Shitty Housewife Gets Nerdy (and Reluctantly Goes Digital)
I have no idea what I'm doing
Dear family, friends, and maybe some random strangers,
I’m trying a thing. As well as an annual update on our food spending I’m experimenting with more regular updates of our life in food. This is beginning now because in March 2023, we lost our kitchen. The long-talked about kitchen renovations finally began in late January 2023 (they were supposed to be COMPLETED by the end of 2022, but the City of San Diego’s Planning Department had other plans). We lost our kitchen in stages. First, we lost the pantry. Then we lost the dishwasher. Then we lost the kitchen sink. Then finally, on 13 March, demolition began and we lost the kitchen. We have set up a temporary kitchen in our living room with a toaster oven, microwave, kettle, slow cooker, and induction cooker (we can’t use all the appliances at the same time though), and we do the washing up in the bathroom sink (after first wiping off every speck of food detritus lest we clog the bathroom pipes and end up needing more home repairs).
With this new development, instead of saving up all our no-kitchen food updates for a year, I thought I’d write these newsletters more regularly. In these newsletters, you’ll find out what we’re actually cooking and eating when we can barely cook at all, what food books I’m currently reading, any interesting grocery observations, and how much we spent on food for the month.
For those of you who are new or are wondering what on earth you’re reading: I’m Jen. I live in San Diego with my husband and two small children, and I have been tracking every cent our family spends on food since 2019 in a glorious spreadsheet. And instead of sending nice family holiday cards at the end of each year, we send newsletters with analyses of our food expenditure, titled ‘Shitty Housewife Gets Nerdy’. Previous editions of the newsletters are now accessible online: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019
The no-kitchen update
It has been one week without a kitchen. In the past week, we’ve eaten out four times (Rubio’s, In-N-Out, pizza, and pho). On our very first night of no-kitchen, we ate leftovers, navigated where to put things and which appliances could be used at the same time, and where to actually eat when there’s no room for any kind of dining furniture (we ate on a picnic blanket on the driveway). In the past two days, we’ve set up the temp kitchen to be a lot more usable (and we can eat indoors, at a table, again!), and last night I made beans and rice. Charlie was over-tired by dinner time and decided he didn’t like beans and rice and first refused to eat at all. He ate a bit when we put tomato sauce (ketchup) on it, and he also ate some of the sardines when Tilly requested I open a tin for dessert. Children are strange.
Tonight, dinner is lentil minestrone (slow cooker meal), and the upcoming week’s meal plan includes quesadillas, tofu (baked in the toaster oven) and microwave rice, spaghetti (with meat sauce I had in the freezer from the ‘When We Had a Kitchen’ times), and more takeaway. How much pizza do you reckon we’ll eat this year? Will the children ever get sick of pineapple on pizza?
Grocery observations
I’m cheating a bit here because this is actually from February, but I didn’t have an e-newsletter then so here it is: rescued organics from Sprouts! I jotted this down on 1 February: Sprouts started a rescued organics program with much cheaper fruit and veg! Bag of pears was $2.99 (bag of pears at Trader Joe’s a few days ago was $3.49). Bag of oranges was $3.99 (7 large oranges in the bag; 3 oranges of the same size at Trader Joe’s a few days ago was $2.07), bag of 6 capsicum was $3.99 (at Costco now that’s about $8-9; Trader Joe’s sells bags of three for $4.99 or individual for $1.29), 5lb bag of sweet potatoes for $5.99 (haven’t bought sweet potatoes in awhile so can’t compare). We’ve been buying the rescued organics pears, oranges, and capsicums since then and they’ve been great. They don’t always have what you want, but when you can get what you need it’s a lot cheaper than the un-rescued stuff.
Current reads
The food book (actually the only book) I’m currently reading is Twinkie Deconstructed by Steve Ettlinger. Ettlinger goes on a journey to find out more about every single ingredient in a Twinkie. It’s a bit meh, to be honest. Enjoyable enough, and readable enough, but it’s not great. (The most interesting tidbit I’ve learnt so far is that there is a company that specialises in breaking eggs, Papetti’s Hygrade Egg Products, and they break seven million eggs a day at its New Jersey plant). But overall, I don’t find the narrative that compelling and some of the ingredient journeys are a bit boring. I’m still reading it mostly because I don’t dislike it enough to stop. A much better book about processed food that I read earlier was Pandora’s Lunchbox by Melanie Warner.
March food expenditure
As of 20 March 2023, we’ve spent $640.20 on food groceries. Last year we spent $1,218.58 in March so it seems like we’re on track to be spending less this March. I think we made up for it in our eating out expenditure though — so far this March we’ve spent $525.98, and last March we spent $268.15. We’re well over that and there are still eleven days to go. I sometimes wish we could just fast and not eat for the next eight months…
And so concludes the first update from our non-kitchen kitchen. Keep cooking, keep eating, and I’ll see you next month. Or in two weeks. I haven’t quite figured out how often I’ll be writing this (will there really be interesting grocery observations EVERY FORTNIGHT?!).