Stories from a Frugal Geek Eating Healthy
This website features articles about how to eat healthier for less money. They are excerpts of and a companion to a book I'm writing about this topic. For more information, see my About page.
This website features articles about how to eat healthier for less money. They are excerpts of and a companion to a book I'm writing about this topic. For more information, see my About page.
I've tapped a number of useful (and some darn near indispensable) resources for my research and cooking, and I'd like to share them with you here. As I continue to write, I'm likely to include new sources, so check back for new ideas!
This is my #1 kitchen reference book. If you need to know anything about growing or preserving any particular fruit or vegetable (and she hits them all, with very few exceptions), this is your guide. She also includes recipes and ideas for using each type of edible. As a bonus, you can also learn how to raise poultry, goats and more. It's a hefty tome that won't let you down.
I learned to make cheese from this book, after hearing about Ricki from Barbara Kingsolver's writings. This book does have recipes but also has a great section at the beginning about the tools and techniques of cheese making. This provided all the instruction I needed to make a quick start. Ricki also owns the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company, where you can order supplies.
This is an excellent reference for making all sorts of fermented foods. I'm partial to his kimchi recipe, much to the frustration of my husband. Like Ricki Carroll's book, Sandor has several sections at the beginning detailing the history and techniques of fermentation that are very informative for a novice. He writes with a subversive undertone that makes you feel like you are a part of a movement when you make his recipes, yet his instructions are flexible in a way that invites you to invent.
Dr. Nestle is a very well-respected authority on nutrition and food science who is renown for her investigations of the food industry's influence on our food landscape. I think I learned half (well maybe 46.7%) of what I know about the health of foods from reading her work. This particular book is a comprehensive look at the healthfulness of foods structured by delving deeply into the science and politics of each category of food we eat. Her website is Food Politics.
This book is as fun to read as it is helpful. I thought I was a master on conserving food until I got schooled by Ms. Adler. She covers the technique of cooking simply and using all of your resources in approachable but entertaining prose. But watch out...reading this book will make you hungry. Really, I couldn't get through a chapter without needing a snack. This is a book I will read again and again and pick up a new idea each time.
Allport’s history of the discovery of omega-3 fatty acids and their role in western and other diets is painted with the scientific characters that discovered them. So, though this book is heavy with biological information, she keeps it bright with those personal stories. I haven’t found any place on the internet that gives as satisfactory an explanation of the role of omega-3 fatty acids in our bodies and how they affect our health. You want the real story? Read this book.
The illustrations of in this book make me really want to eat vegetables. I would frame them and put them on the wall. But this book is not really about fancy illustrations, it's about solid information. It's a cookbook organized by vegetable. Each section, featuring a particular vegetable, comes with a fascinating narrative about such things as seasonality, varieties, recognizing quality in the grocery store and very simple but elegant ideas for preparation in your kitchen. The recipes themselves are simple also, highlighting the vegetable with very few if any unusual ingredients, so they are easily adaptable to what you have on hand.
At first, this might seem to be a regional cookbook, but it's really the best cookbook I've found organized by season. Like Waters' cookbook above, it's organized by vegetable with general information and simple serving suggestions up first. But the vegetables are then organized by season. Though it was created for Minnesota seasons, the general progression of vegetables matches most of the rest of the U.S. I haven't cooked something out of this book I haven't loved, and like Waters' cookbook, the supporting ingredients for the recipes are simple and easy to find.
The title is a mouthful, but his recipes are too, in a good way. If you want to learn how to work a lot more vegetables and fruits into your diet, this is a great resource for new recipes. Plus they are delicious. The spices for these dishes are from scratch (no pre-prepared mixes or pastes), so you really learn how the spices work together to make a flavor. Each recipe has its nutritional profile listed too, for those stats geeks out there. Though this was made in support of a detox plan, it's really simply a great cookbook.
Leanne’s premise: you can eat healthfully, even on as little as the average SNAP (food stamp) budget of $4 per day. Her philosophy is simply to eat more fruits and veggies and she creatively works them into more traditionally carb-heavy pasta and rice dishes. She has a short section of good, general advice in the beginning in which she sole my heart by suggesting things like eating seasonally and making your own broth to save money and make more flavorful food. Many recipes are simple and good for beginner cooks or people with less time to cook. Her web site: leannebrown.com.
