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Category: economics

Walnut Hill Restaurant School

I live a block from a Restaurant School, and they have community classes on the side of their formal chef training. I’ve taken a couple classes on wine there that taught me quite a bit more than I expected (though I didn’t know much to start).

So the Winter/Spring catalog of community classes came in the mail. Here’s a list of what interests me in case you are interested in joining me, too –

  • Knife Skills – Wednesday, April 22, 2009 – 7:00-9:30pm – $65

  • Indian Cassis – Tuesday, February 17, 2009 – 7:00-9:30pm – $65
  • Spanish Tapas – Wednesday, February 25, 2009 – 7:00-9:30pm – $65
  • Thai Cooking – Wednesday, May 13, 2009 – 7:00-9:30pm – $65
  • Bread & Pizza Workshop – Sunday, May 17, 2009 – 11:00am-4:00pm – $125
  • Croissants & Brioche – Sunday, March 8 and 15, 2009 – 11:00am-4:00pm – $125
  • Vegan Baking Class – Monday, March 2, 2009 – 7:00pm-9:30pm – $60
  • 5 Wine Challenge Dinners – 7:00pm – $45 each, $150 for all
    • Wednesday, January 21, 2009 – California vs Australia
    • Wednesday, February 18, 2009 – France vs U.S.
    • Wednesday, March 25, 2009 – Germany vs Alsace
    • Wednesday, April 22, 2009 – Spain vs Italy

Pepping for a longish trip – clearing out perishables

Food list
tonight for dinner:

  • retrieve laundry
  • make bacon
  • 3 ounces of pasta
  • cook together: olive oil, onion, garlic, fried leeks, jalapeno pepper, kale, red pepper flakes, diced tomato
  • cook on the side: small yellow squash with Penzey’s Pasta Sprinkle (in pan with the bacon grease poured out)
  • stir into kale at the end: 2 sliced scallions, 1 roasted red pepper, crumbled bacon, 1/3c shredded parmesan cheese
  • freeze at least half of the kale/pasta as lunches
  • pop turkey meatballs in the freezer
  • put remains of beet/coconut milk soup in compost
  • pack
  • empty trunk of car

tomorrow for breakfast:

  • slice the last scallion and mix it with 1.5 ounces of cream cheese
  • microwave/toast bagel
  • while making up all the rest of the collard greens (kenyan style)
  • freeze half the greens on top of the leftover rice as a lunch
  • do dishes
  • vacuum, scoop litter, fill up extra food bowl for Tika, take everything that won’t melt to the car on the way to work

pondering my finances

Weight Watchers is coming to campus. They are having meetings every Tuesday – at a time (11:30am – 12:30pm) I can actually attend, even with my crazy work schedule. Starting November 13th. The initial sign up is less than half price, if you start either of the first two meetings, and then each week is $14 after that.

  • Can I afford it? Yes, but I could be putting that money toward credit card debt
  • I’ve done Weight Watchers before… and I thought it was one of the more sensible diets out there but
    • I wasn’t invested in being thin (beyond a certain weight, I started feeling cold and getting sick a little more frequently)
    • I got tired of obsessing over food quite that much
  • My household isn’t set up for it
    • I often pick up leftovers from my mother that aren’t going to be measured or made in a particular way
    • I guess I could still make large meals and save portions, but it’d call for a lot of tracking and calculating
    • there are, less with Weight Watchers than other programs, a lot of cheats to coming to the right amounts that require buying pre-packaged stuff (especially WW’s mysteriously light bread product), and I’ve been moving farther and farther away from artificial food products. It used to be that I couldn’t tell much difference between regular sour cream and diet sour cream – but now I can spot the carageenan and other texturizing agents right away, so I’d be doing more cutting things out than substituting 🙁

Swap one for the other

The original Battlestar Galactica, you know – the one with Lorne Greene, is so much better than the new one.

Driving on highways during the daytime is always worse than driving at night. Driving at dusk, dawn, and 3am joyous.

Dairy products are interchangeable.

The key to running an economic kitchen is just the right amount of storage space – too much, and those exotic sauces and fancy jams start looking sexy; too little, and you can’t stock up on sales. It’s the freedom to be able to buy the six boxes of pasta for $3 that saves you from running out of pasta and getting stuck with a box for $2.50. It’s knowing that you have enough meat in your freezer that you can wait for good sales and never pay more than $2/lb for any kind of meat (and can stubbornly wait for some to get even cheaper – like chicken thighs below $.50/lb, whole chicken and pork shoulders or picnic ham roasts for $.80 – and if you live somewhere these are cheaper, that alone will be enough for me to spend at least 5 good minutes considering moving there). Produce is pure luck, though – luckily, I have people selling lots of good produce cheaply off the back of a truck.

Sewing your own clothes from scratch doesn’t save a dime.

People think I can garden even though most of the pots on my porch are empty. The pots are empty because I have been systematically killing the plants that were passed to me when my neighbor moved out of state. They think I can garden because I have pots.