Overindulgence

Well, I messed up yesterday. As normal, I had planned my meals ahead of time. I had a smoothie for breakfast with 2 vegan muffins (based on the Lemon Raspberry Muffins). For lunch I had Red Lentil Dal with Rice and then Butter Pecan ice cream. So far, so good. However, I diverged from my supper plans.

Jaeger and I went for a short hike later in the afternoon. On the way back to the car, I got the urge to make cookies (it just seems like a traditional way to end Sabbath :-) ). In my head, I calculated it out and decided I probably had enough calories left to have a supper consisting of two cookies and a cup of hot chocolate (no, not healthy but within my calorie tolerances).

Unfortunately, I can’t make cookies without snagging raw cookie dough. I hadn’t counted on this when figuring out if I could afford to eat cookies or not. I estimate that I probably ate the equivalent of two cookies in dough before they even got baked. I knew I should probably just quit and call those my two cookies (especially since these are Jaeger’s favorite cookies, not mine) but that felt like deprivation.

Just as the cookies were coming out of the oven, some friends of ours called and invited us over to their house. They had apple pie. Long story short, for supper I had 2 raw cookies, 3 baked cookies and a slice of apple pie. I estimate that this exceeded by daily calorie goal by around 630 calories.

While the calorie part bothers me, what bothers me worst about the whole experience is toward the end I wasn’t hungry. I was just eating. I got home and was planning to go to bed but my stomach was extremely unhappy at the abuse I had put it through. I got back out of bed and exercised for about 30 minutes. It was a little happier by the time I went to bed but I still didn’t sleep well. I really need to work on remembering how sick I feel when I eat too much.

Oh well, another day, another calorie goal :-)

Expenditures on Children by Families

While on the USDA site looking at their food plans, I ran across a publication called Expenditures on Children by Families. It’s very interesting. I’ve been starting to try to calculate the financial cost of children on our lifestyle but without any real life experience, it’s been difficult. While I realize these numbers aren’t refined enough for true budgeting, they provide a nice starting place :-)

Grocery Debt

I have a problem spending more money on groceries than we allocate for in our budget. We budget $425/month for groceries which to me seems excessive for two people. This is just grocery money, we have a completely different account for eating out (though we rarely eat out). In spite of a generous food budget, I’m negative by about a month. Overall, our other budget items have enough surplus to carry the negative food balance but it’s still distressing.

Part of this negative balance is due to me trying an experiment. I decided to buy a half summer produce share from Monroe Organic Farms. A librarian I use to work with highly recommended them. I had saved up a little bit but not enough to cover the entire costs. If we’re very lucky, I’m hoping that the half share might save us money during the summer months. However, never participating in a program like this before, I don’t want to bet on a summer food budget surplus.

A couple of weeks ago, I looked at the budget and decided that I really needed to start being more frugal. So, I’ve drawn up a “get out of food debt” plan. If I reduce my spending to $75 a week, I’ll be out of grocery debt by the end of August.

The first week, I went over by about ten dollars but last week I met my goal! I’m not sure how sustainable this amount is for our lifestyle but it’ll be an interesting challenge.

Shattered Glass

I love bread. However, I’m not very good at making it. I don’t know if it’s the recipes or my technique but my breads never seem to turn out quite right.

A couple of weeks ago I decided that it was time to learn how to make good bread. Using a combination of the library’s catalog and Amazon, I determined that there were two books most people agreed were excellent bread books:

  1. The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread by Peter Reinhart and
  2. Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes by Jeffrey Hamelman.

Happily, Weld Library District owned one and Longmont Public Library owned the other. Unfortunately, they were both checked out. I put holds on both of them but impatience got the better of me so I also checked out from Weld The Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum.

Last Thursday night, I read Beranbaum’s first chapter, “The Ten Essential Steps of Making Bread,” and then flipped through the rest of the book looking for a recipe that wanted to be made. A hearth bread, the “Tyrolean Ten-Grain Torpedo,” caught my attention. I decided that I’d make the bread and serve it Monday night with a Artichoke and Cheese Sandwich topping.

