This begins a four-part series on saving time when preparing meals. Living with diabetes, I don't need to remind you that it takes up a lot of your spare time just taking care of one's self and your disease-testing, going to the various doctors for regular checkups, exercising, and preparing meals. Here we plan to help you recapture some precious free time by helping you keep your preparing of tasty meals quick and easy.
Meal preparation starts at the grocery store. In the April, 2001 'cooking tips' we gave you the essentials for a pantry conducive to cooking for a person with diabetes. Now's the time to reorganize your pantry and replace out-of-date staples, including spices and dried herbs which have outlasted their potency. Now's the time to also clean out and reorganize the freezer and refrigerator. When you purchase the new items, jot down the date on the labels as you're putting the food away to make food rotation easier.
Before you do your shopping for meals, jot down your upcoming menus, making use of the staples you have at home. Then you'll only need to shop the perimeter of the store where the fresh produce, dairy, and fresh meats and seafood are located. Know in advance what you need and you'll find your shopping time has been reduced to minutes instead of an hour or so.
A savvy shopper will also take advantage of farm markets. Just before Christmas we had a new farmers' market open near us that offers year-round shopping for fresh produce at reduced prices directly from the farmers. Check around your area so see if one of these markets is open near you. The savings makes the trip worth the effort once a week.
We frequently get e-mails asking us where we got certain ingredients. Most of these e-mails have the same answer - an ethnic market that offers a treasure of whole foods from Asia, Europe, the Middle East, India, or Mexico. Look in your yellow pages and get familiar with those in your area. Then when you see an ingredient called for in a recipe that your regular market doesn't carry, you'll know where to buy it. Before you waste a trip however, call first to make sure they have the item you want in stock.
The other place you'll find a lot of the grains, dried fruits, nuts, and seeds that we call for in our recipes come from is a natural food store. For example, a woman recently e-mailed us, asking where to buy date sugar. We replied that we got it at a local Wild Oats. She e-mailed us back that she didn't have a Wild Oats in her area, but she did have a new Good Food Store near her. She'd called them and when she subsequently went to the store, they were holding the date sugar she needed to make the Gingerbread recipe on our site for her at the customer service counter.
Other great sources for your shopping are food catalogs and the Internet. Both are indispensable to us for securing items that our local markets don't carry, but are ingredients that we consider essential in our personal cooking and in developing and testing recipes for our cookbooks and this site without spending hours shopping.
Next month, we'll help you save time in preparing the food before you start to cook.
FTG
