I’m in a number of different Facebook groups, and some of the most active ones are through my college network. We have a Foodies for Wellesley Alums group that I read almost every other day, and I occasionally contribute when I have recipes to recommend or suggestions based on questions that other alums post. One of the questions this week that left me thinking quite a bit was from an alum who is part of a growing family of four, and because her husband will be quitting his job soon, she wants to try to limit their household grocery bill to $100/week. I thought about this and how hard that would be, especially if you want a diet filled with fresh produce, meat, and dairy.

I go to a number of different places to buy our groceries, whether it’s staples like spices and rice, or fresh produce, and what inevitably always drives up the bill are the costs of fresh produce in New York city, whether it’s fruit or vegetables. If I’m buying fish or any type of seafood, that will increase the bill significantly, as well. The only way I’d see achieving this for a family of four in New York would be if you almost exclusively ate canned or frozen produce and kept fish and meat purchases to a minimum.

Wild coho salmon was on sale at Whole Foods this weekend, so I went to buy two pounds for dinner this week. Little did I know that coho has a much lower fat content than I am used to experiencing (my favorite, king salmon, is the fattiest of the fatty salmons, and also sadly the most expensive, especially when wild and fresh caught), which means that it will cook faster than other salmon types. I broiled the salmon fillets after marinating them in an Indian-yogurt spice mixture all day. After pulling them out of the oven and letting them rest, I realized I had overcooked the center fillets at just six minutes under the broiler. I was not happy. In a city where buying fresh fish is expensive, even on sale, it is deeply disappointing to know when you’ve messed up a really good piece of fish. Because then for the rest of the week, every single time you reheat that fish, it will become more and more overcooked.

At least the marinade was tasty.

A colleague of mine told me about the Michael Pollan Cooked TV series on Netflix, so I started watching the episodes and loved them immediately. I’ve read a number of Pollen’s books, including his bestsellers Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, and I completely agree with his opinions on food and the importance of knowing where your food comes from and being able to prepare healthy, simple meals. He really delves into the science behind food and talks a lot about how eating has evolved over time, and that’s what makes his writing and documentary-style TV series so interesting and educational.

In one of his episodes, he shows a clip of an Indian woman preparing a dosa lunch with all the fixings for her husband. She explains that dosa takes a lot of time and energy to make, but in the end, it is worth it. He notes that in the past, people spent a lot of time preparing their foods that they ate, and they valued that time. Today, people do not value the time spent cooking and want to minimize it as much as possible, but in the process of doing that, the nutritional value of the foods we eat today have diminished — this includes meats (animals eating grain as opposed to grass, which reduces the nutritional value of the meat) and breads (heavily processed with vitamins and minerals added back in… as opposed to being made the traditional way where these nutrients were naturally occurring, and is also very likely the reason so many people have celiac and gluten-related diseases. So time spent cooking has decreased while nutritional value of food has decreased.

The funny thing is that while re-watching this episode, I’m in the process of soaking lentils and fenugreek seeds for dosa this weekend. I’m like that older Indian lady preparing lunch for her husband, just not Indian. 🙂

For a long time, I wouldn’t buy fish to cook at home unless it was wild. Wild fish is the healthiest, most news articles touted, since these fish are eating what they are supposed to eat and we know they aren’t being fed grain and getting pumped chemicals that fish aren’t supposed to have. I told a friend of mine this a while ago, and he responded to me, “Wild isn’t as important as sustainable.” I thought about it a long while, and I realized he was probably right. Just because farmed fish in the U.S. may be questionable, or especially the farmed fish in China (the video images I’ve seen of this are by far enough to make anyone go off of eating farmed fish forever), doesn’t mean that farmed fish in countries with sustainable and environmentally friendly fish farming practices like New Zealand or Iceland are bad or unhealthy. The demand for fish is high, and only relying on fish in the wild isn’t a sustainable practice (plus, wild fish is generally very expensive). So I bought farmed arctic char raised in Iceland and roasted it for dinner tonight. I’m getting over my farmed fish fears little by little.

And as if all the fish I’ve eaten in restaurants in this country were wild!

Now that the weather is warming up with spring here (well, it actually isn’t warming up, but the idea is comforting that it should be getting warmer), I’ve been looking at a lot of different recipes that require grilling. Unfortunately, we don’t have access to an outdoor grill with our apartment, so the next best thing we can do is broil. It’s the same, right, just that the heat is coming from the top rather than the bottom?

I told Chris I wanted to broil Vietnamese lemongrass beef for dinner tonight, and he whined and insisted it would be bland and boring. “Broiling is so bland,” he said. “Why can’t you do something else?”

When did anything marinated in Vietnamese fish sauce, among other Asian ingredients, become boring? What a silly goose.

Yesterday, I made a very time and energy intensive white bean chicken chili. Most people use powdered spices for their chili peppers, but I used three types of fresh chilies and one dried type, a couple of onions, and a handful of garlic gloves and broiled these in the oven until blackened. After making a paste with them, the smell was undeniably fresh and good. I knew this was going to be a finger-licking good chili. And it was. I’ll be sad on the day later this week when I am enjoying the very last bowl.

I realized that since we’ve come back from Australia and Asia, I haven’t really spent much time cooking at all. Wedding planning has taken over my January and February, and so it was very relaxing to stand at the counter and cut my vegetables and dice my chicken thighs and forget about all my to-do’s. This is like my own therapy.