It seems like most of the breads in The Bread Bible require quite a bit of work. The Tyrolean bread is no exception :-) First, you must start the sponge the night before. The next day you finish making the dough and let it rise two times. After the second rising, you shape the dough into the “torpedo” loaf shape and let it rise for a final time while you preheat the oven (Beranbaum suggests preheating the oven an hour ahead of putting the bread in).

Late morning Monday everything was going according to plan. The bread was almost ready to be put in the oven. It looked perfect. I was putting an 8 X 8 glass pan away when it slipped out of my hands and crashed, spraying shattered glass all over my kitchen and onto my beautiful bread dough.

For a couple of insane minutes I contemplated picking the glass out and pretending nothing had happened. Fortunately, my common sense asserted itself and I came to the conclusion that bread dough and glass shards don’t combine to make healthy eating :-) Unfortunately, that ruined my supper plans. I didn’t have enough time to make another bread loaf. I could have run to the store and grabbed some french bread. However, I was too depressed by the whole incident (hours wasted!) and so convinced Jaeger we should eat out instead.

However, I still really wanted to make the bread. So, Tuesday night I started the process again. Wednesday night there was a “Friends of the Longmont Public Library” meeting that I wanted to attend. I hadn’t been to one before and I thought it would be a good chance to meet other people. I dashed home Wednesday night to start the second part of the bread process, whipped up dinner and scarfed it down in time for bread preparation part three. Then I set it up to raise and dashed off to the library getting there just a couple of minutes late.

The flyer had mentioned that there would be a book sale afterwards and as a result the meeting would be brief. However, I didn’t realize how brief the meeting would be. It lasted a total of 15 minutes. It was obvious that everyone suffered through the meeting just to be first to the book sale. Ever time the masses thought the meeting was over, they leapt to their feet. This happened several times before the meeting actually ended. It was most amusing to watch.

Finally, the meeting was over and there was a stampede to the books. I continued sitting in my chair for a couple of minutes bemused by the enthusiastic crowd. It was almost like store sales the day after Thanksgiving. Eventually, since I was already there, I decided to look and see what was available. Nothing in Fiction looked terribly interesting but I did find three cookbooks and one sex book that looked interesting.

I made it back home 2 minutes before the timer started beeping indicating that my bread was finished with its first rising. The bread making process continued until I finally took the bread out of the oven at 10:30 (for once Jaeger actually made it to bed before me).

This evening is hacking society so Jaeger wasn’t around. However, I made my Artichoke & Cheese sandwhich on the 10 grain bread for supper. It was very good. I’m impressed by how well the bread recipe turned out (especially considering a couple minor mishaps that occurred along the way).

I’m definitely going to make this bread again. However, I’ll probably start trying to replace the bread flour with whole wheat flour. I realize that this will be a complicated process but Jaeger has rubbed off on me enough so now I always feel slightly guilty when eating white bread :-)

My next epic bread undertaking? Either pizza dough or bagels.

Food Adventures

This week I made my very first cheesecake. It was somewhat successful. I’ve been interested in making cheesecake for a while but never think about it enough ahead of time. Also, the calories per serving for many cheesecake recipes is staggering. However, as I was looking through Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat Desserts I saw that there was a recipe for cheesecake that had only 200 calories/serving. I was excited and decided to make it. However, it was just a plain cheesecake recipe. There weren’t any suggestions on what to serve with it. I was browsing allrecipes.com when I came across a recipe for Chocolate Turtle Cheesecake. Unable to avoid changing recipes, I immediately stuck the two cheesecake recipes together with a couple of other modifications :-).

