Moved

I’ve moved my blog to a private server. It’s also been renamed and given a whole new look. It’s now called Crooked Kitchen at http://www.crookedkitchen.com.

Sunland Produce

One way to save money on food is to shop at local, independent markets, especially ethnic markets. When I was living in Santa Barbara, I did some exploring of the local markets, and found that prices on most real food were cheaper than prices at the chain supermarkets. Here in the LA area, I have a large ethnically-biased produce market that I do a lot of my shopping at.

Sunland Produce is a supermarket-sized business on the corner of a major intersection. I believe it’s owned by an Armenian family, and they seem to cater mostly to the local population of Eastern European, Middle Eastern, and Hispanic customers. Aside from the namesake produce section, there are aisles of ethnic pantry items.

Olive Oils

Some of the interesting things are the varieties of olive oils and vinegars. exotic pickles and peppers, cans of hummus and baba ghanoush, and all kinds of spices. There’s also a great bread aisle with all varieties of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern breads and pitas, and lots of interesting little cookies and desserts.

Breads

They also have a full service deli with exotic meats and cheeses. I haven’t had the chance to try it out yet (the meats anyway – I can’t do the cheeses), but I plan to eventually. The other counter of the deli has olives and Mediterranean items like hummus, baba ghanoush, and dolmas.

Meat Deli Counter

Cheese Deli Counter

Then there’s the meat counter. It runs most of the length of that side of the store, with most every cut of lamb, pork, beef, chicken, and fish. And the prices, like the produce, are pretty good. It’s a great place to get cheap meats, though I wouldn’t try to buy a high-end steak there.

Meat Counter

Of course, there’s the produce. Awesome prices, great variety, and lots of things you wouldn’t find at a regular supermarket, like tamarind, Korean chiles, and fresh green almonds.

Produce: Greens

Produce

I’ve put up all the pictures on Flickr, so you can look around there and see what my market offers (hint: if you’re in the San Fernando Valley area, it’s worth checking out yourself!).

Breakfast

When I was young, I used to eat a quick breakfast of cold cereal, instant oatmeal, or a toaster item like frozen waffles or a Pop-Tart as soon as I got up, before rushing off to school. I was never especially hungry, but I knew I needed to eat something, because I wouldn’t have another opportunity for a meal for several hours. My first year of college, I had morning classes, and managed to get up early enough to get to the dining commons and have breakfast. Sometimes it was cereal and coffee, but often it was a larger breakfast of hot foods – eggs and pancakes, or a big bowl of oatmeal, or whatever else they had that day. After that, I started sleeping in more often, and eventually stopped really eating breakfast. When I did get up before lunch hours, I’d just have some coffee or tea.

More recently, I’ve gotten back to eating shortly after waking up. Many days, I find myself actually hungry in the morning. I think it has to do with my appetite being much better now that I’m getting adequate dialysis.

Several studies have shown that eating breakfast can help you eat fewer total calories during the day. Not only does that help a diet, but it means you probably also spend less on food. Not only that, but breakfast can often be made much cheaper than lunch or dinner. If you split your calories between three meals instead of two, and one is significantly less expensive, you save money.

I’ve worked out an example to illustrate my point. Let’s say you eat 2000 calories in one day. Let’s split that between lunch and dinner. For the sake of argument, we’ll say that lunch is constant, and you eat enough dinner to make up calories to reach a total of 2000.

• Lunch: cheeseburger and potato salad – 876 calories, $3.46
• Dinner: pot roast, vegetables, and a green salad – 1124 calories, $8.61
• Total: 2000 calories, $12.07

Now let’s add a typical hot breakfast, and adjust the amount of dinner eaten to stay at 2000 calories total:

• Breakfast: fried eggs, toast, and bacon – 417 calories, $1.06
• Lunch: cheeseburger and potato salad – 876 calories, $3.46
• Dinner: pot roast, vegetables, and a green salad – 707 calories, $5.41
• Total: 2000 calories, $9.93

You can see that, even though you consumed the same number of calories, there’s a 17.7% savings when you eat breakfast. Now, that’s not considering that you’ll tend to eat fewer calories. You might still be sated enough from lunch that you won’t eat that whole cheeseburger for lunch, or maybe you’ll snack less through the day (I haven’t accounted for snacking here, but if you snack, you could potentially save even more, as snacks tend to be more expensive per calorie than full meals).

