Spicy Morning Oatmeal

I make oatmeal for Laura nearly every morning. She has borderline high cholesterol (it runs in her family), so this is one of my many schemes to try to keep her alive.

But oatmeal can get incredibly boring, especially if you eat it every day. Heck, it's boring for me and I don't even have to eat it. That's why every so often I'll add something new to her oatmeal, or introduce some oatmeal variation to keep things interesting.

This time, though, I had the evil idea of messing with her head, so I decided to make her oatmeal spicy.

She loved it. Heh. The joke was on me.

Not only does this oatmeal variation mess with your significant other's head--a lofty goal in and of itself--it also cures boredom. For both of you. And there's an extra benefit: It clears your sinuses too! Highly recommended during spring allergy season or as a cold remedy at any time of year.

I hope you enjoy this unusual breakfast variation as much as we did.

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Spicy Morning Oatmeal

Ingredients:
1 cup water
1 Tablespoon raisins (optional)
1/2 cup old-fashioned oats
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
assorted other toppings: brown sugar, honey, nuts, fruit, etc.

Directions:
1) Bring water (and optional raisins) to a boil. Add oats, reduce heat, stir, and simmer, stirring occasionally, for about 4 minutes, or until the oats are done to your liking.

2) Put oatmeal in a bowl, combine with cayenne pepper, stir well, add toppings of your choice and place in front of your unwitting significant other.
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How to Fight Back Against Overpriced Cereal

This is part two of a two-part series on cereals: If you haven't already, please see part one: Just Say No to Overpriced Boxed Cereal.
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In my prior post, I discussed the various offensive marketing techniques that cereal manufacturers use in their efforts to maintain high prices. Today's post will suggest ways for consumers to fight back.

Read the net weight and do some quick math
This first tip is simple and instinctive for many frugal grocery shoppers, but it serves three non-obvious purposes. First, it will help you compare cereal prices fairly across brands sold at different weights. Second, it exposes just how preposterously expensive most cereal brands truly are. Third, you'll catch any and all examples of stealth price hikes.

First, look at the net weight number on the front of the box, and do the math on how much you are actually spending per pound of food. Remember, a 12-ounce box of cereal priced at a seemingly acceptable $4.99 really costs $6.65 per pound. That $6.65 could instead pay for 3 dozen eggs, or, shockingly, 13 pounds of generic oatmeal. You can get much more value for your money on almost any other breakfast food, a subject we'll address in a moment.

But the most important benefit by far from paying attention to the net weight information on cereal boxes is that you'll never again be tricked by a sneaky stealth price hike.

Instant retribution
But why stop at just noticing a stealth price hike? Why not punish the cereal maker with instant retribution?

From now on, whenever you see a company pull this stunt, punish them right then and there by not making the purchase. If there's ever a time to drop a product and change brands, it's immediately after a stealth hike. I believe that we have an obligation as consumers to vote with our wallets and show food companies that they will lose sales and market share for using ethically questionable pricing techniques.

Scan the ingredients
Food manufacturers are required to list all ingredients in their foods in order of their preponderance. Thus if you see sugar, high-fructose corn syrup or any other sweetener in the first two or three ingredients of any cereal, just put it back on the shelf. You're better off eating real food. The same goes for salt/sodium chloride.

And if you think it takes too much time to scan ingredient lists while you're in the grocery store, keep reading. At the end of this essay, I'll give you two examples of how, in just seconds, you can extract valuable information from any ingredient label. That's time well invested in my view.

Boycott brands that market aggressively to children
We've talked in Part 1 of this series about how our youngest consumers are often least able to defend themselves against well-crafted marketing and advertising. And many parents will tell you that children can be shockingly brand-conscious. That's why, unfortunately, it's often a really good investment for cereal companies to spend large sums of money to advertise directly to children (this logic holds true in the toy, clothing and media industries as well).

Once again, we can vote with our pocketbooks and simply not buy these products. When companies recognize that it will cost them profits rather than earn them profits by marketing aggressively to children, they'll change their behavior. And perhaps then we'll have a healthier, less consumerist generation growing up behind us.

Screw cereal: try other foods for breakfast
There is a virtual infinity of breakfast foods available to us, ranging from healthy and laughably cheap oatmeal to perfectly boiled eggs to breakfast burritos, to fresh fruit and yogurt. Eggs are a particularly good example of a healthy food that can be endlessly varied, and at around $2 a dozen you can eat up to 15 breakfasts for the price of a single box of cereal.

