Goal: Stop Eating Out

Look, I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog kvetching about how much I spend on food. Well, this year, I’m going to do something about it. My two step plan is as follows:

1. Stop going to restaurants that aren’t worth the price. You can see in the below chart I have mapped every local area restaurant I’ve gone to in the past six months in terms of price/quality and, upon reflection, I’ve found some of my most frequent haunts (“Chinese delivery”) don’t actually make the cut. This causes me to continue craving a “nice” meal later in the week, perpetuating the eating out cycle.
2. Limit the number of restaurant trips I make in each price bracket. I typically have too many $20-30 meals which gets me in trouble. Knowing how many of those I can have in a month will hopefully help me ration it out a little better.

Based on these numbers, I’ll be able to go out to eat between 2-3x each week. That’s less than I’m used to, but not terrible. If you sum everything up, there’s a good chance I’ll still be spending ~$300/month on eating out if I go somewhere fancy every month or have a board game night where we order in (there’s always at least one). While certainly not frugal especially for a FIRE blogger, is a number I can definitely live with.

Is eating out consistently “worth it” to you? 

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All The Food I Ate Last Month – Part 2 of 3 (with some photos)

In this installment, I’ll discuss all the food I ate in the back half of last month (April 15-30). Check out my previous post for what I ate April 1-14. Luckily, I got it together a little in the last two weeks and remembered to take some food pictures for this post. Nothing Insta-worthy, I inhale poke too fast to bother trying to photograph it, but just a little something to add visual interest.

Second Half Of The Month: April 15-30

Here’s everything I ate in the second half of April:

Toward the end of the month, I relied a lot more on takeout. And Pirate’s Booty. Soooo much Pirate’s Booty. Part of this was a function of work stress. When I’m stressed I tend to “treat myself” more. That is, let myself not have to cook and worry less about what it is I’m eating. Which, in retrospect, is kind of dumb. Stressful times are exactly when I should be sticking to healthy routines, not deviating from them. Oh well.

I managed to finish off a couple of my loose leaf teas this month, including my “White Christmas” tea (white tea, vanilla, cinnamon and other spices) and shiitake tea (red and green rooibos, shiitake mushrooms). It’s probably for the best that I don’t reorder these right away. One of the things I’ve found is that I don’t hydrate nearly as well if I am sipping on teas all day vs. sipping on water.

As far as “free” meals go, Thursday April 19th I ate a client-provided lunch during an all-day meeting (stress ergo both cookies and a bag of BBQ chips). The next day work friend brought in egg custards from Chinatown which he was very generous to share with me. Fiancé let me eat some of his soba noodles as a late night snack April 23rd. The next day he did a grocery run for himself and, knowing I’d been having a hard time pushing on a work deadline, brought me back a chocolate lava cake, my favorite of all desserts.(@_@) True love, right there.

What I Cooked (April 15-30)

Here are all the groceries I bought in the second half of April:

More eating out than normal -> less cooking -> less groceries.

I skipped some of my usual vegetable pseudo-CSA deliveries this month because I wasn’t feeling up to cooking 10 pounds of straight-from-the-ground vegetables. As much as I love my pseudo-CSA and the quality of the produce I get, sometimes it can be a little too fresh. Like, dirt still lightly dusting most of my vegetables. It takes me a long time to clean that stuff off and for a while in mid-April, I just wasn’t feeling up to the task.

In lieu of doing a big bulk cook, I ended up picking up a few items at the butcher (that sells other local items too), just to unwind with a little bit of light hobby cooking that’d last me only 1-2 meals. I always enjoy going there to buy foraged mushrooms, like the brown beech fruiting body I bought pictured above.

Second half of the month, I had my usual meat CSA delivery, where I get 5ish pounds which I mete out over the course of the month. I added six pounds of beef knuckle bones to my order so I could make homemade bone broth.

I managed to get by without too much home-cooking by trying a meal delivery service in the second half of April:

This meal delivery service was super useful in getting me through those couple of weeks. It had been recommended to be by one of my coworkers. For around $50-60 a week, the service would deliver 7-8 servings based on produce and chicken from local, organic farms.

The meals would get a bit repetitive typically contain some sort of salad or some sort of simple cooked meal (I got roast pork and beef butternut squash). But the sizes were very generous and the salads were much heartier than the word would suggest. For instance, pictured above are two salads I got: the Greek salad with red cabbage, chicken, cucumber, almonds, parsley, and greens on the left and the New England salad with pickled carrots, roasted root vegetables, chicken, parsley, walnuts and spinach on the right. They’d come in these huge containers weighing about a pound. Even I as a big eater could not finish them in a single sitting.

