The Project

I wanted to write about kitchen economy, but something about just writing in a vague, removed way didn't sit right with me. I have had formal culinary training, I have worked in a number of kitchens, and I read obsessively about food. While much of my experience was helpful -- it certainly gave me ideas about where to start-- I felt that the only way to get a real grasp on managing a tight budget was through experimentation. This blog is the written counterpart to that experiment.

The parameters are as follows: I have a food budget of six dollars per day - forty two dollars per week. I will avoid processed and prepared foods, and will use very scrap of culinary ingenuity I possess to turn that budget into satisfying, balanced meals. I will post my notes and thoughts about keeping a thrifty kitchen as well as particularly successful recipes. I won't purposefully limit myself to any particular cuisine (though I am drawn repeatedly to the simply prepared dishes of France and Italy.) I do have an inordinate interest in pre-industrial revolution food preservation techniques and plan on featuring a good deal of brining, candying and drying.

The Details
I've been chatting with friends about my thoughts on this blog for a few weeks now, and a few (very reasonable) practical questions surface each time. After some thought, I have come to some (I hope, equally reasonable) parameters.

The Budget
I will allot myself a food budget of 84$ in cash every two weeks. Extra cash can roll over for future purchases. Why six dollars? I wanted to make sure the budget was stringent enough to limit some of my food choices, but still gave me some flexibility. I recognize that it is, at some level, arbitrary. Arbitrary, but for the moment, useful.

Pantry
I am not starting a kitchen from scratch. It would be absurdly wasteful to pretend that I was. I will use staple items that I have in my kitchen, when I run out I will have to replace them within my budget.

Eating Out

I am thinking of this as a culinary experiment, not a lifestyle. The experiment is explicitly personal- to see what happens when my particular food values and interests are given a fixed financial constraint. I am also interested in setting up parameters that will be sustainable over a long period of time. I will, admittedly, not banish every business lunch or dinner out with friends from my life. That said, I will try to keep eating out to an absolute minimum. I am interested to see if the food that I am preparing is satisfying, and I wouldn't want to be masking any nutritional or sensory deficiency in my cooking by regularly supplementing with outside sources. So, yes, I'll eat out every so often (not in the budget), but I will make sure that those meals are not integral to my nutritional intake.

Duration
I don't have a specific time goal in mind. Right now it feels good to keep things open-ended. I would definitely like to run through the seasons though, and see how see how seasonal availability affects meal options.

Food Values
I dont pretend that my food choices fit everyone else. I voluntarily place quite a few limits on myself. I do not eat meat (I don't take this on as an identity or platform, but haven't eaten meat for the last eight years). I do occasionally eat some seafood and fish, but am limited so much by both allergies and ecological concerns that seafood does not play a significant role in my diet. I also feel strongly that I want to use dairy products from pasture-raised animals and eggs from cage-free chicken farms. So, yes, keeping these constraints will certainly cost me a bit more than buying products from industrial farms. But industrial farms are not that old; the styles of cooking that I am most interested in far predate industrial farming. So it ought to follow that such traditional means of stretching food would be scaled to food prices that are not lowered by industrial farming.

Preparation
I am also well aware that I am willing to spend more time than many other people on my food preparation. I am a bit romantic in my fondness for manual labor. I find kneading my own bread dough by hand to be a profoundly satisfying and meditative experience. I do realize, though, that not everyone shares my sentimentality and just wants to keep eveyone fed and happy. Not all of kitchen economy requires a boundless apetite for fussy kitchen tasks. I'll make sure to be forthright in my posts about what techniques and recipes are suited to the time-conscious cooks out there, and which should be reserved for obsessed cooking devotees like me.