Helping Home Cooks Save Time and Money
I’m starting a short series on grocery shopping, with a focus on fruits and vegetables. Today I’m giving you questions to ask yourself when planning a shopping trip. Go here for more on menu-planning.
1. What food do you have in the house? Check what you need to use up. Look in your refrigerator to see what fresh and cooked produce is spoiled or leftover. Why didn’t it get used up? Keep receipts to compare from trip to trip.
Please welcome reader Kate for today’s interview and recipe.
1. Name, Family, Location, Website. Kate, One Tired Ema, Modi’in, Israel. Married with a daughter (5.5) and a son (3.5).
2. Describe family meals and your mother’s cooking style. My mom cooked really great, homey food. Nothing terribly fancy or restaurant quality, but I don’t remember complaining much. My stepfather was on a very low-sodium diet long before it was trendy, and my mom adapted to cooking without salt by using interesting spices and herbs.
In my recipes, I like to include instructions for using a variety of cooking methods. Some people don’t own microwaves, but in a dorm or hotel room, that may be the only cooking tool available. Different methods work better for different people and situations.
Reader Ilana-Davita’s stovetop broke, and in the absence of a crockpot she requested microwave recipes. Here are a couple of simple ones. They all require microwave-safe utensils, like toughened glass, ceramic, or silicon.
Is there one thing that you always seem to throw away? For my mother, it was cooked rice. She liked to have it on hand, but every few months she found a forgotten jar.
I have gone through stages of throwing out different things. The short answer to, “Why do we throw out food?” is that the food is spoiled. But it didn’t start out that way. Everytime we throw something away, it tells us something about our style of shopping, eating and cooking.
