Food Geek Reflects on 2017

This certainly has been an exciting year. To cement my title as a true geek I went on a quest to discover exactly how long a tube of tooth paste really lasts. I found that one hundred and forty milliliters really does last four months with a twice daily brush. My teeth must like all that brushing because this year, even with a high sugar diet I had no cavities. I am happy to jump straight to the conclusion that my teeth are in fact omnipotent.  It's the first year of my life that I went in with an exact plan on how I was going to be able to afford to buy household supplies and it's also the first year of my life that I have achieved an amount of money at the end of the year that could potentially fund all the household supplies for 2018. This is brand new for me but it feels good. I realized the true source of credit card spending was uncertainty. All those years I was uncertain if I had the money to cover all the things that were coming at me and so the minute something required money outside the regular monthly budget I'd use a credit card. I would feel guilty and undisciplined using that credit card and that feeling of failure and humility would just launch me into even more impulse spending. The worse I felt the more I spent. I absolutely cannot believe that the balances on my cards are no higher than when this year started.

This year the dish soap fairy went into battle with adversity as a way of relieving her stress that she didn't actually exist. Adversity was so impressed by her ferocity in battle that it decided to give all geeks a break and only cause a minimal amount of trouble. The battle this year was fueled by 947,374 calories to be exact. This cost a grand total of $3,880 in groceries. $1,200 of that was donated by family members who were eager to help put food on my table. I feel really privileged to have been able to celebrate the high fat low carb diet without actually going on it.

In January I predicted that one person would only go through 828,000 calories in one year if they were eating 2,300 calories per day. I predicted that if a person stored up 1,209,664 calories in buckets then that would be enough for them and one slave. As it turns out I am my own slave and so I need to eat a lot more than 2,300 calories per day. I need more like 2,600 calories per day to be exact.  It's a good thing I don't have a slave in addition to slaving away or they would be dead or on their way to dead. They'd only have enough energy to give me the finger before going back to their hard work with blinking, breathing, and dying. Two hard working slaves would need to eat somewhere around 1,894,748 calories.

Here is a prototype list I came up with in January 2017 for a year of stored food:

26 bags of organic oats (1 kg each $5 each 3750 cal each) ($130 all 97500 cal all)
17 jars apple sauce (650 ml each $3 each 300 cal each) ( $51 all 5100 cal all )
8 containers hemp seeds (454 grams each $15 each 2775 cal each) ($120 all 22,200 cal all)
2 bags ground cinnamon (400 grams each $3.70 each 988 cal each) ($7.40 all 1976 cal all)
3 bags flax seed (500 grams each $6.00 each 2666 cal each) ($18 all 7998 cal all)
8 bags of chia seeds (454 grams each $15.50 each 2088 cal each) ($124 all 16,704 cal all)
4 bags raisins (1 kg each $6.00 each 3000 cal each) ($24 all 12,000 cal all)
5 bags jasmine rice (8 kg each $19 each 28,688 cal) ($95 all 143,440 all)
36 bags green lentils (1 kg each $3.50 3500 cal each) ($126 all 126,000 all)
17 jars Nanak Desi Ghee (800 grams each $13.80 each 7008 cal each) ($234 all 119,136  cal all)

49 containers organic sugar (900 grams each $5.50 each 3375 cal each) ($269.50 all 165,375 cal all)
3 containers pure vanilla extract (100 ml each $10 each 243 cal each) ($30 all 729 cal all)
6 bags organic white flour (2kg each $10.50 each 7000 cal each) ( $16.50 all 42,000 cal all)
1 container baking soda (500 grams $1.32 each 0 cal each) ($1.32 all 0 cal all)
1 container sea salt (750 grams $5 each 0 cal each) ($5 all 0 cal)
12 bags Chipits (1.8 kg each $18 each 8400 cal each) ($216 all 100,800 cal all)
2 bags Bob's Red Mill Egg Replacer (453 grams each $15 each 1920 cal each) ($30 all 3840 cal all) 

NO ALGAE!
12 jars peanut butter (1 kg each $8.00 each 6250 cal each) ($96 all 75,000 cal all)
20 bags whole green peas (1800 grams each $4.50 each 5,580 cal each) ($90 all 111,600 cal all)
55 bags rice cakes (241 grams each $5.50 each 910 cal each) ($302.50 all 50,050 cal all)
57 jars pesto sauce (190 grams each $4.60 each 728 cal each) ($262.20 all 41,496 cal all)
36 boxes of tea (20 tea bags each $7.80 each 20 cal each) ($280.80 all 720 cal all)
15 containers honey (1 kg each $12 each 3000 cal each) ($180 all 45,000 cal all)
6 containers miso (400 grams each $8.00 each 1000 cal each) ($48 all 6000 cal all)
10 bottles Bragg seasoning (180 ml each $6.49 each 0 cal each) ($64.90 all)
5 bottles olive oil (375 ml each $12 each 3000 cal each) ($60 all 15,000 cal all)

Total cost: $2882.12
cost/10,000 calories: $23.80
Monthly cost: $240
Total calories: 1,209,664
Calories available per day: 3360
Calories needed to cover yearly deviation: 144,000
Expected caloric deviation per day: 400
Excess calories available for slave per year: 237,664
Excess calories available for slave per day: 660


The cost of the 1,209,664 stored calories was calculated to cost $2,882. If I forced myself to store up 947,374 calories in storage buckets for a whole year it would cost $2,257. That would save me around $1,623 over the course of a year but the question is what kind of crazy would I be at the end of the year? Would I be raving mad? Desperate to catch squirrels? Digging in garbages? Raiding berry patches? Chasing bears to find out if they taste like apples?

The storage shopping list that I created in January 2017 was a prototype and I am currently running a comparison between that list and my actual list of purchases. I have to laugh looking back at the idea that I was somehow going to go through forty four kilograms of sugar. In actuality I went through only eighteen kilograms. In retrospect the flour to sugar ratio was way off and there should have been four times the flour going into storage. The only problem is that flour doesn't store very well. I'd much rather store wheat berries although I've never actually tried that before. If I had gone with that list as my storage list I would have a lot of sugar, oats, rice, lentils, chipits, and honey left over. Having food left over isn't necessarily a bad thing however I'd like to make the list work without any glitches.

Amended Yearly Storage List
(Based on an actual year of eating!!!)   

11 kg organic oats ($44 provides 41,250 cal)
17 jars apple sauce ($51 provides 5,100 cal)
3.6 kg organic hemp hearts (wholesale $91 provides 22,200 cal)
11 kg organic chia seeds (wholesale $92 provides 51,040 cal)
4 kg raisins ($24 provides 12,000 cal)
30 kg rice ($76 provides 114,752 cal)
15 kg organic lentils (wholesale $60 provides 52,500 cal)
15 kg organic chickpeas (wholesale $80 provides 54,600 cal)
25 kg organic sugar (wholesale $63 provides 93,750 cal)
3 containers pure vanilla ($30 provides 729 cal)
40 kg organic flour ($112 provides 140,000 cal)
1 container baking soda ($1.20 provides 0 cal)
1.5 kg salt ($10 provides 0 cal)
9 kg organic chocolate chips (wholesale $144 provides 43,200)
6 kg organic peanut butter (wholesale $57 provides 37,500 cal)
6 kg roasted organic peanuts (wholesale $60 provides 34,020 cal)
3 kg organic sunflower seeds (wholesale $19 provides 17,520 cal)
10 jars pesto sauce ($46 provides 7,280 cal)
10 kg organic honey (wholesale $130 provides 30,000 cal)
3 containers miso ($21 provides 3000 cal)
1.8 L Bragg seasoning ($14 provides 0 cal)
4.5 L organic olive oil (wholesale $58 provides 36,990 cal)
4.3 L organic coconut oil (wholesale $57 provides 34,142 cal)
1 kg Surf Sweets gummy bears (website $25 provides 3,120 cal)

(They are dangerous to have in large quantities around adults. Some precautions may be necessary.)
1 kg dried organic cranberries (wholesale $17 provides 3080 cal)
12 cans organic diced tomatoes ($51.60 provides 1440 cal)
5 kg organic coffee (wholesale $125 provides 0 cal)
50 packages Annie's Mac n Cheese( $200 provides 33,000 cal)
8 kg organic pasta (wholesale $109 provides 10,480 cal)

Calories provided: 882,693
Calories needed in one year: 947,374
days of starvation: 24
Cost: $1867.9


After having a look at some wholesale prices I noticed that I could save around $438 if I bought wholesale sugar, chia seeds, hemp seeds, chocolate chips, peanut butter, olive oil and coconut oil. In some cases the savings are fifty percent. Buying 14 kg of organic ghee is rather ridiculous with a bill of $558 on a good day. It's much better to buy organic butter in the store and only spend $224 on 14 kg of butter. What I have shown is that if all conditions were favorable a person could eat organic for $155 per month. The problem behind it all is that it's not a perfect world. If this goes on a line of credit the bank will start charging around $100 every month. In four months you would have lost the savings if you can't pay it off. That is where all the planning in the world starts to fall on its face.

As a side gig to counting calories and creating reliable diets I have been dabbling with a sort of hybrid homelessness. It's the result of flying in the face of everyone else's schedule. It's somewhat complicated at times to be chasing sleep in the day time while everyone else is at their highest potential for activity. It's especially complicated when struggling with periods of light sleep. What would a parent do with a child when someone is complaining their daytime sleep is light? Children especially are at their highest potential for activity from the moment they wake up until the moment they go to sleep. To ask a child to be still for eight hours at the peak of the day's energy is a nearly impossible task that would monopolize a parent's attention.  It's a mighty weight to accept the offers that everyone in the entire residence is going to put their lives on hold for the afternoon. What am I going to say? Sure I will gladly take your family hostage and nobody will be allowed to move or speak while I am sleeping. The silence has an underlying pressure of being held in this unnatural way and it is unfair for one person to stand in the way of seven others.

I slept the best when nobody was second guessing their behavior. Ear plugs would block out the majority of noises including smoke detectors going off which didn't exactly make for a safe situation. Somehow through it all there was a little tiny hole wearing away in my patience as at times it wasn't just like trying to sleep under a race track it was like trying to sleep under a circus. Things were holding steady until the littlest one decided she was going to take her stomping to a professional level. She started a new game where she would stomp as hard as she could in one spot, directly above me, and then see how long she could maintain her effort. The nice thing was sometimes she would alternate with tapping a stick on the floor at a volume that was just barely perceptible and also at a steady interval as if she was soothing her victims with a more gentle auditory torture. When you are trying not to flip out and lose your mind completely one minute seems like an eternity. The light, insidious noise of a stick tapping was actually more excruciating than the stomping game as it was almost impossible not to get the impression that she was instigating a plan to end the sanity of every adult within hearing distance.

It was truly humbling to be so totally broken by such a small noise in such a short period of time by the dedicated efforts of this young lady. I felt really lucky to have someone so close by who was so completely dedicated and willing to do whatever it took to help me lose my mind and my sanity together at the same time. She was so creative that she didn't need anything dramatic like heavy metal music to wear away a person's grip on their sanity. She could use the tiniest thing to achieve an even greater result than eight hours of torture. She was so good she could make the FBI and the CIA look like a bunch of incompetent goofs.  After a while I wondered if Chinese water torture would be slightly easier to handle. Eventually my patience snapped completely and I went into fight or flight. I had to leave the house for a couple months to heal my patience back into shape. It was either leave or get angry at a time when I had no resilience to fall back on. All indicators were that everyone else had run out of resilience as well. The whole house was in danger of being broken into little tiny pieces.

While some people are able to deal with fight or flight and neutralize it I decided to take the path of least resistance and I fled like a bastard all the while making like I was just on my way out to tea possibly with the Queen of England. Back into that delightful van I went to explore what it meant to hibernate. I found the minute I stopped the engine and tucked myself into the back seat with a hat pulled down over my eyes I became more than just still. I began to relax knowing that chances were there was going to be peace and quiet for as long as I wanted it. There was going to be peace and quiet until a whole group of good Samaritans came over to pound on the windows and ask if I was okay. They must have had someone park on the road in the past and commit suicide. I can't think of any other explanation for their distress. Anyone parking near their house makes them really nervous to the point they feel like they have to check things out to reassure themselves everything is okay. If I had known I would have gone out equipped with a big neon sign "Don't worry I'm not here to kill myself. I work at night but I'm not actually a prostitute and I'd prefer you didn't knock on the window while I am trying to sleep. I'm not here to bait or molest your children or rob your home. I'm not going to shit on your lawn. Please don't set off any explosives. I will be gone by twenty two hundred hours. Thank you." If I was really ambitious I'd go straight for the billboard size with flashing neon lights. I'm sure that would help me to blend in with the background. For the illiterate it might have helped to also have a spoken message blaring on a loud speaker in multiple languages.

I would find myself relaxing into that peace and quiet but the peace and quiet was unpredictable to say the least. Whatever happened on the way to falling asleep I was happy to accept the consequences of my chosen accommodations. There would be peace and quiet until some big tough guy decided to go drifting to impress their date or put on Slayer for make out music. There would be peace until the fear set in that my alarm failed and I was now locked in the park. Occasionally the park warden decided to take a special initiative and go around honking his horn to give everyone a head's up on closing time. There would be perfect peace until one of the birds flying by decided they were going to go insane and release a life time of pent up stress by pecking my van to death. I considered myself lucky to survive that bird's rage. I'm pretty sure I might have died if it got through the metal. It looked at me from every window, and then pounded on the roof with its beak as if it was only a matter of time until it got to me. That was a big bird. If it was any bigger it would alternate terrorizing shift workers with eating bears and cougars.

 There were some good times like the day I got to clean the carpet in the van by hand and caught myself wondering if people who live in their van ever say things like "well honey company's coming. Better clean the dashboard." The thing they say about real estate is that it's all about the location. Location location location. That's why it would be so great to live in a van. Your location could be anywhere! Not that anybody wants you wherever you end up. Inevitably neighbors get angry and some don't even pull their punches. They are just sick of anyone parking close to their property and they just start setting off explosives.  The places most likely to seem safe are likely places many many people have felt safe about which is why they are so dangerous.

The night I felt safest tucked into a perfect little gravel turnaround is the night the explosion went off. There was a loud BANG louder than a gun and there was a white light even whiter than a welding arc coming from so close it could have been right next to the front wheel. I lay there motionless and confused and then dared to look but nobody was there. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a bird. Quickly I made my way to the front seat and took off, relieved that everything was working and the sound hadn't been some component in the vehicle randomly destroying itself. It would have really sucked if the explosion had rendered my vehicle inoperable. When you depend on your vehicle for sleeping quarters as well as transportation it seems twice as horrible to imagine a breakdown. Safe to say it was a very long time until I parked there again.

After the park was closed my favorite spots to park were next to houses with massive hedges or next to bridges so I could get a better idea of what rotting fish smelled like. The very very best place to park was anywhere on the road next to a metal side rail. That meant it was safe to park there because the only thing on the other side of it was an overgrown patch of forest. Lots of people probably think that way which is why quite often I would see other camper vans parked there too. I'm glad the neighbors there didn't practice the use of explosives just fog horns and rotten eggs.