I made the batter for the traditional cheesecake and then added 1/2 cup melted chocolate chips and 2 tbs unsweetened cocoa powder. It turned out very good. To add the caramel part of the Chocolate Turtle Cheesecake, I used 1/2 of my mother’s caramel recipe instead of melting caramel candy and poured it into the springform pan. I then put the nut on top of the caramel and poured the cheesecake batter on top of everything.

I had read that I should bake the cheesecake in a water bath. However, I didn’t have many pans that were big enough to fit around my 9″ spring form pan. Finally, I decided that the cheap roasting pans I use for granola would have to work. I put the roasting pan in the oven, placed my spring form pan in the middle and then filled the space in between up with boiling water. I then gently shut the oven door and thought good thoughts.

About a half hour later, Jaeger comes into the kitchen and asks, “why is there water dripping from the oven?” Turns out my granola roasting pans had holes in them. After panicking for a couple of minutes, I discovered that my large frying pan would also fit around the spring form pan (it’s oven safe up to 350 degrees). I wasn’t sure if the cheesecake would survive the trauma but it didn’t appear to have suffered any lasting harm.

Finally the cheesecake was ready to take out of the oven. I let it cool and then stuck it in the fridge for the mandatory 12 hour cool down.

The next night, I got the cheesecake out and attempted to cut it. Unfortunately, the caramel had become brick hard. A war ensued between the caramel and I. I won but chocolate cheesecake ended up smeared all over my kitchen counters.

While the cheesecake was very good, I think it would be better not to include the caramel next time. Next time, I plan to use the main Chocolate Cheesecake recipe and then maybe top it with a raspberry whip cream topping of some sort.


My mom came to us this weekend. She’s tends to eat vegan so I thought it would be fun to try making a couple of vegan recipes. Friday night, I made Beet & 3 Bean Soup. This soup was very nutrient filled but was strange and didn’t taste terribly good. On the upside, I had concocted a vegan Lemon and Raspberry Muffin recipe that turned out remarkably good for just throwing ingredients together :-)

Saturday I tried another experiment, a apple-pear pie in a low fat crust. The filling part turned out okay (though I had fewer pears in it than I originally planned) but the low fat crust was not good.

Sunday, I made Hummus with Roasted Vegetables. I originally got the idea from a meal we had in London at Hummus Bros. It’s pretty good but I think I should add some more vegetables (maybe onions and tomatoes?) next time.

Weight Loss

As some of you may know, I’ve been working on losing weight. Last summer I finally noticed that I was officially in the “overweight” category according to the height/weight charts. This surprised me since I didn’t feel overweight. However, while I know that numbers lie, if the height and weight charts claimed I was overweight I figured it was probably right. I probably should also have noticed that my clothing was starting to be a little snug :-)

I love food so I initially started trying to lose weight by just exercising and keeping my eating habits the same. Unfortunately, this didn’t really help much. Eventually, I decided that I really needed to start paying attention to how many calories I was eating each day. It was really shocking. I eat fairly balanced meals (though I do make a fair amount of dessert from scratch). Using various diet websites I learned that it wasn’t what I was eating that was the problem. It was how much I was eating. What I considered a “serving size” was actually closer to two or three serving sizes.

It was hard making my body relearn how much food was reasonable to eat. Fortunately, I was able to extend my obsession with spreadsheets to an obsession with recording everything I ate. This helped me stay on track. My main calorie counter website for the first couple of months was SparkPeople. It’s a really nice website. However, it isn’t designed for people that cook a lot. You can create “recipes” but once created you couldn’t change them. If you decided to modify a recipe, you had to reenter the entire recipe with the added modifications (they’ve recently changed this so it works much better now).

Eventually, I decided that to get all the features I wanted in a nutrition program, I would probably need to use a desktop application. I don’t like desktop applications since they tie me to using one computer. However, none of the free nutrition websites had the features I needed. I downloaded trial versions of several different nutrition programs. My favorite, and the one I decided to buy, is called Nutribase Personal Plus.