Here are some more ideas for cereal substitutes: simple bread and cheese; two or three pieces of fresh fruit, bagels with toppings of your choice, smoothies, simple energy-dense meats or sausages, cold cuts with or without bread, etc. Heck, even cold pizza can be a satisfying breakfast food on occasion. And there are still more reader suggestions for alternate breakfast foods in the comments section of yesterday's post.

Every single one of these breakfast food ideas is significantly cheaper on a per-calorie and per-pound basis than branded boxed cereal, and not a single one of them will give you a sugar high or make your teeth hurt.

Be a swing voter
In the political area, the term "swing voter" refers to voters who are willing to vote for either party, depending on the issues or the candidate. They are the most coveted of all voters, and they tend to get the most attention--and concessions--when election time rolls around.

I want you to think of your consumption patterns in exactly the same way. Consumers are rarely rewarded for mindless loyalty, and for those consumers who are willing to "swing" from brand to brand, there are all sorts of deals and incentives out there.

Every company in the food industry wants more market share, and many will dangle juicy incentives in front of you--including coupons, buy one get one free deals and other enticements--to get you to try their products. Why not take advantage? If you see an attractive incentive for an alternate brand, try it. You might like the product even more than your regular brand, and if it's cheaper, so much the better.

Obviously you can't do this simultaneously with all of your product buying decisions, or your weekly grocery trips will end up being day-long exercises in decision-making. And I never encourage using coupons as a reason to buy food products you don't need.

But each week, why not grab one or two of those juicy, dangling incentives and see if it introduces you to a better and cheaper version of something you already buy? (NB: For further reading on how to grapple with the dizzying array of choices available to consumers, I highly recommend reading The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz).

In politics, it's the swing voters who often carry the day in a competitive election. In the ultra-competitive food industry, the same could be said for swinging consumers (and no, I don't mean that kind of swinging).

Readers, what other suggestions do you have to fight back against the cereal cabal?
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Addendum: How to Extract Information from an Ingredient List in Just Seconds
I'll close this post with two photos of cereal ingredient lists and a brief demonstration of how you can extract valuable information from these lists with just a quick glance.

Remember, the higher up an ingredient is on the list, the greater its prevalence in the food, so all you really need to do is read the first four or five ingredients. If you're not happy about the nature of those four or five ingredients, you won't be happy with most of what's in the cereal. Thus it takes just a few seconds for you to extract all of the information you need to make a highly informed buying decision.

The most sobering thing you'll find when doing this exercise is how heavily most branded cereals depend on sweeteners, salt and artificial ingredients. Here's a quick look at the ingredients in Cocoa Puffs:



Shockingly, the first ingredient isn't sugar. But the next two ingredients are sweeteners, and the fourth ingredient is a thickening agent. It's not until the fifth ingredient, cocoa, that we arrive at what is more or less an actual food. Other than that, it looks like salt, anti-caking agents and artificial flavors dominate the remainder of this ingredient list. Yummy.

Oh, and did anyone notice the irony of Cocoa Puffs receiving a seal of approval from the American Heart Association?

Okay, here's the ingredients list for Corn Pops:


Here, our second, third and fourth ingredients are all sweeteners. Followed deliciously by salt. Put this box down and slowly walk away.

Related Posts:
Spending to Save: Frugality and Expensive Food
How are You Adjusting to the Economic Crisis? A Question for CK Readers
Seven Ways to Jazz Up Your Morning Eggs
Mastering Kitchen Setup Costs
How to Write an Effective Complaint Letter



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Just Say No to Overpriced Boxed Cereal

This is part one of a two-part series on branded boxed cereals.
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Here at Casual Kitchen, we have completely banned sweetened and processed cereals from our pantry. These sugar- and salt-laden quasi-foods are one of the most pernicious rip-offs in the entire food industry.

They are wastefully and often deceivingly packaged. On a per-pound basis they cost more than expensive cuts of meat. And worst of all, they often target the consumers among us who are least able to resist: our children.

Today's article will expose some of the noxious marketing methods practiced in the cereal industry. In a few days, I'll follow up with a post that suggests some ways to fight back.

