While I love spreadsheets... tracking groceries is a little tricky. This is all stuff we purchased in September, however some of these things are still in our cabinet/freezer so it's hard to say that they were 'for September' when they weren't consumed in the same month. However having these items on hand will theoretically cheaper grocery bills in the following month because I already have things. It's hard to say. I think I'll get a better idea of grocery budget after a few months. Meanwhile I keep all my receipts and try to log them right after the grocery shopping trip (or else I forget what I got and the shorthand of the cash register may be indecipherable!)
TOTAL* $638.86
Alcohol $103.11
Coffeeshop $14.31
Dairy $16.44
Eggs $15.99
Fats $16.84
Fruit $66.28
Liquids $26.33
Meat $112.89
Nuts + Seeds $24.39
Restaurants $100.07
Spices $18.93
Sweets $29.64
Veggies $87.72 + $80 (167.72)
supplies $5.93
*I don't have all the receipts from my fella's spending on food out of the house. Also we have a CSA that we already paid for that adds about $20/ week, so for the month of September that adds about $80 bucks to the veggie budget. But like I mentioned at the beginning of the post, it was paid for in June and August (split the payment into two parts) so it's hard to count now. I guess it really depends on what I want to get out of this tracking.
Here is a list of pretty much all the food we bought categorized. Looks like alcohol and meat are our big budget areas. Trying to eat healthy, on a mostly Paleo diet it makes sense that meat would be a high category... but this also sheds light on our eating habits. A little too much alcohol (I'm tying this while sipping my second Crispin Hard Cider, have I mentioned how much I love Crispin brand?)
$640 for two people doesn't seem like that much in comparison to that I used to spend $400-$500/month for just myself. I can see in these numbers that the alcohol consumption is a little higher than I would like, fruit consumption is not as bad as I thought and I need to figure some better labels. Should eggs be their own category? What category should coconut milk fall into? Perhaps I could also break things down into Paleo and non-paleo spending. That'd be a good indicator as well if I'm staying on budget both financially and caloric-ally Hmm. Any other thoughts on how to organize things?
I feel like keeping track of food at this scale, and relating it to finances is going to help keep things clearer in my goals of saving money and heating healthy. This was the first full month... so we'll see how things go as I collect more data!
One additional thing that I like about doing this spreadsheet is it makes me more aware of how much things cost and where I get the best deal. This way, when I see something on sale, like I did with coconut milk at Uwajimaya, I know it's a good deal because I've been paying close attention to the price of things. Even between Trader Joe's and Winco (coconut oil is cheaper at TJ's btw, by 50 cents). I try to get recepits for everything now and I also compare with my mint.com account tracking what I bought on my cards (mostly restaurant purchases) and what I have written down in my spreadsheets (both for food, and in my monthly budget spreadsheet I hope to write about another time, it's helped put my spending into perspective.
Saturday, October 6, 2012
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Recommended Books
I have recently been reading Make Shift Happen, by Dean Dwyer and Practical Paleo by Diane Sanfilippo. I highly recommend both!
Make Shift Happen is all about changing how you think. He uses examples outside of the fat loss world to show you how your thinking cash hold you back or help you get ahead. I found it very inspiring for my life, not just fat loss. The shifts that had the most profound impact for me were:
#17 Think in beta: Consider that you are the beta version of yourself right now, testing to see what works for you and what doesn't and once you test drive some theories, you will upgrade to You 2.0. Following the lead of software engineers where the dream of perfection doesn't get in the way of getting started but rather pushes them to create something that functions but has bugs that will get worked out after being used to figure out what changes to make. This excited me not only for fat loss and realizing that there is no set plan for my body and lifestyle and it will take me some time to figure out weekday works best for me...
I also saw it in my desire to sew. I love sewing and fabrics and dreaming up images of clothes I would make... But the fear of failure along with wishing my body had a different more "fashion" shape has prevented me from even starting. I have been living in places with space to sew, finally, for 11 months now and not sewn a single item of clothing. This has not stopped me from buying fabric and sewing patterns! For some reason, the thought that seeing clothes for the body i have now can NE a beta period of testing out not only fashion but also my sewing skills (which will only improve the more sewing i do) means that when I do have my dream body, by then I will have developed superior sewing skills and will be able to make even better garments (or alter garments I had already made to adjust to my new body!)
