New Year Food Resolutions

The Sweeper

First out: THIS IS NOT A DIET THREAD.

I eat well and I'm a typical modern age person - fatter than my predecessors, but I fall into the 'average shape, average size' bracket. However I don't eat as well as I should (and I drink too much booze which is a subject for an entirely different thread )

Still, I wanted to make a New Years resolution regarding food, but one that fits with my lifestyle.

So I decided that in 2011, I will embrace the vegetable.

I'm the sort of cook who makes the protein the centrepoint of any meal, and the carbohydrate usually runs a close second. The vegetable will often be a sorry sideline, if not booted completely.

Typical examples would be chili (meat sauce plus rice), ragu sauce (meat sauce plus pasta), curries (meat sauce plus rice or bread) and even roast meat dishes (meat with a carb side, for instance a loaf of fresh bread, cooking club recipe I'm looking at you here...).

The upshot of that cooking style is, while I thoroughly enjoy everything I cook, I don't eat enough fruit and veg - I barely get my five a day. Part of the problem is that fresh veg doesn't lend itself to my lifestyle - working 40 hours a week, dealing with seven animals when I get in the door, living alone - I have to admit Easy Mac N Cheese in a packet found its way into the pantry at the end of 2010 and it's proven bloody difficult to shift. I go to the supermarket once a week, and I've lost COUNT of the number of times I've filled the crisper drawers on a Saturday morning with vegetables, half of which go into the worm farm in the following Friday night's fridge clear-out.

So this year I figured I'd take the approach of crossing Masterchef's Mystery Box with making the vegetable king - in other words, I'll open the fridge, see what's in it, and choose a vegetable as the centre point of tonight's meal, and THEN see what I can do around that.

Last night, for instance, I griddled the asparagus and made that the meal centre, and had it with a thick slice of home-baked soda bread and the remains of the Xmas smoked salmon.

In my fridge currently there's a cauliflower, a half a pumpkin, a couple of capsicums, a bag of carrots... normally I'd overlook these in favour of the meat or fish in the fridge, trying to figure out what I can cook with THAT and then adding veg as an afterthought.

However, 2011's resolution is focus on the veg, so tonight is either pumpkin risotto with sage from the garden, or I'll cook the cauliflower in curry spices and have it with rice and chick peas. Those dishes are incidentally vegetarian, which isn't necessarily the absolute plan, because I'm still a happy carnivore. Still though, it'll be interesting to see how far I get with this 'tweak' in my cooking (for many, many years my overly-dramatic new years resolutions have been doomed to failure, so I don't bother any more - see me? NOT joining a gym. )

Anyone else making food changes in 2011?

neuro-praxis

This year I want my food to be more nutritionally dense. More protein, especially fish, more eggs, more nuts and seeds and oils. Less lazy carbs like white rice and sliced pan.

I'm not sure 5 a day is such a big deal. I used to be completely devoted to it, but not anymore. I visited a nutritionist a few times last year who opened my eyes a little to the needs of the body, and huge portions of fruit and veg are just not as important as we are led to believe.

Don't get me wrong, I eat fresh fruit and veg every single day. But it would now be more important to me that I eat plenty of good quality protein and fresh unprocessed foods than that I get 5 actual portions of fruit and veg a day.

Minder

I would like to cut down on food wastage and impulse buying. I'm lucky enough to have a huge choice of markets and supermarkets to shop from, but that choice has lead an increase in wastage that I really need to cut out.

By impulse buying, I mean I will happily trot along on a Friday to my chinese supermarket where they have a fantastic fish counter. I'll buy fresh fish and shellfish. Then I'll go to the supermarket to get the main shopping, buying meat and poultry. I get home knackered, cook nothing and all the fresh meat and fish gets pushed to Saturday - result is something will go. Either I cook it all and some gets pushed in the fridge where it doesn't get used. Or I don't get to it before it spoils.

This is not a regular weekend, but it happens enough that I want to cut it out. So my main resolution is to shop more often - buying less each time. That way I can keep the sponteneity I like - cook what I fancy rather than searching for ingredients from a weekly meal planner.

Other resolutions - cook more from the cookbooks I own. So if I'm not following a recipe fully, then picking elements out of recipes - sauces etc. Cook more vegetarian meals, I have a copy of Terre a Terre - the vegetarian cookbook of the restaurant in Brighton. Brilliant book. Excellent recipes.