I tried to change up my parking space daily but I couldn't help but favor certain places and eventually people started to notice. They would bring their children to come and stare in the windows. They would bring their friends and relatives and they would all stare in the windows talking to each other as if there was something they were supposed to do but they couldn't quite figure it out. I guess they didn't get the memo on how to scare away shift workers with explosives. I learned not to park at grocery stores as people who go to grocery stores are in a consumer state of mind. They would see a woman waking up from a good sleep and they would want to know how much it costs to come in and have a nice nap with her. It's a good thing I didn't run over that man leaving the parking lot that day but in a way I wish I had. He was two hormones away from jumping on the front hood and showing the world how dogs do it. If that isn't enough to scare someone shitless nothing is.

Aside from narrowly escaping getting blown to pieces and pecked to shreds this year has been relatively charmed. My teeth set such a good example of being omnipotent that my cat decided he was also going to be omnipotent and my van tried to become invincible as well. My cat was free of injury and by some miracle he did not require the attention of a veterinarian. The bill for van repairs and maintenance came in under three hundred dollars which was a rare treat. Health wise I experienced a good year only littered with the usual flu bugs.

The flu bugs are still working on becoming powerful as gods and moving on to create a new world called Planet Influenza in some other galaxy. If we could just teach the flu bugs to use a phone in the mean time they could call us up and give us notice that they are coming to hang out. The phone would probably never stop ringing and eventually we'd have to start blocking their calls just to get some peace. The police station would be worn out from tracing threatening phone calls. There seems to be a ridiculous number of days in a year that the flu bugs are trying to hang out and get intimate. We want to say to them "just go home! You're making us sick!" but we can't because the flu bugs live everywhere.

Every hour is visiting hours for a flu bug and it really makes me sick to think how many days I spent nauseated. Most days I considered myself lucky that the bug was noticeable but not powerful enough to take me all the way down to the ground. The days I was inches from the ground were the days I was thankful for being on the night shift. If I was on the day shift I knew I would be calling in sick. It's hard to forget the two weeks ruled by the Super Duper Pooper Bug. Oddly enough most of the flus in the early part of the year were missing the most common symptom, diarrhea.  It's like the flu bug was really enjoying fucking with us, and it was saving the best for last. It was busy reinventing itself into a giant shit machine and it succeeded. That Super Duper Pooper Bug was going to take your poop away whether you liked it or not. Under the influence of this bug you would not be allowed to keep any poop for yourself. Not even one little turd. Never were the toilets at work so well used and the diaper section so completely kicked. A fool and their poop are easily parted so they say. Given the option I'd probably take the Super Duper Pooper Bug over the one that left me feeling like I'd been kicked in the head for a year straight. If there's one thing I can't stand it's headaches that feel like a part of your brain is being replaced by a blade and the pain radiates until it feels like every muscles in your neck is part of a conspiracy to torture you. I don't like the flus that have you on the ground so fast that you wonder if it might be easier to get up after getting mauled by a lion.

On the bright side there was no need to miss work to nurse any injuries as there were no sprains and nothing tore or broke except my brain. If my brain is broken then I will keep it that way as I rather enjoy laughing myself to tears and laying incapacitated on the floor by the idea of U2 singing "Where the Jews have no name."  My overall endurance seemed to be prone to an overall increase. What seemed like my body becoming exhausted was really my body getting stronger. Climbing up and down off a step ladder all night two days a week and doing squats constantly on another day meant intense pain and fatigue at first but then that gave way to greater strength. The strength came in handy for climbing a couple mountains and covering for numerous employee vacations over the year. In a way it was like as soon as I became accustomed to one extra demand there was another demand added and the net result was that I would go home with enough energy to make diner and blink. At times the blinking was rather vigorous followed by a feat of strength known as a walk.

I credit much of my freedom from injury to taking curcumin. When I know I'm up against something ridiculously demanding on my body I make sure I take at least 1800 mg of curcumin daily. It helps to keep inflammation from becoming a problem and so muscles and tendons are more likely to recover quickly if blood flow is not restricted by an inflammation zone. A wise man once pointed out if you take curcumin with pepper you absorb it even better. The pills with pepper are quite expensive but if you go for the cheap curcumin you can always eat something with pepper on it after you take the pills.

There were no moves required this year which is a first in four years. I might have been smart to move but there is really nowhere to move to that isn't ridiculously expensive. It's highly doubtful given my past average that I would be able to stay wherever I ended up. Even if I lived in a convent most likely the nuns would be smoking just about everything they could get their hands on and entertaining circus animals as a side show. The moral of the story always seems to be, wherever I go I will end up living in my van so I may as well be happy spending a few hours at home before the ceiling starts to shake and then continue on my way dabbling with the art of hybrid homelessness. Eventually one day I will get brave and try to tame the ceiling with a variety of panels to see if that helps. Sound proofing one room wouldn't be too expensive. I could have a good talk with the dish soap fairy about it but I think she is leaning more towards experimentation with white noise and earplugs.

There is a lot of adversity potential in the struggle to attain sleep in the day time and that might be a good way to become immune from attracting any more adversity. In the best case scenario seeking out a good sleep means crashing out for almost twenty hours straight on a weekend or worse case scenario all the effort in the world turns up nothing at all. Showing up at work with no sleep is like an automatic awesome in the world of adversity.  There's enough struggle waiting each day so there is definitely no shortage of struggle which means there probably won't be more struggle struggling to get into the picture if you know what I mean. Even if there was some struggle struggling to get into the struggle there is just no room for struggle amidst the current struggle so the struggle that was struggling to get into the struggle would be having the struggle of a lifetime! Everything is all struggled out. Do you know where your struggle is? Do I sound like someone who is short a few naps? Here we go! Getting closer to a brand new year!

 The last hurdle in the year is to survive Christmas. Christmas seems so benign with all the beautiful lights and the singing but don't let that fool you. It's unlikely that anyone will be able to make it past December 25th without a nagging feeling like they are not only an asshole but that their asshole has grown to proportions that cannot be measured by conventional equipment. If you feel like your asshole has enlarged to the point that it makes the whole country look small don't worry that is normal. That is Christmas. The only way to get your asshole to shrink back down to the size of a city is to give as many presents as you can.

Christmas is a carefully designed killing machine that targets people's self esteem. It's the most wonderful time of the Fuhrer. If you thought for a second that you could be a good person without emptying out your wallet well you were wrong. This is ten times worse than a change rapist who sticks out their hand and effectively communicates that if you don't give them all the change in your purse then you're a piece of shit. Your worth is now directly proportional to the material objects you can generate, buy, bake or wrap. If someone gives you a present and you let yourself think for a second that they love you so much they don't expect anything back well your asshole is now afflicted with that terrible growth problem.

If you want to make it into the New Year without losing the ability to put on your pants you will have to think of something. If anyone curses me and gives me a present I know exactly what I am going to do. I have a strategy and I'm thinking it might work. This is the plan. Make homemade edible ice cream bowls and dip them in chocolate. Make homemade chocolate pudding and homemade vanilla pudding and swirl them together in the cups. Decorate with chocolate fans, duo chocolate sticks and candies and then place on a covered serving tray. Done deal. Everyone can now at least pretend that my pants fit and I'm still a good person.

If you are under the false impression that Christmas is a joyous time of year just go to a retail store and stand in the lineup for a minute. The person behind you will inch forward with rage in their eyes, acting like every second you keep them from spending all their money is another second they can't stand. They are so berserk by the time they get to the cashier they will be foaming at the mouth and before the cashier even opens the till they will be throwing handfuls of money and screaming "Here take it all!" and then run screaming from the store. I feel really bad for cashiers who have to work this time of year. It's a good thing that a lot of stores have the fore thought to organize traffic directors. If it were legal they would be able to carry a taser.

This time of year we would all do well to pray for sanity. I think it's a great strategy to be ridiculously patient and kind. Be Jesus. That's a good start to defeating the damage this consumer driven holiday is likely to cause. If you want to be even kinder just don't give anything, thus sparing your fellow man from having to walk around with an asshole the size of a space station. I think a good strategy is to have a big party in November like Noodlicus that way everyone gets all the merriment they need without the celebration feeling forced or obligatory. Everyone just gets all their guilt out early and hundreds of dollars later the immunity holds but only if everyone believes in the power of Noodlicus.

Food Geek Plans Grocery Trips Sepember to December

For the first twenty days of August the Food Geek brought home $193 worth of food. There was some need to restock salt, tea, honey and coffee. What kind of Food Geek would I be if I didn't have any coffee to offer visitors? What kind of visit would it be if relatives could barely wake up enough to know where they are? All they would remember is that they had to get up early and there was no coffee waiting for them. I could not allow that to happen so I bought the best coffee I could find. Coffee is something we can all enjoy together and it makes for a memorable visit. It's really not much to ask to have coffee on hand since it's nearly the only thing people want other than oats in my family.

The overall food choices continued to highlight peanuts, yams, potatoes, rice, chickpeas, and chocolate chips. Three kilograms of peanuts were purchased providing 17,000 potential calories. Peanuts were accounting for 25 percent of the calorie source. Two kilograms of chocolate chips provided a potential 9,333 calories but so far only one kilogram was consumed. You've got to wonder what is wrong with the average chocolate chip if it leaves a person wanting to dash out for something better. A big factor is probably the cocoa content and how the chocolate was made.

To avoid the problem of being stuck with a type of chocolate that is only half satisfying I would recommend taking fifteen dollars and spending it on at least three different types of chocolate. Try some Bernard Calibaut chocolate, milk chocolate, Lindt chocolate and find out which one shuts off that chocolate craving completely. It may eventually come to light that a really good quality chocolate will be sufficient in smaller quantities to satisfy the appetite over the course of a month. The same has come true for cheese. Rather than eating a lot of low quality cheese I find that just two hundred grams of a really good organic cheese is more than satisfying. Maybe that block of cheese only lasts for three days and the rest of the month is spent without cheese but something that good doesn't need to be a daily occurrence. Also when it comes to peanuts it's helpful to at least buy half salted and half unsalted just to have a small change to look forward to.

I try to avoid roasted peanuts because they almost always contain canola oil which is Roundup Ready however peanuts also have been genetically modified to be Roundup Ready. Is it time to look for another source of energy? I'm not exactly at an income level which allows me to eat 100% organic so my strategy is to avoid the top three genetically engineered crops: corn, canola and soy. For all I know the yams I eat are probably exposed to glyphosate but 6 kg of organic yams would cost me thirty dollars. Three kilograms of organic peanut butter would cost thirty dollars. The people who have the money would do well to invest in organic foods. Until then the Food Geeks of the world just have to do their best.
 
http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/pre-harvest-roundup-crops-not-just-wheat/

This Food Geek is just about ready to throw in the towel. Really? Pre-harvest spraying on crops that aren't even Roundup Ready? What is even the point. I guess it's probably safe to say anything I buy that's not organic has probably been sprayed with glyphosate. I guess the only difference is you know that Roundup Ready agricultural products will have a higher concentration of glyphosate and do greater damage to your body. Whether or not it's true some products that were only harvested with glyphosate did not test as having a residue. Stephanie Seneff, PhD mentions some interesting facts about the correlation of glyphosate and the health crisis.

 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945755/

 https://www.youtube.com/watchinterview

The 6 kg yams, 2 kg potatoes, 3 kg chickpeas and  2 kg rice boosted up another 12,865 calories. Supporting the main staples were bananas, eggs, yogurt, cranberries, cheese, ghee, maple syrup, sauerkraut, onions and hot peppers. The daily cost fluctuated upwards to a maximum of $11 and downwards to a low of $1.80.  The average so far was $6.00 of food consumed per day. The Food Geek consumed about $5 worth of EMP and $4 worth of vitamin C, vitamin D3, and caffeine pills. With everything included the Food Geek spent an average of $6.45 per day on food which means this month is up $1.15 per day from last month.

The marinated chickpeas are very easy to prepare. Just cook the chickpeas for forty five minutes and then add salsa, chopped hot pepper, extra chopped onion if you like, cumin and chia seeds if you want your "veggie nicorette." I find that it is working somewhat indefinitely to chop up the yam or potato and boil it for five minutes then fry it in ghee for ten minutes. It makes a great breakfast or diner. Add salt and spray with Bragg seasoning and enjoy. Some care must be taken with the yams to keep them from going bad. Take them out of the plastic bags and for best results keep them in the fridge. If you don't keep them in the fridge then at least keep an eye on them. If they start to grow mold on the ends cut the moldy bits off, wash them and put them in the fridge.

The batch of frozen pudding found some use despite its initial flavor failure in July. I had to make a tonne of it because I had four liters of organic milk that was going to expire in five days which was all that was left on the shelf. The brown organic flour was also all that was left on the shelf so I bought that and totally screwed up the flavor in the pudding. Into the freezer it went without much hope of acceptance into the daily diet. One day I was desperate for ice cream and I pulled the frozen pudding out of the freezer.  I chopped a chunk off and poured some maple syrup over it and sprinkled some salt to achieve a "salted caramel" flavor. It was a hit as it turns out. Later it occurred to me to throw a chunk of it in some oatmeal to add some extra richness and cool the oats down faster. Now I'm down from six containers of rejected pudding to just one. No sweat.

With an average of 2,461 calories consumed per day there is a trend towards weight loss. A big factor was a flu which meant my body turned completely to internal sources of fuel for a few days. In general energy levels are good and sometimes I would even say my energy level is bordering on hyperactive. Walks outside of work are getting more and more plausible. There is almost no digestive upset at all and only occasional twinges of nausea. All systems regular and reliable. Check and check.


September Groceries


Amended version 5
Due to a tight month a few household items are going to have to be thrown in with the food budget as there are currently plans for the yearly fund. Oh boy it must be time to reboot the zero percent rates! It was decided that regular sugar on hand could be used on the oatmeal this month to save money.
Version 3: It was decided the easiest way to avoid glyphosate present in peanuts is to switch back to eating homemade pudding. 5 kg organic flour can beat out 3 kg of non organic peanuts and it's four dollars cheaper. Must be time to revisit the butter pizza. It's not perfect but it increases the amount of calories derived from a safe food source.
Version 4 resulted from the conclusion that there is a quarter of my monthly caloric requirements in the freezer. The organic cheese is too good to give up. A month without cheese was deemed intolerable. The yams were kicked off the list to make way for cheese, chocolate and cranberries. There is enough food in the freezer that I decided to only bring home one bag of flour instead of two.)
Version 5 - 400 grams of organic cheese was taken away and in its place was added 1 L of organic Kefir. I have never tried Kefir before but I think my gut flora is ready to make some friends. While cheese tastes incredibly good it's not beneficial to the gut and these days with so many things destroying natural gut bacteria the responsible person will make sure they consume yogurt made with bacteria. I would feel extremely guilty leaving a grocery store without yogurt because it also is known for soothing the intestinal lining which is good for people who are prone to an irritated bowel. Just about any product on a grocery store shelf will have been pasteurized so while the health benefits may be lower than raw kefir at least it's safe.

***1.6 kg Pure Desi Ghee ($30 provides 13,714 cal, micro nutrients, CLA, choline, as well as a balance of omega 3 and 6 and butyrate which helps heal the intestinal lining.)
*** There is now a Roundup Ready alfalfa grass so it may only be a matter of time before grass fed ghee is contaminated with glyphosate. 
3.6 kg dry chickpeas ($11.56 provides 13,104 cal, fiber, protein, potassium, nutrients.)
Vitamin C ($10 provides 150 capsules each capsule 500 mg $0.06 per capsule.)
1.89 L salsa ($5.50 provides 576 cal marinade for chickpeas.)
1 onion ($0.67 provides 44 cal, pre-biotics.)
300 grams dried cranberries  ($5 provides 924 cal, iodine, iron, fiber.)
200 grams organic cheese ($6 provides 800 cal, calcium, protein, vitamins and minerals)
1 L organic Kefir ($6 provides 440 cal and those all important friendly gut bacteria.)
2.5 kg organic white flour ($7 provides 9,100 cal, carbs, protein, fiber, nutrients.)
4 L organic milk ($8 provides 1,741 cal, nutrients, protein, and calcium.)
1 bunch banana ($1.70 provides 600 calories, potassium.)
3 dozen organic free run eggs ($21 provides 2,664 cal and a power house of nutrients.)
340 grams of really good chocolate ($5 provides 1,837 cal and a source of "Yay!")