Nutribase is really an amazing program. It has all the normal features that most nutrition software has and also some added features. For instance, it lets me add a recipe to a recipe. I have a basic Cuban Black Bean recipe that sometimes I use as a burrito filling and sometimes I serve over rice. This program allows me to create the basic Black Bean recipe and then add that recipe to my “Burrito” or “Rice” recipe. It’s really wonderful. Nutribase also comes with meal plans for Vegetarians and Vegans for a variety of calorie needs (1000 to 2800). I think the meal plan feature is a nice idea but I’m too independent to want to use premade meal ideas :-) The program also allows me to create my own monthly meal plans so someday I’ll probably get ambitious and try that feature out.

Since around September I’ve lost about 15 lbs. I’m now within an acceptable weight range for my height. I’m planning to lose 5 more lbs. Why? Jaeger and I plan to have children within the next 3-4 years. I want to get on the lower side of my healthy weight range before becoming pregnant because I suspect I’m the ballooning type :-) It’s not that I’m afraid of gaining weight when I’m pregnant, that’s obviously a natural process. However, I am concerned that I’ll have trouble losing it once the baby comes. I’m hoping that by starting with a healthy weight and good eating habits my pregnancy and weight loss afterwards will not be as challenging.

My family has a history of obesity. As a result, I suspect that I’ll need to continue counting calories in some form my whole life. Once I meet my last 5 lb goal, I’m going to start ratcheting up the number of calories I eat each day until I appear to have hit my calorie equilibrium. This is the part I’m least certain about. Of course, I don’t need to worry about this for at least a couple more months :-)

Adara

I have no business having a blog. I don’t update it nearly enough to be worthwhile. Anyway . . .

Several weeks Blue died. I was actually a little relived. She’d been dying ever since I first got her. I started saving for a new notebook last year and the practical side of me hoped that Blue could hang on long enough for me to afford a new computer. The other side of me wanted a new computer that worked. By early March I only had about half the money I thought I needed to replace Blue. However, Jaeger generously allowed me to borrow from the general fund assuming I pay it back in regular increments each month. It may sound a little odd saying that I borrowed from the general fund. However, Jaeger and I each have separate “expenditure allocations” that we use to buy most personal items.

Anyway, my new computer is a Dell Latitude D620 named Adara. She’s much cuter than I expected. Once of the reasons I bought her is that Jaeger has a D810 for work which he is pretty happy with. Also Dells seem to be in ascendancy at BLUG which implied to me that it should work decently with Linux (the previous favorite was IBM Thinkpads but rumor implies that Lenova may not be as Linux friendly). I keep buying notebook computers because I tend to drag my computer with me around the house.

Jaeger installed Ubuntu on her (after “accidentally” deleting the original Windows partition). Once Jaeger installed Ubuntu he also set up XP to run under VMWare and he was successfully able to transfer all the files I needed from Blue’s old hard drive so I didn’t lose any data. On Blue, Jaeger set up Windows to run under VMWare and I quickly decided this was the best way to run Linux and Windows on the same computer. Most things I do in Linux. However, I still use a couple of Windows only applications. It’s really nice to avoid restarting Adara every time I want to sync my iPod :-)

Favorite Vegan Cookbook

I now have a favorite vegan cookbook, The Voluptuous Vegan by Myra Kornfeld and George Minot (library). In general, I haven’t had much luck with Vegan cookbooks. I’ve tried several and all the recipes turn out uninspiring or awful.

I’ve only tried a couple of recipes from this book but so far everything has turned out great. I’ve made the Amaranth-Studded Cornbread (p. 102), Chocolate Pudding Tart (p. 246) and the Chickpea Crepes (p. 80). I think the Chocolate Pudding Tart could have used a bit more chocolate but that’s probably just because I’m obsessed with Chocolate :-)

Cereal Diversification

Last week, Jaeger asked me to explore buying a variety of cereal grains so we could try to diversify our morning breakfast a little bit. When I went shopping at Vitamin cottage yesterday I picked up a smattering of new cereals.

