Peek Inside My Grocery Cart, Please!

[Idgie]

Grocery haul from the Asian market today:

brown rice from California (lower arsenic)
stuff for Thai eggplant soup:

vegetable broth
Thai eggplant
basil
lime leaf
galangal
Thai chili
fresh bamboo

kimchi
pickled radish
frozen broad beans (fava)
mint
ketchup

[roundcoconut]

I’m trying to think what the heck was in my dinner salad dressing — two roasted onions, huge squirt of dijon, one cooked zucchini, limes (2 perhaps?), apple cider vinegar.

It made a lot — 3/4 cup? — and wasn’t a calorie bomb. It was the consistency of hummus (which most people would think is too clumpy, but I really enjoyed it that way. ). Pics at the bottom — ugly salad, plus soup (the kidney beans and avo aren’t visible but I ate them in the soup).

My grocery receipt for this evening:
- one avocado (0.98)
- one zucchini (0.52)
- diced tomatoes (no-salt) (0.72)
- one mango (I’m way over on my fruit consumption, so this was not something I would repeat! I made a silly choice. I dunno!) (0.78)




-

[roundcoconut]

I had another grocery receipt last night. Mostly because I needed to get up off the couch and walk somewhere, and whenever I need a simple one-mile walk out, and one-mile walk back, I try to think of something harmless I can buy at the grocery store. It gives me a purpose. Usually I try to think of something that cannot be eaten out of hand — a spice or something.

Yesterday, I bought onions and lettuce and a knob of ginger. Those will not go to waste!
- 1 lb bag organic carrots (1.29)
- small knob ginger (0.16)
- three yellow onions (1.19)
- a head of organic lettuce on the about-to-rot rack (0.99)

None of those are foods that would ever be involved in an impromptu 9:30pm snack, so this was smart.

I thought about buying my fruit for this morning, last night, but i estimated that I would have a 40% chance of digging in before morning came — thus, no sack of frozen mangoes and bananas.

[roundcoconut]

More grocery receipts:

At half past noon:
Celery, 99 cents per pound (0.76)
Frozen fruit, 1lb bag of mango/strawberry/banana (2.99)
Organic zucchini and squash from the about to rot rack (one of each) (0.99)
No-salt Veg All (canned pea, carrot, potato, lima, celery, corn) (0.79)
No-salt diced tomatoes (0.73)
———Grand Total $6.51

I love eating for so freaking cheap! No, I didnt eat all that for lunch. My patterns are changing a bit!

At 5:30pm —
A can of no-salt kidney beans (0.69)
Three packs of three peppers each from the about-to-rot rack - (3 x 0.99)
One head of cabbage (0.86)
———Grand Total $4.70

A couple comments;
That can of no-salt VegAll is an excellent back-up food for someone like me! I mean, it's definitely not yummy overstimulating food — more like, its suitable for somebody who wants to chew on something but who really isnt terribly hungry. Anzways, I ate a can of that this morning with just a drop or two of mustard on top.

Pics of what I actually ate, because these are starting to diverge — what I ate vs. what I bought.
Breakfast — which I usually dont even eat — a can of no-salt Veg-All
Lunch — one whole bag of mango-strawberry-banana frozen fruit, plus a giant salad — fruit not shown!
Dinner — a raw food platter, plus some soup (which I havent started eating yet)




Anyone who might be keeping score, I ate more fruit than Dr. McDougall recommends. I get this!

Also, I filled up on fruit, so didnt need much for lunch, and certainly didnt need starch to achieve satiety. I was already at satiety, and didnt need long-term satiety in any way.

My evening soup had one potato in the whole batch, so the potato was still firm, but cooked. I think this is an excellent place to start for someone like me — the starch is irretrievably mixed in with the veg, and isnt overly smooshy. :=)

[Idgie]

I love your self-awareness and enthusiasm!

Sticky note - good job by NOGRAN s.r.o., on Flickr

[roundcoconut]

OMG, thank you SO much for that HappySticky! I love happystickies, and may have to start giving myself them also. They are fun to get from others, fun to give to others, and fun to give to oneself. Win-win-win.

