Substitute Canned Tomatoes for "Fresh" Tomatoes

Laura: Your Italian Sausage and Tortellini Soup calls for 3/4 of a pound of chopped fresh tomatoes.
Dan: Nope. Substitute a can of diced tomatoes instead.
Laura: A 15-ounce can?
Dan: Yep. There, I just saved you two bucks. And you're no longer hostage to tomatoes decomposing in your fridge.

The next time you're preparing a recipe that calls for fresh tomatoes, consider using canned tomatoes instead. It's an easy, money-saving substitution.

Remember the key insight from Tomatoland: those out-of-season tomatoes sitting in your grocery store's produce section aren't just tasteless and overpriced. They're also likely to be grown under questionable labor and environmental conditions.

Most of North America's canned tomatoes, however, are grown in California under far better conditions. Better still, canned tomatoes are shelf stable: if you decide to postpone cooking your tomato-requiring recipe until next week or next month, you can. With fresh tomatoes, you're held hostage: you have to cook your recipe before those tomatoes spoil.

Most importantly, canned tomatoes actually taste better than out-of-season tomatoes. Remember, out-of-season tomatoes are picked green, ripened artificially with ethylene gas, and arrive at your grocery story tasting like... nothing. At least canned tomatoes taste like tomatoes. Why? Because they're canned at peak ripeness rather than picked green.

Finally, you can buy a small can of unbranded diced or whole tomatoes for 60c to perhaps a dollar. Larger cans cost even less per unit. In stark contrast, out-of-season tomatoes could run you as much as $3.50 a pound.

What kinds of recipes are best for a canned-vs-fresh tomato substitution? In my view, canned tomatoes work best with soups, stews, chilis, casseroles and stir-fry dishes--essentially, recipes where the tomatoes get cooked down.

Fresh salads, however, are an entirely different matter: canned tomatoes most likely won't work as a fresh tomato replacement. The texture just won't be right.

But wait: who says a fresh green salad with fresh tomatoes is some kind of obligatory meal element? An alternative solution here would be to employ antifragile thinking to your diet and ditch out-of-season fresh salads entirely.

The next time you prepare a recipe calling for tomatoes, forget those tasteless, overpriced "fresh" tomatoes in your grocery store's produce section. Use canned tomatoes.

There. I just saved you two bucks.

Readers! What's your take?

Related Posts:
The "Don't Buy" List For A Low-Budget Kitchen
Where Going Generic Works... And Where It Doesn't
Is Organic Food Healthier? Or Just Another Aspirational Product?




How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

CK Friday Links--Friday April 26, 2013

Readers! I'm back from traveling--thanks for your patience while I took a break from running my links posts. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

PS: Follow me on Twitter!
*************************
Why the Standard American Diet is not the ERE way. (Early Retirement Extreme)

Consumers, beware when retailers "anchor" you. (Save. Spend. Splurge.)

Excellent criteria for dividing up the household chores. [Readers, how about you? How do you divide up housework?] (BbSezMore)

Money-saving spring cleaning tips. (Owlhaven)

Five fitness buzzwords that make me want to punch a hole in the wall. (Nerd Fitness, via Ombailamos)

Do I have to make my blog mobile? Do people still read, even? (5 Second Rule)

We should decriminalize certain types of plagiarism. (Poynter Institute)

Do you have an interesting article or recipe? Want a little extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Disputing My Own Negative Self-Talk

Readers, this is just a quick follow up to Tuesday's post on disputing our negative internal explanations. I have to share my own personal example of negative self-talk with you.

I had been working on the other day's post for forever, and I was really struggling with it. I just couldn't get it right. In fact, I still kind of think it's pretty bad. The flow of the piece isn't quite right and, I don't know, it seems kind of boring.

Which is a tragedy on some level because this concept from Martin Seligman's book Learned Optimism was a truly powerful, life-changing insight for me. I wanted to get the central idea across to readers using an everyday example, but it just wasn't working.

So, here was my negative self-talk as I was working on the post:

Jeez Dan, you really suck at writing. You are so slow. It takes you a zillion edits to even get a decent paragraph written. You are never going to amount to anything as a writer.

Heavy, right? But then I burst out laughing at the irony of it all: I was guilty of negative self-talk as I was writing a piece on disputing negative self-talk! Hilarious.

So, what did I do? I took my own dose of Dr. Seligman's medicine: I "disputed" it.

Stop! You don't suck at writing. You're just struggling with this specific piece. And so what if it takes you lots of edits to get something worded just right? PS: A zillion isn't even a real number. Finally, who says you're not going to amount to anything as a writer? What does that even mean? You had 800,000 pageviews last year at Casual Kitchen, and you've created a body of work here that's approaching 700 articles. I'd say that amounts to something, wouldn't you?