#8 Be 911. Could you save yourself in the event of disaster? Could you save a loved one? He writes about survival and what it means physically to be able to save yourself (endurance running, pullups, pushups, swimming 1 km, etc.) And saving a loved one (carrying 80 pounds for a distance, pulling 180 pounds of dead weight). If you needed to pull someone out of the water to safety could you do it? His entire exercise regimen, while being under 30 minutes, another shift, is designed with survival in mind. This gives your workouts a purpose. Not just mindlessly riding a stationary bike and watching the news, but focusing intensely on your workout and knowing you ate working towards a goal that could mean life or death to you our someone you love. Pretty much blew my mind.
There are other shifts that have been inspiring as well, but I don't want to give it all away :)
Practical Paleo has way more than just recipes. She explains the digestion process and how grains, legumes and sugar effect your digestion, mood and body. It also includes several reference sheets to help sum up fats, foods to eat, and a carb index showing you where to get carbohydrates from vegetables. I found her one sheet references on her website before I got the book at Balanced Bites.After some serious GI tract issues last month I am all about healing my gut and the first half of her book explains the science of digestion and HOW TO FIX IT! This is important! I've only just started reading it and flipped a bit through the recipes which look delicious.
Make Shift Happen is all about changing how you think. He uses examples outside of the fat loss world to show you how your thinking cash hold you back or help you get ahead. I found it very inspiring for my life, not just fat loss. The shifts that had the most profound impact for me were:
#17 Think in beta: Consider that you are the beta version of yourself right now, testing to see what works for you and what doesn't and once you test drive some theories, you will upgrade to You 2.0. Following the lead of software engineers where the dream of perfection doesn't get in the way of getting started but rather pushes them to create something that functions but has bugs that will get worked out after being used to figure out what changes to make. This excited me not only for fat loss and realizing that there is no set plan for my body and lifestyle and it will take me some time to figure out weekday works best for me...
I also saw it in my desire to sew. I love sewing and fabrics and dreaming up images of clothes I would make... But the fear of failure along with wishing my body had a different more "fashion" shape has prevented me from even starting. I have been living in places with space to sew, finally, for 11 months now and not sewn a single item of clothing. This has not stopped me from buying fabric and sewing patterns! For some reason, the thought that seeing clothes for the body i have now can NE a beta period of testing out not only fashion but also my sewing skills (which will only improve the more sewing i do) means that when I do have my dream body, by then I will have developed superior sewing skills and will be able to make even better garments (or alter garments I had already made to adjust to my new body!)
#8 Be 911. Could you save yourself in the event of disaster? Could you save a loved one? He writes about survival and what it means physically to be able to save yourself (endurance running, pullups, pushups, swimming 1 km, etc.) And saving a loved one (carrying 80 pounds for a distance, pulling 180 pounds of dead weight). If you needed to pull someone out of the water to safety could you do it? His entire exercise regimen, while being under 30 minutes, another shift, is designed with survival in mind. This gives your workouts a purpose. Not just mindlessly riding a stationary bike and watching the news, but focusing intensely on your workout and knowing you ate working towards a goal that could mean life or death to you our someone you love. Pretty much blew my mind.
There are other shifts that have been inspiring as well, but I don't want to give it all away :)
Practical Paleo has way more than just recipes. She explains the digestion process and how grains, legumes and sugar effect your digestion, mood and body. It also includes several reference sheets to help sum up fats, foods to eat, and a carb index showing you where to get carbohydrates from vegetables. I found her one sheet references on her website before I got the book at Balanced Bites.After some serious GI tract issues last month I am all about healing my gut and the first half of her book explains the science of digestion and HOW TO FIX IT! This is important! I've only just started reading it and flipped a bit through the recipes which look delicious.
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Monday, September 17, 2012
My first frittata!
I hope it is delicious, I am too full from dinner (chocolate beef chili and sweet potato fries that were disappointingly soft) to try it, so I shall wait until breakfast tomorrow! I love an evening of cooking that is not food for the same night! It takes the pressure off timing and feels more fun and experimental rather than a chore. It just means every meal is a leftover!
Friday, September 14, 2012
SUGAR!! Oh, and getting things done
Yesterday I had a bit of sugar, made my teeth hurt and I felt like I had a long drawn out sugar crash through the evening. So I'm going to work hard to cut as much sugar out of my diet as I can. I've found some chocolate bars I can make that use cocoa powder and agave nectar (though from the Amazon preview of the cookbook Practical Paleo Agave is suggested to be avoided). I think I eat too much fruit. I've slowed down on the fruit smoothies since I first got the Blendtec blender. I need to suck it up and go without sugar for a while to get it out of my system.
I've cut out soda and I feel good about it. I still have some hard cider and beer on occasion. I love Crispin Cider so I'm fine not really having beer and just having cider.