Here is what I cooked in the second half of April:

The Week 3 items are a repeat from the previous post; I figured I’d display them again since I ate them during the week of the 15th.

Weeks 3 & 4, I didn’t cook all that much since I was mostly relying on the meal delivery service to cover most of my weekday eats. But I did manage to put together a cozy little meal of Brussel sprouts, mushrooms, and sausage which was a nice hearty note to eat during the chilly early spring weather. Too lazy for any “real” cooking, I also put together a quick chickpea rollup during the week. It was super easy: mix chickpea flour and water until consistency of a pancake batter, toss in some spices, cook on the stove until firm. Once I had my nice fluffy chickpea pancake, I just topped it with an egg over easy, sriracha and spinach. Honestly, I’m not sure the sriracha and cumin flavorings really went together all that well. Next time, if I manage to think about it beforehand, I’ll probably do a curry based sauce on top instead.

It wasn’t until Week 5 that I managed to get my act together and put together some vegetable based meals for myself. My favorite visually and flavor-wise was the roasted spring salad. At first the salad was meant to be raw, but I had cut the ingredients, particularly the beets, too thick to eat plainly, and I strongly prefer the mellowed out flavor of roasted radishes to raw. I particularly loved the cucumbers in this dish, which had this tangy sweet burst of flavor to them because of the apple cider vinegar and lemon.

I also spent a ridiculous amount of time cooking some beef bone broth in Week 5. I don’t usually make broth. I will throw a few bones into a soup or stew or something, but broth by itself rarely seems worth the hassle. But I wanted to try it, especially since my butcher charges $10/quart of the stuff. Here’s the thing though, making bone broth is so time consuming, at least the way I did it. Roasting the bones (I forgot to blanche them afterwards), cleaning and cutting the vegetables, siphoning off the fat and impurities, sticking around the house all day to make sure it didn’t bubble over, blowing out the bottom of a few mason jars after dunking a pint of jarred broth into an ice cold water bath… It was a lot. And probably not worth it time-wise, even though the bones themselves cost $18 or so, ultimately yielding 4-5 quarts (theoretically $50 in value).

Eating Out (April 15-30)

When I’m feeling really, really down, I am wont to buy a pound of BBQ boneless chicken wings from the shop around the corner and just inhale them in fifteen minutes. This only happens, say, once a month. But if it happens more frequently, as it sometimes does, fiancé knows to take this as a very clear indicator that I’m not in a good place and intervention– sunlight, exercise, watering, a nice new pot of soil– is probably necessary to break out of the cycle.

As far as the types of fast food I typically eat, it looks like I’ve been on a poke kick lately. Not terribly surprising– I tend to crave raw fish when it gets warmer and I try to avoid sushi because of the rice. At some point, it’d probably be worth it to find a grocery store with sushi-grade fish around here, but I’ve been trying to avoid Whole Foods so it might be a difficult task. I’ve also been relying a lot lately on steak burritos (because they are delicious) and Sweetgreen, which has been winning me over with their complex-grains, compostable bowls, and online ordering. As their prime target demographic, I feel successfully pandered to.

Do you eat less/more or eat certain types of food when you’re stressed? Do you try to make your food look visually appealing before you eat it? Do you and your partner share food or do your own thing with meals? Do your local grocery stores offer sushi-grade fish?

All The Food I Ate Last Month – Part 1 of 3

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you probably have figured out that food is really important to me. But I also spend a lot on it, which makes me feel vaguely uncomfortable. So, in true personal finance blogger fashion, I decided to track my (food) spending! Below I itemize what I ate, what I cooked, and how much altogether food cost me in the first half of April.

Notes

• I have an annoyingly long list of food sensitivities. I will sometimes eat things I know aren’t the best for me, but I try to systematically bake into my routine food that’s better for my gut. As long as deviating meals are occasional, I tend to be okay. This month I parted from my rules more than is typical due to work related stress, I think.
• “Weeks” in my Cooking tables start and end on Fridays because that’s the day I usually get my pseudo-CSA deliveries.
• In the food diary charts below:
  • yellow = takeout/restaurants I paid for
  • green = food that was given to me for free (snacks at job, gifts from friends, game nights where it’s someone else’s turn to order/pay for food, etc.)
• I apologize in advance for the lack of food pictures. I am both very forgetful and a mediocre photographer.

