Food - The Back Story

 

You think food prices are excessive? Sure, they are, but all the time you spend whining about it, you could have spent being smart about it, alleviating your cost by educating yourself.

Got some "riblets" at a discount. It's all about being a smart consumer, especially in these days. Two litres of water in the pressure cooker, bit of chopped jalapeno, salt and pepper and down they go. Two hours on low, just to get to all the micro-nutrients of the bone broth (super healthy). Then pick the meat off the bones and add them to your broth, together with some honey garlic sauce and you have yourself the best tasting - and healthiest - soup/stew ever made. Eight meals for $ 4.50. It's all about being a smart consumer. Especially in these days. But read between the lines: You have to educate yourself, change your mindset to "open" and then think smart. You can go a long way to alleviate the soaring food prices. But only if you think smart. But eight meals for $ 4.50? I'll take that any day. Bring on the rice...and the homemade sourdough bread.

Fish! I can usually get that at a good price, and fish is extremely healthy for you. I shop around (savvy consumer) but I always buy the entire fish because unprocessed is both cheaper and healthier for you. My favourite is mackarel (for the most and best flavour) but I take what I can get, and again, like always, I use everything. I gut the fish, leave the head on and toss it in the pressure cooker, together with bay leaves (be generous) and salt. Nothing else. When surely done, I filter the stock out, pick the meat from the bone and toss the meat back in, add whole pepper corns, whole mustard seeds...and then seaweed. How much of everything obviously depends on my much fish you got, but again; quite cheap, super healthy and wonderfully tasty. Soups and stews are the ultimate way to save you money and they are super healthy because no nutrients are wasted as they stay in the water/stock/soup/stew. Did I mention; zero food waste! And it my house, everything comes with homemade sourdough bread.

You might be aware that you want to throw just a tiny amount of black pepper into your dark chocolate when doing chocolate work, just to enhance the flavour. Well, when you do your own pineapple, you want just a few anise seeds in there (and those are the seeds you see). It makes a huge and positive difference in the flavour. But now to the main story:

Pineapple? I do my own. Now let's do the math:

You buy a can of pineapple (398ml) for $ 2.79. 1/3 of that is "juice" (water and sugar). You get 150 gr of sugar water and 290 grams of...shitty, low quality, tasteless pineapple of last year's harvest. That comes out to a kg price of  (1 kg / 290 =3.4482 x 2.79) $ 9.62.

A delicious, fresh, ripe and tasty pineapple (1.8 kg) leaves me with 1.2 yummy kg's of fresh pineapple meat for a price of $ 6.00 (5.99). Math: 1000 gr / 1.2 kg = 0.833 x $ 6.00 = exactly $ 5.00

Now, are you a smart consumer who goes for fresh, delicious and cheap...or are you a dumb one who goes for tasteless, canned crap from last year - with a large carbon footprint - and gladly pays way too much for it?

(more case scenarios to come)