200 page notebook ($3.77 provides writing space for Geeky stuff)
24 rolls toilet paper ( $3.78 provides disposable surface on which to wipe bum.)
dish liquid 709 ml ($1.88 provides soap to clean dishes.)

Total cost $126.86
Calories provided: 45,500 calories
Calories needed: 77,500 calories
*Keep $10 for monthly banana fund. ( adds 3,480 cal)
*Keep $10 for extra organic dairy ( adds 1,000 cal)
Total: 49,980 cal
short fall: 27,520 cal

Excess on hand:
1 kg chocolate chips: 4,666 cal
2 kg rice: 7,300 cal
1 kg oats: 3,890 cal
500 grams oats: 1,945 cal
6 potatoes: 978 cal
500 grams honey: 1,520 cal
200 grams chia: 972 cal
300 grams sunflower seeds: 1,752
700 grams sugar 2,709

Excess in cupboards: 25,732 cal
Excess in freezer: 19,103 cal
Total excess: 44,835 cal

For the month of September there will be a surplus of 17,315 calories between the planned shopping trip and the food in the cupboards and freezer. There will not be a want for cheese, chocolate, cranberries and so all is one big happy land. The best part is my gut bacteria will be making lots of new friends. At least every other item in my cart is glyphosate free and so that makes for a happy body. )


Average diet plan

breakfast

200 mg caffeine pill
500 mg vitamin C
1000 IU vitamin D3

1 banana 100 cal
1/3 cup dry oats 95 cal
1/4 tsp sugar 4 cal

lunch
1/3 cup dry rice 215 cal
1 tbsp ghee 135 cal
1 cup cooked chickpeas 269
1/4 cup salsa 25 cal
1 tbsp chia 46 cal

snack
1 cup pudding 315
1/3 cup chocolate chips 369

diner/breakfast

1 tbsp ghee 135 cal
2 organic eggs 148 cal
freezer item 300 cal

Total:  2,156 cal
Cost: $5.15


Cronometer's nutrition rating: 93% targets
Deficiencies: iron (29% short), calcium (39% short), folate (17% short), B3 (27% short), potassium (37% short), vitamin E (75% short), omega 6 (50% short).
The diet gets a lot stronger if you add a multi vitamin, three more bananas, 1/2 tsp salt, and 8 glasses of water. Add those things and you are at 97% of your targets. Adding just 28 grams of cheese erases the calcium deficiency. Adding a large potato knocks the potassium deficiency down by half and adding 4 tbsp of sunflower seeds erases the omega 6 deficiency. Even with the potassium 11% on the low side Cronometer would say "congratulations you are eating for 100% nutritional success!"

Watch the happiest dairy cows in the world saved from slaughter.
https://www.youtube.com/watchhappycows

To spray or not to spray.
 https://www.youtube.com/watchspraypastureornot
The major question is that are the dairy cows taken out to the pasture or is the pasture brought to them? What kind of pasture grass are they eating? Wheat grass I would imagine? Alfalfa?
https://www.youtube.com/watchweedcontrolinpastures
It seems it's an ongoing issue for any farmer to decide if a weed is forage worthy or if they are going to mow it or spray it. Round Up is so cheap no wonder it's so popular. I guess a lot of us forget that if weeds are left unchecked their root system will overtake the area and prevent us from growing what we want to eat. Eventually it would become a question of kill the weeds or starve. We choose to live and as a result we're killing our futures. 

There are four days until September and a shopping trip with the version 5 food list was executed successfully without any distractions. The driving force to get to the store was to get some probiotics into my system. The kefir was out of the bag before I even left the store. Kefir is a drink I would not have guessed I would take to. In fact I love buttermilk and it tastes a lot like buttermilk. My body's first response to tasting kefir was "now that wasn't so hard was it? What took you so long to try this you moron?" Half a liter of kefir has vanished and a bag of very expensive chocolate remains untouched. That says it all!  Good thing there is a dairy fund!

I was thinking a little bit about how most chocolate contains soy lecithin. The best plan might be to try the cacao nibs which are a hundred percent natural. I have tried cacao powder mixed with maple syrup which was delicious and usually mixed in with walnuts and hemp hearts for a sinful treat. That kind of treat would not agree with a tight budget but the cacao nibs are said to be very bitter. They might be just the thing to get the benefits of chocolate without going overboard. 100 grams of cacao nibs contain 35% of your daily need for iron so that helps to fix any problems with low iron. 227 grams can be bought for $11. It might be an interesting experiment to see how long they last compared to a kilo of chocolate chips.

There were a few triumphant days where I cycled fearlessly through the streets timing myself on the route to work and back. Everything was perfect with a lane for cyclists all marked off and the weather being relatively cool in the mornings and evenings. The time it took was a mere thirty minutes there and thirty minutes back. There was only one thing I forgot, I was going to have to breath the air when I got to work, then I was going to have to bike home again after having been exposed to the latest strain of viruses and their counter parts, the super bugs. It was a good idea at the time. What is it about being all charged up with exercise that seems to make me the ideal target for infection? "Look that one looks really healthy. Lets get her." Eight glorious hours later I was the picture of perfect health puking my guts out in every room of the house.

Perhaps my goal this year would be only to get in the habit of cycling more often but not actually cycle to work just yet. If I am currently spending $250 a month on gas and insurance then if I stopped driving that money could go to an immunity support effort. I could sure buy a lot of cold fx with $250 not to mention Emergen-C and echinacea. I could spend the rest of the year researching and implementing some effective ways to boost my immune system.  While I was at it I could find out how many power bars I could stuff in my rain jacket so I'd never be hungry again. If the car breaks down I know the first thing I would do is raid the cold and flu remedies at the pharmacy.

I read some interesting tips on how to ease into the cycling. Some days leave the bike at work and take public transit home. Drive to work some days with the bike and cycle home. Cycle back, drive home. That way it keeps things interesting and there is more focus on variety rather than on the monotony of the situation. If there's no showers at work use baby wipes to clean up. A great idea would be to cycle to work on Mondays when I'm all rested up and fresh after the weekend.

https://www.alexfergus.com/blog/how-to-protect-yourself-from-glyphosate

It has come to the Food Geek's attention that chickpeas are among the legumes that are sprayed with glyphosate prior to harvest as a means of drying out the crop to make it easier to harvest. Lentils are also sprayed with glyphosate prior to harvest.  At a rating of 555 ppb in terms of glyphosate content chickpeas are only one step under the glyphosate content in soy.  I was under the false presumption that only crops genetically engineered to resist Roundup were sprayed with Roundup. I was wrong. It's becoming common practice to kill off the crops with a herbicide prior to harvest to make it easier to pick up the harvest with the machines.

In fact in Europe there is pressure to increase allowed levels of glyphosate in food by one hundred times to compensate for the new practice of desiccation. EPA safety standards are going out the window. What it means is that for the month of October I will have to figure out how I am going to afford to buy organic chickpeas. If I shop at a local store I will pay $46 for 3.6 kilograms of organic chickpeas. That's four times what I was paying for regular chickpeas. If I go online I can buy three times as much for only fourteen dollars more. I am pretty satisfied that if I buy online I can purchase enough organic chickpeas to deliver enough calories that would make it worth the money. With the cost of shipping added I still save $53 on 11 kg worth of organic chickpeas.

https://www.omfoods.com/legumes/organic-garbanzo-beans-chick-peas/

Alright! There's currently 11 kg of organic chickpeas headed straight at this Food Geek! As it turns out I saved $62 over store bought organic chickpeas even with the choice to ship by ground. Nice job. Continuing on, what this means is that next month my food budget will decrease to a grand $74.

Forecast for October Groceries

11 kg organic chickpeas $76 supplies 40,040 cal
1.89 L salsa $5.50 supplies 576 cal
4 L organic milk $8 supplies 1,741 cal and lots of nutrients
3 organic egg cartons $21 supplies 2,664 cal and plenty of nutrients
900 grams organic sugar $5 supplies 3,483 cal
2 L organic kefir $9 supplies 1,040 cal and plenty of probiotics
1 onion $0.67 supplies 44 cal and some pre-biotics.
1 bunch organic bananas $2 provides 700 cal
227 grams cacao nibs $11 supplies 518 cal as well as iron and other nutrients

$10 banana fund adds 7,000 cal

Total cost: $148.17
calories provided: 57,806
needed calories: 77,500
shortfall: 19,694

The month of August predicted the month of September would end with a 17,315 surplus of food in the cupboards and freezer. Because of that food supply will not be much of an issue in October. It's November that will be tough. If I was smart I'd spend October's food budget on even more staples and forget the kefir, chocolate, eggs, and well everything else. If it's possible to spend $150 and end up with "too much" food that is definitely a worthwhile goal. According to Tony Mitra's latest transciption of CFIA testing results rice, millet, soy and kamut are showing as having the lowest levels of glyphosate.That could indicate that it's okay to eat regular rice.

October Shop Smart Version

11 kg organic chickpeas $76 including shipping provides 40,040 cal
48 kg rice $50.82 provides 178,560 calories. That is enough calories for two months!!!
5 kg potatoes $7 provides 5,390 cal (need to get a glyphosate reading on them)
4 L organic milk $8 provides 1,741 cal
900 grams organic sugar $5 provides 3,843 cal

Total: $146.82
Calories: 229,574
Calories needed: 77,500.
Excess: 152,074 calories

Yahoooooo!!!!!! That is so dumb I can't even believe it! Are we being practical here? No there is nothing practical about throwing more than 2 kg of rice into any one month of the year. It's just going to sit there whether or not it has the potential to relieve hunger. The Food Geek needs to take another stab at this. Okay! Lets try this again! I think I might have freaked out there over the month of November but there really wasn't any need to freak out about it. I'm probably only going to eat three kilograms of the chickpeas so in that respect the chickpeas will really only provide 10,920 cal. I will probably only eat 2 kg of rice so the rice will really only provide 7,480 cal. These purchases will really provide more like 30,538 calories which means I'm not even halfway there. That's something to think about. There must be a way to pull off the last two months of the year without ending up hating rice and chickpeas. I could just diet because I'm not down to my minimal weight yet. Hopefully by 2018 I'll have this figured out. :)

October Shop Version 3

11 kg organic chickpeas $76 including shipping provides 40,040 cal
8 kg rice $8.47 provides 29,760 cal
1 kg organic oats $5 provides 3,890 cal
4 L organic milk $8 provides 1,741 cal
900 grams organic $5 sugar provides 3,843 cal
3 dozen organic eggs $21 provides 2,664 cal
25 ml vitamin D3 $5 (lasts three months)

Total cost: $128
Calories provided: 81,938
Organic banana fund $20  provides 7,000 calories
Calories including banana fund: 88,938
calories needed: 77,500
Excess: 11,438

For the month of September the Food Geek has enjoyed some very long walks in the woods and has endeavored to entertain people far and wide with organic chocolate chip cookies. The Food Geek has pledged to continue to eat food and to try not to die as a result. There has been much celebration as a young family member has recently added two more successful climbs to their mountain climbing list. As a side benefit to the athletic feats occurring in the family the Food Geek has been inspired to try and become more elevated. If all goes well there will definitely be an increase in this geek's elevation by the end of the week and some cheerful screaming to claim the mountain's mid section or at least its foot.

The Food Geek has been really spoiled with all kinds of magnificent food stuffs. There was a brief passing vegetable celebration where squashes and spuds were consumed with reckless abandon. The Food Sneak, a mysterious yet well known personality, has had some tremendous success with a low carb high fat diet. The Food Sneak is all smoothed out and has gone totally zen. Out of respect for the Food Sneak there was some very auspicious purchases made involving coffee, butter, cheese, eggs and whip cream. All in all it was all so very good. In the aftermath of all the really magnificent food stuffs the oatmeal cookies have come in handy to take the edge off of the bacon, butter and cheese withdrawal symptoms. A special thanks to the Food Sneak and their sidekick for making it possible to get completely squash faced.

There may have to be some considerations for the last three shopping trips of the year that take into account the benefits of a high fat diet. It may be the time of year to think about turning more towards fatty foods that reassure the body that there is more than enough to eat. With some chilly days setting in now might be a good time to consider the nutritional aspects of melding the cookie diet and the butter and cheese diet. So far it looks like a person could eat about fifteen homemade chocolate chip cookies  per day and hit seventy seven percent of their nutritional targets. Throw in cheese, bananas, chickpeas, potatoes and some C, D and E vitamins and the cookie diet doesn't look so bad on cronometer. The B12 reading is 46% too low.

To make a very long story somewhat shorter there will be some food eaten and it will probably be enjoyed a lot more if there is some cheese, butter and whip cream added into the picture. There will be organic purchases made whenever possible and periodic nutritional checks on cronometer. There will be ongoing monitoring of food costs and a little celebration as the Food Geek celebrates two years of geeking around. Last year in December the Food Geek was struggling with a KD dependency but this year that will be an easy fix with some homemade organic cheese soup. Thanks for tuning in. I hope you feel a little smarter next time you eat a snack. Put some organic butter on it and your metabolism will thank you.

The Food Geek is having such a strange month full of wonderful surprises. $367 was spent on groceries in one month which is double what I usually plan on however half of that expense was neutralized by family members who wanted to put food on my table. Thanks to everyone who helped out I really appreciate it. The daily food prospects ranged from $0.17 worth of rice all the way to a grand $45 pizza cookie pancake egg ham and cheese mountain climbing special. The actual daily food bill was an average of $7.70 and an average of 2,338 calories was consumed.

Working the kefir into the diet was more than a process. To go from never having had kefir to drinking a liter of it was somewhat of a hazardous act unless of course someone out there has a specific goal to gas themselves to death with farts. Initially I doubted I would be able to keep the kefir down and every time I drank a glass I wondered if it was a bad idea. My metabolism was not exactly behaving favorably. I made a rule to never drink kefir before bed and to use it by the tablespoon in soups. It takes what would otherwise be a thin soup and gives it a very rich elegant flavor. Another favorite lately has been quinoa with a quarter cup of kefir over top. Even more of a gut tonic seems to be a cup of sauerkraut with half a cup kefir and some vegetables thrown in. As long as it is always mixed with something it is received very well. If you are new to kefir you may want to learn from my mistake and always combine it. If you drink it straight it's a hazard but if you add a little bit to a food that is otherwise bland it elevates the flavor to a wonderful level. Having kefir available definitely made it easy to go through some of the food in the freezer.

The Food Sneak drifted in for a martial arts festival and brought their sidekick who likes to pounce on mountains to pass the time throughout the year. The Food Sneak and their sidekick the Mountain Pouncer snuck about 23,268 calories into the Food Geek's cupboards. It was about as enjoyable as food can get when rich foods like bacon, cheese, butter and whip cream come into the picture. I got to practice killing myself with whip cream and then we were faced with an even bigger challenge, Death by Vegetables. The family gardener donated a plethora of potatoes, plums, zucchini, squashes and tomatoes. These were not just any vegetables from any gardener. This gardener heaves sidewalk slabs in a single bound and rips trees out of the ground with her bare teeth. If only it wasn't for the dentist and chiropractic bills she would make her own landscaping crew. She couldn't make it because she had more tree stumps to rip out of the ground with her bare hands.

