KFC and the $10 Challenge

KFC would like us to believe that you can’t make their fried chicken meal for less than $10.

I wanted to post about this awhile ago, after I first saw the ridiculous commercial, but I couldn’t find it on YouTube at the time. Grist writer Kurt Michael Friese sums it up well when he writes, “When it comes to food, America has been sold a bill of goods.” And how.

Friese takes KFC’s $10 challenge. He went to a local independent grocery store and bought hormone-free chicken. Though he typically buys chicken that is also organic, free-range, and local, the chicken he bought was a far better alternative to the chickens KFC serves up. The KFC meal was $10.58, which included Iowa state taxes. He made the same meal (chicken, four biscuits, mashed potatoes, and gravy) for $7.94. Using more organic ingredients ran $10.62. He includes the recipes he used in his article.

Friese does note that it takes more time than a fast food drive-through. But instead of watching Survivor: Season 57, wouldn’t our time be better spent making a tastier, healthier (and less-expensive meal) for our family? I can’t think of anything more satisfying than having a kitchen full of people, preparing a homemade family dinner.

Even KFC can’t put a price tag on that one.

Mark Bittman: What’s wrong with what we eat

In this entertaining talk, New York Times food writer Mark Bittman discusses what’s wrong with the way we eat now. 

No matter your view on global warming (despite what Bittman says, all scientists do not agree on global warming), the arguments about meat, fast food, and home-cooking are the main points, anyway.

I subscribe to Bittman’s stance on meat. We have hunters in the family who rib me about my dietary choices (currently the only meat I eat is seafood), but the funny thing is that I have no issues with hunting. At least the animal didn’t spend it’s life in a tiny pin, it was taken quickly, it wasn’t injected with hormones or antibiotics (to prevent the rampant disease that occurs in factory farms–hello bird flu and mad cow), and afterward, red dyes weren’t used to make the meat look fresh. Some pigs are fattened to the point that they can no longer stand on their feet. No, my concern is not with hunting, which mankind has done since the beginning, but rather with the amount of meat people eat in the U.S. and the methods used to produce that much meat, which are harmful to the planet, inhumane for the animals, and harmful to our health. Who wins in this scenario?

I don’t write this to preach to people, but there was a time when I didn’t know how my food got to the dinner table. I just never thought about it. But I can’t write a blog about food without discussing farms and factory farms. The ingredients are an integral part of the cooking process.

We spend over 60 percent of our grocery budget at the farmer’s market these days. We’ve slowly raised that amount the more we’ve learned about the food we eat, and I feel great that I’m supporting local farmers who are using organic methods to grow vegetables and raise livestock. Yes, the food is more expensive, but that is the true cost of food. If you eat meat less often, you have more money to buy quality. 

Okay, enough of the serious stuff. Yummy recipes to come…

Gathering Pears

We have a pear tree that was bearing the weight of too many pears, so it was time to harvest.

Pears, from what I’ve read, don’t soften on the tree, so we individually wrapped the pears in newspaper to get them to fully ripen.

Now they sit in three boxes while we wait. They have to be checked every day because they’ll be hard as a rock and then go to mush in no time, which reminds me that I need to be a bit more vigilant about checking them.

What to do with so many pears? We’re thinking of canning sliced pears, pear butter, and ginger pears. There are some great recipes here, written by people who are even crazier about pears than I (se possibile).

To be continued…

Kitchen disasters: The marinara edition

I did something so stupid last night that the whole boot of Italy is kicking me in the arse right now. Italian nonnas would scream in terror and cover their grandchildren’s eyes at the sight of it. All I can say in my defense is that hunger clouded my judgement and made me do the unthinkable.

All day yesterday visions of spinach lasagna danced in my head. After my post-workout shower, I preheated the oven and put a pot of water on to boil. The cookbook I was following had two recipes for marinara sauce. One was fairly traditional, the other “quick and easy.” I was skeptical of the latter, but the rumbling in my tummy was louder than the little voice warning me that this was a very bad idea.

The problem with the recipe was that it instructed one to throw all of the ingredients, raw, into a blender. This included 1/2 an onion and two cloves of garlic per cup of sauce. I cut down the amount of onion and garlic to less than half and threw in the tomatoes, oregano, basil, salt, and pepper. After giving it several whirls, I took off the lid and had a taste. Oh. Dear. Lord. It was like eating bright orange onion juice. This was some seriously offensive sauce.

I desperately started to try to bring the sauce back from the great beyond by dumping out over half of it (outside, natch) and adding tomato juice. No dice. I added 28 ounces of San Marzano tomatoes. Still bitter. Salt, sugar, more spices. Forget it. The sauce grew higher and higher as I added everything I could think to add. My sauce had flat-lined, but I was still performing CPR. Had Luis been home, I could imagine him pulling me away. “It’s gone!” he’d scream. ”You’ve done all you could!”

The sauce was wrecked, there was odious orange gunk everywhere, and I was too annoyed to bother starting again. I also was out of tomatoes. The oven, still warming up in anticipation of spinach lasagna, was turned off. Game over.

Spinach lasagna will have to wait for another day, a day on which I’ll make marinara the right way…starting with the happy smell of sautéing onion and garlic. Some things are worth the wait.

Putting your money where your mouth is, so to speak

We’ve heard quite a bit about soaring food prices lately. Prices are rising and container sizes are shrinking. According to an article in USA Today, when food prices increase, shoppers start to leave behind produce in favor of caloric-dense foods, which are higher in fat and sugar. The article also describes the ways shoppers are dealing with higher prices, such as eating out less and cooking more with fresh ingredients.

But I have to wonder, is cooking at home with fresh ingredients such a sacrifice? It seems ideal to me. We used to buy packaged, preshredded lettuce, but then we switched to organic lettuce, and the price is about the same. It takes about 10 minutes of prep work at the beginning of the week to rinse and tear up the lettuce and whirl it in the salad spinner, but then it’s ready for a week’s worth of salads.

We used to buy salad dressings until we started making our own and discovered the difference in taste between something bottled with preservatives and something fresh, with herbs just picked from the garden. It’s hard to go back to Wish-Bone after that.

As for eating out, just watch one episode of Kitchen Nightmares if you want to be inspired to cook at home. (I kid, and I genuinely hope that the restaurants on that show are the exception!)

The part of the USA Today article about buying “fewer frills,” however, has been a bit more difficult. Cutting out extravagances such as my beloved pecorino and Brunello took some time. We save the fancy groceries for special occasions now, but still eat healthy, delicious food. We also have made a concentrated effort to not let our groceries go bad. Can’t even imagine how much we’ve wasted by not keeping tabs on what we had in the refrigerator. We’ve accumulated three bottles of bay leaves, for example. Two are unopened, probably because we bought a bottle, only to discover we had one already. Then we did it again.

The article offers great suggestions even if you aren’t inclined to cook your own beans or grow your own basil. Be sure to note the sidebar with eight ways to save money at the grocery store.