Thinking about my recent trip to Israel, I realize that fresh and good food was so easy to find there, and at relatively inexpensive prices. The restaurant at the beach, the little falafel shop, the pastries at the grocery store at 10 PM, the street corner Shawarma place…  It was all good, fresh, and cheap.

I haven’t seen any junk food chain stores! Can you believe it? Well… besides McDonalds… McDonalds is everywhere, isn’t it? But it’s not very popular in Israel. (They say that even Starbucks did not make it there.) So, you get my point, good, fresh food—and coffee!—was all around. Oh, and fresh juice too. Freshly squeezed juice stores like this one below were on every busy street.

Inspired by that, we started drinking freshly squeezed orange juice for breakfast at home. (The doctor says is has lots of fiber…)

We made fresh juice using these tools which failed to squeeze every sweet drop out of the fruit,

… and it was also somewhat messy and time consuming (Who has extra time in the morning to make orange juice?), so we went back to the boxed juice only to discover that the juice from the box, organic or not, with pulp or not, with added vitamins or not, tastes like nothing.

We are never buying/drinking that stuff again ever!

4 days later we rushed to the store and bought an electric juicer. (In case you’re curious where, click here.) What do you know? It takes only 5 minutes from start to finish, cleanup included, and the kids can do it!

Then, at 12:31 AM—Yes, 12:31 AM!!!—it hit me. None of the oranges we used had seeds!

In the morning, I had to test my revelation.

I cut all 4 different varieties we had in half. To my surprise, I found out that heirloom or not, organic or not, Navel or another… the oranges don’t have seeds besides a lonely, random speck of seed, see?

What happened to the seeds?

Who took them out of the oranges?

What does it mean?

And who’s gonna make fresh orange juice?

Remember the Naked Chef?

You know, the guy with the cool hair, very energetic, talks fast, cooks even faster, Jamie Oliver? About 10 years ago when he became famous, he was referred to as the Naked Chef. These days he is simply Jamie. I did not understand what the nakedness was all about back then. I tried out as I looked and cooked some of his recipes. They were all good but after a while I thought they were too simple, too minimalistic. Not worth spending my money on his cookbooks because in those days I believed that only cookbooks and recipes with a long list of ingredient that took a long time to make were worthy. After a while I stopped using Jamie’s recipes. Only years after, under the influence of Ina Garten and cooking as a personal chef for nearly 4 years in other peoples’ kitchens (The food had to be fresh, quick and easy to prepare), I finally learned that cooking good food doesn’t necessarily mean using long and elaborated recipes. It’s not about killing myself in the kitchen in order to make good food, to make other people happy.

As I changed my approach to cooking, I realized that I prefer to use good ingredients and only do little to them in the process of cooking. I understood that when I shopped for ingredients of lesser quality (sometimes, but not necessarily, cheaper) I needed to work harder to make them taste good. But still, it was not nearly as good as when I used higher quality products (sometimes, but not necessarily, cheaper/the same price/cost more) which did not require any messing around with. This is how I’ve been cooking in the past 7 years. Naked.

Well, not literally.

I invest more of my attention and time to read the labels on products at the grocery stores so I can make better choices when I buy food. I’m not saying I do a 100 % perfect job but I do my best to buy ingredients that are fresh, local, organic, sustainable, and seasonal. It’s good for me and it’s better for the environment. Another approach to the nakedness “thing” is when I read the labels, I look for those products with the shortest list of ingredients where I know what all/most of the words mean! Then, back in the kitchen, I don’t have to work so hard to make those products taste good because they are already beautiful and their flavor is as it should be.

About two weeks ago, friends invited us for dinner. The guy cooked some recipes from this cookbook,

I love cookbooks, so I had to take a peak.
The book was beautiful and had many recipes I immediately wanted to try out. The photos of the natural, unfussy food were amazing too.
The food our friend cooked was simply delicious.
So, of course, I had to buy the book.
And cook from it.

As for reading recipes… Jamie’s recipes are of the few that I actually enjoy reading. (Most recipes are written in such a boring and technical way…) It feels like he is really talking to me. I can feel myself getting energized just by the way he writes them, as if he is standing in my kitchen only a few feet away (I wish), and the photos only add that extra kick in the butt to make me jump off my seat and get cooking.

See?

