Cooking for the Week & a Whole Foods Gift Card Giveaway

Here is your perfect weekly meal plan for $125.

Well, not exactly. I have a hard time believing that I can advise you what you want to eat for 14 dinners and lunches straight. There are cravings! And spontaneous weeknight plans! And people in your life with preferences and restrictions. Often, I think, a meal plan just can’t keep up with daily life. (That’s why this post is going to be a little long! If you’re interested in entering to win a $125 Whole Foods Market gift card, you should definitely make it to the end though.)

There’s a bright side.

That’s because the best cooking happens spontaneously. Exercising your imaginative ability to translate a request, craving, dietary restriction, or budget constraint into a good meal is one of the most admirable kitchen skills a person could possibly acquire. In his book Culinary Intelligence, the food writer Peter Kaminsky makes an incredible claim that understanding what you love to eat is the most productive way to eat well and healthfully. His description of the way you can then plan for dinner is perfect:

Every chef I have known spends a lot of time dreaming up recipes. Every good home cook has the same kind of culinary reveries. Just as a composer hears melodies in his mind before committing them to paper, cooks taste recipes before they put pan to fire.

And then they go to the market.

Next, almost without fail, serendipity strikes, leading in different, surprising, and wonderful directions.

And so begins a four-page account of a “waking food dream” in which Kaminsky takes us to Kentucky, Wisconsin, and his favorite old Italian sausage-maker in Brooklyn. It’s a reverie that ends in a delicious home-cooked meal that perfectly suits the rhythm of Kaminsky’s day, the current season, and his cravings.

To have a moment of serendipity, though, you have to start somewhere. That’s where planning comes in. And so last Wednesday night I headed to the Brooklyn Whole Foods Market to shop, more or less, for the week ahead.

How to Shop on a Budget at Whole Foods Market

Though you won’t find an exact prescription, I’m excited to share how I cooked for a full week of lunches and dinners following my $125 spree. I’ve given loads of details (too many?) about what I had in the house already, what I bought, what we like to eat, what you might substitute in for things you don’t like, etc. If you’d like to mimic my plan, there’s a shopping list and links to recipes. Or, use what follows as inspiration for a more freeform sort of weekly planning, one that leaves your fridge and pantry stocked but also opens up enough space for you to listen to your culinary imagination and find some serendipity. In other words, ditch the plan if that’s what life needs.

As for the budget: these days, Whole Foods Market carries the most astounding range of ingredients. I can get pasta and beans and cheese and produce for cheaper than at my local supermarket. But given that I’ve also been known to prefer expensive olive oil, the best meat in town, and hormone-free dairy, I’m happy to know I can find the high-quality (even fancy-schmancy) stuff I want. When I shopped last week, I kept an eye out for sales, a thrifty move that brought me the on-sale Organic Valley sour cream, a product I now want to gulp down in huge dollops at every meal. Butchers, bakers, and cheesemongers will cut meat, breads, and cheeses in smaller pieces if you don’t need whole portions.

Other tips: the bulk bin is your friend-for amounts large (all the rice you’ll need for the rest of the year) and small (the handful of walnuts for today’s pesto). Flexibility is crucial: if one veggie is on your shopping list but its neighbor is half off, consider making a tweak right then and there.

By keeping my eye trained on both deals and necessary splurges-and bulking up my list with vegetables, particularly bang-for-the-buck seasonal ones-I was easily able to get out of the store for less than $125. The “less than” is important here, because as you’ll see in the meal plan below, I made use of some ingredients I already owned, like tomatoes from my CSA and tortillas from a trip to Queens. You can add those to your list and still come in at $125. Or, if your Whole Foods carries beer, you can round out the budget that way.

My Shopping List

Total=$104.55

Other ingredients you’ll need that I already had at home (there should be plenty of room in the remaining budget!)

• 5-6 fabulously tasty local tomatoes (from our CSA)
• 4 onions (from our CSA)
• 4 red-skinned potatoes (from our CSA)
• salsa (if you’ve got a few extra tomatoes, some garlic, and a hot pepper, make your own by roasting them in oil at 425°F for 20 minutes, then whizzing them in the blender with salt as per this recipe)
• 1 cup dried chickpeas (I order them online from Rancho Gordo, so there are always some around)
• 6 corn tortillas
• soy sauce
• sugar
• white wine
• salted butter, for eating on toast (optional)
• flour
• salt
• sriracha

A Week of Meals

As you’ll see, we didn’t eat our 14 meals straight-in fact the planned-out meals lasted til yesterday, eight days after the shopping trip. And we still had some extra ingredients. Most recipes are cooked for two adult appetites with leftovers. So that you can see which meals are part of the “plan,” as opposed to those we ate at restaurants or friends’ houses, I’ve numbered the key ones up to 14. I’ve also listed when I prepped and cooked (no cooking on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, apparently!), and which ingredients from the list got used on which day. Here goes!