I honestly just have a passion for this. I always wanna get back at it, get back at it. Get home from work, get back at it. Get to work, and get back at it. I just love it, and think of it as my Superpower. (The enthusiasm AND the results. I think of both as my Superpowers.)

Like, I think Mozart believed that music was his superpower. Also, composing music was his superpower.

Hard not to plug away at it when we see it that way!

PS, I also think it can be anybodys Superpower. Anyone can eat a green bean. And if you do it once, you can do it again. And if you do it again-and-again, well, then you become magical, because few on this planet have mastered such a thing. But it can ABSOLUTELY be anybodys superpower.

[roundcoconut]

More receipts:

2 huge bags of tomatoes from the Ugly Rack -- about five big tomatoes in each bag (2 x 0.99)
1 sack of mushrooms from the Ugly Rack (0.99)
1 can of no-salt garbanzos (0.89)
1 can of no-salt organic diced tomatoes (1.00)
1 head of iceberg lettuce (0.89)
1 bag of frozen fruit (strawberry-banana mix) (3.08)

This is a TON of food for so cheap.

[bunsofaluminum]

I’m trying to think what the heck was in my dinner salad dressing — two roasted onions, huge squirt of dijon, one cooked zucchini, limes (2 perhaps?), apple cider vinegar.

It made a lot — 3/4 cup? — and wasn’t a calorie bomb. It was the consistency of hummus (which most people would think is too clumpy, but I really enjoyed it that way. ). Pics at the bottom — ugly salad, plus soup (the kidney beans and avo aren’t visible but I ate them in the soup).

My grocery receipt for this evening:
- one avocado (0.98)
- one zucchini (0.52)
- diced tomatoes (no-salt) (0.72)
- one mango (I’m way over on my fruit consumption, so this was not something I would repeat! I made a silly choice. I dunno!) (0.78)




-

Oh I love that salad dressing with cooked zucchini! I'm looking for good things to put on salads and this looks GOOD! Ooh, I want to be done with work already so I can go to the grocery store and buy all the things, and go home and COOK all the things!!!

[roundcoconut]

OMG, I'm so glad you like the crazy chunky salad dressings! Really, I feel a person just needs something to bulk the dressing up (zucchini is fine, celery also works fine (a little grainy, but carries the flavor well!). I think roasted bell pepper also work!

Surprisingly, I the dijon and ginger and the orange juice are the major flavors I use in salad dressing this week. Just so delicious! I didn't get to take a pic of my food yesterday, but I put some sweet peas and garbanzo beans on a salad and was in heaven.

Yesterday's evening grocery receipt:
2 x yukon gold potatoes (1.06)
a container of nutritional yeast (5.57) -- what was I thinking?! This was a bad move.
a box of whole wheat pasta (1.00)
1 can of no-salt kidney beans
3 apples from the Ugly Rack (0.99)
2 cucumbers from the Ugly Rack (0.99)
---- > grand total of 10.71

For some reason, I've never tried nutritional yeast, and for all the hype it gets, it's just junk food in my book. Well, now I know! (Idgie, there's your rule again! We can either call it a failure in the purchasing department, or a wildly successful experiment. So let's go with "It was a wildly successful experiment!")

Anyways, I have to say that I see nutritional yeast as just palate-stimulating crap. Yes, it tastes like the powder from Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, but since when is that my standard for what I eat? I think that's probably a path I won't be going down. I'll try to pawn off the rest of the container on someone at work!

[roundcoconut]

I can't believe I'm so far behind:

Yesterday morning's receipt:
1 container of rolled oats (1.59)
1 sack of frozen peas (1.00)
yellow cherry tomatoes (2.99)
no-salt garbanzo beans (0.89)
lettuce (0.99)
navel orange (0.89)
one-pound bag of frozen fruit (papaya-mandarinorange-pineapple) (2.99)

I don't regret anything above. Yes, I think my fruit consumption is still a tad higher than ideal, but I am OK with that for now. I use the fruit as ice cubes in my water, and it's keeping me from being too much of a coffee fiend.