The Food Sneak and the Mountain Pouncer started a curtain foundation for the Food Geek upon noticing how difficult it was to fight through the improvised layers of fabric that were covering the windows. Unfortunately the curtain foundation somehow became a pizza foundation which kicked in to replace the Cookie Breakfast Day. The pizza was made with the butter pizza crust found in a previous entry. The rest was made Hawaiian pizza style with organic cheese and all natural bacon. That means the pig was all natural with only one head and three legs instead of five. The pizza was an absolute success in fact it must have been the best pizza ever tasted. It's going to be hard to justify overspending the food budget by $176 if the pizza breakfast day becomes regular but at least if my discipline gets away on me it will have somewhere healthy and delicious to go. Quite possibly the next pizza breakfast day will be nothing more than a crust if I know what's good for my budget.

The Food Geek immensely enjoyed the relief from the hum drum of rice and organic chickpeas. Putting whip cream in the coffee was not just something the ladies were doing for fun, in fact it was part of the discipline associated with the low carbohydrate high fat diet. Eating cheese and bacon was an equally disciplined task. With so much food available all of a sudden I felt like the least I could do was go out and climb a mountain. I climbed to 850 meters and then gave up because I thought I was only a third of the way to the top. A nice old man came by and informed me I only had 100 meters left to reach the first summit. Together we tip toed our way carefully up the rest of the way although it was against my better judgement of what I could handle. We went in search of the highest peak but alas it looked like the only trail leading to it was through thin air. I impressed him with the standard issue mountain top profanity until we were both suitably impressed that I had lost my mind.  While he settled down to use his ham radio and test for extra terrestrials I decided I had better get off the mountain while I still had plenty of day light.

I made my way down and realized very quickly the down portion was not going to be a piece of cake. I was making up my endurance as I went along and as the hours wore on it was getting harder and harder to buy my own story that I was going to be able to pull the whole thing off. I switched over to pure survival mode and took step after step just because I knew my only other choice was to be stuck on the mountain in the dark. As a true food oriented survivor I focused completely on the one thing I wanted most, a cup of coffee. I would have given just about anything at that point for some flat ground and a cup of coffee. Two hours before I hit the flat trail I went into a type of shock where I was now a walking mess. I could have sworn I had gone past muscle failure but I kept walking. It was a mix of desperation and adrenaline that kept me from sitting down more than ten seconds. The adrenaline rush must have gone on for too long and by the time a father and his daughter came up the trail to ask how far to the end of the trail I must have looked like I just woke up from a nightmare. I gave him a grim look which wasn't very hard and told him "this morning someone informed me I could get to the top in four hours. I hiked it in five." I think the look on my face must have been enough to convince them it wasn't worth it and about ten minutes later they both turned around and followed me.

I thought for sure I was going to collapse when I hit the flat trail but I just kept on walking. The last half hour to the car was the last segment of what was starting to seem like a very cruel joke. When I got to the car I thought for sure I was going to collapse in the back but I got in and drove home. I kept my eyes open singing "I'm wide awake!" I opened the door at home and I thought for sure I was going to collapse on the floor but instead I went for the fridge. The Food Geek was no longer a geek but a ham scarfing monster. Once the ham was gone the bananas slowly began to disappear as I literally threw together the ingredients for pancakes with as much desperation as if it had been a decade since I last ate a meal. In less than an hour I made a twenty six hundred calorie breakfast disappear as if it was nothing more than a snack. I had anticipated that it would have been enough reinforcement to eat 2300 calories worth of pizza and and 1000 calories worth of cookies but I was dead wrong there. I would have done immeasurably better to have brought another two thousand calories up to the top of that mountain. Having plenty of extra food on hand would have grounded me and may have relieved stress and regulated the adrenaline rush to a more manageable level. What did the Food Geek learn? When climbing mountains bring a cheesecake or at least an extra pizza. Climbing a mountain does not mean losing weight it means eating six thousand calories if you're smart.

As I sit hunkered over a giant bowl of Annie's macaroni and cheese I must admit that I've noticed a lot of differences in the month of October. A bird's eye view of my spending reveals that I took home $813 worth of food although I only went through $350 worth so far. This month turned up a little tiny pot of gold and the gold is quite obviously headed straight down the hatch. Perhaps the colder weather has brought with it a feeling of uneasiness that can be remedied with some extra snacks. A few snacks led to a few more and before long I was wondering if I climbed a couple mountains and just didn't notice.

There were some pretty long hikes in the month of October. What happened is that I kept returning to the same trail expecting it to branch off into a nice easy hike. The signs kept pointing me up the mountain so I just gave in eventually and went up. It was far nicer than the previous assault-by-mountain-trail last month although it was still equally hard to use my legs in the days following the little mountain adventure. A week later I returned to the same place and I was going to find the flat trail this time. I chased the flat trail up a mountain and realized it definitely wasn't a flat trail. I had just about had it trying to find this flat trail but at the end of the day with darkness closing in I finally found the trail head I was looking for.

The next day I went out exploring on the long anticipated easy trail and felt more tired after a few hours of easy hiking than I had three hours up a mountain. Maybe it's the monotony of the flat ground that makes you so relaxed you just want to have a nap and forget about doing anything adventurous. That was about all the adventure I had before the rain started. The rain was really more like a monsoon but it was quite welcome. It seems that the only thing to do on the rainy days is enjoy a variety of foods and dream of hibernating in a very cozy place.

On a daily basis I have noted that my food costs have doubled from $8 per day in September all the way up to $16 per day in October. That number is with all regards to budgeting thrown to the wind, or to the rain for that matter. Every purchase was organic and there was a preference given to high fat dairy such as cheese, sour cream, cottage cheese, whip cream and butter. This month I have been trying organic dairy products that I have never tried before and my first impression was that organic sour cream tasted better than ice cream. I think organic cottage cheese tastes much fresher than regular cottage cheese and really any type of organic dairy has a lot more flavor and fullness to it.

The meal theme was swinging towards comfort foods and so I gave full allowance for Annie's macaroni and cheese and homemade pudding. Spending $6 on a bit of organic chocolate milk is heavenly yet organic chocolate pudding can be made at home for a very affordable cost.  The butter pizza continues to prove itself as a very practical food creation to have on hand. It can be made into pizza or if your budget is too tight you can always make it into a peanut butter sandwich. If you want a nice treat you can do up the butter pizza crust into a ham and pineapple pizza for around $18. That is using bacon from pigs that are free of hormones or antibiotics and fed a mixture of vegetables and grains. It may be expensive but chances are you will feel so much healthier for having avoided animals raised on chemically farmed corn.

In theory all this organic food could be consumed within a $6 per day budget however that is with an eye towards always buying the organic food on sale. Throw in a half a cup of organic sour cream into your daily regimen and it will cost you $1.20. Throw in a box of Annie's mac n cheese and it will cost you $2 if you can buy it on sale. Luckily almost every store I've been to this week has had organic macaroni and cheese on sale. Throw in a cup of homemade organic pudding and it will cost you $0.90 per cup. A tablespoon of organic butter costs thirty cents but serves up 105 calories. The real problem is that a food that satisfies on all levels is likely to be costly like one of those homemade organic pizzas which can easily cost $22 worth of groceries. It's hard to imagine going back to trying to finish up left overs from the freezer once you start getting used to eating top notch ingredients. Maybe the key is to cut back gradually, or just have a big pizza party until the cold weather is over.

You can imagine it was with some surprise when this old Food Geek went to draw up the budget for the month of November and noticed with a slight air of disbelief that the month was starting with a deficit. There was such an unexpected loot last month that it made everything seem so rosy. The money came in easily and went out really easily.  I had so many plans running through my head. I'll use it to stock up for next year's supplements. I will put it in my savings account. Just a little bit of expensive food isn't going to hurt. I became more and more optimistic until I was convinced I was financially invincible. While I didn't actually ever think I could use this money to fly I imagined that I could eat like I was in paradise for a hundred days while really a week was stretching it. The money was going to keep growing back and it was going to last forever. I became so over confident that what started as a giant buffer for the month of October ended up buffing just a little too much off the month of November. Poor November. Without further delay here is the all exciting "oops what have I done" diet. It's constructed almost completely from food that is sitting in the cupboards. Here's what to do with that precious $237 worth of food sitting in the cupboards.

The Oops Diet

2 c organic granola (894 calories costing $1.42)
1 c organic pudding (300 calories costing $1.15)
1 regular potato (250 calories costing $0.20)
2 organic eggs (148 calories costing $1.20)
3 organic peanut butter cookies (276 calories costing $0.60)
1/3 c regular dry rice (215 calories costing $0.17)
1 cup cooked organic chickpeas (269 calories costing $1.65)
1 tbsp organic olive oil (119 calories costing $0.25)

Total calories provided: 2471
Total cost: $6.64

When investigated on Cronometer the usual suspects appear. Without bananas there is a deficiency of potassium, without cheese or sesame seeds there is a deficiency of calcium, without any dark leafy greens or chia seed there is a deficiency of vitamin K, and C and D are low unless you supplement those. Luckily I dumped all kinds of chia seeds into my granola but whether the nutrition survived the baking is another story. Because I take C and D then my Cronomoter rating is 96 % targets hit. I love the fact that adding a chocolate bar with 85 % cocoa solids kicks the iron deficiency. To make the Ooops Diet more nutritionally sound you would add four bananas, and 50 grams of cheese.

I'm finding already that the peanut butter cookies are the best way to stave off hunger and so the daily intake for those would be more like six small cookies. We are talking bite sized cookies here.

For the cookies I used a hundred percent organic ingredients and the recipe yielded 48 small cookies, each one ringing in at 92 calories and twenty cents each. The main highlight last time I was trying to go through food in the freezer was soup. I'd take down a package of frozen cooked peas, then add chopped potato and crack in a few eggs. A Martial Arts Muffin gave it some extra gritty grains. That trend from August came back and has been going steady as a ritual. I start with a half a pot of water, add some salt, a bay leaf, a cut potato. Into it might go a quarter teaspoon of cumin, oregano, and maybe a tiny bit of garam masala. Once it's boiling I crack a couple of eggs into the water as if I was going to poach the eggs but the eggs stay in and become part of the soup. I don't whisk them I crack them right in. It's like having a wonton in the soup except it's an egg. I have no idea why I've become so intrigued by eating soup with eggs cracked in but I guess it goes hand in hand with an ever increasing enjoyment of organic eggs. The whole pot cooks for about ten minutes and then it's ready to enjoy. A cup of green cabbage is a nice addition or in really rich times throw in a cubed grass fed burger. Man those are expensive. They cost about three dollars per burger but they are so filling it would be almost impossible to eat one and still feel unsatisfied.

The frequency of cooking would be as follows:

Once a week make granola, pudding and peanut butter cookies.
Every day make soup and rice.

It seems I had barely resolved myself to the Oops Diet when the whole picture changed again with a donation from the Tree Fetcher. No doubt it will help to pave the way for a very smooth visit with the Food Sneak who might not have to sneak any food into my cupboards this time. There will be all kinds of festivities to be had like coffee sipping and cider swigging. If there is one thing that makes it even nicer to visit with family I'd have to say it is the ability to share really rich food. We'll see what the Mountain Pouncer has to say about all this, and if they might bring The Chocolate Pouncer. We will definitely have to make a point of pouncing on all kinds of chocolate. We might pounce on some chocolate pudding, chocolate brownies and a few chocolate bars to boot. Throw in a chocolate boot and every is happy.

The month of November has already had some rather mysterious food activity afoot. I'm not about to call in a supernatural detective but this stock pot seems to have spawned the birth of the holiday that comes before Festivus. It has been dubbed Noodlicus. You need a large stock pot filled with about eight pool noodles which can then be decorated with lights. For this holiday it is important to go shopping both hungry and tired and buy a ridiculous amount of organic food at the expense of a close family member. That family member will then stay home and cry incessantly while everyone else gets together and eats non stop for two days. Breakfast will last for eight hours, followed by eight hours of lunch and diner will also last for a period of eight hours. The food choices will have nothing to do with noodles until the last possible moment when somebody decides to make Ramen. There will be so much chocolate present that even chocolate fanatics are likely to be put off and then get sent to their rooms for not finishing their brownies, pudding and chocolate bars. To further overwhelm the chocoholics it's best to buy cacao nibs and sprinkle the nibs all over everything including the breakfast cereal. Someone will need to learn sword form and demonstrate it with a pool noodle or if the holiday has offended someone they can always come by and chop the centerpiece to shreds with a real sword. This holiday will be so much fun that it will be all you can do not to shit your pants.

https://www.youtube.com/watchendofnoodle

https://www.youtube.com/watchfestivus

For a spur of the moment idea in the kitchen this Ramen met with no complaints at all. It's the first time I ever made Ramen and while I know the really good soup takes years to learn everyone has to start somewhere. It's amazing how fast the soup disappeared even though the main thought running through my head was that there must be a way to make all the ingredients fit together more harmoniously. Two bowls and I was as good as passed out for ten hours. There must be something in the soup that helps stimulate a deep sleep. Usually my first thought walking into a grocery store is not "oh wow I think I will buy a handful of crustaceans for five dollars" so the prawns in the soup were a definite treat. I calculated that a bowl of homemade Ramen costs about five dollars which would be great except that's my whole daily food budget. Great for special occasions. On the bright side I suppose there is nothing stopping me from working on the Ramen broth for the rest of my life as that may be somewhat affordable. I'll know I have succeeded when I can serve the broth with only one noodle in it and someone will find themselves truly satisfied with the experience and then pass out for ten hours.
https://damndelicious.net/2014/10/13/easy-homemade-ramen/

 Food Geek Reports on the Oops Diet

The Oops Diet has continued as the daily diet through the month of November. Alcohol has been weaving its way in and out of the picture although each time I'm reminded that I just can't handle it anymore. Between the headaches and the bloating it all comes back to the reminder that it's just not worth it considering how much it costs. Coffee has been weaving its way in and out of the picture because there's something about coffee that can reward in a way that other foods cannot. Some days at work need a light at the end of the tunnel and coffee is that light of supreme satisfaction. I can't explain how such a bitter bean makes me so crazy but it's hard to say no to comfort foods during stressful times.

The major finding from the festive Noolicus holiday was that cacao nibs are far better than expected. I always avoided them because I was told they were much too bitter compared to the cacao powder but with the holiday funds pouring in I decided to give them a try. I sprinkled a tablespoon on my homemade organic chocolate pudding and it was heaven at first bite. They were so amazing on the pudding that I decided to branch out and try them in the granola and it definitely took that granola way out of the dull range and boosted it way up to the exciting range. I would definitely include cacao nibs from now on!

The current list I have planned for the month of December delivers 65,558 calories for $170.90. The sugar is a bit of a deceptive presence in the calorie pool but it will no doubt find its way into a batch of cookies or a batch of pudding and help me keep the hunger beast at bay. The groceries I planned to buy only provide 2,059 calories per day but as usual I will just shrug that off because there's plenty of rice and chickpeas to fill in the shortfall. Now that the initial shock has worn off from the falling temperatures my metabolism seems to have relaxed. October saw a record 92,889 calories destroyed in one month putting the daily average at 2996 calories! I also destroyed 160 hours of hard work and investigated a lot of hiking trails and climbed a mountain so somehow that balances out. November is looking a lot tamer with a dainty average of 2,464 calories consumed per day.