These days there are so many web sites with good recipes that will spur your creativity in the kitchen, but I've found several that focus on health and budget. They are worth spending some time investigating, not only for recipes, but for more general approaches for eating healthy and frugally.
Beth has captured my heart. Her approach to building information about how to eat healthy with less money is exactly like mine: quantitative. She does what I am doing for my book, but she puts her recipes online, so you can see not only how much it costs in total and per serving, but per ingredient. Making her recipes is a great way to learn what foods add the most cost to a recipe. She also has great sections on her principles and kitchen supplies, if you are new to cooking. Her cookbook is Budget Bytes: Over 100 Easy, Delicious Recipes to Slash Your Grocery Bill in Half.
Like Beth of Budget Bytes, Jessica also gives quantitative information to back up her experience and advice in her “Grocery Geek” section. She also includes plenty of how to articles for prepping ingredients. If you’re new to meal planning, she has a section devoted to that, and of course there’s my favorite section: Freezer Cooking, which is a branch of home-cook knowledge that will really help you save some dough. Er…money. Well dough too. She also has a cookbook: Good Cheap Eats: Dinner in 30 minutes (or less!).
The EWG is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that works to protect human health and the environment. They have a strong goal to educate and empower people to make positive changes in their personal lives. Check out their top food lists! The EWG analyzed fruits, vegetables, and other food groups to give to you the top nutrient-packed foods that cost the least…brilliant! They also give information about pesticides and pollutants in foods, tips for simultaneously cooking healthier and saving money, and a list of other resources.
If the EWG is your big brother, looking out for you on the playground of food, then the CSPI is your grandfather, that person who gave you your whole life of healthy eating, protecting your interests while passing you sage advice at regular intervals. The CSPI has worked on the behalf of the citizens of the U.S. for decades to help people live healthier lives and lobby for government and food industry changes that help protect the public. You know those nutrition labels you see on prepared foods in the grocery store? Yeah, the CSPI was the main driving force behind that positive change to our food system. Their subscription Nutrition Action Healthletter summarizes the most recent health-related research in laymen’s terms, interviews authorities about health-related topics, and they have their own cook! Each issue comes with 2-3 recipes from Kate Sherwood that are easy to prepare out of simple, whole, healthy ingredients.
I tend to be a proponent of simple kitchen tools. Fancy tools that require too much fuss to set up and clean actually impede my cooking, because I often don't have enough time to bother. They just sit in my cupboard feeling lonely. Therefore I'm only going to recommend tools here that are worth the cost both because they are easy to use/clean and they will frequently come out of the cupboard to play with you.
Flexible silicone baking mats like the Silpat allow you to bake without having to “grease” the pan. So it allows you to avoid adding extra fats to baked goods and keeps things from sticking to your pan. Just set it down inside a normal baking tray and you are ready to go. I mostly use my Silpat to make my own crackers and dry vegetables in the oven. I’m generally not a good baker so I tend not to bake much, but if I did, I would use it for many baked goods, including biscotti and bread.
If you are looking to grow your own food, planting from seed is much more economical than planting seedlings you buy at a garden store. These organizations specialize in heirloom and heritage seeds for growing more disease-resistant and climate-adapted plants that produce seed you can save and plant again, making your garden even more economical. The western companies also sell seeds that require less water (and thus less cost/resource use) than typical varieties.
Native Seeds/SEARCH is a Tucson, AZ based seed bank specializing in preserving seeds from the gardens of Native American tribes and the descendants of Spanish migrants of the desert southwest. Their primary focus is seed preservation, so they don't always have the same seed available all the time, but as they continue to find and preserve new seed lines, they sometimes have new plants available to experiment with in your garden. They actively promote seed saving and run educational programs to help people learn how to save their own seed to replant. Be sure to visit their store if you are in the Tucson area! Members get discounts in their online store.
Botanical Interests is a Colorado-based seed company that has heirloom and organic options for most of the seeds it sells. Many of their seed varieties are water-wise and they carry varieties that grow quickly for high elevation and northern regions with shorter growing seasons.
An excellent non-western seed source is Seed Savers Exchange, based in Iowa. Like Native Seeds, they are a seed bank focused on preserving seed lines from heirloom and open-pollinated crops. They also provide a platform that allows members to connect and share seeds with each other. Membership is very affordable and gives you perks besides participation in the seed exchange.
