Comments on: What You Spend, What You Eat: The Deep Connection Between Food and Personal Finance

By: Christine

Christine — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 17:37:10 +0000

Trent,

I’d love to see your recipe for garlic/rosemary chicken. You mentioned getting some great cookbooks recently – care to share titles of your favorites?

I’m just starting to cook more at home as opposed to going out, but I’m getting bored with the same old stuff each week!

Thanks for another great and very needed post,

Christine

By: KMunoz

KMunoz — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 17:23:30 +0000

Have you read Dinner With Dad? The author decided to spend one full school year preparing and eating dinners with his family, something he hadn’t done in years due to his busy Manhattan job. You might find it really interesting… it’s an easy read, but he does come to many of the same realizations as you.

By: Trent

Trent — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 17:02:11 +0000

John is right about the cooking blog. I feel uncomfortable launching without some material built up and I’m still somewhat struggling to find my “voice” with writing about food.

By: John

John — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:40:25 +0000

I’m guessing that even though he has reservations about revealing a cooking blog, Trent has been building up articles like he did when he launched the Simple Dollar. I would not be surprised if within the next year we see “The Simple Kitchen” make it’s debut.

By: Ryan Hanser

Ryan Hanser — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 14:14:15 +0000

Regarding the ‘value’ (political, economic, psychological, moral, etc.) of food, I’d recommend Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” as a deeper dive into the benefits of conscious consumption.

By: k12linux

k12linux — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 05:07:08 +0000

A in NC, good point about “cheap” cooking vs. “frugal” cooking. I’m sure we could cut an extra $50/week from our food budget. We figure if we are going to go through the effort of cooking everything ourselves then we’re going to get the most out of it. So quality both in terms of nutrition and taste is important to us. I also try to avoid things like hydrogenated oils and other ingredients that the “experts” say are bad for you and need not be in your diet anyhow.

By: k12linux

k12linux — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 05:04:37 +0000

By: Trent

Trent — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 03:02:08 +0000

I would like to make this blog full time someday soon (that would give me time to launch the cooking blog and do some other things I’d like to do), but I’ve never been able to live off of the income from this blog and support a family of four.

By: Ty Brown

Ty Brown — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:05:46 +0000

BTW, I thought I read an interview from you where you said you make your living with this blog. In this post you reference a job. Which is it? Maybe I was mistaken.

By: Ty Brown

Ty Brown — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 23:59:59 +0000

The more I watch Food Network the more I appreciate good food and the higher my food spending goes. It’s worth it, though.

By: A in NC

A in NC — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 23:45:52 +0000

Wow, once again the comments were about as good as the blog itself.
We figgered out that eating out was killing our budget and tried the “tightwad gazette approach”. We really cut back and got it down to $40 a week. Our teenager was ready to kill us as a result. Too tight. so we lightened up to $50 a week AND gave each person $10 of “walking around money”. If she wanted expensive cereal it came out of that fund. Great resolution.
We are all happier cuz sometimes you just WANT that expensive thing at teh grocery store. As long as we aren’t eating in restaurants (my cooking blows those out of the water i learned) and not buying convenience foods, the extras help us keep from losing it and blowing the whole plan.

One thing a friend who read all the tighwad gazette books and I gleaned was a lot of “frugal” cooking is filled with cream of mushroom soup, white pasta, and hamburger. We just don’t eat that way and aren’t going to in the name of saving money. So a blog on cooking with finances for the New world order would rock!

By: guinness416

guinness416 — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 21:40:47 +0000

To echo Liz, in the decade or so I’ve been working on and off in North American restaurants and bars I’ve never found the nationality of the staff/owners (and I’m one of those filthy immigrants) has any correlation to the hygiene in the kitchen. Plenty of native-born owners and chefs don’t give a damn about educating on and enforcing hygiene – and really, some of the things I’ve seen would make your hair stand on end. Plenty do, and run a clean shop. Likewise the furriners in the business.

But your broader point is on the right track – you can’t expect restaurant owners to care too deeply about your health (and I’m more neurotic about the quantity of butter that goes into restaurant food than washed hands). I’m reading Atul Gawande’s “Better” at the moment, and one of his essays is about how and why the professionals in his Boston hospital, nurses and doctors both, ignore the necessity to wash or alcohol-gel their hands between patients. If doctors put their patients at risk and know it, why expect that chefs will care about your health.

By: Liz

Liz — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 21:03:33 +0000

@deRuiter….Oh please, don’t be so elitist and egocentric….people are people, including those who work in restaurant kitchens. Some are clean and follow sanitary proceedures and some are not. Some may have illnesses and some do not….has nothing to do with whether someone is “illegal” or not. Substitute your term “illegal” for any other term describing any other ethnic minority and see how you sound. I have traveled to many third world countries and been in the cleanest homes imaginable. People are people no matter where they are from. Some good, some bad, some clean, some not, some careful, some not, some sanitary, some not…..most people who work in restaurants(except managment or owners, perhaps) are not paid if they do not show up for work, foreign born or not!
Please! Ugly Americanism at it’s best. :(

By: caryn verell

caryn verell — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 16:46:50 +0000

a few years ago when my husband and i discovered we had no money and lots of debt, we wrote up a budget and found that we were going to pizza hut once a week-and this cost us over $2000. a year…i can cook a lotta food (and really good food at that) for that kinda moolah.

By: Rob Madrid

Rob Madrid — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 16:17:04 +0000

Trent I have to say you inspired me to cook more. My epiphany moment came one day when I decided to stop at McDonalds for lunch after the market, on a whim I decided to try making lunch at home. It was such an enjoyable experience buying chopping and cooking my own meal that I’ve never looked back.

One great spot to get new recipe ideas is womens mags, every time my Wife flies she picks up a Womens Own (UK) it’s given me loads of new ideas, stuff I would never have thought of, like garbanzo beans for example. Don’t know if I ever get to Trent’s level but it doesn’t really matter, I do it because I enjoy it.

Were hoping in the next few years to buy a house with a small garden and then start container gardening.

By: madisongrrl

madisongrrl — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 15:43:04 +0000

deRuiter……have you ever worked in the restaurant industry? What makes you think it is only the foreign born people don’t have proper sanitation techniques? When jobs are low paying it don’t attract the cream of the crop employees….period. Foreign born employees are the back bone of the kitchen. And when people need their jobs they listen to instructions and do what they are supposed to be doing.

Not only that, it is the executive chef’s job to train and manage his staff properly. If someone isn’t using proper sanitation then it is the exe. chef’s job to correct that. End of story.

By: Dave

Dave — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 15:39:31 +0000

In relation to the statement about not getting sick. I have worked at a restaurant and I have seen many times the waitstaff touching ready to eat foods like salads and bread without washing their hands. Since these employees handled money you can imagine that the transfer of bacteiria and other rather unpleasant microbes to the food happened often which could result in a possible illness. One reason I got out of the restaurant biz.

By: K. Cook

K. Cook — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 15:18:21 +0000

It took us 2 years to go through a quarter of a beef but it all tasted good. Only thing we’d do differently is get had more stew meat than hamburger – stew meat you can cook up into a meal with biscuits on the side, hamburger needs…help.

By: Dan

Dan — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 14:20:07 +0000

A nice side benefit is that this makes going out to dinner all the more special.

By: Niki

Niki — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 13:58:55 +0000

Look for heirloom variety seeds, and harvest the seeds for the following year. You’ll get the highest quality veg, with seeds that haven’t been tampered with, and won’t have to buy seeds again.