Paring Down

From shopping and cooking for two hungry boys, who have grown into young men and left home, to shopping and cooking for herself.

My guest this week, yoga teacher Cindy Lawrence, is learning how to pare down.

Yesterday, I wrote that Cindy is now likely to grocery shop several times a week because these days she has the energy and the time to look around for deals, picking up just what she needs to make simple, healthy meals for one.

As a 16-year old teen, her mother gave Cindy the car keys and sent her to King Soopers to do the grocery shopping for their family of six. At 24 she married, and a year later had her first son.

When we lunched and then walked through Whole Foods together, she remarked that this is the first time in 30 years that she's no longer responsible for shopping and meal planning for a family.

Learning how to pare down has its challenges. Yet her parents are thrifty folk from Kentucky who taught her to look for sales and BOGOF (buy one get one free) deals, a tip she employed shopping for her own family, and still employs shopping for herself.

As we perused the Good Stuff for Less items in produce, she went straight for the butter lettuce: 10 for $10 or $1 a head, and since she's on her own and no longer buying quantity, she picked one lettuce

In the dairy section she chose a dozen of the competitively priced 365-brand cage-free brown eggs and 2 packs of the 365-brand unsalted butter, which is not organic, but it does not contain synthetic growth hormones.

Now 2 packs or two pounds of butter might sound like a lot of butter for one person, but Cindy makes ghee with her butter; it's a staple in the Ayurveda diet which she follows as part of her yoga practice.

Read the article I've linked to for 10 healthful tips on using ghee. You might find that you're suddenly curious to try it. It's very simple to prepare:

Ghee
1) Add a box of unsalted butter to a pot on the stove, turn heat to med.
2) Butter will melt and begin to boil.
3) Allow butter to boil then turn heat to low and let it simmer very gently for maybe 15 mins. You'll notice the white butter-solids disappear leaving only the butter oil, which is often referred to as clarified butter.
4) Once all the butter solids have boiled away, remove pot of ghee from the heat, allow to cool slightly, then pour into clean glass jars with screw-top lids.
5) The ghee will solidify once it's completely cooled. At this point, screw lid onto glass jar and store either in a dark, cool cupboard or in a cool spot in the kitchen out of direct sunlight.

From dairy we transitioned to seafood, where Cindy noticed the fresh whole trout on sale.

I alerted Cindy to the service WFs offers whereby they will skin, fillet, marinade and steam cook your chosen fish right then and there while you're waiting, and for no extra charge.

This is a great value-added when you're on your own and can't be bothered preparing a whole fish for yourself.

Cindy's grocery budget for a week is $80 and yesterday we learned that she shops maybe 3 times a week, often leaving her wallet in the car, taking a $20 bill with her and buying only what she needs with that twenty.

She said this helps her stick to her budget -- I love this tip for singles!

Given that Cindy's boys, their girlfriends, her mum, and friends drop by for impromptu meals, she stretches her $80 and sometimes, depending on whether the boys come for the weekend, her budget might increase to $120.

So she's paring down, but still providing food and family meals for drop-ins.

Tomorrow, I'll post some of her favorite meals for one and I'll include a couple of meals she's stretched to feed drop-ins, like me!

Grocery Shopping for One

In contrast to last week's guest Amy Menell, a working mum shopping and cooking for a family of 6 to 7, this week I'm featuring empty-nester Cindy Lawrence.

Cindy has two boys, who as of this year are both in college, which means for the first time in 25 years Cindy is living on her own.

As soon as Cindy's younger son went off to college, she turned his bedroom, with its separate entrance to the house, into a yoga therapy room.

She took the dust cover off the living-room sofa -- because Andrew had taken Lucy, his shedding dog with him, and then she turned the other spare bedroom into her home office.

On any given day her home is hardly empty, rather, it's bustling with the coming and goings of her yoga clients, her myriad women friends, her mother and her brother and his family, and her sons, who still pop by on weekends and holidays with their girlfriends and at last count, three dogs.

Nevertheless, despite that her home is Grand Central to family, friends and clients, Cindy is more often than not shopping & cooking for just one these days -- herself -- and therein lays a challenge, particularly when for so many years she shopped and cooked in quantity.

Though in my professional-chef days I was ordering food and cooking for as few as four or as many as a 1000 people, today I don't cook professionally. In fact, I cook just for myself mostly, which means I've become an expert in shopping and cooking on a budget for one.

With the above in mind, paring back and shopping for one at the grocery store is the theme this week.

And when I met Cindy over a salad-bar lunch at Whole Foods, she had a number of things to say about what that's like for her.

1. 1. Because I have the time to enjoy the aesthetic of a store like WFs, I'm more likely to drop in several times a week and pick up what I need instead of doing one enormous shop for the kids and me at one of the big-box stores.
2. So I don't go over budget shopping several times a week, I leave my wallet in the car and just take in a $20 bill. That way I have enough money on hand to pick up just what I need, i.e. I look at what's on sale, like a protein item and some fresh produce and buy only that.
3. These days I'm more likely to buy made-up items like boxed soups, a frozen entree or food from the salad bar and use these items as meal starters.
4. If I shop only once a week, buying quite a bit, so the food I've bought doesn't deteriorate before I eat it, I freeze stuff.
5. Because I'm simplifying my life and my diet, if I'm getting a head of lettuce, I'm not going to get a lot of other greens just for me. I don't want to end up throwing stuff out and wasting food.
6. For a single person, I don't feel weird getting my lunch or dinner and sitting in WFs cafe and eating amongst the other single people; it saves me cooking and cleaning up and it costs no more to buy a meal than it would buying the food and cooking it at home.
7. I used to go out weekly to eat with a girlfriend but I'm reluctant to pay $25 or more for lunch these days. But you can't beat $6 for a WFs salad-bar lunch!
8. I can now buy myself treats, like small, on-sale gourmet containers of ice-cream (pic below) instead of the huge tubs I used to buy for the boys, which I then never got to eat because they demolished it so quickly.
9. I feel like I've come full circle, back to the more simplified life I had during my college days when I went looking for great meal deals just for me.

Tomorrow, I'll talk a bit more about what Cindy bought after our lunch, and what she tends to buy when she grocery shops for herself.

Like Amy, Cindy is incredibly comfortable in the kitchen, cooking fabulous family-style meals, so this week, I'll also post some simple and delicious meals she can make for one, versus a tribe.