Simple breakfasts are pretty cheap. Two eggs and toast comes out to a few cents (okay, maybe 50 cents). If you utilize leftovers, it gets even cheaper. An omelette using leftovers in half-free. Oatmeal is very thrifty too, as long as you don’t pile on the butter and out-of-season berries.

Moving Out

I had a plan to write a great post on shopping the grocery flyers. That was April 29th. But the infection I had been fighting flared up and made me not want to work all day, then put me in the ER that night. Since then it’s just been problem after problem, and only now am I finally able to get back to posting.

Since the last time I posted, I’ve moved out of my rented room in Santa Barbara and back in with my family in LA. it’s been a month, but I still have to move all my stuff in to where I want it. Health problems have kept me from doing that, but now I’m getting better. One of my major goals in moving in is to get my computers set up in a clean, organized environment, so I can be more productive, both with my blog and the other things I do.

Also, once I’m all moved in, I’ll take over the kitchen and start doing my own grocery shopping. My eventual goal is to do all the grocery shopping and cooking for the family, with my mother willing to finance the shopping. I think the best way to get that going is in stages. First I’ll do my own shopping, with my own money, and cook mostly for myself, but in larger portions than I’d usually cook. I’ll offer the extras to whoever wants them, or leave leftovers in the fridge (which my brother will probably eat). Eventually, when more of the food in the kitchen is “mine,” I’ll begin asking for input on what the family wants for dinner, and cook dinner for everyone. Hopefully once I’m doing that on a regular basis, I’ll be able to ask for funding to buy food each week.

Once I’m fully moved in (should be within the next couple days), I’ll post again about how I’ve organized my working space. I’ll also post once I’m on my way to cooking for the household.

A Pictorial Guide to Great Sushi

The Sushi Bar

One of the reasons I want to save money is to be able to splurge every now and then. One of the things I like to splurge on is good sushi. Eventually, I’ll be able to have my kidney transplant, and unfortunately, the resultant anti-rejection drugs will cause me to not be able to eat raw fish ever again. So before I have my transplant, I’m planning a huge splurge at a top-quality sushi restaurant.

Over the last couple months, I’ve visited a few sushi restaurants in the Santa Barbara area and had some of their best. I’d like to write about the sushi I’ve had.

Arigato

Salmon and Japanese Snapper Nigiri

One of my favorite fishes to start with is salmon. I have a love/hate relationship with salmon, in that I love it raw, but dislike it cooked. Even barely cooked salmon turns me off – it can’t be warm, it has to be cool or cold. I also enjoy the different white fishes, especially types of snapper with ponzu and negi garnishes, like this Japanese snapper.

Bluefin Tuna and Kampachi Nigiri

If I had to compare the more expensive and sought-after bluefin tuna with the more common ahi (yellowfin) tuna, I’d say bluefin is more meaty and less metallic tasting. Now, when I say ahi is “metallic,” I’m not saying it’s a bad flavor. It’s a quality that’s hard to describe – somewhere between tangy and fresh. Kampachi, on the other hand, is simultaneously fresh-tasting and buttery. Some places add garnishes to kampachi and hamachi, but oftentimes I like it better ungarnished.

Uni and Mirugai Nigiri

Living in Santa Barbara, sea urchin is plentiful, and it’s easy to get high-quality uni. This was the first time I’d had good uni at a time that I was prepared to enjoy it. It’s certainly a taste that’s inline with the other acquired tastes of sushi and Japanese cuisine in general. If you enjoy raw oysters, uni isn’t far off. Mirugai, also known as giant clam or geoduck, is another thing I hadn’t tasted up to this point. I’m not sure how good this sample was in relation to all the mirugai sushi out there, but I wasn’t terribly impressed. It wasn’t bad, but I’m betting it could have been better. (Note that I did get two pieces – I forgot to take the picture until I had already eaten a piece.)

