eat healthy

[Before anyone asks: yes, I know I’m really, really lucky, and I know that even my former employer was pretty amazing food-wise. I’ve also worked at places where the cafeteria used baked beans in the mexican food, and I’ve worked places where I’ve tried to plan a well-rounded meal only from items found in the vending machine.]

The new job has one great perk: lunches are free. (We also get paid a little less than average, but the perk’s worth it.) There’s also rumors that new hires all gain weight, so I worried that a few months of this would take me straight from my current thin-but-healthy weight straight into over-weight-and-middle-aged.

Probably not.

Now, although all the young kids might pile their plates high with food (because who knows when they’ll get fed again), one of the very neat parts of free food is that there’s no pressure on the cafeteria for the portions to seem like a good value. If the portions are small, you just go up for seconds, or pile on two portions. If not, you get meat portions that are a few ounces rather than sized for the guy digging ditches.

At my last job with a normal cafeteria, I remember that I sometimes couldn’t eat a whole portion. Huge burritos, 10” (thin crust) pizza per person, large pre-made sandwiches on large pieces of foccacia. It was pretty decent food, and folks were happy with it, but those portions needed to be enough to keep a twenty-something engineer hacking from lunch time til he raided the vending machine at 9 or 10pm. (Yeah, I raided those vending machines too.) The rest of us ate the same portions, and if we didn’t think about what we were eating, we’d find we wolfed down the whole pizza while trading office gossip.

I never would have thought that free food would have cut my food intake, but I still remember looking at one of my meals the first week and realizing “I thought this was enough food when I went through the line the first time, but I really didn’t get much food, did I?”

Hint to large corporations: if you really want to cut your healthcare costs and have a healthier workforce, how about making the meals free and cutting portion sizes? It’s probably cheaper than heart bypasses.

Additional hint: if all the food comes on a series of small plates, it’s harder to pack too much on a tray.

Since I took over the cooking, I’ve been keeping a running list of meals just to keep track of what I’ve been up to. Here’s some of the dishes we’ve made more than once or twice. Some may not seem completely healthy, but I’m being careful about the amount of meat and oil I’m using. Besides, cooking from scratch is a heck of a lot better than living off frozen stuff. The other big drawback is that I’m using a fair amount of preserved meat (prosciutto, ham, etc.) but it’s so nice not to have to shop for fresh meat every couple days.

Tomato and bread salad: dried bread cubes, tons of cherry tomatoes, and mozzarella in balsamic vinegar dressing. (Counting the days til the tomato plants turn up in the nursery.)

Salad with garlic, bacon, and stale bread cubes (sauteed in the bacon grease) “La Tante Paulette” from Bistro Cooking. Wow. I’m not fond of bacon or croutons, but making croutons from scratch (er, from a stale loaf of bread) shows how wonderful they can be.

Pasta with lemon, prosciutto, and olives. (Lemon juice and olive oil dressing.) Mmmm… Also from bistro cooking.

Salad nicoise with canned tuna and whatever hard veggies and salad are around.

Cabbage soup/stew from the “Sicilian Gentleman’s Cookbook”. Nice recipe, easy to adjust to whatever’s handy. I keep canned chicken broth, carrots, and celery around just so I can make this in less than 45 min.

Roasted beets, onion, and goat cheese salad.

Kale soup—sauteed kale, some onion, and chicken broth. Ten minutes.

Any moroccan tagine that’s handy and that I’ve got the ingredients for. Chicken and (sweet potato, or honey, or carrots.)

Grapefruit, sliced onion, and lemon-mustard dressing.

Seffa (couscous cooked in broth with almonds, chopped dried apricots, raisins, cinnamon, and saffron.)

I can hardly wait til we start getting ripe tomatoes again, either from the store or from the backyard.