When it comes to egg drop soup I think I have partaken in quite enough of that. This is the last one on the stove I swear. Out of rebellion I made it taste even better than ever so I might just keep making it anyway. My menu item of interest has all but shifted over to German potato noodles. These were time consuming in the past because a dough had to be rolled out and cut into sections but now I make a soft mixture on purpose, throw it in a Ziploc bag, cut a half inch hole in one side and then just squeeze the mixture out in lines in the frying pan. It saves a person from having to clean the counter afterwards. German potato noodles are a lot like big french fries when they are done. They taste really good and they don't require a reserve of deep frying oil which is the best part.

German Potato Noodles

Submitted to More With Less Cookbook by Adele S Mowere, Phoenixville, Pa

Combine in a bowl:

2 cups mashed potatoes

1 egg beaten

3/4 cups organic flour

1 t salt

Mix to form a dough. On lightly floured board roll out pieces into long strips 1/4" thick and cut into strips 1" wide. In a skillet heat fat 1/2" deep and fry until brown. Serve hot.

To save time make a softer mixture, throw it in a Ziploc bag and pipe it out into the fry pan with just a tbsp of coconut oil melted in the pan between batches.

Makes roughly 13 noodles one inch wide. The whole recipe costs $3.65 and provides 1400 calories.

Each noodles provides 107 calories and costs about thirty cents. 

I'm not sure if there's something in these noodles that birds just can't resist but if I go out smelling like German Potato Noodles really strange things happen. Just last week I was accosted by a crow. It was so determined to get into my van that I almost doubted if the metal roof was thick enough. No bird has ever taken that much interest in me so I figured it must be the smell of the potato noodles that was driving it crazy. Good thing there weren't actually any noodles in the van with me or that crow would have demolished the whole van. If you have children I hope they don't develop these crow like habits after they know how good the noodles taste.

Everything Cereal

Submitted to More With Less Cookbook by Rosemary Moyer and Marlin Dick.
Recipe tweaked by Gina Lipford.
How did I tweak it? I took out the sesame seeds, wheat germ, buckwheat and grape nuts and added a bunch of other things instead.

Preheat oven to 300 degrees

Combine in a large bowl:
1 cup flour
1 cup dry milk powder
6 cups rolled oats
1 cup chopped almonds

Combine separately:
1 cup melted butter
1/2 cup honey
2 T molasses
1 tsp vanilla

Mix it all together. Roast in giant pan like a turkey roasting pan for 45-60 minutes stirring every 15 minutes at first and then more frequently until particles are golden brown but not dark (not burned.)

After mixture has cooled add:
1 cup raisins
1 cup cacao nibs
1 cup hemp hearts
3/4 cup chia seeds
1 cup shelled sunflower seeds

Recipe makes around FOURTEEN one cup servings of cereal. (I started a fresh recipe the other day and measured more carefully. I realized I needed to update the cost after adding the almonds and sunflower seeds to get the right vitamins.)
Each serving provides 660 calories for $2.24

Double Oops Diet

13 German Potato Noodles  (Provides 1400 cal for $3.65)
1 cup homemade granola (provides 660 cal for $2.24)
2 glasses milk (provides 248 cal for $1.00)
2 banana (provides 200 cal for $0.60)

Total calories provided: 2508 cal for $7.50
Ooops. Looks like that cost is a little high.
Cronometer rates this diet as hitting 99% nutritional targets.
On the low side: Vitamin A.
Note: There's sweet potatoes on the shopping list so if you use those in the German potato noodles every other day you will get your vitamin A. If you make sure to add almonds or sunflower seeds to your granola that will take care of the vitamin E. If you drink your two glasses of milk you will only be short 10% of your DV for vitamin D in which case you might only need to take a dose of D drops once a week.

Grocery List for December 2017

8 L organic milk 2% (provides 2096 cal for $8)
2.5 kg organic sugar (provides 9662 cal for $15)
300 g organic chia seeds (provides 1,458 cal and vitamin K for $7.48)
227 grams hemp hearts (provides 1155 cal and a plethora of nutrients for $5.88)
227 g organic cacao nibs (provides 500 cal, iron, magnesium, potassium, antioxidants, zinc for $10)
10 pounds potatoes (provides 3,493 cal for $7)
2.5 kg sweet potatoes (provides 2,150 cal for $5.35)
5 dozen organic eggs (provides 8880 cal for $35)
5 kg organic flour (provides 18,200 cal for $14)
500 g organic butter (provides 3585 cal for $10)
2 kg organic oats (provides 1360 cal for $10)
1 organic whip cream (provides 163 cal for $3.18)
500 g honey (provides 1520 cal for $6)
1 kg almonds (provides 5,760 for  $14)

$10 banana fund (provides 3,480 cal)
$10 dairy fund (provides 2096 cal)

Total calories provided: 65,558
Daily provided: 2,114
Total cost: $170.89

https://www.youtube.com/watcholdiestouptownfunk

Food Geek Plans Grocery Trip

As I continue to plan the weekly calorie targets I continue to find that desserts play a crucial role in achieving the right amount of calories for the least amount of money. The pie in the picture above is an applesauce pie. While I am not the first to make an applesauce pie it struck me as kind of a novel idea. I had a lot of applesauce left over from past shopping trips and I just wasn't into it. I can't turn down a slice of pie though so it seemed appropriate to mix up that applesauce in a pan until it was so thick it wouldn't run.

I took about four cups of applesauce and put it in a saucepan on medium high heat. I mixed in a quarter cup of flour, a teaspoon of cinnamon, half a teaspoon of cloves, a couple teaspoons of butter, and a couple eggs. I let it boil and then simmered it a couple minutes before pouring it into the crust with some raisins thrown in as a bonus. The applesauce was already sweetened so there was no need to put in any more sugar but I sprinkled some sugar on the top just in case it was going to come up short on sweetness. The whole thing went into the oven for 10 minutes at 450 degrees then 20 minutes at 325 degrees. The cost was twice as high as the banana cream pie but considering I had everything on hand it meant keeping my bank account happy.

The crust was about as simple as ingredients get. I took a couple cups of white flour and mixed in a half cup melted coconut oil and almost a half cup of cold water. Maybe it was because I was using flour that was pre-sifted but I'd never had a dough roll out so easily and stay together so well. Not one crumb fell off of that dough as I picked it up and plopped it in the glass pie plate. That happens maybe once every couple years so I couldn't help but mention it.

Reflecting on last week's recipes I have a number of comments.  The banana cream pie had one major fault that got overlooked in all that initial fan fare. The bananas don't necessarily taste better after they are baked and they look pretty bad unless they are covered in meringue. The texture of the baked bananas is questionable and the nutrition component goes down after they are baked. With so many reasons not to bake the bananas it made more sense to only bake the peanut butter bars and leave it at that. The cream portion was already cooked on the stove, and if anyone wanted bananas that bad they could cut them on fresh and enjoy them even more.

The peanut butter bars and the cream was a winning combination. I was taking that every day as an energy boost in my lunch and half the time I couldn't wait to crack open that container. If I separated the peanut butter bars and the cream sauce into five containers that gave me nine hundred and thirty four calories for only $1.50. It was a little cheaper than I expected because I used peanut butter instead of peanuts. The calories were maxed, the enjoyment was maxed, over half the ingredients were organic and the cost was minimal.

When it comes to the breakfast loaf, that one still needs tweaking. The quantity of oats needs to come down and the sugar needs to go up or it won't bake properly. The reason it baked to perfection the first time was probably because there was so much sugar still hanging around even though I had tried to soak it out. Also I was using quick oats the first time and rolled oats the second time.

This month the targets were 2300 calories for $3.50 a day. The calorie portion was about twenty percent over and the cost was about two hundred and thirty four percent over at $8.20 per day.  Still at the beginning of the year I would have been really pleased to be able to eat for $8.20 per day. Thanks to the extra effort I made adding the yearly budget into the monthly budget it was observed that a much lower food cost was required. Trying to reduce my daily food budget from $15 per day to $3.50 per day is going to take some adjustment. There's a lot more $5 days popping up than there used to be and in time there will be some $3 days.

The Food Geek is pleased to now own a bicycle. We will see how the food budget responds to an increase in daily exercise. The plan is to bike to work which will mean adding about forty minutes of exercise to my day on top of an hour of taiji and the exercise I get walking and lifting at work. The smart thing to do would be to stock up on a bunch of heavy items that are difficult to transport by bike. Once the vehicle is sold there will still be the option of taking a cab home from the grocery store. Transportation will most likely not be an issue. If life truly becomes unbearable without a vehicle there are plenty more out there. Lets make this the year that the money going out agrees with the money coming in.

This week required a whopping $3.60 worth of beans to get the meals going. I had a hankering for some kidney beans and 900 grams provides three thousand calories. That means if I really wanted to I could get a thousand calories for $1.20. All I'd have to do is eat four cups of refried beans. Throw in four cups of rice and that would hit 2440 calories for $2.28.  The only problem there is that I would become a walking instrument of death and I would have a heightened tendency towards eating food that actually tastes good.

http://thestonesoup.com/blog/2010/07/how-to-eat-for-2-a-day-5-ingredients/

Kidney beans can be sort of a wild beast of a food. Some of them you swear you cooked them for three hours and they're still not cooked. One of the things I notice is that when I'm boiling such a big pan of water with so many beans I can't simmer it and keep the boil going. It has to stay close to medium heat the whole time. A lot of directions will say to simmer the beans but I say screw it. Don't simmer, just keep the beans boiling on medium or you will never get those things cooked. This particular package of beans came with instructions on soaking and cooking and it even had a reminder that you have to boil them to the right softness because they will not cook in the oven.

I have one recipe for refried beans that calls for boiling the beans with a couple onions thrown in and then after that is cooked add some bacon drippings. That recipe depends on the water cooking down at exactly the right time and I just don't see that happening when I try to work with kidney beans. Not only that but eating pork makes me feel like I just got kicked in the guts by an angry critter so I prefer to focus on adding tomatoes, onions and spices. I cook about 450 grams of beans at a time.  After the kidney beans are cooked I pour out all but two cups of the water, add a fried onion, two cups crushed tomatoes, 6 tsp garlic powder, 2 tsp salt, 2 tsp hot chile powder, and 1/2 tsp cumin. Now it can be simmered and check it every ten minutes to stir with a wooden spoon and mash it with a masher. Eventually after an hour or so the water will cook it down and it will be nicely mashed. That's the long way to do it without a food processor.

When it comes to making chapatis my results always looked like a beginner. I was afraid to roll the dough out too thin but you have to. Roll it out until you are worried you will roll it right out of existence. Fry it in butter a couple minutes per side and if you want to force more heat into it hold it with a metal spatula about an inch over a naked burner. The steam cooks it from the inside and after about ten seconds you should see it puff up. Sometimes I alternate frying the chapati and holding it over the naked burner with a metal spatula. There is a metal rack you can buy that sits over the burner so your hands can be free. There is also a special non stick pan you can buy with curved sides that is specifically for frying chapatis but it's not necessary. Between the pan and the naked burner you have a chapati cooked to perfection. After you get it right the only problem is that they are so good they will never make it into the next meal.

Best Example

1 cup cooked rice 326 cal $0.27
1 cup refried beans 227 cal $0.25
4 chapatis (each fried in 1 tbsp butter) 756 cal $0.96
one fifth of peanut butter bar recipe 660 cal $0.96
one fifth of cream recipe 380 cal for $0.80

2349 cal
$3.56

Cheers to another week of economical eating. Add a slice of chocolate cake and a cup of coffee and eating for a few dollars a day isn't such a chore. Add a burger and some potato chips and it's not bad at all. Add a little yogurt, some fruit and veggies and you could almost swear you were still eating for $3.50 a day.

I am sorry to say that two days in a row of trying to make fresh chapatis has broken my patience down into a sniveling heap of rebellion. It's easy enough to mix the flour, water and butter and it's not so tough to kneed it a few times and then separate it into tiny little balls. It's not so bad to roll those little tiny balls of dough out of existence and then wait a couple minutes here and there for them to cook. It's mildly entertaining to hold that little tiny piece of dough on a metal spatula over a nude burner hoping that one bubble in the middle will somehow empower itself to become a mighty bubble capable of inflating a giant balloon. As the minutes tick by that mediocre bubble shows no interest in becoming a mighty dough splitting bubble and as the first chapatis becomes the fourth and fifth the pan starts to overheat and pressing on gets harder and harder. When all the hard work is finally done the only evidence that anything was accomplished is one little crumb that a local ant has claimed for diner. There is only one thing to do while waiting for the chapatis to cook and that is eat chapatis.

In the spirit of laziness it was decided that I should only have to do five minutes of work and the oven should do the rest. The product of my laziness was rewarded with something I like to call butter pizza. The secret to making butter pizza is that you must take every opportunity to put more butter in it. The pizza pan is buttered liberally leaving strategic gobs of butter every couple inches to add "hot spots" that help the bread bake. Melted butter is added in with the flour and water. Once it's rolled out and sprinkled with caraway seeds and garlic powder more butter gets poured over top and rubbed in. After twenty minutes in the oven the butter pizza is cooked but it needs more butter.  As a final embellishment Parmesan cheese is sprinkled over top. This bread is really good by itself but it's out of this world when you dip it in tzaziki sauce.

How to make Butter Pizza:

The dough for the butter pizza is the same as for chapatis. You take two cups of all purpose organic flour, mix in 1/2 tsp salt, 7/8 cup of water and two tablespoons of organic melted butter.  Mix it up and turn it out on a floured surface. Kneed it a minute or so until it is more cohesive and then roll it out to fourteen inches.

Make sure the pizza pan is greased with a couple tbsp of butter and purposefully leave pea sized globs of butter every two inches. Lay the dough in the pizza pan and pour two tbsp of butter over top. Sprinkle a tsp of garlic powder and 1/2 a tsp caraway seeds over top. Sprinkle a little more salt. Pour two more tbsp of butter over top and rub it in evenly. Bake for twenty minutes at 350 degrees. Once it is baked place a few more tbsp of butter on the top so they can melt. Sprinkle Parmesan cheese.

If you are saying to yourself, but Food Geek, eating so much butter is going to make me fat, all I have to say is ha! All that butter is going to do is grease up your chubby little belly so that burning up fat is the easiest thing your body ever did. It could be that I am over confident because my metabolism has recently shown signs of recovery. I was advised a couple years ago that it takes a long time for the metabolism to come back around after a person has quit smoking. I can hardly believe that after a two month calorie extravaganza my weight is headed back down. When I stepped on the scale a couple days ago I was expecting to see the product of excess. I kept telling my family that I was due for a diet this summer but wonder of all wonders I might not have to cut back. This is the first time in two years I might be able to eat more than two thousand three hundred calories per day without piling on the pounds.

For any curious followers I know for a fact that extra exercise was not a factor. The bike has sat unused for weeks. My hiking boots have not racked up any more wear and tear. The Food Geek is one tired geek. It seems like the minute I brought that bike home my body decided to put me in my place and it went and hid all my energy. I still haven't been able to find where it went to. My taiji has gone from an hour a day down to a five minute short form routine. My greatest act of glory is walking into the kitchen to make coffee. I sure hope this all turns around soon because life isn't the same without a healthy dose of vitality. Cheers to one day being reunited with a sense of vitality.