Jalapeno Hamachi Sashimi

I don’t so often like to indulge in the Americanized new-style dishes at a sushi bar. By this I mean the kinds that combine a lot of untraditional flavors, especially mayonnaise-based sauces. However, sometimes I do order them, either to satisfy my curiosity, or to fill me up cheaper than going with all the exotic nigiri I usually like. Granted, rolls are better at the latter than sashimi, and indeed I ordered this sashimi to satisfy my curiosity over yellowtail with jalapeno, which seems to be a popular combination. Unfortunately, I found there was just too much mayo here.

Tobiko and Idtakko Nigiri

I’m a fan of fish roe on sushi, and I’ve had masago often in the past, but never tobiko, so I opted to try it out. I’d also seen idtakko (baby octopus), and it’s been on my list of strange sushi to try out. It was less chewy than regular cooked tako sushi, and since it was marinated and garnished, it was pretty flavorful.

Ankimo and Anago Nigiri

By this point in the meal, I was about ready to call it quits, but not before trying two more things on my list: ankimo (monkfish liver), and anago (sea eel). Ankimo is said to be similar to foie gras, and in texture it was. The flavor was different, obviously – closer to the flavor tones of sushi and fish than the savory notes of French cooking. The anago seemed to me just similar to unagi (freshwater eel), which I’ve had many times before, and to me it’s the teriyaki chicken of the sushi world.

Sakana

Salmon Sashimi

Like I said above, I enjoy salmon. By this meal, I’d realized how much I liked it, and went ahead and ordered some nice salmon sashimi to start. This was interesting, served on ice with thinly sliced lemon.

Modai Snapper and Otoro Nigiri

I like to order off the specials menu at a sushi bar – at a good place, often those are the freshest and best choices for the night. Here I ordered the special Modai snapper, and I went all the way and ordered the otoro, the fattiest, most prized part of the tuna.

Aburi Yellowtail Belly and Aburi Engawa Nigiri (mixed up sauces)

Here I went for another semi-Americanized indulgence, and a local delicacy that I’d enjoyed before: aburi yellowtail belly and aburi engawa nigiri. Apparently “aburi” refers to sushi that’s been seared with a blowtorch to bring out the fatty flavors of the fish. The aburi yellowtail belly was scorched yellowtail with habanero, chives, and roasted jalapeno yogurt sauce. Engawa is halibut fin muscle, reportedly hard to find, but with the abundance of local halibut in Santa Barbara, every sushi bar has it. It was topped with sliced negi and some sort of miso/ponzu vinaigrette. At least that’s how they were supposed to be. The making of my sushi was passed off to a second itamae because the one serving me was busy with other orders, and this other sushi chef must have gotten confused, because the sauces were on the wrong fish. Notice the crosshatched pattern on the nigiri on the left – that’s an identifying mark of engawa, yet the yogurt-based sauce is on top of it, and the miso sauce is on the other pair.

T&T Roll

After seeing all the special rolls being prepared for other patrons of this sushi bar (it’s a popular place and was crowded), I had to order one. This a T&T Roll – spicy tuna, crab meat, and avocado in the roll, topped with tuna and jalapeno. The jalapeno wasn’t as hot as it looks. One thing I didn’t enjoy was the oversaucing of the plate. The sauces weren’t listed on the menu for this roll, but by tasting and comparing with other rolls listed, I’ve guessed that they are eel sauce, chive oil, coconut curry sauce, and a roasted red pepper basil sauce.

