My Vegan Budget Foods

Do I even have to expound on why money is tight? Everyone has their own story, mine is currently the story of a woman working an hourly wage at a temp job. The upside for me is that I have the option of working for paid overtime if and when I want. My client currently has more than enough work to go around, and would love to have me there on Saturdays chipping away at the immense amount of data currently pouring in.

My current job is entering, managing, and reporting on flu vaccinations, eventually to include H1N1 vaccinations, and eventually to include data concerning suspected and or confirmed cases of illness. It's not where I thought I would be if you asked me 6 months ago, but I love working with data and building reports. It speaks to my science background.

Unfortunately since I'm an hourly worker, I don't get paid if I don't work. The past 2 weeks have been really hard on me. I started getting sick on September 17th, and tried to push through it. That was a mistake. I ended up seriously sick, in bed, with what was diagnosed as sinusitis (when I finally decided it wasn't going away and I needed to see a doctor). I relented my anti-antibiotic stance and now after a full course of little pink pills I'm feeling more like myself.

The lesson here is two fold. First, if I don't work, I don't get paid, and it's harder to pay the bills let alone buy groceries. Second, If I'm sick with anything worse than a cough and sniffle, and especially with "flu-like symptoms", then I'm stuck at home and can't go to the store to buy the things I need. In fact that last one is an important reminder to anyone who isn't used to getting sick. For public safety you shouldn't be going around passing your disease along to other people. No one wants your swine flu. What this really means is that you should have at least 2 weeks of food and provisions (better to have a whole month just in case). I lucked out in that my husband was well and could go out and run errands for me. But it was still a burden for him as he was also trying to pick up shifts to cover our expenses.

Also if you are the primary cook in the house (like I am) or live alone, it's a good idea to have foods you don't have to work for. This is one area that I failed miserably at. We had lots of food in the house, but most of it was "challenging" foods that take more than a few minutes to prep and/or need constant stove-side tending. Think easy-prep crockpot or casseroles. Better yet, stockpile a few already assembled casseroles in your freezer, sort of like a mini-pregnancy without the fun party and gifts. Soup is good but after the first week I didn't want any more salty broth. Gatorade. I don't drink gatorade "recreationally" ie. when I'm not sick, so it's not something I tend to have around, but over the past couple years I've had a stomach bug and now this last round of sick that made it a challenge to keep myself hydrated. It also helps with calories and electrolytes when you can't bring yourself to cook or eat anything else. So buy some gatorade, put it in a closet, and forget about it.

Today was my first day out of the house since visiting the Dr. and my first trip to the store since I started getting sick. I bought at least a month's worth of food. I'll admit that I tend to stockpile anyway, in order to take advantage of sales, but I bought a lot of things that never go on sale and never have coupons like dried beans - which are cheaper per bean than canned, even when the canned are on sale. I'll cook and cool the beans in the crockpot, batch by batch. Once the beans have cooled in their cooking liquid I transfer them to 2 cup deli containers draining most of the liquid and freeze them. Each container is roughly equivalent to a can. Really it's a compromise between cost and convenience. Cooking them in the crockpot is a background task that takes no real work at all and frozen beans are almost as convenient as canned. Onions, potatoes, carrots, cabbage, and winter squashes will keep well for a month or more if stored properly. Frozen veggies are convenient and a good bargain since they won't suffer if I don't use them right away. Tofu, tempeh, and soymilk keep well unopened in the refrigerator. And of course grains and pastas are always on the shelf. I think the only thing I added for flu season is my favorite bland cracker. Oh and maybe a frozen treat like popsicles, sorbet, or dairy-free icecream.

So I now have more than a month's worth of food in the house, especially if you consider that most recipes feed 4-6 and there are only 2 of us. I like leftovers for lunch and even breakfast, so I never cut the recipes down.

The following is a very rough sketch of a menu plan... really it's more like a list of options that we'll choose from depending on our moods day to day. The meals based on fresh and fragile ingredients are the starred at the top, and the rest are pantry meals. I feel pretty good about it.

The Resolution...

Recently I've acquired as gifts two new cookbooks: Veganomicon: the Ultimate Vegan Cookbook by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero as well as How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food by Mark Bittman. Both are tomes among cookbooks. I fell in love with the Veganomicon while visiting friends in New York; so many fabulous-sounding recipes! The Bittman book was a gift from Paul's grandmother who learned about it in a Fresh Air interview with Mark Bittman.

I think that it was the overwhelming urge to cook everything in the Veganomicon that drove me to reflect on my previous relationships with cookbooks. I owe my love of cooking to growing up watching PBS. Actually, being an avid PBS-watcher as a small child accounts for a lot of my hobbies: woodworking, gardening, home-improvement to name a few. My first excursions into the world of cooking were heavily influenced by my favorite shows: The Frugal Gourmet with Jeff Smith, The French Chef with Julia Child, and Yan Can Cook with Martin Yan. The most important thing that I learned from these shows was to be fearless with food. By the age of eleven I started cooking for myself and occasionally for my family as well. I made the choice to become a vegetarian and I didn't want to sacrifice my love of food. I started heavily modifying recipes to make them fit my new food choices. I became an adventurous cook. Having very little actual cooking experience, I relied on my visual experience watching those shows on PBS. My choices in cookbooks were heavily influenced by those visual experiences. I chose cookbooks with large color photography that in today's blogiverse we call "food porn". But the recipes hardly ever lived up to the fantasy and I started using cookbooks with pretty pictures as inspiration only and making up my own dishes that matched the flavors that my imagination tasted in the pictures.

It wasn't until recently that I started following other people's recipes faithfully. A few years ago I met a vegan housewife who actually managed to make menu plans and shopping lists, and she introduced me to Veggie Life Magazine. My mother, like most other women I knew did her shopping based on a rough estimate of what her family needed for the week and whatever else "looked good". Sometimes that meant that things didn't get used in time and wilted or spoiled, sometimes it meant that we didn't have all of the ingredients we needed for a particular dish and had to run out to the store again during the week. I inherited this pattern of shopping behavior, until I made friends with this vegan housewife who made shopping lists. I subscribed to VeggieLife Magazine and started building menu plans and shopping lists around each new issue. This renewed my faith in other people's recipes and my faith in new ingredients.

Two years ago Paul and I embarked on a major home renovation, choosing to do as much of the work ourselves as possible. For the better part of the past two years I have survived on a limited budget and without a kitchen. The crockpot and toaster oven have been my friends. Now I have a working kitchen with brand-spanking-new appliances. I have more time to cook, and the Veganomicon has renewed my interest in following other people's recipes. I want to be an artist with food, and one of the principles of The Artist's Way is the need to continually replenish the well from which we draw our inspiration. It is my resolution this year to work my way through as many recipes in my cookbook collection as possible starting with the Veganomicon. I'm not going to use a recipe for every meal, and I'm not goig to refrain from improvising or cooking old favorites, but each week I will chose a handful or recipes from one of my cookbooks and blog about them.