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Some good tips there. My DH pointed out that the whole section on âshortening the feedback loopâ with more frequent shopping trips is straight out of Agile project management. You can be more nimble and responsive when the whole thing isnât plotted out from the beginning. But for me at least, it increases the stress to have to menu plan on the fly and go out for missing ingredients. I prefer doing a big weekly shop and maybe a few smaller one-off trips, but not shopping every day or even every other.
I also enjoy binging recipes and dedicating time to researching recipes and menu planning for about two weeks at a time. His âPCSVâ formula wouldnât satisfy my creativity but I do something similarly unstructured around 20% of the time (usually as grain bowls or salads). One pitfall of his formula is itâs really hard to eat enough vegetables with those types of meals.
I also wish he had covered the fact that if buying some pre-prepped ingredients or meals helps you avoid DoorDash, it might be worth the extra cost if you value home cooking.
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I had a similar reaction about the vegetable content - radically insufficient. Iâm prepping two veg, plus a salad, every dinner. Fortunately I consider grocery shopping a hobby and do it at least four times a week.
Also, as a longtime agile project manager, I tip my hat to your DH.
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Helpfully motivated towards helping folks who hate grocery shopping - Iâm not one of them. This surprised me by simply outlining questions/values for each person to weigh. And clearly acknowledging that what works for him as a single guy making meals for one wonât work for everyone. Iâm thinking a working mom making meals for a family with school-age kids will never get in/out of the grocery store in 10 minutes, nor make quantity meals in 20 minutes or less.
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Totally agree. Itâs a workable strategy for single folk.
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Depends on how much free time they have and whether they want to spend it going grocery shopping many times (and thatâs from someone who enjoys grocery shopping). In peak work phases, I do not have extra time for multiple grocery store visits.
And in general, I do better planning out meal ideas and shopping once or twice a week â both in terms of eating healthfully and in terms of spend / grocery usage / minimizing waste.
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The triple potato pie appeals to every potato-loving cell in my body!
Hereâs a recipe from someone who attempted it from the video of the original:
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Oooo thanks for sharing that !
as a single folk, iâm not sure iâd say that. it is a staged video made to get clicks/eyeballs & not question the actual content. in this case he is a food influencer sponsored by Made In.
yes i believe he did the food shopping at the two different stores, but i wonder what he did with the duplicate items? did he eat those too in the same two weeks peroid? did he donate it to a food bank?
yes, i believe he cooked all the meals shown⌠but for himself? we see him taking a bit of this and a bit of that in an immaculately clean kitchen. how do we really know that is the food that provided his needed daily calorie intake for two weeks.
iâd rather see a video of a single person, or mon with kids, that has a go pro strapped to their heads do a start to finish time lapse video of what it is really like to go shop, prep, cook, eat and clean up afterwards - two meals a day for two weeks for under $90.
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What about that strategy doesnât work for you? Genuinely curious.
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As a single folk, I think it really depends on your personality and cooking style more than the single or not part!
When I look at the other singles I know, we all have very different approaches to shopping and cooking. When Iâm not cooking for my DCs, and Iâm on my own, itâs more simple dishes. My shopping pattern doesnât change too much, but my shopping pattern is so different than other single ppl I know who are not as into food or shopping.
Some do batch cooking, some live on take-out salads and prepped food from the grocery store. Some do a ton of takeout.
If I was only cooking for myself, I would probably be spending 30 to 40 minutes prepping and cooking dinner each day. I would probably still be spending $200 a week on groceries here in Ontario, but I like nice stuff.
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Whether itâs a single person, or a âmom with kidsâ or whatever, I think the throughline is that there are certain basic principles that apply uniformly.
Such as (1) generic or non-name brands are often just as good, if not better, than âbrand namesâ and (2) make cooking as effortless and flexible as possible.
I donât think the main takeaway from that video is that 2 trips (or multiple trips) are better than 1, as a universal matter, though sometimes it is. For example, if a person lived in Manhattan, making multiple trips is not only better, but often a necessity. If a person lived in the burbs, with big box retailers, than a single trip may be more efficient and just better.
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I like to shop more frequently, so I can pretend Iâm living in Europe, instead of in a North American suburb a mile away from Costco. LOL
I am living vicariously through ZivBnd.
I buy some generics and no name brands.
Which generics are better than branded items in your experiences?
I find generics to be worse than branded items or house labels for dried beans, mayonnaise, ketchup, cucumber pickles, frozen veg, canned beans, and bacon.
I like house labels, such as Farm Boy, Our Compliments, Irresistibles, Presidentâs Choice, up here in Canada, but those house labels are usually made by companies with brands, and they cost more than generics and No Name.
(sigh)
things are so much more complicated than some click-influencer wants to consider.
we do a weekly menu plan. I base my shopping on what I need to fix those dishes.
I never shop hungry, I always have a list (⌠sorted by aisle . . .)
I do sometimes âviolateâ the list - e.g. .. passing by the condiments section: 'ah nuts, yes the dijon jar is almost empty"
we shop Costco - stock up on pork//prime beef@choice prices, fresh salmon/steel head, non-perishables . . .
Costco lobster tail $/lb prices are extremely attractive - if you are feeding 8 people. itâs âpreviously frozenâ so buying it and freezing the not immediately eaten . . . not a good idea.
biggest âoopsâ of his approach: fresh vegetables/produce and fresh salads.