Tamago Nigiri

Sometimes I like to end a sushi binge with a “dessert-like” sushi, and tamago usually fits the bill. The best tamago nigiri is made at the bar to order, but that’s hard to find. The second best is made in small batches throughout the day, and kept at the ready. Sadly, many places either make a bag batch early in the day and keep it refrigerated through service, or buy their tamagoyaki premade. This tamago tasted premade – it was served to me very cold, it was quite sweet, and tasted of alcohol like the mirin wasn’t cooked off. It was by far the worst sushi I’ve had in a long time.

Torching a Roll

Since this place had a lot of “aburi” sushi and special rolls, I got a good show all evening, with the sushi chefs using their blowtorches to sear rolls and nigiri. I thought my itamae looked a lot like Iron Chef Sakai.

Some of the others I’ve had, but didn’t get pictures of:
Nigiri: marinated ono, seared black pepper ahi, smoked salmon w/ cream cheese and kelp pickle, amaebi, squid, chutoro, Japanese sea scallop, octopus, halibut
Sashimi: wild salmon, oyster shooter
Rolls: MaMa Mia (yellowtail, salmon, avocado, cucumber, jalapeno masago, jalapeno, “grazed garlic”, spicy aioli, chive oil), BaySider (Japanese sweet scallop, snow crab, asparagus, masago, spicy aioli)

If there’s any other sushi that you think I should try before I run out of time, let me know in the comments!

Free Chicken!

Free leg, thigh & tortillas on April 28

I’ve been hearing about this all day, and only now did it occur to me to blog about it. Today, KFC offered a free piece of their new grilled chicken to everyone who visited a location. Unfortunately, I missed it today. Not to be outdone, El Pollo Loco, a regional chain here in California and the Southwest, is giving two pieces of chicken, two tortillas (corn or flour, your choice), and salsa to anyone who asks for it tomorrow until 8:00 PM.

Free food deals like this are a great way to save a bit of money. If you were to buy the equivalent food at El Pollo Loco on a regular day, it would cost you somewhere around $2.50 – though this is an estimate, as they don’t post the price of tortillas on their menu. Unlike KFC’s offer of a single piece of chicken, El Pollo Loco’s promotion is enough for an actual meal. A drumstick, a thigh, two corn tortillas, and house salsa comes out to 436 calories, 21 grams of fat, 28 grams of carbs, and 35 grams of protein. That’s perfect for a light lunch. If you can find multiple El Pollo Loco locations to visit, you can try to take advantage of the offer multiple times (although it’s against the rules, so don’t tell them I gave you the idea).

Selling on eBay

As much time as I’ve spent on the Internet, I’ve never sold anything on eBay. I have bought a few things, but selling is new to me. Just this week, I finally posted my first two auctions.

I used to play Magic the Gathering. I started collecting the cards in 1997 and started playing shortly thereafter. I wasn’t very good at the game, and had no real idea of the range of value of the cards at the time. I stopped playing for a couple years, then picked it back up around 2001 and started buying newer cards. I collected and played until 2003, supporting my habit with the small local comic shop. That spring I graduated from high school and lost contact with all the people I used to play with, so I again stopped playing and collecting.

In October 2007, during a lull in my studies, I got addicted again and, now finally imbued with money, bought up a sizable number of cards. Unfortunately, I never really found anyone to play against, and all of my cards stayed in mint condition. By this point I knew more about the value of the cards, and I was able to find a price list and write scripts to price out my collection.

Now in April 2009, I find myself needing money, and looking at my collection to save me. My pricing script applied to the latest price lists tells me my collection of 340 recent rares comes out to about $425. Earlier this month I posted all the rares on CardShark, and so far I’ve sold just over $76 worth of cards. Selling off more of the less-valuable rares doesn’t look good, and I would like to monetize these cards sooner rather than later, so I’ve put the collection together and I’m selling it as one item on eBay. In addition to the rares, I’ve also tallied and posted my foil cards.

I’m excited that so far the rares have 3 bids, up to $51. I’m hoping to get at least $250 for the collection, and there’s still 6 days for that to happen. There aren’t any bids on the foils yet, but it’s still early.