Photo by © David Loftus as seen on Jamie’s web site

But these days, there are other ways in which I find Jamie Oliver inspiring. He is not only a very talented chef, business man, and fun to watch and read, but his passion about food exceeds way beyond his home and restaurants’ kitchens. He is passionate about teaching people about good food, how to raise it, and how to cook it.

You know that bad food is making people terribly sick.

Oliver is doing a very important job in schools and cafeterias in England, and wanting to do so in the US as well, teaching parents, children, schools, and the lunch ladies about real, healthy, good food. I don’t want to go into much detail because in this video below Oliver does a great job.

Also, make sure to read “Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children” by Ann Cooper. The book has eye opening information about the food kids eat in the schools’ cafeterias and offers healthy recipes. Ann Cooper works with the legendary Alice Waters.

Now watch this:

For the original whole baked cauliflower with tomato and olive sauce, click here. I made a few changes, here’s my version:

Whole cauliflower in marinara sauce and olives

Adapted from “Cook with Jamie” cookbook

1/2 red onion, peeled and sliced
3 cloves of garlic, peeled and chopped
1 large head of cauliflower, outer green leaves discarded
olive oil
a handful of black olives, pitted
1 anchovy fillet, sliced
a handful of fresh parsley
20 oz. tomato/marinara sauce, or canned chopped plum tomatoes
a splash of red wine vinegar
salt
ground black pepper

First, find a pot in which the whole cauliflower will fit, leaving an inch around.

To the pot, add the onion, garlic, and a drizzle of oil and slowly sauté for about 10 minutes over medium heat until softened. Add the olives, anchovy and parsley and cook for another couple of minutes. Add the tomato sauce and about 1/2 cup of water, and a splash of red wine vinegar, season with salt and pepper. Stir everything together and bring to the boil.
Gently add the cauliflower to the sauce. Half of the cauliflower should be in the sauce, half above it. Drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, put the lid on and let it cook on low heat for about 30-40 minutes.

NOTE: I think an even easier and faster way to do this is to cut the cauliflower into florets and cooked it totally immersed in the tomato sauce.

I’m not writing about Weight Loss Weekly today since I’m going to post about the Hunger Action Week in the next 5 days. But do go and visit Bernie, Sunny, and Joie de vivre who are discussing this question: How do your family and friends support you or hinder you in your weight loss efforts? Do they adapt easily to your changing habits and help you along, or do they confront your new habits with skepticism?

And now to the challenge.

I am feeling a bit nervous about this challenge. It is mainly the thought that to me it’s a 5 days experience but there are other people who face this challenge every day. While I usually shop at my favorite fancy food store, they have to rely on food stamps for much longer periods of time. It’s an everyday reality for them.

I don’t know anyone personally who relies on food stamps to eat – besides my grandmas who raised families during the previous depression years – and I don’t know how they do it. I’ve never been too smart or careful about spending money on food. Ever since I started buying my own groceries out of my own money, I always spent too much on food. I never planned a food budget. Not even when I was a student and working multiple jobs to support myself. I know I’m very lucky. In trying to prepare for next week’s hunger challenge, I realized I must know how much certain ingredients cost and I must plan my expenses.

We have decided to take this challenge as a family, meaning my husband and our two kids are participating as well. Our budget is $22 per day * 5 days = $110 for the 5 days’ challenge. We usually eat at home and I usually cook from scratch. It saves money, I believe, compared to buying pre-cooked, pre-packaged, or highly processed food, and it is much healthier and tastier. For example, if it costs $6-$7 to buy a take-out chicken teriyaki with rice and lettuce salad (and it’s a lot of food, enough for 2 people), I can buy for the same amount of money free-range, maybe even organic, chicken legs and make a home-made cooked meal with a side dish of rice and fresh salad enough for 4 servings. So that’s a good start. (And less Styrofoam.)

The food

Our meals in general, are simple and usually look something like this:

Breakfast is tea,coffee, milk for kids, bread, butter, jam, cheese, yogurt, fruit, maybe 1 egg is involved too.

Lunch: Baby eats lunch and snacks at day care. My son’s school lunch is food from home, either leftovers from dinner or a sandwich and fruit. My lunch is the same. My husband usually eats at his work’s cafeteria. The cost is $4-$6 per lunch and he doesn’t enjoy the food so much so for the challenge I will cook our lunches and he will take food from home. (He would have been very happy to take lunch from home every day, I’m sure.)

Snacks between lunch and dinner can be a fruit, yogurt, crackers, milk/smoothie.

Dinner: See recipe page for dinner ideas.

