MBI · single meal

How’d I do on Lunch?

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Sometimes eating at the Most Basic Ingredient level is simply a matter of planning ahead and preserving. Today around lunch time I was starving and thinking that we didn’t have anything quick and easy in the house. Previously  I would have just grabbed a microwave burrito, okay let’s be clear previously last week during lunch.

I had forgotten though I had defrosted some soup I made a month ago. I also already had everything bagel seasoned bread from a few days ago as well. A little toasting and reheating later, lunch! Fortunately for my future lifestyle, unfortunately for my immediate quest we are moving shortly so I can’t do a bunch more of this sort of precooking until after we move.

How do you think it looks? I can tell you it was delicious!

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MBI

Most Basic Ingredient versus Most Local Ingredient

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Basic ingredients don’t have to be in opposition of local ingredients, but lately I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the value of each. Let’s look at an example, this morning for breakfast I did very well on basic ingredients, but not so well on local ingredients. I had smashed avocado on toast.  I made the bread and all the other ingredients are pretty basic. When you start look at where they came from is where the problem lies.

The bread I made contained flour, yeast, salt, water and seeds. The flour was from Bob’s Red Mill which is a company based in Portland, but I’m not quite sure where the flour is sourced. The salt certainly not local, nor the seeds. Bread making has been a recent hobby for me, next I’d like to look into locally sourcing the ingredients. The other ingredients were certainly source from nowhere near Portland. If I had to guess the pepper was probably the farthest away. I recently read Eight Flavors the Untold Story of American Cuisine. Sarah Lohman gets into the history of pepper in the US in one of the chapters, I highly recommend the entire book though I was thinking about the pepper chapter today. This is partially because Indonesia where it is native to is dear to my heart.

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Could I give up the ingredients from far away? Certainly, though it does tempt me to begin a quest to grow my own avocado tree in the PNW.

MBI

Quest for the Most Basic Ingredients

wonderchookLeave a comment

Over the past years I’ve been influenced how we as individuals and cultures interact with food by writers such as Michael Pollan and Mark Schatzker. I also have had an obsession with watching cooking shows beginning with Yan Can Cook when I was in elementary school. I could and probably should als0 write an entire other post on diets and the body positive movement (since I like to procrastinate you should at least read Lindy West’s memoir and Kelsey Miller’s Anti-Diet Project).

These influences have led me to my current project to buy the Most Basic Ingredients(MBI) possible. Often I document for myself these types of goals, but why not share this experiment with the world? Why do I call it MBI? Well I work in tech and there is an obsession with building Minimum Viable Products(MVP) in some circles. A MVP is the most basic thing you can build as a product and put out into the market place, my MBI is intended as a counterpoint to that. The most basic piece you can purchase to make food. In a world of heavily processed food as an individual I’m simply trying to get back to the basics. What is at the root of what I am eating? Not the fastest way, not even the easiest way, the most basic way.

It bears mentioning that I come from a place of a lot of privilege. I have a good job, I work remotely and I don’t have any dependents. I can afford to do some experimentation, I have the time to do it and by working from home I can do multi-step processes that require you to check-in over the course of the day.

So to start here is what I bought tonight at the local grocery.

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  • Dozen eggs
  • 3 tomatoes
  • 2 avocados
  • 1 bottle of kombucha
  • Cane sugar
  • Half & Half
  • Gallon glass jar
  • Box of black tea (not pictured, since I forgot and had to run back)

Cost: $41.23 (the jar was $15.00 so that was a big of a splurge)

I think I’ve done pretty well on the raw ingredients. In this case I consider the sugar raw (despite some refining) and classify the half & half about the same. My least raw item under my unscientific classification is the kombucha. Though the goal with some of these ingredients is to start making my own. I hope to continue sharing what I do with these sorts of purchases as I document my path to MBI. At the very least I hope to be drinking some MBI kombucha in the next month or so.