cheaper to dine or cook

So...you cooking something?




I'd find the food you picture hard to eat every day......but I've eaten stir-fried veg and rice for weeks at a time. Or potatoes with potatoes, when very poor. Not the same, I agree. I knew I wasn't married to it!!!


That's a great name for food, by the way.

You know...I normally DO bring food for lunch...but I actually cannot when it is really hot, if I am walking to work, if it needs to stay cool at all.

The walk is long enough that it bakes in my back-pack!

Mebbe I need a lunch box with one of those frozen thingies...only it's not fit in the back pack.

yep, of course much of the world lives that way, especially since 2/3 of the world live in poverty and 1/3 in extreme poverty.

but none of us on a2k is fortunately from even those 2/3...if we were, well, we wouldn't be here on a2k in the first place I'm afraid. In Slovakia we have "chizhi -pizhi" -- same idea as gallo. Leftovers remixed.

We have a lunch pact at work here in the Hague. We do lunches together, everyone chips in 1,50 EUR, 1 person always brings the food, and we make a table of salads, bread, soups --- that is easily doable in any setting in the world. The only ingredient needed is to have colleagues that are good and like each other, and I am very fortunate that way.

That's bubble and squeak in England, I think...only with the addition of masses of fat.


I really like mixed up and heated left-overs...but I normally have 'em for dinner.


But not every day.

We usually have left-overs for lunch. Cold meat loaf sandwiches (on whole wheat, of course). Yummy.

I generally don't like leftovers - especially leftover meat -- so one thing I did learn is cooking just the right amount for one dinner. I'd rather defrost and cook afresh than reheat...brrrr.

but this will only become an issue once I actually cook again. One more month to go!

Only food, including meats, that has some liquid in it are really suitable for freezing. I never freeze cooked meat all lonesome. So it would be stews, cassoulets, soups and that sort of meal. I don't cook enough meat loaf to freeze but make sandwiches for the rest of the week (about the time I would just thrown out any remnants). Pea soup with diced ham freezes just fine but I like to defrost it in the fridge rather than nuke it.

We used to do something like this in the accounting department of a title company I worked for. We had 25 people in the department participating and every other Friday we had a pot luck lunch. There was a static list of dish categories (2 of each: soups, appetizers, meats, vegetables, fruits, salads, breads, beverages, cakes, cookies) and each person made a 10-serving dish of the category they were assigned that week. The names rotated down the list so the same person didn't get stuck preparing the more expensive dishes all the time while someone else just brought a loaf of french bread or a 12 pack of sodas.

There was always an eclectic variety of cuisines and every pot luck lunch was a tasty exploration. If you didn't bring a dish but wanted to eat, then you were automatically volunteered for clean up duty after the lunch. There was usually a lot of left overs and people took home enough food to feed their families that night too.

We too had a good group of people in that department at the time. Most of us ate our lunches in, either brown bag or take out that we brought back to the office to eat with the others. We were avid board and card game enthusiasts and spent most of our lunch hours playing dominos, Uno, backgammon, rummy, cribbage, chess, etc.

But....if you eat that when you are married, don't you also eat it as a kid?


So...food-wise...isn't being married the same as just being?

Or, is there some magical time in the average Costa Rican's life, between being a kid and being married, when you get to eat different stuff?