Week 1: Skillet Chicken and Broccoli Salad

One of the inconveniences of buying meat in bulk is that the meat is always frozen when I want to use it. Or I take it out of the freezer, stick it in the fridge with the intention of cooking it in a few days, and then I forget and it goes bad. One of my resolutions for this year is to stop wasting so much food and so, when I opened my fridge and saw five thawed chicken breasts, I was determined to use them. There are a bazillion recipes for chicken out there but

1. I was looking for something light and healthy,
2. I wanted to use only ingredients I had on hand, and
3. I needed to have dinner on the table in less than an hour.

Skillet Chicken with Rice

I was on my fourth cookbook before I found a recipe that met all four requirements. Americas Test Kitchen to the rescue! Their Skillet Chicken and Rice is made with white wine and chicken broth rather cream. I didn't have the peas, scallions, or lemon that the recipe called for so I left them out. The basic rice and chicken is nothing to look at but was still delicious.

Broccoli Salad with Walnuts, Dates, and Red Cabbage

One of the challenges I am giving myself with this new experiment is to try new fruit/vegetable preparations. Normally we eat steamed vegetables or chopped vegetable salads with dinner. This is partly due to a lack of imagination on my part, but it is also because I like my fruits/vegetables to be fresh or barely cooked and very simply dressed.

Several years ago, during one of my many on-again, off-again engagements with Weight Watchers, I bought their Simply the Best: Italian cookbook. It was an impulse buy and quite frankly, there is really nothing all that interesting about this cookbook other than that it lists the Weight Watchers point values per serving for each recipe. But the one recipe I found that I absolutely love is for Broccoli, Raisin and Pine Nut Salad. I am not a fan of uncooked broccoli but if you chop it into small pieces, you'll never notice the raw flavor. I didn't have any raisins, bacon, or pine nuts so I substituted dates and walnuts and left out the bacon. I couldn't find the recipe online so I am posting it below.

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Broccoli, Raisin, and Pine Nut Salad
From Weight Watcher's Simply the Best: Italian cookbook

2 Tb reduced-calorie mayonnaise
2 Tb nonfat sour cream
1 Tb packed dark brown sugar
1 Tb white-wine vinegar
3 Tb pine nuts, toasted
1 pound broccoli crowns, cut into small florets (about 4 cups)
2 Tb raisins
2 scallions, thinly sliced
3 slices bacon, crisp-cooked and crumbled
2 c shredded red cabbage

1. Blend the mayonnaise, sour cream, brown sugar, and vinegar in a small bowl until smooth.
2. Toss the pine nuts, broccoli, raisins, scallions, and bacon in a salad bowl. Drizzle with the dressing and toss to coat. Cover and refrigerate up to 1 day to blend the flavors.
3. Serve the salad over the cabbage.

Busy Mom Modifications

• As I mentioned and as you can see from the photo, I left out the bacon, peas and scallions from the chicken and rice dish. You can add any cooked, chopped up vegetables and a handful of cheese to this dish (tossed in just before serving) to make it more interesting.
• The recipe calls for broccoli crowns but I wanted to use up the stalks as well. I cut off the tough bottom of the stalk and most of the outer peel and then chopped it into 1/2 inch dice. Both kids ate crowns and stalks without comment.
• I substituted walnuts and chopped up dates for the raisins and pine nuts. My daughter especially loved the dates and asked that I make it this way from now on.
• I let the salad sit for a few minutes before serving, mainly because that was all the time I could spare. This dish keeps well though, and the leftovers that I had for lunch the next day tasted even better.

The Results

Both kids loved the salad. My finicky kid said this was now his favorite way to have broccoli, a vegetable he normally does not like to eat.