 For the entire month 82,108 calories were consumed or an average of 2736 calories per day. There was a total of $258 spent on groceries. $90 of that was impulsive spending which means that if I had been completely regimented I might have gotten away with only spending $168 on groceries. What really surprises me is that despite going sixteen percent over maintenance levels I ended up four pounds lighter than last month.

Looking back over the menu selection the most enjoyable foods to eat were the pies and puddings. No food was wasted or thrown out. None of the food went bad. Pork does not perform well as a protein for me at all. I feel disgusting and nauseated the more pork that I eat. The use of 33% cream on a daily basis is a really bad idea. Saturated fat is bad for the heart and you can feel it slowing everything down. Cheese is a slightly better option and is more sustainable than pork and cream.

Adding a small salad costs about $0.70 per day and that is based on breaking down a head of lettuce, a cucumber, four tomatoes, and a few rings of onion into eight salads. I'd have to say I look forward to having a bit of vegetables to go with rice, cheese and beans.

The food cost is still fighting to climb back up closer to $9 per day and that is despite my best efforts. Who really has the energy to chip dollars off the menu? Shopping trips are turning into quiet battles where quantity is at war with quality.

 Here is a shopping list for someone if they wanted to fuel themselves for a month at 71, 692 calories for a total of $128.80. This person would have to have some basic items in the cupboard like salt and vanilla. They would have to have bowls, pots, knives, stirring spoons, baking pans, a whisk, measuring spoons, a can opener and a spatula. They would need containers in which to keep the food in the fridge. As stated before don't buy all the milk all at once. Only buy 4 L per week to keep it fresh. Eggs keep a long time so I wouldn't worry about the eggs.

2- 900 gram packages red kidney beans $7.00 ( 5,994 calories)
2 cans crushed tomatoes $4
4 onions $2.40
3 kg rice $8 (3,900 calories)
10 L organic milk $24 (5,220 calories)
4 kg organic flour $20 (14,560 calories)
2 kg organic sugar $10 (7,740 calories)
2 kg peanuts $16 (11,340 calories)
1 kg sunflower seeds $5 (5,840 calories)
2 kg organic oats $10 (7,780 calories)
2 pounds butter $8 (6510 calories)
3 dozen eggs $14.40 (2808 calories)

Total $128.80
Total calories provided: 71,692

The key recipes would be the breakfast loaf, peanut bars and home made vanilla pudding. There would also be rice and re-fried beans on the menu every day. Please see previous post for recipes. With luck those tomatoes would keep you from getting scurvy. Good luck and happy eating. I'll be munching with you and experimenting yet again to see if this is getting any easier.

If there were such a thing as bean angels they would be singing today. Those bean angels sang their way onto the butter pizza and convinced me to go all out. It barely requires any imagination at all to conceive that the most delectable pizza crust would help to create the most delectable pizza. How the beans managed to charm their way into the pizza well that's all the doings of those bean angels. It's all their fault that it tastes so god damned good. It's sort of like a cross between a pizza and a burrito. It's like an open faced burrito only the crust is so stiff that it's really a pizza. Or is it a burrito? For the really ambitious types you may as well roll the whole thing up and call it a giant burrito. The mother of all burritos. This butter pizza bean burrito packs 3374 calories.  Split it into two and you've got two really hefty meals for $3.20 each. This totally fits into the current trend of trying to get close to six hundred calories for a buck. Enjoy.

Butter Pizza Crust
2 cups organic flour (840 calories $0.66)
8 tbsp butter (840 calories $1.92)
7/8 c water ( 0 cal free)
2 tbsp Parmesan cheese (50 calories $0.34)

Bake it as usual for 20 minutes at 350 degrees. Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese.

Transform your butter pizza into a burrito hybrid:

1 cup refried beans (270 cal $0.25)
180 grams of shredded cheese (720 cal $2.20)
10 olives (40 cal $0.20)
2 tomatoes (54 cal $0.30)
8 rings onion (20 cal $0.05)

Put the topped pizza back in the oven at 350 degrees for another ten minutes. 

Total calories:2834
Total cost $5.90

If you are all set to enjoy a whole month of eating burrito pizza and home made pudding then I have created the matching shopping list. I calculated everything very carefully based on each recipe and the frequency of baking each month. Things have changed a little bit in the banana cream pie department. Lately it's been more a piece of cake with a cup of pudding, a half a cup peanuts, and a fresh banana. You may want to note I dropped the eggs in the pudding down to two eggs since I am now adding the whole egg not just the egg yolk. The pudding is basically the cream portion of the banana cream pie but without the pie. The peanuts are so good there's really no reason to go through all the trouble of making them into peanut squares. The whole menu delivers 3238 calories for $5 per day. That's a bite and a half for all the hard working folks.

Daily Menu

1/2 burrito pizza  (1417 calories $2.25) I cut the cost by dropping the cheese from 180g to 90g
1 piece white cake (393 calories $0.70)
1 cup homemade pudding (633 calories $1.20)
1/2 cup peanuts (435 calories $0.33)
1 banana (100 calories $0.25)

Total calories 3238
Total cost: $4.73

Frequency of Cooking

Make one white cake four times a month
Make 450 grams of kidney beans into refried beans eight times a month
Make a batch of pudding ten times a month
Make a burrito pizza fifteen times a month

Are the proteins complete? Do they provide all nine essential fatty acids? Yes. Will eating like this cause bloating for people with lactose intolerance? Absolutely. The bloating is so prolific that a woman could easily start to believe she was carrying a baby and a man might even start to believe he was pregnant too. You should definitely eat like this if you want to work on being more neurotic and begin building a whole relationship with your stomach until you find yourself talking to it like it's a person and obsessively monitoring how far out it's getting. Meals this good permanently mesmerize the mind until the mind and body are locked in a staring contest. Staring, bloating, thinking, staring, eating, thinking, bloating and then bloating some more until it's hard to breath. If only there was a way to eat cheap without bloating so much.

Yogurt has always been the choice for ease of digestion. Regular yogurt is $0.83 per cup (per 250 grams.) Organic yogurt is $1.60 per cup (per 250 ml) and the calories are only slightly higher than milk. Organic milk costs about fifty cents per cup. In my past history it was once recommended to me to drink buttermilk as it was more in my capacity to digest it than milk. The only problem is that I have not ever seen organic buttermilk.

http://www.mapi.com/ayurvedic-recipes/beverages/digestive-lassi.html

The above link points out a recipe for a digestive drink made from mixing a quarter cup yogurt with a cup of water and spices. This appeals to me because it will mean stretching out the yogurt and reducing bloating.

I find it really interesting that a lot of cultures allow the baby calf to stay with the mother and nurse and only take some milk that is left over after the baby drinks. I think that is really beautiful. I think it's AWESOME that there is a lot of reading to do on HOW TO USE DAIRY PRODUCTS. Most of us don't ever think there is a method to it or an instruction manual. I really needed this reminder! The website below gave me the hint to put CARDAMON in the pudding to fix the mucus forming problem.

https://yogainternational.com/article/view/ayurvedic-dairy

https://draxe.com/symptoms-of-lactose-intolerance/

https://greatist.com/health/complete-vegetarian-proteins

Master List

5 kg organic flour ($14)
3 kg organic sugar ($20)
3 dozen free run eggs ($15)
90 ml vanilla (1/3 bottle $4)
three pounds regular butter ($15)
5 L organic milk ($10)
3600 grams kidney beans ($10.80)
1400 grams cheese ($17)
180 grams parmesan cheese ($5.25)
150 olives (705 ml $2.45)
6 onions ($2.70)
4776 ml organic tomatoes (6 big cans $10.74)
5 bunch bananas ($6)
2 kg peanuts ($10)

Total $142.94

I did some work to figure out how this selection of food delivers in some basic categories. It really doesn't come as a big surprise that this method of eating means high fat and high sugar. In terms of a one month picture this is how the diet measures up:

Fat: 2894.7 grams (554 grams over monthly recommended amount of 2340g)
Saturated fatty acids: 1195 grams (595 grams over monthly recommended amount of 600g)
Cholesterol: 12 grams (3 grams over monthly recommended amount of 9g)
sodium: 53 grams (46 grams over monthly recommended amount of 6.9g)
potassium: 30 grams (twice the monthly recommended amount of 14.1g)
carbs: 8638 grams (388 grams over monthly recommended amount 8250g)
sugar: 3907 grams (2407 grams over monthly recommended amount of 1500g)
fiber: 749 grams (91 grams under monthly recommended amount 840g)
protein: 2228 grams (728 grams over monthly recommended amount 1500g)

The daily banana, tomato, and 1/2 onion provide only 65 percent of the needed vitamin C. The solution to that is pretty easy. When you make the pizza add two more tomatoes for a total of four tomatoes. Once the tomatoes have been increased then the vitamin A requirement is met as well. Calcium is covered with 10 percent extra. Iron is only covered by 76 percent. That could be fixed with a cup of raisins. Vitamin D is easy to account for since milk is fortified with vitamin D.

As a note of interest I also was looking into the omega 6 omega 3 fatty acids ratio. If I buy regular butter because it's cheaper I will be getting an excess of omega 6 in my diet and that will set my body up for inflammation. If I buy grass fed butter the ratio of omega 6 and omega 3 is completely balanced. Grass fed butter also provides a number of other benefits that stabilize and heal the intestinal lining. I'm as good as converted back to the more expensive butter. I was already converted once but I needed a second conversion. Buying unsalted butter will certainly help pull that sodium level back down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_Daily_Intake

The shopping list above is intended to get one person through one month when that person has a moderately active lifestyle. For people who don't have much money to spend on groceries this is the way to go. For me the only way to sustain eating flour and sugar without feeling gross is to eat organic. Then at least you save yourself from dealing with herbicide content while your body is busy enough dealing with the repercussion of a diet heavy in flour and sugar. For women who have altered their hormones using birth control this diet probably would be a fast track to a yeast infection. I found that whenever I tried to use the pill form of birth control it would almost always result in severe fatigue followed by a yeast infection if I wasn't fanatical about eating vegetables. If your hormones are in good shape and you don't tend to be vulnerable to candida then this diet would be tolerable. Yeast formation in the body affects men and women. If the conditions in the body lose proper homeostasis then yeasts can transform into mold and cause havoc in the whole system. Doctors often mistake a bad outbreak of candida as mono.

There's still the matter of coffee consumption. Honestly I am spending over fifty dollars a month on coffee alone between the regular coffee, the decaf and everything I put in the coffee. Coffee is a desert because I put in cream and maple syrup and it's so enjoyable that no matter how short I am on cash it always seems to sneak its way back into the cupboard. I am thinking of starting to use caffeine pills in place of coffee. You can get 100 tabs of caffeine pills each containing 200 mg caffeine for $8.97. That's $0.08 per tab. I could get my caffeine fix for $2.50 per month. That's a huge improvement.  That's a dramatic savings each month. I will definitely look into this further.

Today the Food Geek is tasting the flavor of water. The water from the tap tastes really good. It tastes clean and refreshing. How do you like your water? Do you put lemon in your water? A dash of pepper? Is there something that might really bring out the flavor of water, or could water really bring out the flavor in something else? How would the water taste with a few flakes of mint? Is there some way to drink water like it has never been drank before? These are some crazy questions the Food Geek will be working on apart from creating more types of pizza with the Beans Angels. Has the Food Geek finally found a way to enjoy eating on a tight budget? Could things possibly get weirder than a burrito pizza? What will this diet morph into next? Can caffeine pills really replace coffee? Lets find out together as Project Munch continues with a food budget of $150 a month.

The Food Geek has been reviewing the daily value charts for vitamins and minerals. If I was out to fit my diet to the DV charts without supplementation there's definitely some holes in the "nutritional armor". The Pizza n Pudding diet leaves a number of categories unfulfilled such as B5, iodine, magnesium, zinc, selenium, copper, and chromium. The solution for people whose bodies are really tired of digesting red meat is to eat more fish, avocado, sunflower seeds, peanuts, cranberries, wheat bran, wheat germ, oysters, poultry, spinach and tuna. If you want some extra riboflavin eat beef liver or better yet a fortified breakfast cereal.

I buy organic milk in the case that Anthony Samsel is correct and that we need to drive glyphosate out of our diets. The fact that organic milk might be healthier is just a bonus. The one thing nobody can seem to get straight is if the omega 3 in organic milk is ten percent higher, fifty percent higher or seventy percent higher than regular milk. In any case it is higher and that is a definite advantage unless you want inflammation to rule your body's processes. Organic milk contains a higher level of conjugated linoleic acids which helps to boost the body's metabolic rate, increase immunity to disease, and increase muscle growth. It's higher in antioxidants which protect the eyes from disease, and it's higher in Vitamin E and beta carotene.

 I analyzed the amounts of micro-nutrients I was getting from taking two capsules of Empowerplus per week and that amounts to about a quarter of what the charts recommend. Still it's entirely possible that my food choices are hitting on most of the important categories which is why I don't feel a need to take more than that.


http://www.peanut-institute.org/health-and-nutrition/protective-nutrients/vitamins-and-minerals.asp

https://www.dairynutrition.ca/facts-fallacies/product-quality/differences-in-the-nutritional-composition-of-organic-versus-conventional-milk

http://laurenfollett.com/organic-milk-vs-conventional-milk/http://laurenfollett.com/organic-milk-vs-conventional-milk/

https://thebovine.wordpress.com/2008/12/21/newcastle-university-study-reveals-advantages-of-organic-dairy-farming/

 https://bcdairy.ca/milk/articles/organic-milk-vs-regular-milk-whats-the-difference


For the month of July 2017 the Food Geek will be given the following items to eat directly or cook into recipes:

1 bunch mint ($3 gives 70 cal and vit A, vit C, calcium, magnesium, iron)
3 lemons ($3 gives 24 cal and vitamin C)
1 avocado ($2 gives 322 cal and vit C, magnesium, B6)
1 piece ginger ($0.60 gives 60 cal and antiviral properties as well as a digestive aid)
1 bunch spinach ($2 gives 78 cal and provides a powerhouse of vitamin A, C, magnesium and B6)
1 red pepper ($1 gives 37 cal and a lot of vitamin C and vitamin A)
426 grams canned salmon ( 2 cans $5 gives 613 calories plus omega 3 and 6 and B5)
212 grams sardines (2 cans $2.88 gives 442 calories plus omega 3 and 6, phosphorous and B6)
150 g cranberries ($2.77 gives 450 cal plus iodine, vitamin C)
5 pounds potatoes ($3 gives 2,500 cal and carbs, potassium, fiber, vitamin C and B6)
5 kg organic flour ($14 gives 16,666 cal and protein, fiber and carbs)
900 grams organic sugar ($5 gives 3,483 cal)
2 kg honey ($20 gives 6,080 calories)
2 dozen free run eggs ($10 gives 1,776 cal and a powerhouse of nutrients)
4 liters organic milk ($8 gives 2080 cal and protein, calcium, vitamin D, B vitamins, vitamin A, saturated fat)
1.6 kg Nanak Desi Ghee ($30 gives 13,714 cal and micronutrients, CLA, vitamins A,D,E, butyrate, omega 3 and 6, choline)
1.5 kg balkan yogurt ($6 gives 1,200 cal and active bacterial cultures)
4 packages kidney beans each at 900 grams ($10.80 gives 12,521 cal and protein, fiber, carbs, magnesium and folate)
375 ml Jalapenos ($4 gives 62 calories and a metabolism boosting capsaicin)
3 onions ($1.50 gives 132 cal and pre-biotic enzymes)
3 cans organic tomatoes $5 (796 ml each gives 382 cal and vitamin C and vitamin A)
5 bunches bananas ($6 gives 3120 cal potassium, carbs, fiber, vitamin C, and sugar)
100 grams cumin  $2.50 ( helps with digestion)
100 grams peppercorns $1.90 (helps with digestion)

Total: $149.95
Total Calories : 65,812 or 2,193 calories per day.