Saving Money with Cheap Meats

A great way to save money on food is to cook with cuts of meat you wouldn’t usually cook with. Some of the bony, fatty, ugly pieces of meat can be had very cheaply, and surprisingly, they have great potential in the kitchen if you know how to use them. Generally, the cheap meats have a lot of connective tissue, and are tough or hard to eat if you cook them the same way you’d cook an expensive cut.

The trick is braising. To braise a piece of meat is to cook it low and slow for a long time in a covered pot in a relatively small amount of flavorful liquid. The long slow cooking causes all the connective tissue to break down and turn into gelatin, which gives you that fall-off-the-bone consistency and nice savory flavor. Stewing is also an option – just the same method, but with much more liquid. Bony cuts contribute a lot of flavor to a stew’s broth.

Some of my favorites in this category are pork arm roast, beef short ribs, 7-bone roast, and pork neck bones. The roasts are quite meaty, and generally sell in the neighborhood of $1.49/lb for the pork arm roast, and $2.29/lb for the 7-bone chuck roast, when not on sale. 7-bone roasts are perfect for pot roast (which is a classic braise), and pork arm roasts can be braised, cubed and stewed, or even slow-roasted. The pork neck bones are more suited to stewing – a good amount of the weight is bone, but there’s still a lot of meat clinging to it, and a couple pounds of neck bones, cut into 2″ pieces, will make several servings of really good stew. Below I’ll give you a recipe for pozole, a Southwestern stew of pork and hominy. I can usually get pork neck bones for $0.99/lb, making them a very economical choice for meat.

There are also the odd bits of the animal to consider. Organ meats and variety cuts are often considered ethnic delicacies, and for good reason. Chicken gizzards and hearts are often a bargain, and it’s not hard to use them. I recently made a couple of dishes from a package of duck gizzards I picked up. Gizzards have an interesting texture if you cook them quickly – they’re crunchy, almost like water chestnuts, and very un-meat-like. But if you simmer them for an hour or more, the crunch goes away and you’re left with nice little nuggets that taste just like the animal they came from. You wouldn’t even know you were eating gizzards if you weren’t told.

Of course, you should always watch the sales if you’re looking for cheap meat. Whole chickens often go on sale for as little as $0.69/lb; chicken legs for $0.99/lb or less. Once you try it a couple times (and have an adequate knife), turning a whole chicken into parts is easy, and certainly worth the savings over buying parts. Not to mention you have a carcass left over for making stock. There’s a use for every part of a whole chicken.

Other cuts of beef, like London broil or top round, are often fairly cheap, but they lack the fat and connective tissue that make things like chuck roast ideal for braising. Top round is a pretty lean cut, and if you try to braise it, you might not like the result – it can turn dry very easily. I never buy round simply because it turns tough no matter what you do to it. The only use I can think of is to make roast beef, medium-rare. Cook it any further and it’s tough and dry.

As I said, pork neck bones are great for stew, and my favorite way to use them is in pozole. Pozole is a Southwestern/Mexican stew of pork, hominy, and chiles. If you have access to a Hispanic market, you can obtain all of the ingredients very cheaply; if not, it’s still quite economical provided you can obtain the dried chiles.

Pozole Rojo

• 2 Tbsp olive oil
• 3 lbs pork neck bones, cut into 2″ pieces
• 2 large cans white hominy
• 2 ancho chiles, or 1 Tbsp ancho chile powder
• 10 California chiles, or 3 Tbsp California chile powder
• 2 onions, chopped
• 8 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 Tbsp whole cumin
• 1 Tbsp oregano
• salt and pepper
• radishes
• cabbage
• corn tortillas
• tortilla chips
• limes
• onion, chopped
• serrano chiles, chopped
• Mexican oregano
• red pepper flakes
• hot sauce

Heat the olive oil in a large pot (I use a dutch oven) on medium-high heat. Add the pork neck pieces and brown on all sides. Add the onions and garlic and let them saute with the pork, about 5 minutes. Add 1 Tbsp salt, some freshly ground black pepper, then water to cover, scraping up the brown bits stuck on the bottom of the pot. Bring to a simmer, then turn the heat down to low and cover.