All in all, I want to spend less and waste less. Simple.

the beer revolu

I'm with Sweeper here.
I reckon I eat far too much meat and am very reliant on it for inspiration too.
So tonight I had already planned to have roast oka, carrot, parsnip, garlic with black beans.
I'm also planning on more or less giving up the booze for the month of January (think I'll join Mrs Beer in a glass or two of nice wine at weekends but cut out all the beer and the odd drop of whisk(e)y/rum/tequila -this will probably result in me mostly giving up the smokes too).
I don't really waste a lot of food, so I think I'm ok there and while we do like white rice we also eat plenty of wholegrain rices too and very little white bread.

Possibly we will end up snacking more on saucission and other dried meats to make up for the reduction of meat in our dinners.

I beginning to think that I have the very beginnings of gout in one big toe so all this will hopefully help.

Minder

the beer revolu wrote: »

Possibly we will end up snacking more on saucission and other dried meats to make up for the reduction of meat in our dinners.

I beginning to think that I have the very beginnings of gout in one big toe so all this will hopefully help.

The cured meats are a no no if you suspect you have gout.

Or rather, it would probably be better to reduce the amount of cured meats rather increase the amount if you suspect you have gout.

psycho-hope

well my plan for the year is to eat less processed food and more home cooking+ i want to get more confidant baking and start trying differnt food i wouldnt normally eat.

kenco

Definately cut back on food wastage.
Try some more ideas than the usual reliables
Shop for 'weekend' meat more in the butcher than off the shelf (now I know they open on Sundays)
Continue to reduce influence of spuds
Eat more fish
Further embrace the stir fry veg
Finally and most importantly get some Garlic bulbs and pot same soon as its going to be harder to get apparently
If home growing spuds again this year (dont bother!!)

Nevyn

Smaller portions for me and more fish in the family diet and better management of the veg bin.

Dinkie

I only have a couple.

1. To clear out my freezer and cupboards regularly. I keep forgetting what I have in there and buying the same thing (leading to three big bags of ground cumin currently in the press).

2. I travel nearly every day for work. I'm going to start keeping nuts and water in the car to stop me snacking and I'm going to start bringing my lunch with me when possible. This will hopefully mean I don't buy as many crisps in the various petrol stations.

3. I'm going to try one new meal a week. I'm going to pick a recipe and make it.... there are loads of meals I would love to try but keep putting them off (e.g. gyoza, quicke, etc). They don't have to be difficult meals. Just ones I haven't tried before.

RJC09

I'm going to try and be less wasteful and more frugal. last year i started meal planning and that really helped, but i could still do alot more.
I tend to make too much (potato, sauce, meat) and cant think of anything to do with it, so it gets thrown out a few days later. I got a few new cookbooks for christmas that have some awesome ideas and tips for leftovers so i'm going to try and maximise them.
I want to start buying cheaper cuts of meat and making a more flavourful dish, instead of relying on expensive cuts to make the meal.

I also plan on learning how to make bread. my husband and son eat alot of it, and it seems so easy once i get the basics, and far healthier to make myself.

pampootie

Cook more fish, at least one dinner a week. And this means extending my rubbish 4 fish dinner repetoire (tuna pasta/mackerel pasta/prawn risotto/breaded haddock). I bought this book http://www.amazon.com/Fish-Complete-Seafood-Companion/dp/1862058334/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1294088737&sr=1-1 a few months ago with this very intention, and have only looked at the pictures so far

unkel

The Sweeper wrote: »

it'll be interesting to see how far I get with this 'tweak' in my cooking (for many, many years my overly-dramatic new years resolutions have been doomed to failure

From your thread it seems you know yourself very well

Be careful not to overdo it - almost a guarantee for failure. Cooking for one is hard and not as enjoyable as cooking for a family / for others. I also feel you're being a bit harsh on yourself. Ragu (I presume you mean Bolognese?) sauce with pasta has a very large portion of tomato (possibly the healthiest of all vegetables out there) in it and also garlic and onion. Most curries have onion and garlic in them - why not just add one more vegetable as well as the meat?

By all means, embrace vegetarian meals you like. A veg Jalfrezi (pretty much as in the cooking club) based on cauliflower and chickpeas has become a regular here. There's your 5 veg in the one (pot) dinner!

Here's a suggestion - leave your main meals more or less as you like them. What I do is get a lot of my intake of vegetables at lunchtime. Roast your pumpkin and capsicums and with garlic and onion it will make into a lovely soup - I give mine an Indian twist! Make up large salads with lots of veg (tomato, cucumber, peppers, carrot, radish, you get the idea - one salad can give you your 5 veg a day). All of those are easy to bring to work as long as you have access to a microwave oven at work?

I've no new food resolutions for this year, except continue on from last year. Eat well though on a tight enough budget. Cook a different meal that I've never done before every week (or so) and waste very little (this is easier than you think - but requires planning and a rolling buffer on best before days of a few days. For the days you have a take away / don't bother cooking / go out for diner). Cleverly use the freezer!