Most of the nutritional holes were filled but the calories dropped. I will simply fill the calorie deficit with all the leftover food in the cupboards and freezer which there is a ton of. I am really lucky that I don't have to try and live on $2.50 per day. $5 per day I can do if I stay focused. I say that after already having spent $195 on food this month and it's only half way through. I swear I am trying. One of these days all the changes will fall into place and I'll be able to meet nutritional and caloric needs like it was the cheapest thing that ever happened. One of these days.

In July The Food Geek will be challenged to come up with something that is as good as pizza but without any cheese on the ingredients list. The Food Geek will be paying special attention to foods that help with digestion such as spiced yogurt drinks, ghee, and detox drinks. Honey was highlighted once again for its qualities as an antibacterial.

This selection includes a small amount of produce to boost magnesium, vitamin C, B5, iron, and iodine. Desi ghee will be a highlight as it is cited to have a higher nutrient level than even grass fed butter and it has higher levels of butyrate.

https://www.prebiotin.com/foods-containing-prebiotics/

https://draxe.com/ghee-benefits/

http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/dairy-and-egg-products/111/2

 Today the Food Geek called the number for Nanak Foods and they confirmed that their milk comes from cows that are ninety nine point nine percent grass fed.  1.6 kg of Nanak Desi Ghee costs $30 compared to the Verka Desi Ghee which is 1.6 kg for $15. Grass fed cows produce less milk so they are more expensive to raise as dairy cows.

Nanak Desi Ghee is not organic but I am much happier that the cows are grass fed. The question is are grass pastures sprayed with roundup? Is there roundup ready grass seed? Ah crap there is but maybe so far it's only for golf courses where the grass has to be perfect. Still it's possible if the dairy farmers use Roundup Ready grass in their pastures then we are no further ahead. The cows may as well be eating corn because their milk will contain as much glyphosate as if they were eating corn. Back to organic unless I get a reply from Nanak Foods very soon.

https://www.wired.com/2011/07/engineered-bluegrass/ 

 I started trying to think of some ways to curb cheese usage while still maintaining the main ingredients in the Burrito Pizza. Cheese is a little heavy for the digestive system to take in regularly. I don't have the confidence in making my own soft wraps and that just adds an extra step. Who says you can't just cut the dough in two, roll out two circles, put in some filling and then fold it over and bake it? It's sort of like a giant perogy except you don't have to risk it falling apart in boiling water since it's baked. The only difference is I baked it for half an hour. With this in mind you could still add a bit of cheese and nobody would be caught up in thinking they were shorted on cheese because you can't really see in there anyway after it's cooked. Out of sight out of mind. What's in the Beanza Pop is a mystery of sorts. I like this idea because

How to make two Beanza Pops

Each Beanza Pop contains 805 calories and costs $1.30  if you only use two extra tbsp of butter in the buttering process.

In a medium size bowl mix:

2 cups flour
7/8 cup water
2 tbsp melted butter
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp garlic powder

Turn it out and kneed it until none of the dough falls off anymore. Separate the dough into two pieces.  Roll out each piece to nine inches. Add 1/2 cup refried beans and your vegetables of choice be it peppers, onions, olives, broccoli, or whatever your heart desires. Fold the dough over, pinch it shut, roll it shut or a combination of pinching and rolling. If you want rotate the whole thing so the- oh my god how badly does this thing look like a vagina? It's bad isn't it? Not the kind of thing you would send your kids to school with or you'd scar them for life. God I love the night shift. I could bring a pizza shaped like a vagina for lunch and nobody would be there to notice.
Please cook the Beanza Pop at 350 degrees for thirty minutes. You can put caraway seed on it if you think it's safe to decorate it that way. 

Today's entry will conclude with a positive note that the quantity of beans eaten at one meal should not exceed the carb they are eaten with. Digestive nightmare now explained. Bringing the quantity of beans down to only one cup on the whole burrito pizza has liberated my stomach from feeling like a beach ball. Yay! Have a great day everyone! Don't forget to make some Bean Tarts!

http://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/mary-s-bean-tarts

http://ontariobeans.on.ca/recipe/maple-syrup-bean-tarts/

These sound so good. I would like to try and live off of these.

Forty minutes at 350 degrees is even better for the Beanza Pops. I suppose these are a lot like the South American empanadas except I don't fry mine. Empanadas are thought to have originated in Spain.

https://www.laylita.com/recipes/all-about-empanadas/ 

The Food Geek is reporting this morning that the transition to caffeine pills was a supreme success. I have noticed that with only one pill I feel like I wake up much faster and I feel really good about my state of alertness. I don't miss the physical coffee drink but the maple syrup has charmed its way into a variety of other meals since it lost its place in my coffee. Hopefully it's just a brief phase of needing to celebrate maple syrup although it could be a lot more than just a sweet tooth since maple syrup has plenty of micro nutrients. According to the first site below one tablespoon contains 33% of your daily need for manganese as well as 6% zinc. Another site toots it for riboflavin content. It's always a tough call when it comes to trying to decide if something on the monthly list is expendable. Maybe buying maple syrup is a weakness or maybe it pays for itself by supplying manganese, phenols, lignans, and antioxidants as well as electrolytes.

https://paleoleap.com/all-about-maple-syrup/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/maplesyrup

http://www.purecanadamaple.com/maple-syrup-recipes/nutrition-for-exercise/ 

Since the mid-month introduction of the caffeine pills the Food Geek's daily food cost has dropped by $1.64. For the last twenty four days the average calorie consumption has been 2847 calories and the average cost has been $6.13. The month of June is showing a two dollar daily improvement over May's $8.18 average per day. I am a little concerned that the food supply that I arranged for the month of July will be used up in the first twenty days. That means I might have to kick those vegetables off of the list to leave room for two kilograms of peanuts. I'd really like to kick the kidney beans off the list as well and replace them with maple syrup. I can easily continue with the lentils and chickpeas that I have on hand. What have those kidney beans done anyway? It would have been more comfortable to just suck on a bike pump every day. When it comes to the Nanak Desi Ghee I did get a reply from the company and they are not sure what goes on with the pastures on the dairy farms. I may or may not go with the desi ghee or just organic butter. The Food Geek can easily go through four pounds of butter a month so it has to be good quality.

In terms of the quality of the food I'd have to say the burrito pizza tasted really good but unless the quantity of the kidney beans is kept to a one cup total per pizza the after affect is really uncomfortable.The Beanza Pops seemed like an alternative at first but they are not appetizing at all. Even if I was really hungry and they had a really good dipping sauce I still couldn't quite bring myself to eat a leftover Beanza Pop. Yuck. Another trick in making kidney beans more digestible is to soak them for sixteen hours instead of eight and rinse them and replace the water after the first eight.

With my guts teetering on the brink of rejecting food in general it's making a lot of sense to eat plain food. It's hard to say how much of the abdominal discomfort is due to a flu bug, how much is due to improper ratios of beans to carbs and how much is from working at night. Whatever the cause it seems to help to eat plain food. In the morning the plain oats are back on the menu with cardamon powder to ease digestion. For after midnight something rather plain like a poached egg that was wrapped in dough and baked. When I get hungry in the middle of the night my stomach starts churning up acid like crazy and it's kind of a no brainer to eat so everything settles down. The trick may be to eat really plain food. I have taken a fancy to the idea of wrapping very simple food items in dough and baking them for twenty minutes. Some of these simple food items would be poached eggs, or small cubes of potatoes or yams. These little food nuggets taste incredible when dipped in sriracha sauce mixed with maple syrup. Having a piece of food inside the dough just creates a hot spot and makes the dough cook even better. When it's done it's crispy and it's fun to tare apart with the hands.

 The method for making these food nuggets is really easy. Make the dough from two cups of flour, 7/8 cup water, 2 tbsp melted coconut oil and 1/2 tsp salt. Mix it together with a spoon until the water has moistened most of the flour then turn it out on a lightly floured surface. Kneed it for less than a minute just to get the dough a little more consistent. Cut it into eight pieces. Roll each piece of dough out into a four inch square. In the center of the square place a poached egg or a cube of potato and fold it shut. Place the eight pieces on a greased pan and pour another two tbsp of melted coconut oil over top. Bake for twenty minutes at 350 degrees. For a nice dipping sauce mix equal parts of sriracha and maple syrup.  

I realize I am not about to get away scot-free when it comes to dabbling with the night shift although I will try my best to soften the blow. There have been experiments done on mice where they are exposed to lights at night and darkness in the daytime and their guts end up looking like mice that have been given alcohol in their water supply. Humans are not mice but there is evidence to suggest I may have treat myself as carefully as a recovering alcoholic. Good thing 2017 is an alcohol free year. The balancing factor is that the stress level is so low on nights that with any luck it will make up for any gut abuse.

Amended Grocery List for July 2017

426 grams canned salmon ( 2 cans $5 gives 613 calories plus omega 3 and 6 and B5)
150 g cranberries ($2.77 gives 450 cal plus iodine, vitamin C)
5 pounds potatoes ($3 gives 1,746 cal and carbs, potassium, fiber, vitamin C, chromium, and B6)
5 kg organic flour ($14 gives 16,666 cal and protein, fiber and carbs)
2.5 kg sweet potatoes ($7 gives 2,150 cal potassium, fiber, carbs, vitamin A, B6, magnesium, iron, vitamin C)
900 grams organic sugar ($5 gives 3,483 cal)
500 grams honey ($6 gives 1,520 cal carbs, iron, potassium, vitamins, minerals, and antibacterial qualities)
1 Liter maple syrup ($14.50 gives 3,462 calories magnesium, manganese, zinc, riboflavin, calcium, carbs, phenols, antioxidants, and electrolytes)
2 dozen free run eggs ($10 gives 1,776 cal and a powerhouse of nutrients)
4 liters organic milk ($8 gives 2080 cal and protein, calcium, vitamin D, B vitamins, vitamin A, saturated fat)
1.6 kg Nanak Desi Ghee ($30 gives 13,714 cal and micronutrients, CLA, vitamins A,D,E, butyrate, omega 3 and 6, choline)
1.5 kg balkan yogurt ($6 gives 1,200 cal and active bacterial cultures)
375 ml Jalapenos ($4 gives 62 calories and a metabolism boosting capsaicin)
3 onions ($1.50 gives 132 cal and pre-biotic enzymes)
3 cans organic tomatoes $5 (796 ml each gives 382 cal and vitamin C and vitamin A)
5 bunches bananas ($6 gives 3120 cal potassium, carbs, fiber, vitamin C, and sugar)
100 grams cumin  $2.50 ( helps with digestion)
100 grams peppercorns $1.90 (helps with digestion)
1 kg peanuts ($5 gives 5,670 cal folate, and protein)
900 grams plain sunflower seeds ($5.44 gives 5,256 calories B5, B6, magnesium, calcium, vitamin E, copper, iron, protein, and fat)
2 kg chickpeas ( $3.80 gives 7280 cal potassium, carbs, fiber, magnesium, iron, B6, calcium)
2 kg rice ($4 gives 7,300 cal carbs, protein, magnesium, B6.)

Total: $150.41
Total Calories :78,062 provides 2,602 calories per day

If you already have rice on hand which most people do then replace the rice with $4 worth of sardines to get caught up on your selenium. If you already have chickpeas on hand then congratulations. Take your $3.80 and start saving for your dream vacation. If you have a kg of oats on hand then great you just boosted your available calories by 3,890.

A day in the life of the Food Geek now looks like this:

Breakfast
1/3 c cooked oats ( 95 cal $0.18)
1 banana (104 cal $0.25)
yogurt lassi with 1/4 cup yogurt or 58 grams (37 cal $0.40)

lunch option A
1 c rice (324 cal $0.27)
1/2 c chickpeas (120 cal $0.09)
 or
lunch option B
4 food nuggets  (976 cal $2.00)
dipping sauce 2 tbsp maple syrup and 2 tbsp sriracha (100 calories $0.65)

Breakfast/diner

1 cup homemade pudding (500 calories $1.26)
1/3 cup oats cooked (95 cal $0.18)
1 cup peanuts (870 calories $0.64)

Calories and cost with option A (2145 cal $3.27)
Calories and cost with option B (2777 cal $5.56)

https://cronometer.com/
This software is neat to get a reading on your diet. The software rates this diet as hitting 93% nutritional targets. So far the diet mentioned above is hitting low on vitamin K because there are no green leafy vegetables at all. Just adding a half a cup of kale per day could bring up the vitamin K level to 94 percent.  The diet is low on vitamin C, vitamin D, potassium, sodium, and calcium. I haven't quite figured out a fancy way to work in the tomatoes but you could just eat a cup of canned tomatoes per day to get the vitamin C up to 77%.  Last time I checked I was getting enough calcium but that was before I cut out cheese. According to Cronometer I have to drink four glasses of milk per day to get enough vitamin D but then my calcium level goes over by seventy percent. Cronometer is telling me that on top of the tomatoes I would need to add another banana to satisfy the daily need for vitamin C.


This calls for a moment of serenity.
https://www.youtube.com/watchserenity

https://www.youtube.com/watchbunnybeach

https://www.youtube.com/watchbunnypoet

 The month of June tallied up to a grand total of 78,437 calories eaten and $161.50 spent on groceries. Each day an average of 2614 calories was consumed and $5.40 was spent. There was absolutely no impulse spending at all except for a bag of chocolate chips which shall stay completely "off the record". Deny a woman chocolate and there will be a penalty of unknown size and duration. All the menu planning in the world will never suppress the chocolate cravings and even if the chocolate cravings could be eliminated that would be a waste of time. Chocolate is good for you. It just happens to have a reputation for being expensive but it's not that expensive. As far as calorie pricing goes chocolate chips pull their own weight. Put in $1.80 and you get out 746 calories for one cup of chocolate chips or 160 grams. As a fail safe chocolate chips can be added to the pudding any time to fulfill that chocolate craving. At the end of a hard working shift there are no complaints when presented with pudding, oats, banana, peanuts and the occasional handful of chocolate chips.

In regards to the rest of the diet plan for the month of June I don't have any complaints except for being beaten up by a bag of beans. That bag of beans went into my guts and blew me up from the inside out. I thought I was either going to die or give birth to a giant bean baby. Multiple lab tests later it was discovered that in fact I was very healthy but the kidney beans would have to go. Kidney beans are especially nasty when it comes to bloating and to over shoot the ratio of kidney beans to carbs is asking for trouble of the worst kind. Chickpeas are so much more forgiving as a menu item and I can't say I have ever had a problem digesting chickpeas. The food nugget idea went over very well. The baked food nugget approach is going to be the jumping off place for combining homemade dough, potato and sweet potato.