The plan

I am planning to use pantry items that I already have such as sugar, coffee, tea, olive oil, spices, but I will deduct them from the $110 budget. I estimate the cost of using those to be $2 per day + I add baby’s food at day care (I think it’s around $2 per day). Let’s say it’s a total of $20 for 5 days. That leaves me with $90 for the groceries. It doesn’t sound like much, does it?!

I have to cook 5 lunches and 5 dinners and I’ll be using recipes I have already posted on the blog. Yes, the kids will probably be happier to eat more pasta, pizza, and hotdogs, but I would like to see if what we normally eat would work on a budget.

Estimated cost of 5 dinners for the family

#1 Chicken liver – $3 and Yellow rice – $1

#2 Sweet and Smoky pork chops – $6 (4 servings) and Mashed yams $4

#3-4 Roasted Lemony Chicken Thighs – $8 (8 servings), leftover sides, and Roasted vegetables, like carrots, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts – $5 (4-6 servings)

#5 Upgraded pizza – $6 or Ravioli – $6 and Top Secret Orange Marmalade Salad – $4

Anything that’s left – $0

Estimated cost of 5 lunches for 2 adults

#1-3 French Onion Quiche – $10 (8-10 servings) and Simple salad $10 (6 servings)

#4-5 Black-Bean Burgers $9 (4 servings)

#4-5 Leftovers – $0

That’s $66 for lunch and dinner. So I have $24 left for breakfast and snacks. 

This morning my husband and son took leftovers from last night’s dinner to work and school, Mac and cheese and roasted chicken. The cost for both is $3 which I will take it off of my groceries budget.

… I have no idea how many hours it took me just to plan, estimate, and calculate all these things. Probably 2-3 hours. I could have done so many other things during that time.

OK, I’m going to do the grocery shopping now. I’ll post later about how I did.

Leave a comment, I’d like to know what you think.

Thanks, Nurit

Other food bloggers taking the challenge:

All You Can Eat, Cook & Eat, Eat All About It, Eric Rivera’s Cooking Blog, Favorite Freezer Foods, Foodista, Julie Jams, Live To Eat, Mirch Masala, Musings on the Path to Frugality, NOMalicious, Savory Sweet Life, Self Rising Flour, The Curious Domestic, The Gastro Gnome, What’s For Dinner

You might be interested to read my short post on Portion Control and how can we NOT eat more than we really need on my other blog “Good Food & Bad Food”. Click here to read it.

If you are a person who likes to know more about the food you are eating, you might want to subscribe to it as well. (It’s free).
Happy eating,
Nurit

In my last post – With Respect to the Animals – I mentioned that unintentionally I got to this web site chooseveg.com, and watched a video depicting the awful life and death of animals – cows, pigs, and chickens, raised on “farms” (click here if you are brave enough to watch it). If you were wondering, no, I am not becoming vegetarian, but for now I’m taking some time off from meat. So in the past days we had Linguine with Shrimp Scampi (recipe here) and a few vegetarian meals (except for that BBQ we went to on Saturday), and I will soon post the recipe for the lovely onion quiche I made last night.

But I did decide that we will eat those animals in smaller portions and less frequently. And when I buy meat, chicken, or poultry, as well as seafood, I will choose free-range, organic, local, and sustainable food. It doesn’t necessarily cost more. Here’s an example. I went to Whole Foods and bought a pound of organic chicken liver. It costs $2.99 per pound, and $2.49 for free-range! Enough to feed 2-4 people. You do the math.

I had a great recipe, really special, which everyone loved – baby, kindergartner, husband, and yours truly. And the house smelled like cake! The one below is based on a recipe I got about 15 years ago. It’s by an Israeli cookbook author, Elinoar Rabin, and my brain remembered it because of the unusual flavor and pretty unique use of fruit with chicken liver (unlike foie gras).

Chicken Liver with Cinnamon and Apples
For 3-4 servings

¼ cup flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 lb. chicken liver, washed and patted dry
Salt
Pepper
A few tablespoons butter
2 medium apples, cored and cut to ½-inch slices
1 teaspoon brown sugar
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar, optional

Mix flour and cinnamon in a bowl. Sprinkle liver with salt and pepper, and then dredge in flour-cinnamon mixture.
In a medium size skillet melt butter over medium heat. Sauté the chicken liver until nicely browned on each side (I didn’t measure the time, about 4-5 minutes on each side). Remove from skillet and place in a covered dish to keep warm.
Add some butter to skillet and sauté apples until golden. Turn to other side, sprinkle with sugar and cook another 2 minutes.
Serve liver with apples and a drizzle of balsamic.