Today I decided to try the “Guisto’s Brand Nine Grain Cereal.” It includes cracked wheat, barley, corn, millet, oats, rye, triticale, brown rice, soy and flax seeds. I was dubious when I calculated that with my normal add-ins for oatmeal (fruit, soy milk and sugar) this mixture would have about 100 more calories than my normal oatmeal (though significantly more iron and protein). However, by excluding one of my normal fruits, chopping the sugar by 1/3 and not including soy milk, I got it fairly close to my oatmeal. Thus, my breakfast consisted of a ½ cup of nine grain cereal with 50 grams of frozen peaches (it’s too hard to try to measure frozen peaches by the cup), ½ cup sweetened frozen raspberries (I can’t find unsweetened at a reasonable price) and 2 packed teaspoons of brown sugar.

For oatmeal (old fashioned, not instant), I can usually stick it into the microwave for 5 minutes and come out with a decent consistency. (Those who know Jaeger will probably not be surprised to learn he considers the microwave method of cooking grains to be sacrilege.) Thus, when I saw that the directions stated the nine grain cereal needed to be cooked for 10 minutes, I was hoping that my normal 5 minute microwave time would be sufficient. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. I ended up microwaving it about 9 minutes before it reached the right consistency.

The cereal tasted . . . okay. I still prefer the oatmeal because the soy milk adds more creaminess. However, I might be willing to include it in my weekly rotation. Tomorrow, I’m contemplating trying Quinoa.

Cooking (again)

I think I need another hobby. My life seems to revolve around either cooking or books :-)

Last week I checked out the King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking book. I was familiar with the King Arthur Flour company since they are the only company I’ve seen that carries white whole wheat flour (lovely stuff, whole wheat nutrition without all the whole wheat taste).

Friday it took me 1 ½ hrs to get home due to an accident. Jaeger had called me and I told him he could find leftovers in the fridge. For some reason, when I’m tired, I start craving waffles with lots of peanut butter and fake maple syrup on top (no, I don’t like the real stuff, I don’t know why). When I got home, I decided to try channeling this unhealthy craving into something a smidgen more healthy. I flipped through the King Arthur cookbook and found an interesting recipe called “Peanut-Butter—Chocolate Chip Waffles with Banana Cream” (p. 17). I made the waffles but forgot to add the chocolate chips at the appropriate time. So, I melted the chocolate chips down and added them to the Banana Cream recipe instead. The waffles were decent. The resulting Chocolate Banana Cream recipe was quite good. I’m not exactly sure what I can use it with in the future. Maybe scones. Scones with Chocolate Banana Cream sounds good :-)

The other recipe I’ve tried in the King Arthur cookbook was “Granola Bread” (p. 199). In my first attempt, I tried making it by hand. However, I couldn’t get consistency right, it was too wet. I added quite a bit more flour than it said and the results were okay. I tried the same recipe again the next day except this time instead of making it by hand, I put it in my bread machine and tried not worrying about how wet/dry the dough was going to turn out. This time the results were much better. I’m hoping I’ll be able to replicate my success again because it’s the perfect bread for the toasted peanut butter jelly sandwiches I’ve been taking to work recently.

Midweek, I decided that Jaeger and I weren’t eating enough vegetables. So, I checked out several vegetable cookbooks to try. My favorite so far is The Roasted Vegetable by Andrea Chesman. Last night I tried the “Glazed Carrot Coins” (p. 19) which was pretty good. The other recipes that look interesting include “Zucchini Chips with Feta and Herbs,” “Spicy Sweet Potato Wedges,” “Stacked Roasted Vegetabl Enchiladas,” and “Artichoke and Leek Stuffed Pizza.”

My new goal is to serve at least 2 vegetables every night. It’ll be interesting to see how quickly I give up on this goal :-) I’m also going to start posting my menus each week so I can remember what I’ve tried and liked/disliked.