Let's start by asking a fundamental question: why is cereal so expensive? How do these companies get away with charging so much money for such unhealthy food?

Here's how. First, just a few large cereal manufacturers control the distribution channels to your grocery store, limiting competition and giving them pricing power similar to those of spice manufacturers. Second, cereal is a particularly egregious example of a second order food, larded up with an enormous stack of processing costs, advertising costs and packaging costs that get passed to you as the consumer.

But perhaps the sneakiest and most anti-consumer trick these companies use is the stealth price hike, where the manufacturer keeps the price of the cereal the same, but reduces the amount of product sold in the box. This technique is used widely throughout the consumer products industry, and it's effective primarily because most consumers simply don't notice.

Classy, right? Well, imagine if you were a cereal manufacturer and you used this sneaky technique repeatedly over a period of years. Your one-pound, $4.99 box of cereal would shrink to 15 ounces, then 14.5 ounces, then 13 ounces, then 12 ounces. It's worth noting that a 12 ounce box of cereal priced at $4.99 really costs $6.65 per pound!

Do these food manufacturers actually consider this a viable long-term pricing strategy? Something tells me that ten years from now, when we're paying $4.99 for a half-ounce box of cereal, consumers might begin to see through this.

Even the way cereal is sold to us is a sham. Walk down your local grocery store's cereal aisle and you'll see row after row of extremely tall, skinny and lightweight boxes. There would be far less packaging waste and it would be far more efficient to transport cereal if it were packed in shorter, cube-shaped boxes, but tall, skinny boxes look like they are bigger.

Thus, thanks to the many thousands of hours the cereal cabal has spent test marketing product shapes and sizes, your cereal comes to you inefficiently packaged--and costs, waste and efficiency be damned.

Of course there's an irony here: when every brand uses identical tricks, nobody stands out. That's why, when you wander unsuspectingly into your grocery store's cereal aisle, you get blinded by this:


Just look at that picture for a few seconds and tell me it doesn't make both your eyes and your teeth hurt.

And by the end of my third bowl [of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs], I usually feel sick.
--Calvin, from Calvin and Hobbes

I suppose the most pernicious aspect of the cereal industry is this: there are well-researched reasons why these products are branded and packaged the way they are, with bright colors and cartoon characters. Everything is designed to grab the eyes of your children.

The implicit presumption is that the child, not the parent, makes the buying decision in the grocery store. Moreover, your kids also serve as an indirect reason why these cereals are saturated in sugar and sodium. Children tend to prefer simple tastes like sweet and salty (admittedly, many adults do too), so they gravitate towards cereals that contain extra high-fructose corn syrup and salt.

As consumers, we need to use our collective economic clout and show the companies who make these quasi-foods that we will no longer tolerate cereals that are unhealthy, overpriced and questionably marketed. We want something better. In a few days I'll go over some ideas on how to fight back.
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Readers, tune in tomorrow for the next column in this series: How to Fight Back Against Overpriced Cereal!

Related Posts:
Seven Ways to Jazz Up Your Morning Eggs
Ten Tips to Save Money on Spices and Seasonings
A Recession-Proof Guide to Saving Money on Food
How to Make a Simple Frittata
When High-Fat Food Can Actually Be Healthy For You




How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Calling All Coffee Addicts: 100% Kona Coffee

I've talked about coffee a few times on this blog, sharing our favorite coffee store and our favorite way to make coffee. But until now I've never shared with readers our absolute favorite type of coffee.

This post is for those of you who truly love coffee, particularly if you prefer it strong, dark and bitter. Let me introduce you to Hawaiian Kona coffee.

We discovered Kona coffee a number of years ago on a visit to Hawaii, but to be honest it took us a little while to acquire a taste for this earthy and particularly strong brew.

And we'll probably never acquire a taste for the cost of this coffee, which is a rather unseemly $25.95 per pound. You can't get any further from laughably cheap than that, so obviously we don't drink this stuff every day.

Instead, we drink it on special occasions. Perhaps we'll treat ourselves to a pot of Kona after hard week, or I'll surprise Laura with a cup of it on a Tuesday morning (it's her longest and most grueling day of the workweek) as an extra incentive for her to leap forth and bring home the bacon. Any time we need a so-called happiness booster, a caffeinated kick from a strong pot of Kona coffee always seems to do the trick.