Last night we watched Ratatouille. I love that movie. It makes me so excited about cooking, and plating and trying new recipes. Last weekend I spent some time prepping foods (pressing garlic, chopping onions, making Pad Thai sauce) so that we'd have food ready to go for the week. The prepped food lasted about 2.5 days. So this was brilliant to do but I need to do more! As much as I enjoy cooking, when I get home from work or the gym, I hate that we don't eat dinner until about 9pm because prepping food takes a long time.
One part of this is when the kitchen isn't cleaned up the night before, if I leave a few pans in the sink after dinner and get home the next day from work and want to make dinner but first have to do dishes it makes me procrastinate. This leads to an even later dinner. I have a 7 minute commute! I used to have this problem when I had a 45 minute commute and I thought "oh, if only I had a shorter commute, I could eat dinner earlier!" This is not the case I am learning. I need to keep the kitchen ready to go for whenever I want to cook. There was actually a Good Magazine tip about this in 30 days of home cooking.
Looking up "clean kitchen" I found this article from The Kitchn about how to keep your kitchen clean by doing a little something everyday. This is a concept I have been planning/thinking about incorporating into my life - the only want to build a stone wall is one stone at a time. So the quilt I am working on, I'm going to start by gathering the fabrics, then cutting the pieces, then slowly assembling quilt blocks.
I downloaded a desktop timer program to use the Pomodoro Technique to try to focus more on work when I'm working and also in seeking things to help me not only study for my exams but also get things done like chopping up veggies on the weekends, cleaning the house/my woman cave, etc.
I've cut out soda and I feel good about it. I still have some hard cider and beer on occasion. I love Crispin Cider so I'm fine not really having beer and just having cider.
Last night we watched Ratatouille. I love that movie. It makes me so excited about cooking, and plating and trying new recipes. Last weekend I spent some time prepping foods (pressing garlic, chopping onions, making Pad Thai sauce) so that we'd have food ready to go for the week. The prepped food lasted about 2.5 days. So this was brilliant to do but I need to do more! As much as I enjoy cooking, when I get home from work or the gym, I hate that we don't eat dinner until about 9pm because prepping food takes a long time.
One part of this is when the kitchen isn't cleaned up the night before, if I leave a few pans in the sink after dinner and get home the next day from work and want to make dinner but first have to do dishes it makes me procrastinate. This leads to an even later dinner. I have a 7 minute commute! I used to have this problem when I had a 45 minute commute and I thought "oh, if only I had a shorter commute, I could eat dinner earlier!" This is not the case I am learning. I need to keep the kitchen ready to go for whenever I want to cook. There was actually a Good Magazine tip about this in 30 days of home cooking.
Looking up "clean kitchen" I found this article from The Kitchn about how to keep your kitchen clean by doing a little something everyday. This is a concept I have been planning/thinking about incorporating into my life - the only want to build a stone wall is one stone at a time. So the quilt I am working on, I'm going to start by gathering the fabrics, then cutting the pieces, then slowly assembling quilt blocks.
I downloaded a desktop timer program to use the Pomodoro Technique to try to focus more on work when I'm working and also in seeking things to help me not only study for my exams but also get things done like chopping up veggies on the weekends, cleaning the house/my woman cave, etc.
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Awesome dinner, curry and mashed cauliflower
Mashed garlic cauliflower and red pineapple curry. Eating while watching Ratatouille, quite possibly my favorite movie :)
Cook up 2 bags frozen cauliflower.
In small saucepan, heat up a couple Tbsp coconut oil and a cup of coconut milk, a crushed clove of garlic. Heat up for a few minutes.
Put cauliflower in the food processor with the liquid and blend until smooth. Add Salter and pepper.
For the curry... Coconut oil in hot pan, spoonful of red curry sautee a bit, toss in some thinly sliced onion, sliced zucchini, can of pineapple chunks after drinking most of the juice, shredded 1/4 cabbage. Sautee for a while then pour in a can of coconut milk and add a pound of sliced already cooked chicken thighs (cooked on the George Foreman). Put lid on and simmer!
I was so pleased with this dinner... deliciousness! And paired with Ratatouille?! Now I'm even more excited to cook more! Omnomnom!
Shifting to a budgeted, stationary lifestyle
The hardest part of a food budget is that I know I have enough food for the week and my fridge is getting more and more empty. Normally I would go to the store now and buy more food just to fill it up - I have to keep reminding myself that I have food already for the rest of the week, it just requires thawing some meats and using things in the pantry. (The plan for tonight is grass-fed steak with cauliflower "mashed potatoes" and sauteed kale and spinach; then is red curry with chicken thighs with cucumber to cleanse the palette afterwards.