Wednesday

Cook/Prep/Plan/Shop: Shopped for the week at Whole Foods in Gowanus.
Ingredients used: steak, tortillas, sour cream, avocado, tomatoes, 1 lime, tiny bit of red cabbage
Dinner (meal #1): I had been at a work shoot at the amazing Tortilleria Nixtamal earlier in the day, so I had fresh corn tortillas already. That meant steak tacos for dinner. I seasoned 1/2 pound of steak with salt and pepper and seared for about 5 minutes per side. While the steak cooked and rested, I sliced an avocado and some red cabbage and grabbed the salsa I’d made a few weeks ago using this insanely easy recipe. I sliced the steak, then warmed the tortillas over the burner. Each taco got: steak, red cabbage, salsa, avocado, and a squeeze of lime. My tacos got sour cream. We had some cilantro in the fridge, but it’s not really necessary. We both went back for one more taco.

Thursday

Cook/Prep/Plan/Shop: Cooked 2 cups of white rice in the morning, then put in the fridge before work so that I could easily make fried rice after I got home.
Ingredients used: rice, 1 onion, garlic, ginger, bok choy, 3 eggs
Lunch: Alex ate the leftover patafla that I had made while recipe testing. I had a team lunch at work.
Dinner (meal #2): Fried rice. I stir-fried onions, garlic, and ginger, then added in the bok choy. I had the dregs of a jar of kimchi, so I added that as well, but it’s obviously optional. I scrambled in three eggs and seasoned the whole thing with a little soy sauce and sugar. This recipe’s not too different from what we had.

Friday

Lunch (meal #3): Leftover fried rice for us both.
Dinner: Our friends invited us to shabbat dinner, so we happily picked up red wine and indulged in Kate’s delicious chicken with tomatoes & olives, inspired by a Paula Wolfert recipe, roasted cauliflower, salad, and challah. We got sent home with the leftover baklava (yum).

Saturday

Cook/Prep/Plan/Shop: Made Spanish omelet, baked the chicken and blended together the sauce for Pasta with Chicken, Lemon & White Wine in the morning, cooked the dish in the evening. (I followed the recipe pretty closely, using water instead of chicken broth and making the sauce in the food processor.)
Ingredients used: potatoes, 1 zucchini, 1 onion, 4 eggs, chicken, parsley, garlic, 1 lemon, 1/2 of the whole wheat shells
Brunch (meal #4): Spanish Omelet with zucchini (recipe at bottom), bread and butter. We ate about half the omelet at mealtime, then snacked on little wedges later in the day.
Dinner (meal #5): Pasta with Chicken, Lemon & White Wine with friends. We’d been playing frisbee in the park and gotten drenched when the rain came down, so we headed back to our place. I wasn’t sure the recipe, with just a half pound of pasta and a pound and a half of chicken, would be enough food for six, but there turned out to be plenty. I boiled the pasta, mixed chicken, sauce, and pasta together, and baked the dish while we were all playing cards. There were still so many tomatoes, so I chopped one up and added it. After eating, we used extra bread to mop up the sauce in the bottom of the pan.

Sunday

Cook/Prep/Plan/Shop: Cooked bacon at 400°F until crisp, boiled the dried chickpeas from scratch early, made chickpea curry later, made pesto pasta with zucchini for Monday night (see instructions on Monday entry).
Ingredients used: Bacon, bread, mayo, lettuce, tomato, ginger, garlic, onion, 1/2 the hot pepper, sweet potatoes, 1 white potato, carrot, all the broccoli, coconut milk, curry powder, chickpeas, basil, parsley, walnuts, 2 zucchini, pasta
Brunch (meal #6): BLTs. After the bacon was done, this was just assembly: I toasted bread, spread it with mayo, added the bacon, sliced one from the never-ending bowl tomatoes, and piled on lettuce. As you can see on the left, I really like my BLTs open-faced…I just think the balance is better. By the end of the meal, somehow all the bacon was gone. Oops.
Dinner (meal #7): Chickpea curry with all the vegetables-this turned out so, so well! I put an onion, half a hot pepper, and lots of garlic and ginger in the mini food processor. Then I fried that in oil until super fragrant before adding 3 tablespoons of curry powder and salt. Then, in went the veggies: one diced potato, the two sweet potatoes, the carrot, the broccoli, and the cooked chickpeas. I added the little can of coconut milk, plus the same amount of water, and a chopped tomato. Then the whole thing simmered for 30 minutes. We ate the curry with some bread, but I’m not sure why-we really it was perfect as a true one pot meal.