Let me also share the brand we typically buy: Hawaii Mountain Gold Coffee, from the Ferrari Coffee Company. Our favorite is the 100% Kona Dark Roast (a note to readers: this is simply a recommendation and not an affiliate link--we've been very happy with the quality and service of this company after years of ordering and drinking their coffee).

Finally, there's also a more affordable Kona coffee option available: Kona blend, which is a striking and rich tasting blend of Kona and regular coffee. And at a more reasonable $14-15 a pound, it's a lot easier on the wallet.

What is your absolute favorite brand of coffee? And have you ever tried Kona coffee? What did you think of it?

Kona Coffee Resources:
Ferrari Coffee 1-800-288-1542 (We buy the 100% Kona Dark Roast, at $25.95 in the bean or ground.)
Royal Kona Coffee

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How to Live Forever in Ten Easy Steps
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Top Ten Most Popular Posts of Casual Kitchen

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

How to Use Leftover Ingredients

There's a regular occurrence in cooking (I call it the hot dog phenomenon*) that invariably happens whenever you buy ingredients for a homemade recipe: you will always end up with random leftovers of at least some ingredients.

After you're done cooking, and all those leftover ingredients are scattered around your kitchen, how can you make creative use of them? Today I'll share with you a simple example of ingredient reuse that shows how you can make a practically free meal, while reducing waste and saving time and money.

The other day, we had extra cheese left over from making burritos, as well as leftover corn tortillas after stuffing ourselves with homemade tortilla chips a few too many nights in a row. In fact, the corn tortillas were already cut into chip-sized wedges, ready to go, but we just didn't have the stomach for them.

So for the next few mornings, we put the two together and made mini-quesadillas to go along with our eggs. It made for a creative, and essentially free, breakfast, and it was delicious enough to qualify for our list of ways to Jazz Up Your Morning Eggs.

This painfully simple example of ingredient reuse illustrates some of our favorite concepts here at Casual Kitchen. First, reusing leftover ingredients that you've already bought for another recipe is an excellent example of the benefits of scale. We bought these ingredients in bulk, so they were already inexpensive to begin with, yet we derived still more scale benefits by making extra breakfasts from them. And here's yet another scale benefit: we didn't need to plan another meal or make another trip to the store.

Furthermore, how much does it cost to re-use ingredients that likely would have otherwise gone to waste? That's right: nothing. This delicious breakfast was pretty darn close to free, and yet it didn't have the boring and monotonous feel so typical of a meal made of leftovers. I've eaten similar meals in Manhattan diners and foolishly paid $13.95 a plate.

The next time you cook at home and have leftover ingredients, try and think of ways you can make extra meals from the remaining ingredients you have on hand. This is a skill that improves with a little practice--once you put a few simple and inexpensive meals together you'll really start to get the hang of it.

And for those of you interested in how we made our mini-quesadillas, I just put a few pieces of cheese (seasoned with a couple of generous shakes of ground chipotle pepper) between two tortilla triangles...

...and then fried a few of them in a pan right next to our eggs.

What are some examples of free extra meals you've made from leftover ingredients?

* The hot dog phenomenon refers to the fact that hot dogs come in packages of ten, while hot dog buns come in packages of eight--essentially forcing the consumer to buy extra dogs or buns.

Related Posts:
How to Apply the 80/20 Rule to Cooking
More Applications of the 80/20 Rule to Diet, Food and Cooking
When High-Fat Food ... Can Actually Be Healthy For You: Diet and Athletic Training Part 1

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! Another way you can support me is by submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

When High-Fat Food Can Actually Be Healthy For You: Diet and Athletic Training Part 1

Dan: Should we cook the whole thing? Let's cook the whole thing. Life is short.

Laura: Yep. Let's make it even shorter.

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Thus began our breakfast from the other day, consisting of three-quarters of a pound (split between us) of delicious polski kiełbasa from one of our town's local Polish delicatessens. Cost? $3.49. Calories? I don't want to know. Grams of fat? No comment.

Preparing this breakfast was a snap. Slice up the sausage both crosswise and lengthwise into manageable chunks, and fry in a nonstick pan for three or four minutes per side on medium-high heat.

