This is way far from the French family presented in the pictures.
> Food expenditure for one week: 315.17 euros
1200€ / month on just food? This is more than my mortgage.
I took the September groceries and checked, and we are at.. -462,11 €
So yeah, it's an actual figure.
$18K per year on groceries is insane. Yes, some people go with their families to restaurants and bars >1 week, but people who don't go, know they don't.
Average expense based on Statistics Canada puts the expenditure at 7,000 per annum, which works out to $130 a week, which is about on par with me and my wife's expenditure and we're almost dead on median income.
If you start throwing in fast food that price would really spike, but for the average family in an average week you're not going to see a doubling of food expenditure based on fast food. We might spend $25 in a week on fast food.
The other disclaimer is that in some cultures what would be presented may be what the family itself perceives as what they should present, not what they actually consume. There is always that pressure to conform.
Really I just want to learn how to base our diets around cooking. I can cook pretty well. My wife can, too. We just don't plan ahead. I wish there was a guide that told me exactly what to do to create a traditional kitchen that can create a home-cooked complete meal each evening with < 1 hour of work per day.
It was a bit fluffy, but gets at the heart of how to run a kitchen as an ongoing concern, rather than as a place you dive into as a one-off recipe, and leave when done.
[1] http://smile.amazon.com/An-Everlasting-Meal-Cooking-Economy/...
"Tonight I had a few (lovely, organic) chicken breasts in the fridge that were getting perilously close to the date. As it is the end of the weekend, I haven't shopped in days and I don't have the ingredients to make any of my glossy paged cookbook recipes. There was some stuff in the fridge, yet I would have thought "nothing to make". Thanks to Tamar Adler, I pulled out my trusty pot, boiled some very salty water and starting by boiling the chicken (who does that???) with a handful of Tuscan spice blend. Then I sauteed a diced onion with some leftover mushrooms (that also would have gone bad), chopped celery ends my kids didn't eat from their Ants on a Log, then made a little roux. I created a sauce with a couple of cups of the broth from the chicken breasts and a cup of milk and random cheese bits. Then I tossed some random leftover cooked veggies and the diced chicken breasts in my lovely mushroom sauce. I also found some too-stale-for-salad croutons in the pantry, so I threw them in the rest of my seasoned broth, making a kind of stuffing, and put it on top of my mushroom saucey chicken concoction and baked for a few minutes. My family declared this makeshift casserole the best thing ever. And there was enough to put another one in the freezer, so I have solved "what's for dinner" twice, never having touched a single recipe. Everything except the chicken, onion, and cup of milk was what Tamar calls "ends", most of which would likely have been in the garbage."
My mother did this but routinely spent an hour and a half, two hours or even more cooking daily. More if we had more than a sandwich or leftovers for lunch, and that's also not including the 20-30 minutes to prep breakfast.
The trick seems to be finding yourself a loose weekly meal plan (5 meals you would be happy eating every weekday for a season) and freeze portioned sauces - my mother in law uses zip lock bags as they freeze flat and are quick to thaw in warm water, skipping the need to thaw in the fridge.
So basically you pick your meat for the evening and have that thawed, then you might have a choice of 3 sauces or seasonings that you can quickly thaw and mix in.
My biggest problem with prepared food is not feeling like it at the end of the day, it just makes you miserable and prone to getting take out.
There's no special guide needed, just a knife, cutting board, spatula and a couple pots and pans. You can make a great meal in one cast iron pan (maybe a couple if you're feeding a family) in half an hour. Make sure there's more green/other colors than beige and you're good to go.
Then after you mastered some recipes you;ll have some standby recipes (either written down or in your head) that are yours that you are comfortable with. But you'll probably keep experimenting too.
You will mess up. Probably a lot. You'll make some crappy food once in a while. You'll learn the hard way, but instead of feeling like a failure, look at what you learned from it. Try again.
I also suggest trying some stirfry first. It is extremely simple to stirfry, pretty healthy, and there is a real lot you can do with it - different flavors of sauce, different veggies, meats, etc., and you can buy the veggies frozen so there is very little prep.
I find that a lot of children don't get that kitchen experience while they are young so they grow up clueless in the kitchen about how to even start to prepare meals. I really can't understand this too much. I was in the kitchen since I was old enough to stand upright and hold a spoon helping out, standing on a chair to reach the counter or stove. As a result I'm extremely comfortable in the kitchen. I'm far from a "good cook," I'm average, but having that comfort I think is key.
http://www.npr.org/2014/09/30/352808184/how-to-cook-everythi...
It was about the book "How to Cook Everything Fast: A Better Way to Cook Great Food"
http://www.amazon.com/How-Cook-Everything-Fast-Better/dp/047...
Personally, buying a slow cooker was an awesome investment. In under 30 mins I can easily put things into it and leave them cooking over night and have excellent meals for the rest of the week.
Disclaimer: No relationship except as a satisfied customer.
1. Rinse the quiona off with water until there is no more foam.
2. Bring water (with a bouillon flavoring cube, or instead use vegetable broth) to a boil (about 4 parts water to 3 parts quiona)
3. add rinsed quiona to boiling water, lightly boil for about 7 minutes.
4. enjoy!
Look at slow cookers, they're really fantastic for the cooler months and are about the simplest way to get started eating home cooked food without much fuss or cost.
Since we've got too deep and I can't reply. If you're getting anything out of a slow cooker thats raw/hardly cooked then your power must have went out along the way.
For each of almost 30 countries, it has a photograph of an average family with all the food that would comprise a normal week's consumption, accompanied with a description and cost. (Not all families are from separate countries. Some larger countries have two families from different regions).
Later, the authors published an expanded version as a book, which I believe covers 80 families.
I think there is at least one more subset of photos other than the set TIME published that has been published in some major online magazine, because I am sure I saw one of a German family whose weekly consumption included an amazing amount of beer, and that doesn't match the German family in the TIME article.
More directly relevant to the current story, here's a look at typical breakfasts from several countries: http://www.businessinsider.com/breakfast-around-the-world-20...
These are adult breakfasts, not kid breakfasts.