The Sweeper

The problem with salad, believe it or not, while it's not difficult to prepare salad for one, it's really difficult to BUY salad for one.

I won't eat a whole butterhead lettuce in a week. Bags of green leaves are dreadful - I eat three large handfuls and the rest of the bag goes into the worm farm. I'd eat a baby cos lettuce as part of a substantial chicken caesar salad, but they don't sell baby cos in singles, only in packets of three. I'm always buying bags of carrots and nets of onions, and throwing out some of the contents, instead of buying singles.

So then we're back to cooking for one versus fresh veg.

The solution, given where I live, is very much to plant a vegetable garden, but that's another part of my list of 'things to do'. I would actually seriously consider buying a separate freezer, as I raw feed my seven pets and their bloody frozen baggies take up most of the space in my freezer. This is a pain because I get very bored eating the same thing - dinner tonight and lunch tomorrow is about my limit, and if I'm looking at it again for dinner on day two I'm likely to leave it in the fridge and cook something else, which is just putting off throwing it in the bin.

I know major lifestyle changes don't work for me, so it needs to be a minor tweak that piques my interest, and focusing on the vegetables is actually doing that. It's not that I stress about not getting specifically five fruit and veg a day - it's that I eat sod all fruit and veg. One evening a week I might have an apple and a bunch of grapes along with cheese and bread for my dinner (and a glass of wine). The rest of the week more often than not the vegetables I have are incidentally cooked into the meal e.g. as you described, the tomatoes in a pasta sauce, the kidney beans and tomatoes in a chili, so on.

I agree with neuropraxis on the better quality food thing - one element of living alone is you don't HAVE to have a "proper" meat and two veg dinner, but that doesn't mean you can't eat well. One evening I'll have a bowl of mixed raw nuts (unsalted) with a couple of squares of dark chocolate and a glass of red wine, and I'll feel far better the next day than if I'd had a packet of instant noodles and a cup of tea.

I bought a couple of wee tartlet tins yesterday - 12cm loose-bottom ones, so I can bake myself a mini-quiche or two when I get home. I love frozen shortcrust pastry sheets, and it's the work of moments to mix up eggs, cheese, some chopped veg and some bacon with salt and pepper and a little 2% milk for a quiche filling, then serve that with vegetables and bring a second to work the next day for lunch.

The other thing I'm steering away from is the weekend cookathon - something I previously relished. I find that weekend cookathons essentially fuel the bin. I indulge in a cookathon on Saturday. I eat Saturday night. Sunday I'm sick of the sight of the food but have another helping and then fridge/freeze some of it. Monday I'm utterly disinterested in food at home so I skip the food in the fridge and eat out. By Tuesday, Saturday's food has been in the fridge four days - bin, more often than not. Cook something else instead. Wednesday, eat the second half of Tuesday's cooking effort, bin anything else left in the fridge from the weekend. Thursday, random foodstuff e.g. bowl of nuts or grapes n cheese. Friday, clear out fridge in preparation for Saturday shop for pointless cookathon.

Hate something, change something, hate something change something make something betterrrrrrrr....

Dinkie

Sweeper...

I live alone and my solution used to be to lettuce is to plant it in smallish pots (now I travel too much and the lettuce/spinach bolts). I used to plant every couple of weeks (takes about a minute to do) and it was just enough to keep me going. I could just pick what I needed. Eventually I moved from lettuce to spinach as I could put spinach in hot dishes as well as salads.

Much easier then a veg garden.

Now most of my veg comes in the form of soups (which I don't like that much) as its the only way I can keep it from going off

fonda

Most of the veg I have left over at the end of the week goes into a pot with some stock to make a veg soup, better than throwing it away and does a day or 2's lunch and is very tasty.

the beer revolu

kenco wrote: »

Finally and most importantly get some Garlic bulbs and pot same soon as its going to be harder to get apparently

What's that about?


Might explain why one dried up fart of a garlic is €79 in Tesco whereas a couple of months ago 3 plump heads were €99 or €1.20.

Have some down since Nov, must plant more.

Loopy

the beer revolu wrote: »

Might explain why one dried up fart of a garlic is €79 in Tesco

Holy shit.
Dunnes is where it's at dude
:pac:

the beer revolu

Loopy wrote: »

Holy shit.
Dunnes is where it's at dude
:pac:

woops, that should read €0.79 and €0.99:o

Malari

I only have two resolutions and they are both foodie ones!