First Half Of The Month: April 1 – 14

Here’s everything I ate in the first half of April:

Overall my diet the first half of April was pretty meat and carb heavy. Leftover Matzo from Passover dinner, carbonara, saffron rice for days. As much as I love white rice in particular, by the end of the second week, my stomach was in knots from so much processed grain. It also caused me to rapidly gain weight and inches around my waist, which pretty quickly melted away once I pared back in the back half of April. Sigh.

In terms of free food, I get a lot of snacks from my work. One of the things I’ll miss most– you know, other than my colleagues and a salary– will be the snacks available on demand. I love having an ounce or two of almonds or cashews in the morning, though I don’t know whether I’ll be able to afford to substitute this expensive habit once I fall off the company payroll. Unfortunately, my office ran out in the second week and I think it made a substantial difference in how hungry I was all day long, probably because I was getting 200-ish fewer calories every day.

There were also a few times that I was treated to food by friends.

• April 4th’s shahi paneer came as a game night offering. We take turns paying for food so it’ll come back around at some point as a one-time delivery $80 hit to my food budget.
• April 7th I hosted a dinner with some friends at my home in order to get rid of five pounds of ham sitting in my fridge. They, in turn, provided me with some delicious homemade desserts.
• April 9th, I ate some of Fiancé’s takeout as part of a second dinner (I blame the lack of almonds).
• April 12th, Fiancé treated me to dinner at a new gourmet Peruvian restaurant that opened up in our neighborhood to celebrate his new job.

What I Cooked (April 1-14)

Here are all the groceries I bought in the first half of April:

My second pseudo-CSA delivery had a lot less food for a lot more money than the first because I decided to go the custom vegetable route (where I choose what I want in my box) versus going with their default for the week. Plus, pint nuts are expensive.

I also stopped by my local butcher, which sells a lot of local specialty items other than meat, to buy ingredients for some home-made carbonara. I really enjoy their foraged mushrooms which, at $5/4 oz, are expensive but not unreasonable given the labor involved and the intense flavor they imbue. The butcher also has my favorite fresh pasta– I never buy boxed since the texture and flavor is rarely worth the stomach ache I often get eating wheat products. I figure if I’m going to eat something that is going to make me feel sick, it might as well be worth it.

Here’s all the cooking I did in the first half of April:

This is a decent reflection of the meals I’ll typically make week to week. My cooking is really determined by what ends up in my veggie CSA, which due to the sheer volume of produce helps make sure my diet is largely plant-based. I mostly cook simple dishes– sauteed or roasted vegetables, a stew here and there. I think the most intensive thing I made was the tortilla for my Spanish-themed dinner party, but even that was fairly straightforward.

“Week 1” I actually cooked during the last week of March, but ate during the first week of April. The ingredients for those meals came in March and are therefore not reflected in my spending totals. Similarly, I get deliveries from my meat CSA once a month, so the first two weeks of April I was using up what was left of my March drop-off. I also keep a decent amount of non-perishable food in stock, from oils to spices to grains. It’d be pretty safe to assume that all my cooked meals also include olive oil and salt, but I thought’d be repetitive to throw it in over and over again.

The most decadent, almost-dessert like dish I made was the roasted cauliflower tossed in a rosewater-tahini sauce with pan-roasted pine nuts and raisins. I got the idea for this dish from a nearby Mediterranean restaurant that served something similar but with Brussel sprouts.

One thing to note is that I almost never use recipes for what I cook. I might use recipes as inspiration for flavor combinations or if I’m trying a new technique, but by and large I submit to the “throw things together and heat them up” school of culinary arts.

Eating Out (April 1-14)

Yes, I do like Asian food. Why do you ask?

One of the things I notice looking at this chart is how much more expensive my sit down meals are relative to take-out, usually 2x the price even though all of these were lunch meals!

Part of this has to do with the volume and variety of food I order at restaurants. Usually during the sit-down meals I’m ordering multiple dishes since I guess is already a pretty luxurious feeling and I like to add to it? Plus throw in the cost of service and we’ve pretty much accounted for the difference.

At the end of the day, none of these meals were particularly noteworthy, but they tasted good overall and I think it was nice to take a break from my own cooking for a few days.

What kind of snacks do you eat at the office? How often do you cook versus eat out? Are there certain kinds of meals you tend to gravitate toward? Any frugal paleo recipes to share?