved
Don’t fear failure, or feel the fear and do it anyway
Make the world around you a better place than you found it
Someone always has it better, someone always has it worse
NEGOTIATE YOUR SALARY, BROS, and don’t be afraid to job hop
Sometimes it’s okay to be selfish
If at first you don’t succeed… try, try again
Life is a marathon, not a sprint

These may seem superficial, or useless to you. You will hear tons of advice, most of it well-meaning. Your job is to accept and put into practice those things which make sense and improve your life, while weeding out and filing away those things which do not serve you.

I do know that I wish someone had told me in my 20s that I was doing a lot of things right by cooking at home almost all the time, having a budget and meal planning, not giving a damn what others thought and not spending tons of money on beauty products, and avoiding going out partying to the bars (it is way cheaper to have a potluck or drink a bottle of wine at home with friends!).

I wish someone had shown me how easy it is to set up a retirement account and start putting money into it, even tiny amounts. I totally did force my younger sister to open a brokerage account, even though she can only put away $25/month right now. It’s more than zero! And she will have more than me saved by the time she is 30. And I wish I had actually bought a house sooner, so I could have rental properties in 3 different states! And perhaps have been a bit smarter about my daily commute…

I cannot tell you how to live your life, nor would I want to. I never listen to anyone who tries to tell me how to live mine. Adulting is hella hard, but the rewards are worth it. Every stage of life has its own challenges and its own beauty. All I can tell you is that this life we live is one crazy ride, hang on tight and regardless of how bad or how good it gets, each day is indeed a gift.

Budget Epicurean

Monthly Archives: February 2018

Weekly Eating – 1/29/18