In another stray bit of nerdy news the Food Geek made a discovery on Cronometer. The anticipated caloric expenditure for my activity level at work is 1,244. That matches the conclusion I came to last summer comparing my 1,800 calorie diet with the rate of weight loss I was experiencing. What it means is that the whole time I thought consuming 2,800 calories per day was too much but it's actually the perfect amount to match my activity level. The only reason I gained weight before eating 2,800 calories per day is because my metabolism was still recovering from eliminating cigarettes. I quit smoking January 26 2015. Two and a half years later my metabolism finally picked up the slack. If anything I hope that convinces anyone reading this that it's a really smart idea not to start smoking.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1559911

https://www.verywell.com/smoking-and-metabolism-2825347

 http://www.livestrong.com/article/399983-does-smoking-speed-up-your-metabolism/

The Food Geek will continue to monitor the sustainability of eating for $150 per month with an eye towards further cost reduction and nutrient maximization. From a caloric stand point $150 can deliver enough food for a moderately active adult. There will be an attempt made to fill in the nutritional deficits using either food or supplementation. Fish is a little fishy to try and incorporate due to its cost and heavy metal content. Hemp oil is the cheaper route to get omega 3 for 0.45 cents per day as apposed to the cost of sardines and it's been said that hemp oil is more balanced than oils in fish.  Then again sardines also supply B12 and calcium so they may be worth their while. It's hard to say without further inquiry.

https://www.nateralife.com/blog/lifestyle/omega-truth-hemp-vs-fish-oil/

For the month of July the Food Geek will be piloting an eating plan with the daily additions of 1000 mg of vitamin C, 1000 IU vitamin D3, 200 mg caffeine, and a reliance on sriracha and maple syrup to add flavor to rice and chickpeas. There will be a new addition of a kale salad with the 1/4 cup of yogurt. Each week there is one can of fish allowed. The menu will continue otherwise unchanged. The food nugget recipe will be put to a one month test to asses its popularity.

The Food Geek will be working to fill the last four major nutritional short falls. The calcium intake must come up twenty three percent more, the potassium must come up forty percent, the iron must come up fourteen percent, and the B12 must come up nineteen percent.  The calcium fix may be relatively easy. Kale is comparable to cheese in the amount of calcium it can provide and it's a lot cheaper. There will also have to be something done about the 800 calorie deficit so at some point more food will have to be added.

Gut abuse or no gut abuse energy levels are starting to climb to back to normal. I am once again eager to do my taiji long form every day and even on my days off I can't wait to get out hiking. I am looking into rollerblading again as well as swimming. The hour of biking every day will have to be implemented more gradually than I originally thought. The first time I tried biking to work I was puking by the time I got home. Not something I would rush to repeat. It's pretty discouraging to associate biking with illness. I'd rather associate it with vibrant good health but it's entirely possible that the extra demand on my energy made it too hard for my immune system to fight off the latest bug. A couple more weeks on the vitamin C and I might try again to extend my high activity period from eight hours per day to nine.

Today the Food Geek was tossing ideas around with Cronometer. I ran a diet plan through the program and noticed to my astonishment that the homemade pudding was performing really well compared to rice and chickpeas. I thought for sure that the end of the story would be that rice and chickpeas would win out as the most nutritious and economic choice but I was wrong. The pudding itself provides 21% of the daily targets. The really awesome thing about Cronometer is that if you click on one food that you entered it will show you all the nutrition associated with that food only. I was pleased as punch to see that a tablespoon of chia seeds could deliver 79% DV vitamin K and 162% DV omega 3. The diet is hitting 95% of the targets and checks in at under four dollars. The only problem is that when the work variable is entered the diet falls short by nine hundred calories.

Vitamin D3 1000 IU ($0.05 provides 167% vitamin D)
Vitamin C 1000 mg ($0.04 provides 1333% vitamin C)
200 mg caffeine pill ($0.06 provides wake up call)
1 tbsp chia seeds  ($0.17 provides 46 cal 80 % vitamin K 162% omega 3)
1 1/2 cups cooked rice ($0.27 provides 307 cal  and 34 % daily carbs)
1/2 cup chickpeas ($0.09 provides 36% manganese 21% copper)
1/3 cup oats ($0.18 provides 95 cal 54% manganese)
1 cup pudding ($0.88 provides 315 cal 59% B12 30% vitamin A 27% calcium 50% riboflavin 25% energy 27% calcium 46 % carbs 21% vitamin D)
1 cup peanuts ($0.85 provides 861 cal 88% folate 56% energy 126% B3 52% B5 85% B1 18% B2 39% B6 81% vitamin E 186 % copper 157 % manganese 78 % phosphorous 60 % zinc 189% omega-6)
2 bananas ($0.60 provides 200 cal 67% B6 27% vitamin C 41% carbs)
10 glasses of water (provides hydration)
1 tbsp ghee ( $0.30 provides 120 cal 22% fat 18% vitamin A)
1 tbsp maple syrup ($0.20 provides 50 cal 32% manganese 23 % riboflavin)

Total calories 2134
Total cost $3.70
Nutrition targets hit: 94%
Enjoyment: 90%
Improvement: Add a cup of chocolate chips and the diet hits the calorie mark on the nose but alas this adds $2.50. Hey cool. I didn't know there was iron in chocolate. One cup of chocolate chips provides all kinds of micro nutrients ranging from 3% to 131% of your DV! I will never look at chocolate the same way again.)
Suggestion: You can take out the chocolate chips and add two sweet potatoes ($3.80), a can of sardines ($2.88) and one ounce of cheese ($0.30) to hit 100%. That adds $7.00. It's much cheaper to just eat the chocolate chips.

 Have you ever had a day where you wanted to jump out of bed and eat a salad? That's the last thing I thought would happen when I brought home the kale for July's food adventure. I had visions of kale slowly wilting and dying in my arms asking "why, why couldn't you have just eaten me?" I had an assortment of vegetables lurking in the fridge that had served a purpose on the burrito pizza and some sauerkraut that had been sulking for months on end without nearly enough attention and a piece of ginger that wasn't really impressed with being chopped and boiled. Onto that one stalk of kale went a cup of canned tomatoes, some diced hot banana peppers, chopped onion, olives, some sulky sauerkraut, and some gently mutilated ginger. That yogurt just wasn't about to head into any lassis so into the salads it went and top it off a teaspoon of balsamic vinegar. Since week one of salad paradise that familiar addiction is returning. Now I'm trying to figure out what I can take back to the store to get my next fix of greens. Common who really needs five kilograms of flour in one month? It's too hot to bake anything anyway. It's bad when it gets this way. To save trips to the store why not throw on chia seed instead of kale? It's going to give you vitamin K if you're not feeling comfortable taking the risk of bringing home any of those gateway vegetables. Chia could save a lot of people from having to go to Veggies Anonymous. It could be like nicorette for smokers.

To witness the troubling affects of vegetables please watch this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watchstunnedguineapig

It's the middle of the month in July. The peace and serenity of the morning was shattered by an ear splitting scream from my stomach "buy more peanuts or I will kill you!" My metabolism pretty much had me at gun point to forget that there was such a thing called "savings." That cream cheese was going to go into a cheese cake but it didn't last that long. Visions of chocolate truffles were not just dancing through my head but in fact rampaging in a giant chocolate mosh pit.

The number one reason I didn't want to depend on eating chickpeas in the past was because they were pretty dry. Everyone else in the lunch room could pretty much inhale their lunch and be done with it and there I was gnawing away on a bowl of rice and dried up chickpeas. Curried chickpeas tends to liven the texture up quite a lot but not quite enough and the cooking process is somewhat long. In the spirit of laziness it was decided that the answer was as simple as splat splat chop.

"splat" 1/4 cup salsa
"splat" 1 tbsp maple syrup, 1 tbsp sriracha, 1 tbsp ghee, 1/4 tsp cumin, 1 tbsp chia seeds
"chop" 2 tbsp onions, 1 tbsp ginger, 1 tbsp olives, 2 tbsp hot peppers

Mix it up ahead of time and let one half cup of cooked chickpeas marinate in it overnight. The next day all you have to do is make a cup of rice and it's ready to take with you. It's as fresh as it could be at that point.

Working with the yams was a bit of a process. At first I thought "this will be great. I will boil them and mash them like mashed potatoes and they will be ready in the fridge." Every day I lifted the lid and looked at the mashed yam and it looked and smelled worse and worse until it finally went into the freezer. It was over cooked and the flavor was not there. That was the first yam. The second yam I decided to give the "hash brown" treatment like I learned from my sister. She would chop up the potatoes into cubes and boil them for eight minutes. Then she'd drain them and fry them up for hash browns. Guaranteed the yams would be cooked and taste really good if they followed the same pattern as regular potatoes. The yams I found cooked a lot faster so I could boil them for just five minutes. Then they'd go into a fry pan with a tablespoon of ghee and fry on low for ten minutes. They get a liberal amount of salt and sprayed with Bragg seasoning to keep the sodium level up. Are they good? Absolutely. They are great for any time of day. Bring on the yams and all their vitamin A and potassium.

https://www.youtube.com/watchmissionimpossible

So far the stats for this month are an average of 2,333 calories consumed per day for an average of $5.85. That includes all condiments and supplements and the caffeine pill. I don't know if I will be able to pull off 2,800 calories for $3.30. Even a yam these days costs almost two dollars. Two yams and the $3.30 would be blown. So maybe if you ate fourteen cups of rice per day you could get your 2,800 calories for just $2.50 but you'd only be hitting sixty seven percent of the nutrition targets. Who could possibly sit down and eat five cups of rice per meal? You'd be so stuffed you'd probably throw up.

Realistically the most rice I've ever eaten in one day is three cups. I could not see myself eating more than three cups of rice under any circumstance. Three cups of rice is even pushing it. You have to really be in the mood for rice for it to eat like a meal and not like a hardship. If somebody really had to they could eat like this:

4.5 cups cooked white rice (978 cal $0.80)
1.5 cups cooked chickpeas (316 cal $0.27)
1/4 cup salsa (25 cal $0.30)
2 tbsp grass fed ghee (270 cal $0.60)
1 cup plain peanut (provides 861 cal $0.85 and 55% of a bunch of stuff you need)
4 tbsp onion, ginger (16 cal $0.30)
4 banana (provides 400 cal $1 and your DV for potassium)
1 really good multi vitamin ($0.50)
1 tbsp chia seeds (provides 54 cal for $0.34 162 % of your omega 3 and 79 % of your vitamin K)
1/2 tsp sea salt (provides 80% of your DV sodium for $0.02)

Total cal: 2531
Total cost: $4.98
Nutritional Coverage: 99%
Deficiencies: 30% short on calcium.

If you want to just live on rice and peanuts you'd hit 75% of your nutritional targets and that is based on eating 2.3 cups of rice and a third cup of peanuts three times a day. You'd pay $2.70 and if you added a supplement you could go from 75% nutritional coverage to 89% for an extra fifty cents. With this type of trend macaroni and cheese is starting to look pretty good. Six cups of home made macaroni and cheese results in 87% nutritional coverage.

Cheaper Diet

7 cups rice ($1.26)
1.5 cups chickpeas ($.27)
4 bananas ($1 has you covered for lots of potassium)
1 tbsp chia seeds ($0.34 has you covered for omega 3)
1 multi vitamin ($0.50)
1/2 tsp sea salt ($.02)

cost $3.30
nutritional targets covered 98%
deficiencies: calcium 36% short and potassium 30% short
fix calcium shortage with 60 grams of cheese for $0.72 or 1/2 cup sesame seeds (70 grams for $0.80)
fix potassium shortage with a potato (adds $0.50)
100% targets will cost $4.50

A diet like this would definitely mutate into something else pretty fast because it would be a very uncommon hassle to try and eat over two cups of rice per meal. Wouldn't it? Leave it to the Food Geek to have to try something like this. There's only one way to prepare and that is to practice.

 https://www.youtube.com/watchrice

https://www.youtube.com/watchcooklikeasian

An alternative solution is to eat three packages of KD for $3 and smile as you get run over by the food delivery truck. It may end up taking that extra two dollars to improve the quality of life and avoid that "freshly peeled off the road" feeling. I already investigated eating 170 grams of pasta per day and that felt like way too much. 600 grams of pasta would be like eating a box of play dough.
Here's a delicious distraction from life. A five second no bake cheese cake. Take a fifth of the cream cheese package slap on some honey and some chocolate chips and enjoy getting run over by the dairy truck for only $1.50

There's six days until the month of July rolls into August. The eating arrangements for July seemed to go out of wack pretty quickly during the month. What started as a reasonable forecast to eat pudding and food nuggets went horribly wrong. The store only had organic brown flour on the shelf and so I tried that in my recipes. Each one of them failed miserably with the brown flour. The taste of the pudding was thrown off and the food nuggets went from good to almost intolerable. The pudding is still lurking in the freezer but there's not much that can be done about it. Baking all but stopped completely due to the hot weather although rice doesn't produce that much heat when cooked on a burner.

The food arrangements moved over towards rice and chickpeas with a salsa marinade for the chickpeas. I couldn't seem to keep enough peanuts in the house and if anything I kept running to the store for peanuts, chocolate chips, yams, cheese and bananas. The kale went over a little too well and caused a bit of a salad craze for the Food Geek. The overall cost of eating crept up from $150 to $174 due partly to a vegetable craze and partly to a typical chocolate craze. Rather than succeeding in slipping down towards $4/day the trend was back to $6 even with free food available at work on occasion.

The Food Geek says "aha I get it. I need to buy more peanuts and more chocolate chips." Here is the finely crafted shopping list for August taking all that was learned from last month. The Food Geek is really not up to becoming a Rice Geek so all that rice might just have to remain as a moderate aspect of the diet.

August Groceries

150 grams cranberries (provides 450 cal plus iodine and vitamin C for $2.77)
2.2 kg potatoes (provides 1,694 cal, carbs, potassium, fiber, vitamin C, chromium, and B6  for $6.20)
6 kg sweet potatoes (provides 5,160 cal, potassium, fiber, carbs, vitamin A, B6, magnesium, iron, vitamin C for $16)
2 dozen free run eggs (provides 1776 cal for $10)
2 Balkan Style yogurt (provides 1,200 cal as well as gut friendly bacteria, calcium, and protein for $6)
2 L hot banana peppers (provides 240 calories, metabolism boosting capsaicin for $4.70)
2 onions (provides prebiotics for $2.00)
1 bunch bananas (provides 600 calories, potassium, carbs, fiber, vitamin C, and sugar for $1.70)
3 kg raw peanuts (provides 17,010 calories and 55% of all kinds of things you need for $24)
8 kg rice (provides 10,400 cal as carbs, vitamins, minerals and protein for $15)
2.4 kg chocolate chips (provides 11,193 cal plus copper, iron, manganese, magnesium, phosphorous and zinc for $27)
1 kg UNHULLED sesame seeds (provides 5775 cal and calcium for $20.50 however finding unhulled sesame seeds requires going to a specialty store.)

Total: $135.87
Banana fund: $10 (provides 3,600 cal)
Dairy fund: $5 (could provide 800 extra calories)
Calories provided: 59,898 or 1,932/ day

The "secret" plan is to keep using the chickpeas, ghee, maple syrup, chia seeds and salsa on hand to top up another 325 calories per day. Even with those additions the caloric requirement could fall short about five hundred calories when the work variable is entered. Must be time to go digging in the freezer. Maybe the whole wheat pudding will taste better with chocolate chips.

At this point I am not sure what the success strategy would be to lower the food costs down another $1. I think at this point I'm still trying to maintain as much comfort and confidence as I can eating for $5 per day since this budget range is still fairly new.  $5 seems reasonable to eliminate the majority of deficiencies as well as to have an occasional cream cheese bash.