Another use I made for this recipe is to serve it, without the apples, with fresh (but store-bought) pumpkin ravioli. Make a sauce with shallots sautéed in butter, some canned pumpkin, heavy cream, cranberries, and roasted chestnuts. Delicious.

If you want to see something really special regarding eating the whole animal, I stumbled upon this post showing how to cook pork head, click here. It’s fascinating. And, hey, people in the world are eating like that.

I’d like you to visit my Good Food & Bad Food blog and read the post I wrote about it, “Can We Eat Like That and Be Healthy?”

No, this doesn’t mean that I am becoming a vegetarian now. But I did think what can I do that is doable, practical, and will make a change? Even if it is a small one. Because if millions of people will make a small change, then together, it will make a huge difference, don’t you think?!

I have decided that:
1. At least two nights each week we will have a vegetarian dinner.
2. At least once a week, I will pay more to buy meat/chicken/seafood from sustainable, free-range, organic, preferably local farms.

Tonight it’s going to be an Upgraded Pizza (recipe here) and a Citrus Salad (recipe here) for dinner.

What ideas do you have so more animals can live a respectful healthier life which will make our food healthier and better for us?

Since the summer of 2004, CEH has purchased and tested over 200 children’s soft vinyl lunchboxes and found that many of them contained high levels of lead. Lead was usually found in the lining of the lunchboxes where it could come into contact with food. In addition to being a known carcinogen and reproductive toxin, lead is a neurotoxin that can cause health effects such as behavioral problems and hearing problems in children that are exposed to low levels.

As of the Fall of 2006, CEH has forced many companies to eliminate lead threats from their lunchboxes through legal action. Now brands such as InGear and Fashion Accessory Bazaar lunchboxes are lead-safe for children. However, if you have a vinyl lunchbox purchased before last Fall, CEH recommends you test it for lead.

Because it is difficult to tell by sight which lunchboxes contain lead, CEH is advising parents to buy products from companies that have committed to only sell lead-safe lunchboxes. If these are not available, we recommend that parents avoid soft vinyl lunchboxes altogether, or test their own lunchboxes at home.

Manufacturers/Retailers who agreed to change their products to be lead-safe include:
Ingear
Fashion Accessory Bazaar
Lisa Frank
Big Dogs
Accessory Network Group
Baby Universe
Buy Baby Buy
Romar Accessories
Silver Goose

To read more, click here.

My comment on this: notice that the products are not lead-FREE but lead-SAFE. That means there is lead in the products, but in a “safe” amount. What is exactly safe? Why can’t it be zero levels of lead?

I have just returned from a vacation in BC, Canada, where I read this article in the local Globe and Mail newspaper.
This is another example of how people play with nature, in this case feeding animals what they are not supposed to eat. The result is a food product that is not as healthy for you as you might think.

From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail, by CARLY WEEKS, August 6, 2008

“… eating farmed tilapia, a widely consumed fish that has been steadily growing in popularity, may be no better than dining on bacon, hamburgers or doughnuts.
New U.S. research has found that farmed tilapia have low levels of omega-3 fatty acids – and surprisingly high levels of potentially detrimental omega-6 fatty acids.
Omega-6 fatty acids are considered to be essential and must be obtained through diet because they can’t be produced by the body… But consuming too much omega-6 can contribute to cancer, asthma, depression and heart disease, among other ailments.
Farmed tilapia contains more omega-6 fatty acid than is found in doughnuts, pork bacon or hamburgers made with 80-per-cent lean ground beef, according to a new study.
Tilapia, a lean white fish with a mild taste, is the second-most cultivated fish in the world, after carp, according to Fisheries and Oceans Canada. While China is the world’s leading producer of tilapia, British Columbia and Nova Scotia also produce it on a commercial scale.”
And the reason is…” “This is a serious problem because they tend to feed [the fish] vegetable oils for growth and that’s not quite what the tilapia is accustomed to getting in its native state,” he said.”
You can read more here.

This article reminded me of the mad cow disease. The cows, which are vegetarian animals, are being fed with animal by-products, than they go mad and get cuckoo in the head and people who eat them get sick. Not to mention the poor animals suffering.

Why do those farmers feed animals with food they don’t naturally eat?