I'm going to cook more for other people. Just invite friends over, try to make it a weekly/fortnightly thing of going to each other's houses for dinner. It doesn't have to be fancy dinner party stuff either. We can eat a casserole with a plate on our laps watching tv if we want, but it's just more fun when there's 4 or 5 for dinner, not just 2 of us

Also I am going to try more recipes. I have loads of cook books and I tend to pick the same ones all the time. I do pick and choose from the Cooking Club recipes but then fall back on the old favourites again. But I intend to try to cook new meals/sides/ingredients from the hundreds of recipes on my shelves!

Plus, :eek::eek: on the garlic. How do you plant garlic? I use it lots!

Minder

kenco wrote: »

Finally and most importantly get some Garlic bulbs and pot same soon as its going to be harder to get apparently.

Why is that?

Garlic is easy to plant, easy to grow and keeps for ages. I have probably another 2 or maybe 3 months of garlic left from last year - all grown in a bed 1.2 x 2.4m. I'm told it doesn't grow well from shop bought garlic, but I've never tried it.

the beer revolu

Malari wrote: »

Plus, :eek::eek: on the garlic. How do you plant garlic? I use it lots!

You just stick a clove in the ground!
But the sooner the better - apparently the cold weather helps form bigger cloves (mine is down since Nov).

kenco

Sorry didnt mean to spread doom and gloom on the garlic front!

Read and article recently (cant remember where but it was reputable) where the topic was foods that could be less easy to get in the next year or two. Garlic was one of them (from the mass produced sense) and the point being made was that it was relatively easy to grow in most climates and the result is far superior to most supermarket tasteless junk.

It definately has gone up in price in the last 6 months or so and as I use it a fair bit one of my resolutions is to try growing it myself (regardless of a potentail shortage and despite the potato fiasco of 2010...)

johnnycee66

One of the books on food that most influenced me over the last few years was Michael Pollan's In Defence Of Food, particularly his axiom about not eating anything that your grandmother wouldn't recognise as food. I have become very mindful of this regarding food/shopping choices, and as a result my cooking has become more simple, tasty and satisfying, so for this year I hope to continue on the same theme, shopping and cooking wisely and locally, taking some power back from the mass producers and retailers.

Minder

johnnycee66 wrote: »

One of the books on food that most influenced me over the last few years was Michael Pollan's In Defence Of Food, particularly his axiom about not eating anything that your grandmother wouldn't recognise as food.

Isn't Pollan's axiom more to do with whole foods and a lack of dietary fads rather than a lack of the choice that globalisation has made available?

The Sweeper

So you're saying that while your grandmother would be likely to recognise neither a chicken nugget or a dragon fruit, Pollan's steering you away from the nugget as opposed to the fruit?

johnnycee66

Pollans points as I recall were in relation to the industrialisation of food, and that, despite the fact that there has never been more choice in the supermarkets, most are edible food-like substances rather than actual whole foods, and that actual foodstuffs recognisable by one's grandmother (!) are now confined to he periphery of the supermarket (forgive me if this isnt 100% correct, i'm quoting from memory). A bit of intelligence has to come into this, so my interpretation would be, chicken nugget no (or at least factory produced chicken nugget), dragon fruit yes

Dizzyblonde

I'm definitely going for smaller portions this year, and also going to use my cookbooks more because I'm in a rut and seem to cook the same things every week.

I'm planting garlic again this year because I'm still using last year's yield from the one head of garlic I planted. It's so much nicer than supermarket garlic too.

Toto Wolfcastle

Where can you get garlic to plant? I presume you can't just plant stuff from the shop? Actually just reading back on this thread it seems that supermarket stuff doesn't grow well. I had a look for it last year but I had no luck. I'm sick of going to the shop and finding crappy garlic.

This year I want to cook more at the weekends. I'm always wrecked by the time Friday evening comes so I don't cook but for health reasons it has to be done.

Dizzyblonde

janeybabe wrote: »

Where can you get garlic to plant? I presume you can't just plant stuff from the shop?

The garlic I planted last year was from the supermarket and it was very successful - I might have just been lucky though. You can get prepared heads of garlic in garden centres and from places like Mr Middleton's

http://www.mrmiddleton.com/index.php/view-all-products-in-shop.htm

Malari

Dizzyblonde wrote: »

The garlic I planted last year was from the supermarket and it was very successful - I might have just been lucky though. You can get prepared heads of garlic in garden centres and from places like Mr Middleton's

http://www.mrmiddleton.com/index.php/view-all-products-in-shop.htm

Must try that. Although I don't have any ground to put it in. Would have to be a pot on the window sill!

I use garlic in loads of things and my dad plants it but they use it as much as I do in cooking so no hope of getting my supply from the folks

antoniosicily

I'll try pot noodles!