. . . buy a head of iceberg lettuce; calculate how much salad you have to eat (donât forget all the other stuff for the salad . . .) before that head of iceberg lettuce turns brown&mushy . . .
same with cabbage - longer time frame . . but how much corned beef/coleslaw/stuff leaves you gonnaâ eat real soon?
package/purchase size: marketeers have totally missed the shift in demographics.
the number of empty nester / single-no martial interest households is increasing exponentially.
we (two) cannot consume 5-7 pounds of potatoes or onions in +/- week before they sprout/go to mush - but it is much cheaper to buy a bag and later throw out the soft/mushy ones, than purchasing a qty of individual potatoes.
for especially (in our case) potato and onion.
it is a choice: waste âfoodâ or waste âmoneyâ
yes, Iâve done the math . . .
âfreshâ produce quality is an absolute over the top huge quality/waste issue. unless you shop every other day, much of the produce basically âgoes bad - slimyâ / wilts / rots when purchased 1x-2x week.
some time back I tracked âfood spendingâ as a part of tracking our âretirementâ budget.
yes, Iâm a engineer and Iâm a nerd.
re-started "food spendingâ tracking 01 Jan⌠and with not two months history, and realizing a major portion of our beef/pork/fish costs are âfrom last year Costo spendsâ - costs are really really brutal.
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as far as (1) goes - he said similar items (hamburger, chicken, pickles, etc ) are available at each store and shopping at the cheaper priced store can save you quite a bit of money. he never said the cheaper items are âas good, if not betterâ. he did say his palette prefered the more expensive items.
as far as (2) goes - who actually cooks 13 out of 14 meals they eat in a two weeks span who tries to make things as complicated and inflexible as possible? who has the time for that?
what i find interesting about the message within the video is the assumption that folks penny-pinching their food budget & minimizing time spent on menuing/shopping/food prep are the same ones looking to buy Made In cookware. if i were to spend that much on cookware, iâd be wanting to spend more time in the kitchen [using it], not less.
at 18 minutes in length, itâs too long for me. repeating the various video clips - word messaging - graphics, etc. was not necessary and comes off as an infomercial.
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After decades of buying 5 or 10 lb bags of potatoes, I now by potatoes every couple weeks by the pound.
I was finding the bagged potatoes being sold in Ontario these days have a lot of green potatoes, injured potatoes, bad potatoes from Nov to May.
I sometimes was throwing out half the bag. I have racks and a cold room. I was cutting potatoes in half to make sure they werenât bad in the centre. I couldnât make baked potatoes because around a third of the russets or white potatoes that looked good from the outside ended up being flawed on the inside.
It was a pain for me to be discarding so much potato. I rather pay more and choose my potatoes, one by one.
I grow my own in the summer, and generally use my own potatoes from August until November.
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as you explain/discover . . .
buying âhand selectedâ onion or potato most definitely reduces the amount of âbought and unusableâ product.
the issue is âwaste foodâ or âwaste moneyâ
for me and you and the average cook⌠Iâd much rather settle on knowing âthe stuff in the binâ is good. but in my area, hand selecting âgood stuffâ is 4-8x more expensive.
so, , , I buy the big bag. and my squirrels are happy with me tossing the mushy stuff their way . . .
people will insist I should buy the big quantities and donate the pre-known going to go bad portion to a food bank / etc.
neat idea. totally unrealistic in our area/situation.
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itâs not about âthat strategyâ not working.
i am single and i am poor, so i donât need to be told the food at 7/11 is way cheaper than the food at Whole Foods - i found that out the first time i spent my whole paycheck at WFs, and have not been back since.
i donât scour through cookbooks figuring out what next weeks menu/food prep is gonna be. over time iâve learn to make certain dishes, and i tend to stick with what i know. coming out of highschool i learned to cook pizzas because i got tired of McDonaldâs rather quickly. in college when i dated the waitress at an Italian restaurant and realized spaghetti didnât originate from a can, i learned how to make my own pasta and what to put with it. coming out of college into the workforce my roommate at the time had a few favorite family dishes that he taught me how to make.
over 40+ years my foodie toolbox has grown to the point that making a simple list of things i want to make for the upcoming days naturally turns into my shopping list at the store. i shop 2 and sometimes 3 times a week because fresh food goes bad fast and i canât afford to waste - food or $$$. i learned that through experience, not a video. i guess nowadays what seemed to be common sense regarding food is lost⌠maybe because of all the restaurants, food trucks & fast food joints which have taken the place of home cooked meals.
i left a well paying engineering job to become a stay at home single dad - which led to poverty, but seemed better than being a Disney dad (complicated divorce story for another time). one of my works gigs after that was home remodeling (floors, kitchens, bathroom). i worked in the $$$ part of town & would rip out perfectly good/functioning kitchens just to replace it with new floors, new tile, counters, backsplashes & appliances. often times iâd ask what was wrong with the old kitchen and the answer would be - âbecause the wife wants something new.â the icing on the cake was that half the time the wife didnât even use the kitchen except to get drinks out of the refrigerator because they had hired help come in and cook the meals, clean the house & take care of the kids.
anyway - this is getting long and rant-like so iâll stop now. i will end by saying i will be looking at more new recipes to fix in the future since iâm retiring this year and hope to have more time for cooking & gardening. Hungry Onion is a great foodie community and iâm glad @ernie_in_berkeley pointed it out to me.
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Nothing on sale this week (that I can use) exceptâŚ
Yep⌠Oodles of Noodles for 9 cents each (limit 48, but I only purchased 40).
Just to clarify, I would never feed these to Sunshine or Neighbor #2. These are for me on nights that I have limited portions or only enough leftovers for the two ladies.
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These make great croutons / flavoring for oriental coleslaw as a side or (with added shredded chicken) as a main.
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