DILDOs

All this talk about yuppies and their shopping habits this week made me want to share the best new acronym I've heard in ages.

DILDOs, aka, Double Income Large Dog Owners. It's me and Ron, to a tee.

Just a couple of DILDOs, heading into the weekend. Have a good one!

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

My entry about grocery shopping at Whole Foods got me thinking again about how much we spend on food, and how spoiled we are, frankly, that we have the option to eat the way we do.

As I mentioned, we grocery shop at Whole Foods almost exclusively, for a number of reasons, prime among them being laziness.

If we eat most meals at home during the week, we'll probably spend about $150-200 on groceries, depending on whether we have to restock on expensive stuff like wine olive oil.

When I say we're eating "most" meals at home, that means that we go out for no more than two meals- maybe one dinner and one breakfast/brunch- in the course of the week. That is us at our most disciplined- it requires that we cook at home pretty much all week and then save eating out for the weekend, with friends.

Most weeks, we can manage that. Maybe once during the week we'll be stuck working late, or just be too tired to cook, and we'll end up ordering pizza (we can get a good carry-out one for $10) or Thai.

Given how expensive Whole Foods is, I sometimes wonder if we're really saving money by cooking, but for the two of us to go anywhere we like to go for dinner is easily $50. It's not hard to see that grocery shopping (even for expensive groceries) and cooking at home is cheaper. Of course if you grocery shop and then decide you're too tired and order out anyway, your meals start getting really pricey.

I heard the CEO of Whole Foods interviewed one time, and the interviewer asked him about the prices at Whole Foods, and how he expected people to justify the high costs versus a cheaper store. His answer was dead-on- basically, we all have to make choices about how to spend our money, and you spend your money on the things that are of highest priority to you. If having cable at $100/month, or having a cell phone at $100/month, is more important to you than buying top-quality produce, then that's fine, those're your priorities.

The graphic below demonstrates all of this very tidily, and comes from a very interesting website, if you're interested- link is below the graphic.

From http://thesocietypages.org/graphicsociology/2011/09/28/is-fast-food-cheaper-than-cooking-at-home-bittman-mashup/

Thug Kitchen

Thug Kitchen is my new favorite food blog and everyone should read it.

He's a vegetarian gangsta. Despite the graphic I chose, he offers a lot of recipes, and they all look great. Plus he makes me laugh out loud and at inappropriate times.

In the immortal words of one Mr. Lavar Burton, you don't have to take my word for it. Saveur just named Thug Kitchen the Best Food Blog of 2013.

Word.

I Made This

And it was good. 

You should make some.

And eat it all up.

Because it's spring.

And life is short.

And it was delicious.

The Clean 15 and the Dirty Dozen

Ron and I grocery shop almost exclusively at Whole Foods, that well-lit haven for yuppies in search of multi-hyphenate food products to buy in order to rid themselves of their gobs of superfluous income. Free-trade gluten-free locally-sourced-buckwheat soba noodles, anyone?

Basically, yeah.

We shop there for a couple of reasons. Primarily, laziness- it's the the only grocery store within walking distance of our house.

But even when we lived directly across the street from a Harris Teeter, we'd still make trips to Whole Foods to supplement our produce and meat. Those items in particular are much fresher and of much higher quality at Whole Foods.

When we bought produce from the Teet, it started out looking somewhat depressed at its own underachievement, and would go downhill from there. It would be moldy and soft within a day or two; the fish and meat seemed to visibly decompose even as you stood considering it.