Experiment #2: Eating Healthy From My Pantry

I love beginnings. Every morning. Every Monday. The first of every month. And now the beginning of a new year. I love resolutions too. It seems that lately making New Year's resolutions has fallen out of favor but not for me. Every January I buy and start writing in a brand new journal, even if the old one still has empty pages. I buy composition notebooks, the kind that students use for writing and lab work, specifically for this purpose. I use books with graph paper instead of lines so that I can make graphs and lists as well as write. I look back on the year that ended, dream about the things I'd like to accomplish in the coming months and years. Of course I will have forgotten or given up on most of the things I wrote down within a couple of weeks but then the first of the new month arrives and I happily begin again.

The scale is creeping up a lot higher than I would like these days and so, of course, these last few days I have been journaling about eating better and getting more exercise. I've also been jotting down ideas about this blog, what I'd like to do next, what can I do better. Now that the food levels in my storage areas are down to a manageable level, and I've learned that I can still feed my family on a quarter of what I was used to spending, I'm ready to launch a new shopping adventure from my pantry. For the next six weeks, I will blog about cooking meals that are light and nutritious. My focus will be on healthy eating and weight loss while continuing to use up the things in my pantry, or at the very least, not increasing my food stores.

The Rules
I'm sure the rules will evolve over time but here's my starting point:

1. My monthly food budget, not including eating out, will be $300/month.
2. I will serve at least two different fruits/vegetables at each meal and they will make up the major portion of the meal.
3. The primary sources of protein will be poultry, seafood, and low-fat dairy products. Red meat and fatty foods will be limited to one serving per day or less.
4. Carbohydrates such as white rice, pasta, flour, desserts, etc) will be limited to two small servings per day.

I've learned an important lesson from the last six weeks and it is that writing a daily blog requires more dedication and time than I have right now, so I'll be posting at least twice a week, more as time (and life) permits.

Adventure #2 Begins!

It's a Wrap!

It's hard to believe my 44-day experiment has come to an end. I apologize for being absent the last several days. Due to a rash of holiday parties and eating out, the year ended with my not having to cook a major meal for the past several days (and over budget by about $100 for the month).

I achieved my primary goal, which was to eat down the food in my pantry and refrigerators/freezers. The most visible difference is in my freezers. This is the outside freezer which, you may recall from Day 1, started this whole adventure.

The kitchen freezer is much more spacious and well-lit now that the lightbulb is not completely walled off. The photo doesn't really do it justice - I now have a single layer of food rather than stacks of plastic bags and containers.

Since everything in my pantry and garage is organized in plastic containers, you can't really tell that the quantities have been reduced so I am not posting pictures of those areas but quite a bit of food has been used up there as well.

What did I learn?
My most unexpected lesson was that buying groceries willy nilly really fed into my propensity to shop. When I stopped going to the grocery store everyday, it also curbed my desire to run to the store (any store) any time I felt like I wanted or "needed" something. From a household budgeting perspective, I finished out the month a few hundred dollars in the black, despite buying Christmas presents and being over my grocery allotment. WOO HOO!!

I did not realize how much I would love being able to see what all I have without having to dig through a ton of stuff. I am determined to keep my food stores at their current level, which means no more buying dozens of items simply because they are on sale. This also makes it easier to ensure we have completely consumed what we have on hand before buying more, a root cause of why I accumulated so much food in the first place.

Towards the end though, my restricted budget really dampened my enthusiasm for cooking. The last couple of weeks, I found myself thumbing longingly through my cookbooks, wishing I could try something new. I am looking forward to cooking again, starting with tonight's dinner. But, I am loathe to fall back into the habit of running to the grocery store everyday and so I will limit my trying of new recipes (and therefore the need to shop) to once or twice a week.

The most surprising food-discoveries were a giant bag of gourmet cheeses (emmenthal, gruyére, havarti, chevré etc) and numerous prime rib roasts. I had no idea I had purchased so many of these expensive food items and am looking forward to enjoying them over the next several weeks.

What's Next?
As I mentioned on Day 26, I've been eating a little TOO well these last several weeks and therefore have decided to focus my efforts on eating healthy. The Pantry Shopper will be back in a few days with a whole new plan and adventure!