I couldn't really come up with anything to dispute the "you are so slow" statement. But, well, three out of four ain't bad.

Guess what happened next after I conducted this little experiment in disputation (besides realizing that maybe I should, uh, reread Seligman's book)? I went right back to writing and pounded out yet another post. And I had a big smile on my face.





How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Dispute This! Negative Self-Talk And Better Health

Susie* had been careful and disciplined with her diet. For the last three weeks, she'd been paying extra attention to what she ate. She cut out sugary drinks and reduced her between-meal snacking. And what little snacking she did do was on healthier foods like unsalted nuts, fiber-rich fruit, and so on. She was starting to find real success changing her eating habits.

Everything was going great.... until last Friday.

That's when Susie went out with a big group of coworkers after work. It was fun. She had a couple of big, sugary frozen margaritas. Somebody ordered a big platter of chicken wings, and she ate... several. And then, for dinner, she had a huge burger and a ton of fries.

So when Susie woke up Saturday morning, this is what she said to herself:

Great job Susan. Really good. You really blew it with your diet, didn't you? Jeez, you are such a glutton. Absolutely no self-control. You've just ruined your diet.

Readers: what is Susie likely to do next? Do you think the odds are good that she'll return to her prior habit of cleaner eating? Or will her diet go off the rails?

Would you believe that Susie's own words play a gigantic role in determining the answer?

One of the most important insights in Martin Seligman's striking book Learned Optimism is the strong link between what Susie says to herself and her future actions. Let's take a moment and analyze her self-talk:

You really blew it with your diet
Jeez, you are such a glutton
Absolutely no self-control
You've just ruined your diet

What do these sentences have in common?

For one thing, they're judgmental and pessimistic. Deeply so. Dr. Seligman would say they are permanent, pervasive and personal. Sure, admittedly, Susie experienced a setback in her diet. But what she's doing here is taking a one-time mistake and extrapolating it into permanent negative traits. This is a single instance of poor eating, but according to her self-talk, she views it as "proof" that she's a diet-ruining glutton with no self-control.

Look, we all screw up occasionally. We're only human. And from time to time, we all use negative language when we're angry at ourselves for screwing up. Take it from me, an expert negative self-judger: it is really, really hard to avoid doing this.

The problem is, this negative explanatory style sets us up for future failure. Our negative explanations usually become self-fulfilling. With her negative self-talk, Susie is actually increasing the chances that she will revert back to her old, unhealthy eating habits.

So what's the solution? The solution is to train yourself to dispute these negative statements--and to do so instinctively. Here's an example of what Susie could say next:

No, wait. Stop. Just because I overate on a single Friday night does not mean I "blew it" with my diet. It does not mean I am a glutton. In fact I've eaten really well for three full weeks! If anything, that is proof that I do have a lot of self-control. I just had a one-evening letdown in my eating habits. There's no way my diet's "ruined." It's up to me to decide how I eat going forward.

Unlike the first set of Susie's statements, all of which are either false or cartoonishly exaggerated, these disputative statements have the benefit of actually being true.

In fact, it's usually quite easy to find evidence to support your disputations. As Seligman says: "most of the time you will have facts on your side, since pessimistic reactions to adversity are so often overreactions." We tend to catastrophize in reaction to our setbacks, and our minds reach for extremely negative conclusions. And once again, our negative internal explanations can lead us into a self-fulfilling prophesy. In Susie's case, it may mean actually behaving in the future like a glutton with no self-control. It's the exact result she dreads.

Okay. You've heard Susie's initial negative self-talk and you've heard her disputation of that self-talk. What do you think her most likely course of action will be now? I'd bet she gets right back to her established pattern of clean eating.

Our minds are always chattering away, constantly making predictions, judgments and explanations. And when we experience a failure or a setback, our minds instantly leap to the most dire negative explanation. Once again, the secret is to dispute that instant negative explanation. Change it.

Our observations of reality are both highly subjective and self-fulfilling. We owe it to ourselves to see ourselves in a positive--and accurate--light.

This post is gratefully dedicated to Dr. Martin Seligman and his book Learned Optimism.

* not her real name--in fact I pretty much made this person up.





How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

The Extreme Reach Fallacy

1) Count calories? Who has time for that?

2) Keep track of what I eat? Nah, I don't want to watch my diet that carefully. Can't I just enjoy my food?

3) There's no WAY I'd track my expenses to the penny. What are you, anal?

Readers, can you see what these three sentences have in common?

Each involves shooting down an idea by jumping to the extreme. In all three cases, the speaker makes a potential solution seem more difficult than it really is, which gives him a gift-wrapped justification for ruling out the idea.