Meanwhile, toast all the dried chiles briefly over an open stove flame. Tear the chiles into pieces and fit them into a spice grinder or food processor, and grind to a fine powder. Add this chile powder to the stew. Next, toast 1 Tbsp whole cumin seeds in a dry pan. When they just start to smell toasty and fragrant, grind them up and add to the stew. Also add 1 Tbsp dried Mexican oregano, crushed in your hands.

Simmer the stew on the stovetop on low heat, or in the oven at 250 degrees, for 2 hours.

Once the pork is tender and falling off the bone, take out all the pieces of bone and any fatty pieces of meat that fell off. Let cool on a plate until you can handle them, then strip all the meat off the bones and return it to the stew. Drain and rinse the two cans of hominy and add them to the stew. Bring back to a simmer, taste, and adjust salt. Simmer another 30 minutes to an hour.

Serve in bowls accompanied by any of the side items listed above. Radishes can be quartered or sliced, cabbage should be shredded, limes should be in wedges for squeezing. Add to the top of your bowl of pozole as you like.

Coming up over the next few days, I’ll write about other ways to eat frugally with cheap starches, supermarket sales, and ethnic markets.

My Current Situation

When I write blog posts, I like to include time-sensitive information. Blogs are inherently temporal. When I write more permanent pages, I tend to hold back what I really want to say for fear of including things that will be irrelevant, obsolete, or flat-out wrong in the future. Permanent pages aren’t dated – blog posts are, and readers take those dates into account.

That’s why I’m writing a post about my current situation, and not posting this information on the About page.

My name is Matt. I’m 23; I currently live in Santa Barbara, CA, but I’ll be moving back home to Los Angeles in the next month. I was a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, but my academic career was rather choppy. No, I haven’t graduated. I’ve yet again been asked to remove myself from studies at UCSB until I can “provide convincing evidence” that I can do better than I have been.

Two years ago, I was diagnosed with end stage renal disease (ESRD). I currently have very little kidney function, and I wouldn’t last 3 weeks without dialysis. Over the last two months, I struggled with inadequate dialysis and resulting systemic problems, particularly lung issues. This caused me to miss a lot of class toward the end of the winter quarter, and I was unable to live up to the academic contract I was on (due to past poor performance because of similar complications).

So now I’m moving back home to LA to figure out what to do with my life. Getting back into school is in my plans, possibly at CSU Northridge. In the meantime, I intend to try to stay active and find ways to earn and save money, and stay healthy. One of those will be to cook for the household (I’ll be living with my mother and brother), which will be an improvement over their current diet. I’m also working on selling off some of my junk, most of all my collection of Magic the Gathering cards, on eBay.

I’ll be using this blog to document things as I go. I hope to show ways that I’ve saved or earned money, and I’ll be posting recipes and meal reports. If I get down to it, I’ll even make weekly meal menus and post those. I draw my inspiration from a few other blogs I’ve been looking at recently: The Frugal Girl, Mental Experiment, and Lunch in a Box.

For now, that’s it. I’m going to try to keep up my writing. Once I get started it’s not really too bad – of course, it’s always the starting that hurts the most.

Opening Post

I’m starting this blog on a whim. I’m thinking that I’ll use it to document interesting things I’m doing, with a focus on food, cooking, and maybe some of my projects. I also want to use this blog to share my experimenting with reducing my spending.

I plan to post pictures of food I cook and eat, and reports on how I shop and how I’ve tried to save money. Posting pictures of my grocery receipts is probably the easiest way to do that. I also want to start creating weekly menus, to help me plan my shopping. I’ll post those here too.

Right now, this blog is still tentative. I could use help with a name for it. If you stumble across it somehow, leave a comment with a suggestion.