Lowcarbezine!

What About Low Carbers Short On Time and Money?

After my recent article regarding low carbing on a budget, I got a plaintive question from one reader - how was a low carb dieter with a tight schedule to save money? It's all well and good, she pointed out, to suggest that people do more prep work on their own, to save money, but where was everyone to find the time?

I, of course, work at home, so this has not been my problem. However, my friends and family are like everyone else, and of course I hear from my readers.

Many busy people on budgets, low carbers or not, depend heavily on their slow cookers - and indeed, I am working on a low carb slow cooker book, due out next winter. Slow cookers are an example of the most important time-crunch kitchen technique: Time-shifting. It's not that you don't have to cook, but you can shift your cooking to more convenient times, so that you don't have to scurry to get dinner on the table when you get home. Indeed, with a slow cooker you can cook dinner after dinner - that is, you can come home, eat whatever is in the slow cooker waiting, and then do your cooking, putting together your dinner for the next night, and getting it ready to slow-cook in the morning.

You can, however, time-shift in all sorts of ways. My sister Kim, who runs a killer schedule and makes do on a very tight budget, does a lot of time-shifting of her cooking, some of it with a slow cooker some without. Kim cooks on the weekends. Every Sunday she takes a few hours to make a double batch of soup, chili, or the like, and a double batch of some other entree. These, then, form the mainstay of her and her husband's dinners for the rest of the week. This is a time-honored technique, and still a good one.

If you like, you could also make a couple of "deli-style" salads - cole slaw, cucumber salad, bean salad, or the like - while your main dishes are cooking. These salads keep well for at least a few days, and let you put dinner on the table right away, with no work at all. If you want a hot vegetable, microwaving them is by far the fastest way to cook them, and preserves a lot of nutrients, too. Most frozen vegetables now come with microwave directions on the box or bag.

If you prefer tossed salads, consider making your own "bagged salad." Wash and dry salad greens and break them up, then stash them in zipper-lock bags in the fridge. This gives you the convenience of purchased bagged salad without the price.

Or you can ditch the salad all together. Instead, cut up peppers, celery, cucumbers, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, and the like, and keep them on hand, again in those zipper-lock bags. This lets you put out vegetables and dip for the ravening hordes, to appease them while you take more than fifteen minutes to put supper together. Using vegetables and dip as a "put-off" this way also means that the family is confronting those vegetables when their hunger is the sharpest. This is a Very Good Thing.

Another great idea is to revive the Sunday roast. When I was a kid, some sort of roast - a big ol' hunk of protein, cooked simply in the oven - was the centerpiece of nearly every Sunday meal. Roasts are very easy - for the most part, you just stick them in the oven for the requisite period of time. And if you make a large roast, you'll then have pre-cooked meat on hand for the rest of the week. Of course, if you're on a budget you won't be roasting a prime rib of beef, but other roasts are often far cheaper. Again, I realize my local prices aren't representative of the whole country, but I have seen whole or half-hams for 99c a pound, leg of lamb is usually $2.99 a pound, and drops to $1.99 a few times a year, and turkey is economical all year round. Oh, and I got whole boneless pork loin on sale for $2.29 a pound just last week, not a bad price for lean, well trimmed meat with no bone.

Make leftovers of everything! Never roast just enough chicken or make enough meat loaf for one meal. Making a vegetable side dish you love? Make extra, for zapping in the microwave later in the week. Who needs frozen dinners? Indeed, you can buy Gladware plates with covers, that let you dish up a meal, cover it, freeze it, then put it directly in the microwave. Since these plates are washable and reusable, they're not much of an extravagance. If you've been frozen dinner dependent, this might be a useful path to follow.

In short, do your cooking when your schedule permits, so that you aren't stuck with playing short-order cook and/or depending on expensive pre-prepped convenience foods when you get home.

I suggest pressing the family into service to help. No child should grow up ignorant of basic cooking; that way lies junk food addiction. It's easy for me to make parenting suggestions, having no kids and all, but consider rotating sous-chef duty. If you give the child whose turn it is to help considerable say in what the next night's dinner will be, you may find them more interested than you thought.

Finally, I'd like to recommend a great book, The Complete Tightwad Gazette by Amy Dacyczyn (that's pronounced "decision," as in "She made a decision to marry a man of Ukrainian ancestry.") A compilation of virtually all of the articles that went into Dacyczyn's ground-breaking newsletter, The Complete Tightwad Gazette is bursting with terrific ideas on how to pinch pennies in every possible way; I guarantee you will find at bare minimum a half a dozen money-stretching strategies that never occurred to you.

The book is also compulsively readable, and tons of fun. My only word of warning: Dacyczyn recommends cutting way down on meat intake, and eating lots of grains and legumes, to save money. Obviously, we won't be doing that. But even ignoring her dietary advice, there is plenty in The Gazette to help eke out even the toughest budget, and a good dose of creative bootstrap philosophy to keep you from feeling sorry for yourself while you do it. And the money you save on other things can go toward inexpensive cuts of meat, and low carb vegetables, and the like.

You can get The Complete Tightwad Gazette at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375752250/lowcarbohysoluti , where you can also read many rave reviews. But I'd be untrue to the true spirit of the thing if I didn't recommend that you borrow it from your public library first! (Me, I renewed the first Tightwad book three times, and then decided I needed to buy. And I bought The Complete Tightwad Gazette at a used book sale! Amy would be proud.)

Posted by HoldTheToast at February 23, 2004 06:55 PM