[roundcoconut]

A note on WHY I am asking other people to look in my grocery cart:

A receipt I never purged from my change purse from 6/23 shows really high expenses, for basically the same level of nutrition:
-- I actually bought two containers of tomatoes at 2.97 each
-- I bought a container of raspberries AND a container of blueberries (3.98 each)
-- PLUS a can of kidney beans, and PLUS iceberg lettuce and PLUS (good Lord!) a bag of frozen fruit and an avocado.
So I spent $20.63 on just that one trip to the store, and that's just more expensive than it really needs to be.

I mean, I know I'm all over the place sometimes, because on the one hand, I know that food is ridiculously inexpensive these days (relative to income), and that if a person were to spend the same portion of their income on food, as we did 40 years ago, or 80 years ago, then we would actually use such a larger portion of our income at the grocery than most people currently do.

But, still -- if optimal nutrition is available without going overboard on costs, then WHY NOT get in the habit of keeping more money for ourselves.

After all, two apples is all that would be needed to hold body and soul together. The rest is just expensive poopy. And excess calories. So WHY, god, WHY.

OK, that's my rant!

[roundcoconut]

Morning receipt
3 apples (0.99)
A head of lettuce (0.99)
No salt added chickpeas (0.89)
1 pound bag of carrots (0.79)

My evening receipt was super cheap:
Small head of green cabbage (0.82)
Big bundle of celery (1.83)
4 onions (1.25)

Over the course of the work day, I really DID have the chickpeas and the lettuce and all three apples (plus some leftover peas), but did not need the carrots.

At home, for dinner, I had a large veg platter; consisting of bell peppers from a previous day, tomatoes from a previous day, lettuce and roasted onions from today), plus a bowl of oatmeal (from the container I bought yesterday morning.). I DID finally have to put the nutritional yeast in its new home, so that is outta the way now.

That is all!

[roundcoconut]

No grocery receipt yet for today, but it strikes me that the “Grocery Cart Challenge” is this:

1. Soup Ingredients — keep these on hand and replenish often. Stuff like cabbbage, celery, ginger, carrots, rutabega, and especially no-salt diced tomatoes. A soup will never steer me wrong!
2. Salad ingredients — keep on hand and replenish daily. I am on a salad kick, and nothing but iceberg lettuce will do. A navel orange, or possibly some limes have featured prominently in my salad dressings, along with some roasted onions or some cooked carrots or zuccchini.
3. Fruit — buy a piece or two at a time, so that i don’t give myself a natural sugar rush by pounding back to back mangoes or such.
4. Starch — keep something on hand for one meal, but dont buy in bulk (often a mistake for people with binge eating in their past)
5. Expensive & Exotic Stuff — once every couple of days, buy something more costly — an expensive spice, for example, or a package of fresh berries. Not every day, because that gets to be a pattern, and starts to snowball into unnecessarily high expenses. Let expensive items be infrequent, and you’ll enjoy them more when you partake.

Those are my rules for me. Not imposing them on anybody else!

[bunsofaluminum]

Your grocery receipts reminds me of a challenge I followed/tried. Something like $3.00 a day. It was very doable for me at that time because I lived two blocks from a "dent and scratch" grocery store that carried everything WAY cheap. I found grapes there one time, fresh. Like literally off the truck, straight to this place. $6.00 for a flat of 12 lbs. Yes, I ate grapes for a while. They were red seedless, my faves.

Anyway, they carried all kinds of canned goods and "close to sell date" greens. I kept track and yes, ate for less than $3.00 a day. Sometimes much less, if I made a huge batch of something for $5 and made it stretch.

Very cool. No one can ever tell me that eating healthy is expensive. Ain't nothin in the produce department that costs as much as even plain old ground beef. Though, those grape tomato packages ARE pricey

[Idgie]

Today's grocery haul:

Tomatoes
So many sweet potatoes
Frozen corn with onions and Mexican spices
Frozen yuca/cassava
Shredded wheat
(Partner got some non-veg stuff)