Sous vide cooking. It’s easy to buy a bulk quantity of food, vac-pack and cook it, then freeze it. This saves time and money both on purchase, initial prep, and mealtime prep.
For example, we buy a whole, locally-grown, grass-fed chuck flap. We trim, bag, and cook the entire flap in one day. This provides my partner and me about six weeks of meals with high quality protein. Added bonus: the juice and gelatin in the bag after cooking makes excellent soup stock or cooking liquid for beans. Double added bonus: a sous vide chuck steak is just as good as the best ribeye fillet.
Also learn to use an entire chicken. For example, spatchcock and roast the chicken for dinner. Break down the carcass to get every scrap of meat. Make chicken salad the next day. Roast the bones, make a mirepoix, and make chicken stock. Use that to make chicken and dumplings or chicken soup. The two of us eat for a week from one chicken.
Learn about food preservation and safety: reusable containers, dangerous food conditions, fermentation, canning, making stocks… A huge part of saving money on food is not wasting any of it. Being able to buy in-season food when it’s cheaper and more nutritive is a big deal.
And on that note: avoid cheap, low-nutrition food. Sure, that industrial, NPK produce and ultra-processed box meal might be “affordable.” But those tend to be empty calories; you have to eat more of it to feel sated and get the nutrition you need. Locally grown, in-season foods tend to be better food values since you need to eat less of them to get the same micronutrients. See: “The Doritos Effect,” by Mark Schatzker.
Just gotta watch out for freezer burn and avoid the food being in the temperature danger zone for a significant time. The real issue here is that you’re essentially applying three separate transformations to your food (cooking, then freezing, then cooking again), which compounds the amount of possible error in your finished result.
Freezer burn is a function of air reaching the food while frozen. Use a chamber vacuum sealer that can pull vacuum into single-digits mmHg. We live on a sailboat, and our freezer is set at 22F/-5.5C for energy conservation. Never had freezer burn.
Well, goddammit, I just had a huge reply typed out, and the website deleted it when the text window lost focus. Okay, super short version: /u/akrot raises a good point, and we would all do well to apply harm reduction and awareness of EDCs in our lives. They are ubiquitous and insidious. In my case, sous vide cooking is one of the very few explicit uses I concede to single-use plastic in my life. It is also one of the few points in my kitchen that food touches plastics.
We must all pick our own battles, and everyday EDCs demand some awareness-raising.
I don't know if this is the case in the US, but a lot of food products here in the UK have a version of the nutritional information which is "prepared as directed". Breakfast cereal is often shown as "x grams with y ml semi-skimmed milk" for example. Is your tea doing something like this and giving you values for brewing it and adding a splash of milk, perhaps?
For Tazo Awake English breakfast tea the label says “based on tea brewed with freshly boiled water for 5 minutes (no milk, no sugar), an 8 fl oz cup typically contains insignificant amounts of calories, fats, carbohydrates, sugars, protein and sodium”.
Seems weird for yours to have such a significant difference even if its a slightly different type, could you post an image?
Tea is made from plants. All plants have proteins. The parts of the plant that we eat may or may not be a good source of protein for humans.
Practically all Chinese, Indian, and English teas are all made from the same species of plant, Camellia sinensis, simply known as a tea tree. If you were to eat the leaves they would be a good source of protein and fiber, not to mention vitamins and antioxidants. However, we discard the leaves with the fiber, and typical ways of preparing the leaves and the tea can decrease the protein and antioxidants. Its possible your brand flash freezes tthe leaves or uses some other method to try and preserve these nutrients. Ive seen some English teas that are powder you mix in instead of steeping, and this would work as well. In fact, tea leaves are absolutely edible! If you get a decent to high quality tea you can take your leaves after you make tea and throw them in a smoothie, soup, or even eggs and youll get the rest of the nutrients left in them and wont be thowing food in the bin.
On that same pedantic note: they’re not minimums, they’re testable limits. Testable. As in, not every batch is, nor every thousand…
Also, somebody here’s gonna love finding out how much of their own body mass is bacteria, parasites, and just plain dead. Not to mention that everything pasteurized still has the corpses of the “cleaned” microbes floating in it.
I used to work with health inspectors, when talking about my work I would describe what they do as “ You know the guys who go into restaurants and say ‘I’m shutting you down there’re too many cockroaches in the soup’”
About 1 person in 10 notices I said too many cockroaches.
Restaurants are allowed to have a certain amount of bug parts in soup.
I learned to make home made chicken soup from scratch a while back and it’s the best. Lots of work, but worth it, especially when it’s cold or rainy.
The secret is adding chicken feet (about 1 lb per ~1.75 gallons of water) to the broth. It adds so much collagen, the soup is thick and delicious.
I like to also add parsley, carrot tops, a bay leaf, and a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar with roasted chicken bones to the broth as well. Pressure cook for an hour, or simmer for a day.
Strain the broth, add yukon potatoes, carrots, chopped onions, garlic, rosemary, thyme, sage, kosher salt, freshly ground black pepper. Pressure cook for another hour or simmer for two (or until potatoes are soft…).
Once done, add roasted chicken meat, and lightly simmer with fresh mushrooms and slowly whisk an egg in. Serve over cooked quinoa, topped with freshly chopped basil, cilantro, and/or green onions.
Tazo is a subbrand of Lipton which itself is a sub brand of Unilever. I was unable to find any English Breakfast on their website that the nutrition label stated it had 2 grams of protein. Every tea I saw had 0 listed.
Pretty popular in the US, so I do drink them from time to time and they arent bad, but I dont advise to eat the leaves when you are done. The leaves are very highly processed, and they dont really care if other things get mixed into the tea peaves before processing.
I was confused by this as well. I looked it up and couldn’t find any label that had 2g of protein. The most I found was their Vanilla Chai which contains 0.1g.
My wife and I have decided to adopt the Icelandic tradition of buying each other books, and opening them on Christmas Eve. We then have a wonderful quiet read that evening.
We might buy each other small presents aside from the books, but nothing is expected or required.
We pay bills, rent, get food (all generic and heavy sales) then the money is gone. Its a good month if we have 20$ at the end of the month, thats how we budget, by having no money. Donated a decent amount to medical aid for Ukraine and ate plain rice most of that month, priorities
I’m thinking yes. Assuming their dietary needs are roughly similar. However, every cat I’ve ever know has been notoriously picky about what food they like and dislike so I’m assuming big cats are the same.
asklemmy
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.