The purpose of today's post is to begin a discussion about energy-dense food, and to explain why it’s actually okay, on occasion, to eat food like today’s Polish sausage, especially for breakfast. This delicious sausage might be pretty high in fat and protein, but that does not mean it is by definition unhealthy. It’s only unhealthy if you're sedentary and you eat this kind of food to excess.

I know this will sound heretical to those readers conditioned by the food industry to believe "fat is bad." But on a typical Sunday, where our afternoon plans might include a five-mile run, a long hike, or two hours on the local tennis courts, we've found that modest portions of a protein-rich (and yes, a relatively fat-rich) food like this actually makes for a nearly perfect energy-dense breakfast.

What does the term "energy-dense" mean? It simply means you get a lot of calories, and thus fuel for your body, in a relatively small volume of food. Note that you'll need to watch your portion size carefully with these kinds of foods. Just a few bites can fuel your body for a surprisingly long time.

And certainly, no energy-dense meal can be good for you if you don't exercise and ultimately burn all of the calories you take in. And if you run out there immediately after a meal like this, you won’t play your best (although you will barf your best). But a modest-sized breakfast of Polish sausage (or perhaps two perfectly boiled eggs), eaten an hour or two before heavy physical activity, will provide you with a far superior fuel than any typical sugar-laden breakfast cereal.

Once again, the key issue is: you need to burn the fuel. If you flatly refuse to exercise and cling to a sedentary lifestyle, then quite frankly you should avoid energy-dense foods as much as possible. It's simply too easy for your body to convert fuel-rich food like this into body fat.

I'll be returning to the subject of food energy-density shortly, where I'll cover other issues related to diet and athletic training, including the pros and cons of a high-carb/low-fat diet, and what kind of diet will help you do heavy athletic training without compromising your muscle mass and immune system.

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This is Part 1 of a three part series on diet and athletic training. Please see:
Part 2: The Pros and Cons of a High-Carb/Low-Fat Diet, and
Part 3: When High-Carb Diets Don't Work.

Related Posts:
How to Make Your Own Inexpensive Sports Drink
Ten Strategies to Stop Mindless Eating
Three Easy, Delicious and Inexpensive Homemade Salad Dressing Recipes

An Easy Granola Recipe

Since the publication of this easy granola recipe, I've put together an extensive blogroll of great granola recipes. Feel free to take a look!
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I really wanted this to be another screed, this time against boxed cereal. But after my outburst on phony syrup last week, a few of my legally inclined readers strongly suggested I settle down for a little while. :)

So instead I'll share with you a pretty easy granola recipe that I've borrowed from a Wall Street Journal article (of all places for a granola recipe!), but then heavily adjusted and modified later. One batch of this will make the equivalent of two boxes of cereal--and it'll taste better, be healthier, and be a heck of a lot cheaper.

It's funny, because where I went to school, "granola" was a perjorative term for people that wore tie-dyed shirts, went heavy on the body hair and really got worked up about the environment. I guess these folks like granola and eat it all the time? I don't know--I just heard the name. Of course I would never use that term myself. :)

Anyway, it's just amusing and sort of ironic that now the Wall Street Journal is running granola recipes. Life just goes in circles, man.

Granola:
(adapted and heavily modified without permission from the Wall Street Journal)

Dry Ingredients:
4 cups oats (not quick oats)
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 cup to 1-1/2 cups of nuts (unsalted almonds, walnuts or even peanuts are fine here)--[3/18/07: if you use peanuts though, use about 1/2 cup only. Otherwise the peanuts pretty much overwhelm the granola]
[Can also leave out nuts and add 1 to 1-1/2 cups raisins or other dried fruit, if desired]

Liquid Ingredients:
1/4 cup oil (corn oil or vegetable oil)
1/4 cup honey
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract (please don't let me catch you using the fake stuff here)

Mix dry ingredients together in a large mixing bowl.
Place liquid ingredients into a small sauce pan and warm on a stove on medium low. Stir until combined.
Pour liquid mixture over dry ingredients and stir well until dry ingredients are coated.
Spread mix on a cookie sheet and bake at 325 for 30-40 minutes until golden brown, stirring every 10-15 minutes or so to prevent burning.

After you've cooked and cooled granola, keep it in a relatively airtight container so it won't get stale.

Enjoy!

Related Posts:
The Granola Recipe Blogroll
Fake Maple Syrup
Waffles!
How to Make a Perfectly Boiled Egg Every Time