Monday

Lunch (meal #8): Chickpea curry leftovers with a dollop of sour cream for me.
Dinner (meal #9): Pesto Pasta with Onion & Zucchini. I followed this recipe, but with some changes. Instead of pine nuts, I used the walnuts I got in the Whole Foods bulk bin. I skipped the spinach and added the extra parsley from Saturday night’s dinner. Instead of rabe, I put 2 julienned zucchini in the pan with the onion. And I used up the rest of the box of whole wheat shells instead of spaghetti (since I wasn’t sure it’d be enough food, I also threw in the bottom of a box of penne from the pantry). I had made the pesto on Sunday, since I had an 8pm pilates class Monday. We heated up the pasta in the microwave before collapsing in front of 30 Rock.

Tuesday

Lunch: Lunch at work (they ordered us pizza).
Dinner (meal #10): Alex got to eat the leftover pesto pasta while I went out for Essie’s birthday-tacos at Tacombi and the candle-lit tequila shot pictured above (photo by Sam). The tacos were incredible, but then again so is pesto.

Wednesday

Cook/Prep/Plan/Shop: Made a big batch of Spicy Quinoa Slaw (I omitted the second vegetable and used a bit of my remaining hot pepper instead of the birdseye in the recipe).
Ingredients used: quinoa, about a quarter of the red cabbage, garlic, ginger, peanuts
Lunch (meal #12): Spicy Quinoa Slaw
Dinner: I was planning to make okonomiyaki, but I was so happy about meeting a deadline a couple hours early that I convinced Alex to go to Franny’s instead. No more cooking for me today! At Franny’s, we shared the house wine, roasted pole beans, a baked zucchini-tomato dish, and two pastas. I had panna cotta with roasted strawberries. Totally worth forgetting about the meal plan for!

Thursday

Cook/Prep/Plan/Shop: Made the okonomiyaki when I got home from work-they’re so quick!
Ingredients used: Red cabbage, remaining zucchini, half an onion, 5 eggs, mayo
Lunch (meal #13): Spicy Quinoa Slaw: the salad that never ends.
Dinner (meal #14): Vegetarian Okonomiyaki with Spicy Mayo

Gift Card Giveaway!

This giveaway is now closed. Congrats, Noreen! Thank you for entering!-Cara, 9/22/14

I’m giving away one $125 gift card to Whole Foods Market, so you can go on your own weeklong home-cooking fest. Here’s how to enter:

• {one} Leave a comment below telling us your best foodie hack at Whole Foods Market. What do you look for when you shop, in order to make your money go further?
• {two} Be a subscriber to the Big Girls, Small Kitchen newsletter and leave a second comment letting me know you’ve subscribed.
• {three} Tell your facebook friends and/or twitter fans about the contest – post the link and tag @Big Girls Small Kitchen (facebook) or @BGSK (twitter). Leave a third comment letting me know you’ve done so.

**Recipe**

Spanish Omelet with Zucchini
Serves 2-4

This is good warm, room temperature, or cold. Make the omelet in advance if you like, or pack extra wedges in your brown bag lunch. I beg you: don’t cut back on the oil. It’s what makes the omelet tasty and easy to make.

Ingredients
1/2 cup olive oil oil
4 red-skinned potatoes, thinly sliced
1 medium zucchini, thinly sliced
1 small onion, sliced
4 eggs
Salt

Set a large frying pan over medium heat and let it get hot for about 3 minutes. Add the oil, then add the potatoes, zucchini, and onion. The pan will seem pretty crowded, but don’t worry. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 20 minutes, until the vegetables are soft but not brown. Lightly sprinkle with salt, and scoop out the vegetables into a big mixing bowl. Drain off the oil into a small prep bowl. In another bowl, beat the eggs and add 1/4 teaspoon of salt. Add the eggs to the vegetable mixture, and fold together gently so you don’t smash the potatoes.

Wash out the pan or grab a new heavy skillet, 8 to 10 inches. Set it over medium-high heat. Return enough oil to the pan to generously coat the bottom and sides-you probably won’t need it all. Pour the vegetable-egg mixture into the pan. Lower the heat to medium low, and cook until the bottom is golden, about 5 minutes.

Here’s the hardest part of the whole recipe: Use a spatula to slide the omelet onto a heat-proof plate. Now carefully turn the pan onto the plate and use both hands (in oven mitts) to flip the omelet back into the pan. Cook another 5 minutes, until the second side is golden. Slide onto a clean plate, let rest 5 minutes, then serve in big wedges.

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