This "Extreme Reach" fallacy is an excuse script that lets us rationalize and maintain our prior unsuccessful habits.

Let's put the sentences above in context by imagining a conversation that might surround them:

Person A: I'd really like to lose 20 pounds.
Person B: Really? Well, I managed to lose 45 pounds by counting calories. It really worked well for me.
Person A (defensive): Count calories? Who has time for that?

See what just happened there? Person A opens a conversation by claiming he wants to lose weight, but then when presented with a possible solution, he makes the absurd claim that counting calories takes too much time.

Never mind that counting calories actually doesn't take much time at all, and never mind that some have found it to be astoundingly effective. The point, of course, is that Person A gets to act like he wants to lose weight, while creating a ready-made rationalization for not taking action. And if Person B is a member of polite society, she'll smile wanly and change the subject. Which completes the circle of rationalization.

Hard to believe all this can happen in such a short conversation, right?

Okay, let's move on to our second example:

Person C: How in the world do you stay so thin? What do you do?
Person D: Oh, I struggled with my weight for years. But in 2010, I decided to keep a notebook where over three months I wrote down everything I ate. Literally everything. Man, I couldn't believe it when I saw it all in my own handwriting--how many sodas I was drinking, how much ice cream, how many snacks. It forced me to really accept what I ate. After that I started making big changes to my eating habits.
Person C (defensive): Keep track of what I eat? Nah, I don't want to watch my diet that carefully. Can't I just enjoy my food?

Person C leaps to an extreme conclusion too: keeping track of what she eats means she has to watch her diet more carefully than she'd like. Worse, it will interfere with her enjoyment of food.

This claim is of course exactly backwards. It's actually more plausible that keeping track of what she eats would help her enjoy her food more. Further, what does "watch my diet that carefully" mean, exactly? There are lots of ways to track your diet, some of which are probably easier than she thinks.

Sadly, she didn't leave the door open for these considerations. This idea died the moment it collided with her mind.

Do you see the pattern here? Now, to our last example:

Person Y: How did you manage to retire at such a young age? Man, I'd love to quit my job and retire early.
Person Z: Have you heard of this book Your Money Or Your Life?
Person Y: Yes! I saw something about it on some guy's food blog that I read every so often. He wrote some series on it. It was kind of long and boring, so I didn't read it.
Person Z: Well, we basically followed the steps of the book, starting several years ago. We started by tracking our expenses to the penny for a full ye--
Person Y (defensive, interrupting): There's no WAY I'd track my expenses to the penny. What are you, anal?

Ouch, right? Person Y spontaneously murders the conversation with an extreme reach excuse, and he also gets in a bonus dig at Person Z. (Well played!) Person Y knows for sure that tracking your expenses is "anal" and therefore unworthy of consideration.

But wait. What if tracking your expenses is just another minor daily habit, like brushing your teeth? That's what we found here at CK: within days of adopting our expense-tracking habit, we were doing it in a fraction of the time we spent brushing our teeth.

Or is brushing your teeth anal too?

Either way, instead of considering a new idea that might be congruent with his goals, Person Y employs the extreme reach fallacy to rationalize taking no action. And he likely walks away from this conversation with an improved opinion of himself.

Watch for this excuse script in and around your daily life. Believe me: now that you're familiar with it, you'll see it and hear it all over the place. Don't complete the circle of rationalization.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Ramit at I Will Teach You To Be Rich for helping me think through some of the ideas in this post.

What Is An Antifragile Diet?

So if you agree that we need "balanced" nutrition of a certain combination, it is wrong to immediately assume that we need such balance at every meal.
--From Nicholas Taleb's latest book Antifragile

The idea that every meal should consist of, say, a salad, a vegetable, a meat, a piece of fruit and a dessert is pretty much a complete fiction created in just the past few centuries of human existence.

Yes, you need a balanced diet. But you don't need every single one of your meals to be balanced. Moreover, your diet may actually be better balanced if you subject it to imbalances from time to time.

Roll this idea over in your mind and you'll arrive at some interesting implications. For one thing, it supports one of the fundamental pillars of the food philosophy here at Casual Kitchen: you don't need meat at every meal. Over a period of days and weeks, yes, of course, your body has specific protein needs you'll need to fulfill. But you do not need a fixed amount of protein every single day. In other words, consider that your body's protein and amino acid needs can be met flexibly, creatively and far less expensively without a daily helping of high-cost meats.