I've been keeping track of our grocery spending, we're just about to halfway through the month and we are more than halfway through the month's small food budget ($300).
Spending Since Sept 1st (for two people)
TOTAL $165.04
Meat $60.40
Fruit $42.23
Vegetables $27.16
Alcohol $20.02
Spices $16.72
Fats $16.33
Dairy $9.10
Eggs $8.99
Sweets $8.65
Coffeeshop $6.00
Nuts + Seeds $5.89
Restaurants $3.95 (a Jamba juice)
Internally saying "no" to going out to eat when we're tired and hungry has been difficult, but it has also lead to making a random stir-fry with whatever veggies and meat we have which always turns out delicious - especially with some coconut amios and Worcestershire sauce! Mmm.
I made soft caramels last weekend, mainly because I wanted to, I'm not really eating them. And now I found this recipe in Imbibe Magazine for Apple Cider Caramels! I very much want to try these.
I have also started a budget spreadsheet where I am keeping track of expenses. I'm adding in big ticket items I know about, average bills that I then update when I actually get the bill, spending as it happens and trying to keep track. I have this vision of the future that is keeping me going. Visions of living debt free, in a house that I own, with a puppy and a garden. Not too much to ask right? So I just need to keep that vision clear every time I want to splurge on something that's not a neccesity in the budget.
The gas budget is a big stumbling block because having a car makes it feel really easy to so somewhere, "Oh my friend is in Seattle? I'll just pop up there for a weekend." Well, the cost of gas is really high and then the expense of buying food when I'm visiting a town where I don't have a kitchen just adds to it. So as much as I love to travel and visit friends - this is going to be a big change for me.
I'm excited about it too though because I will be studying to take my Architect's exam and I have many projects at home, and a lovely fella who I can happily lounge around with at no expense :). When I first moved here back in October of last year, I spent most weekends not at home and wondered why I felt like I wasn't accomplishing any of the things I was so excited to have space and time for now that I didn't live in the Big Apple anymore.
I hadn't stopped my living on the road mentality from the travels of the previous summer. So now, I'm here, I'm buckling down, staying home and studying as well as sewing, learning to cook more things, bonding with local friends and working on fitness. I'm excited about this, but I just have to remind myself of that when I start feeling restless... and maybe go for a jog in the park and hang out with some friends among the trees. :)
I've been keeping track of our grocery spending, we're just about to halfway through the month and we are more than halfway through the month's small food budget ($300).
Spending Since Sept 1st (for two people)
TOTAL $165.04
Meat $60.40
Fruit $42.23
Vegetables $27.16
Alcohol $20.02
Spices $16.72
Fats $16.33
Dairy $9.10
Eggs $8.99
Sweets $8.65
Coffeeshop $6.00
Nuts + Seeds $5.89
Restaurants $3.95 (a Jamba juice)
Internally saying "no" to going out to eat when we're tired and hungry has been difficult, but it has also lead to making a random stir-fry with whatever veggies and meat we have which always turns out delicious - especially with some coconut amios and Worcestershire sauce! Mmm.
I made soft caramels last weekend, mainly because I wanted to, I'm not really eating them. And now I found this recipe in Imbibe Magazine for Apple Cider Caramels! I very much want to try these.
I have also started a budget spreadsheet where I am keeping track of expenses. I'm adding in big ticket items I know about, average bills that I then update when I actually get the bill, spending as it happens and trying to keep track. I have this vision of the future that is keeping me going. Visions of living debt free, in a house that I own, with a puppy and a garden. Not too much to ask right? So I just need to keep that vision clear every time I want to splurge on something that's not a neccesity in the budget.
The gas budget is a big stumbling block because having a car makes it feel really easy to so somewhere, "Oh my friend is in Seattle? I'll just pop up there for a weekend." Well, the cost of gas is really high and then the expense of buying food when I'm visiting a town where I don't have a kitchen just adds to it. So as much as I love to travel and visit friends - this is going to be a big change for me.
I'm excited about it too though because I will be studying to take my Architect's exam and I have many projects at home, and a lovely fella who I can happily lounge around with at no expense :). When I first moved here back in October of last year, I spent most weekends not at home and wondered why I felt like I wasn't accomplishing any of the things I was so excited to have space and time for now that I didn't live in the Big Apple anymore.
I hadn't stopped my living on the road mentality from the travels of the previous summer. So now, I'm here, I'm buckling down, staying home and studying as well as sewing, learning to cook more things, bonding with local friends and working on fitness. I'm excited about this, but I just have to remind myself of that when I start feeling restless... and maybe go for a jog in the park and hang out with some friends among the trees. :)
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