Fusion-abomination cooking

Or how I put together meals these days

Well hello July! We are now into the second half of the year and for the Australians reading, a new financial year (which only mattered when I lived there when it came to sales and charitable donations, and is of essentially no relevance to me right now but where you were raised has a profound impact on shaping who you are and what you remember). This means we are now four and a half years into food spending tracking, so let’s have a look at some 2023 numbers, shall we? 

Our food grocery* spend in June 2023 was $684.98, bringing our 2023 food grocery total in the first half of the year to $4,938.07. If we spend the same amount in the second half of the year, it puts us on track to spend the same amount as last year. 

More noteworthy is our eating out expenditure which I honestly don’t even really want to know. The June total was $796.80, and in the first half of the year we spent $3,781.37 on eating out. For some context/comparison, for the entirety of 2022 we spent $4,829.83 on eating out. Since construction began, we’ve been spending about $700–800 on eating out each month (compared to $200–300 a month on eating out when we had a kitchen). So I guess this is a good little tip for anyone considering renos — when you’re calculating the cost of the project, remember to account for all the eating out you’ll do when you don’t have a kitchen. For us it’s been about three times as much as it used to be.

The cobbled together meals

My husband and I have different approaches to food. On the one hand, I care a lot more about food than he does. I read about food, I find new recipes to try, I like trying new things, when I remember events I attended the strongest parts of the memories are often the food I ate. He, on the other hand, would happily eat nothing but carrots and hummus for days at a time, and can even forget to eat if he gets caught up in a project. This is an entirely alien concept to me (how do you forget to eat?! I’m thinking about my next meal as I’m eating the current one!). 

Despite his seeming lack of care about food, there is one point that he is more adamant about: that meals should be cohesive. The different components served as one meal should make sense, generally belonging to one cuisine. On the other hand, what I prioritise more is eating leftovers, or food already in the fridge or pantry that needs to be used up, and I’ll put together things that don’t make sense as long as each meal has protein and vegetables (there is also usually a starchy carb too). I call it fusion cooking; he calls it an abomination. I’m also happy to eat leftovers for breakfast because if you reserve leftovers for lunch and dinner you are wasting the potential of breakfast (anything can be breakfast as long as you eat it first thing in the morning). My husband, however, prefers traditional western breakfast foods. 

This past week, there were two dinners that were clearly more of the abomination-fusion style of eating (I think that has quite a ring to it; I ought to write a cookbook). On Friday night, I baked tofu in the toaster oven, made scrambled eggs in the microwave, microwaved a bag of brown rice from Trader Joe’s, and opened two tins of sardines. There was also mixed frozen veg that I heated up in the microwave (the microwave is doing a lot of heavy lifting in our ‘kitchen’ right now).

On the following night, we had the sardines, eggs, and rice again, but I mixed it up by including roasted carrots and beans cooked in the slow cooker. And cut up some cucumbers (in three different ways because variety is the spice of life. There were sticks, circles, AND semi-circles. So fancy). Even I admit that these two meals don’t make a lot of sense BUT there was protein and there were vegetables. And everyone was fed. 

The rooftop-shouting book

I’m not currently reading a book about food, and I haven’t read a food book since the last newsletter, but the one I’m reading now and that I’m mere pages from finishing is another great one I’m telling everyone about: Exercised by Daniel Lieberman. This was mentioned in Burn by Herman Pontzer (which I wrote about earlier), and so I followed Pontzer’s recommendation and I’m finding that I like this even more than Burn. Lieberman is an evolutionary anthropologist and the book is a (long) history of exercise and about how bodies evolved to move (and rest). He clarifies some myths about movement and exercise, uses storytelling to great effect, and explains complicated science in ways that are easy to understand. The writing is clear and witty, and this is an immensely readable book that I’m very much enjoying.

But there are other food things!

Although I haven’t read a food book in the past two weeks, I have listened to podcasts. There was this one on ultra-processed foods from NPR’ LifeKit and a special episode on food with Tim Spector on the Just One Thing podcast from the BBC. My new resolution after listening to these podcasts is to track down kefir and incorporate that into our diets, and I’m still thinking that one day I’ll write about what my husband calls my vendetta against ultra-processed foods. Maybe next time. 

*I have been using the term ‘food grocery’ when talking about our food expenditure because from the beginning the food spending spreadsheet has been about food. But writing this today made me wonder: are things like soap, detergent, and paper towels also considered groceries? Or is ‘groceries’ specifically and exclusively referring to food and therefore ‘food grocery’ is redundant?