Further, we can find intriguing support for other central elements of low-cost eating. There's nothing wrong, for example, with building your diet almost entirely on low-cost, in-season fruits and vegetables. Don't worry if you eat mostly tree fruits, leafy greens and summer vegetables in the spring and summer--when, conveniently, these foods are least expensive. And don't worry if you completely switch away from these foods when they go out of season (and their prices skyrocket) in the fall and winter. After all, that's when you'll switch to those seasons' least expensive foods, like healthy cabbage, potatoes and root vegetables.

The idea that a "real" meal has to have a broad range of specific elements--that it must contain things like soup, bread and a salad of mixed greens with three and half grape tomatoes on it--is just an artificial expectation created for us by restaurants, the food industry and by our own presumptions of a proper life of modern convenience.

And of course, basing meals around these artificial expectations costs us an unexpectedly large amount of money, with little nutritional return. Long before the modern conception of a "balanced meal" ever came about, humans survived just fine. Your body will survive too.

We can go still further. There's nothing wrong with completely leaving out certain high-cost elements of our diet that we think we need. Consider your family's daily glass of refined, deoxygenated and overpriced Pure Premium orange juice. The idea that your day should start with citrus juice is nice, sure. But it's also an arbitrary idea created for you by modern society. Orange juice is just one example among many of foods and beverages modern eaters consume, most of which are heavily advertised, high-cost, and promoted to us to the point where we assume they are natural. You can safely eliminate these foods from your diet.

Thinking about food this way can be immensely freeing, not to mention immensely less expensive.

Here's the punchline: dietary variation is a positive stressor for your body and for your health. Try it. And remember: everything in moderation. Including moderation.

Related Posts:
Is Organic Food Healthier? Or Just Another Aspirational Product?
The "Don't Buy" List For A Low-Budget Kitchen
How to Blind-Taste and Blind-Test Brands
Thoughts On High-End Cookware





How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter(follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

How Do I Add Eggs To My Diet?

A quick addendum to the other day's post:

Are you looking to add eggs to your diet? Here are the specific posts at Casual Kitchen you can turn to for help:

Seven Ways to Jazz Up Your Morning Eggs
How to Make Pickled Eggs
How to Make a Simple Frittata
The 911 Frittata
Egg on Tata
An Easier Way to Crack An Egg: Blunt Force Trauma
How to Make a Perfectly Boiled Egg Every Time
How Do I Follow the Wheat Belly Diet?
How to Fight Back Against Overpriced Cereal

Enjoy!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

What's the Link Between Dietary Cholesterol and Blood Cholesterol?

Readers, I want to let you in on a little dietary experiment I've been running.

Over the past year or so, I've made one modest adjustment to my diet: I've been starting my days with a simple breakfast of... two eggs. Sometimes I'll include some fruit, occasionally I'll add a third egg, and once in a while I'll add bacon, sausage or some other easy-to-prepare meat. But most of the time, my breakfast is just eggs, a big splash of Tabasco and nada más.

Which means for more than a year, I've been eating about fourteen eggs a week.

More importantly, here's what I don't eat for breakfast: I skip the orange juice, I skip milk. I skip overpriced cereal, toast, and all the rest of the mostly unnecessary foods our society considers "normal" parts of a balanced breakfast.

Other than this change to my breakfast, I've otherwise maintained my reasonably healthy diet and lifestyle.

As a breakfast food, eggs fit my needs perfectly. Unlike carb-heavy cereal, eggs don't leave me ravenous ninety minutes later. They won't give me a brief burst of glucose spaz and then leave me dragging the rest of the morning. Because they're high in protein, eggs are a "slow burn" food with a high satiety factor, so it's sometimes four or five hours before I feel hungry again. Plus, it's easy (and laughably cheap) to fry up a couple of eggs: in 3-4 minutes you're fueled up and ready to go.

Well. A few weeks ago, I went in for a physical and bloodwork. Laura makes me go every so often, so I make sure I go grudgingly and make a big passive-aggressive production out of it.

This year, however, I was really interested to see my cholesterol levels. Would this egg-heavy diet impact my blood cholesterol? I've always had good numbers and good ratios, and my total cholesterol has been stable for years in the 160-170 range.

And the results were a huge surprise. My cholesterol fell even more: from an already-low 165 on my prior test... to a hard-to-believe 146. With good ratios.

After all those eggs--fourteen eggs a week for more than a year--my cholesterol numbers went from excellent to kickass.

Is this a controlled study? No. Is this a scientifically defensible experiment? Duh, of course not. And no, "kickass" is not (yet) a scientifically valid term. This is just a single anecdote, from one guy, with his own genetic and environmental markers. Your mileage is almost guaranteed to vary.

But there's one conclusion you can safely consider here: the link between dietary cholesterol and blood serum cholesterol is far more tenuous than you think. Food for thought, isn't it?

For Further Reading:
Understanding Cholesterol Numbers at WebMD


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.