Eating Healthy on the Cheap

Don't you bring your "science" into this!

Salt attracts flavor electrons. Microscopes and shit have proven this.

This, a thousand times this! I thought I hated yogurt after trying Dannon and Yoplait and all the other stupid brands out there. Then I tried Fage and OH MY GOD IT IS SO DELICIOUS! I eat one every day for lunch. So good. I usually go with the Faye Cherry 2%, since that's what my supermarket tends to carry, but when I can find a Faye Total? It's like eating ice cream.

When I went to Crete with the family for touristy vacation stuff the one thing I always grabbed from the breakfast buffet was the yoghurt. Holy crap was that good. Drizzle some honey on top and the day was off to a great start.

Makes me wonder if I'm ever going to find yoghurt like that again.

I'll have to give that a more serious try, then. I'm used to the combination of texture and sourness being absolutely off-putting when it comes to eating yoghurt, but maybe the thicker stuff will be different... <fingers crossed>

Try Fage. I never liked yogurt until, like you, I was in Greece and they always had some out and someone convinced me to try it. I searched and searched when I got back home for something similar--Fage isn't perfect, but it's the closest I've found!

I tend to forget to mention I'm Swedish, assuming everyone already knows by now. It's probably easier for me just to try to import the real deal from Greece.

If you import some name brand yogurt from Greece, it probably will be Fage. It's one of the biggest names in dairy there. Though I hear they're moving to Luxembourg or something to get away from shitty economies.

Stop at Fage. Chobani is some real poop.

Where's the trigger warning? I'm blaming you for my going to Burger King! If I get whoppers and I get back here and it turns out those aren't whoppers I am going to Red Robin and you are going to be sorry, mister.

As far as salt goes, I actually went too far the other way and didn't get enough salt in my diet at one point. I didn't eat out much, ate snacks rarely and didn't salt food when cooking. The doctor suggested using sea salt since it still has naturaly occuring minerals in it and isn't just strait sodium. I still salt spairingly but I find sea salt gives foods a nice little bump up in flavor.

I'm not a fan of Chobani, either (Fage is my favorite), but some people like it, and it is real Greek yogurt (as in, strained to remove the whey and thicken the yogurt). But to me it has a sort of funky/sour taste (as compared to the Fage yogurt, which is just creamy and delicious). I also don't like that they do the "fruit on the bottom" thing, which isn't really ideal for Greek yogurt. Part of the appeal is the texture, and you aren't really supposed to stir it up before eating. That's why Fage puts the fruit in those little side containers.

I'm a Chobani fan myself. Not because it's the Absolute Best Greek Yogurt--that award still goes to the Greek Gods honey flavor--but because it's the best proper Greek yogurt I can find that comes in little cups of flavors I like within my budget. I don't think I've even seen Fage on the shelves at my grocery store, but I'll keep an eye out for it.

Yes, please. I was actually just talking with my roommate about making our own pickles and this would do nicely.

They're super-easy, actually. The key things to remember are:

1) Garlic is supposed to turn blue when steeped in acid for a while. It's not spoiled.
2) The saltier your initial brine, the more sour the resulting pickles.
3) A little heat goes a long way.

And 4), they're only supposed to keep for around two weeks, so make sure they get eaten. But generally that's not much of a problem. :)

Ah-ha, thats the brand I like, the Greek Gods one. Super chunky, not liquidy. I like plain though, none of this honey BS.

I'll dig up our recipe. It's sort of an Asian-style pickle, with ginger and peppers mixed in with the cucumber slices.

Plain yogurt tastes weird to me. I grew up on unsweetened home-made yogurt that we'd add jam or syrup to, like you do with pancakes or the like. So having a yogurt that's not flavored, but not sharp and unsweet, is just...creepy. And almost all of the yogurt brands that sell "plain" yogurt mean it's been sweetened, and then sell the unsweetened as some bizarre other harder-to-find type. </yogurt opinions>

Ah, now, I actually agree with you, plain yogurt tastes weird/boring, and yeah, a lot of the yogurts add sugar, which is annoying. But, as I mentioned up thread, I add a bunch of stuff to my yogurt, like frozen blueberries, strawberries, blackberries and almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, pecans, etc. So I don't need any funky sugar additives. (Some of them add Splenda, which I think tastes terrible, and my mind boggles when people tell me that they can't tell the difference between it and sugar.)

All right, here we go. This one has some sugar in it, so it's not quite as calorie-free as other pickles. It's really, really good, though.

Combine in bowl:

2 cups cucumber
10 slices ginger root
1/2 dry chili pepper, diced
1/2 T salt

Cover and put in refrigerator for six hours, then drain and add:

3 T sugar
3 T white vinegar

Cover and refrigerate for another six hours, then consume. It will keep in the refrigerator for... honestly, I'm not sure. We always eat them all in the space of, like, twenty minutes.

I can only tell the difference between Splenda and sugar if I'm really looking for it. Meanwhile, stevia tastes like angry plants are trying to get their revenge on my tongue. I think it's sort of like the whole cilantro thing; it's not just a matter of personal preference, but different people really do taste some substances in a completely different manner.

Anyway, since I'm getting off topic, I'll note one thing that served me well during my college days: store-brand Bisquick and a jug of milk. You can make biscuits and pancakes really really easily if you're up for any amount of stir-ingredients-then-heat, and store brand strawberry jam goes well with either. And if you go to the real Bisquick website, they'll give you a lot of recipes of dubious high cuisine that come down to variations of "Heat protein, apply biscuity coating, add something creamy, call it a day." Which I found very useful for when I wanted to actually Cook A Meal for my then-SO, but didn't have the equipment or finances to make something that required buying six spice jars and a roasting pan.

It is not ideal on the calorie-counting side, but it's not terrible, either. And it's definitely cheaper--and usually still lower in calories--than buying frozen food equivalents of the sort of thing you'd make.

Athryn mentioned in some other thread about making air popped pop corn in a bowl in a microwave. I tried the corollary today - paper bag popcorn in the microwave at work, and it worked! I was actually shocked, I was expecting it to go up in flames. So I had a whole bag of air popped corn, with nothing to put on it but some salt I found from an old takeout bag. Anyways, I'm going to try it again, this time remembering to bring butter.
What I did... 1/3 cup popcorn in a paper bag, fold over the top a few times, and place it in the microwave for 3 minutes. Amazing

A thousand times this. Bisquick is also a wonderful vehicle for cleaning out bits and pieces of leftovers from your fridge. I have a batch of parmesan-dill biscuits with minced red onion cooling on the stove right now. :)

Kale chips are pretty tasty, and exceptionally easy to make, just a little bit of olive oil and salt, stuck in oven for 10 minutes, and then it's like having a bag of chips. They don't 100% taste like potato chips, but they're still good.

Athryn is understating the case for delicious kale chips. My neglected bunch of kale was wilting a bit but some gentle rubbing with white truffle olive oil, sprinkling with sea salt, and time in the oven has produced light and crispy mouth sex. This is quite literally one of the best homemade snacks I've ever had.

I'm pretty sure rubbing anything with truffle oil results in mouth sex.