Bringing in The Sheaves

Vol. 1 Issue 1

(A sturdy and wintry dish with inexpensive ingredients and loads of pantry staples.)

Happy New Year…whatever this means to you in such fraught times. 

This is my foray into the world self-publishing. A place where I will talk about food and finances so we can all eat a little better and rest a little easier knowing our money is making—you know—money. I hope you’ll stay awhile. 

Believe me when I say I wrestle with starting a digitally-based business. I want STOCKED to be about gaining financial solvency via your grocery budget and not about me or selfies or the cult of personality. So my goal is to remain behind the scenes, letting the anecdotes, recipes, and money-saving tips shine. However, in order to tell you why you should even be reading this and what makes me qualified to earn your trust on matters relating to food and finance, I have to begin with me.

Food is my jam. And jam is the right word because one of my earliest food memories is of my grandma letting me spoon hot wax over a jar of fresh raspberry preserves. The closest I ever got to a halcyon summer were my semiannual trips to New Brunswick, Canada where I’d run around with a brood of cousins, plucking fiddleheads from the dew-soaked earth and nestling sun-warmed strawberries into bowls of fresh cream. Our daily reward for collecting this bounty was waking up to rashers of bacon warming in the oven and eggs frying on the stovetop.

From there, restaurants provided me my food backbone and I worked in them steadily throughout high school and college. Post college, I moved to NYC and transitioned into restaurant marketing during the gilded dot com “Silicon Alley” days. After 9/11, I returned to Boulder and worked for Starwood Hotels. After the birth of my first child, I was on the opening team of The Kitchen. From there, everything is a beautiful blur of very hard work marketing restaurants and starting a restaurant week from a shaky homemade wooden door desk in a tiny Pearl Street office with scant ventilation. Apologies to my employees for the vertigo (Holly, Greer, Sandja, Hamza, Julia, Nick, Alex, Laura, and Matthew). 

I don’t have a husband, or a trust fund, or a husband with a trust fund. It’s just me and my kids. Neither parent has ever given me a dime and while there are significant reasons for this, they aren’t pertinent to this particular story. What is important to know is that I learned much about money through my many, many financial mistakes. For me this meant getting my ass kicked by high interest rates and late fees and overdraft fees for decades until I realized there had to be a better way to live.

There were two factors that led me to change my financial ways. The first was that I had a young child and wanted to provide stability for her. I bounced around a lot as a kid and was clear I wanted a different life for her. I remember being awakened by clanging pipes in our rental in the fall of of 2006 and it was then that I knew I had to buy a home. For months, we lived on the free food from my only restaurant client as I scraped together 10k. By January of that year, we moved into a brand new condo and we’ve been here ever since. 

The second had to do with overriding some pretty defeatist thinking. Because my early years were filled with such tumult-tumult became my norm. There was something about always riding that edge of uncertainly that was familiar (and misinterpreted as comfortable) to me. It was only through the help of a great therapist that I learned I was perpetuating the drama of my youth. I began breaking the habit bit by bit, squirreling away money until I could get out of paycheck to paycheck living. 

Flash forward fifteen years, I am now financially solvent. I have growing investments, I have some savings, I have a bit of breathing room. Not bad for a woman who—fifteen years ago—was putting her student loan payments on her Amex and taking out cash advances to buy rounds of drinks for friends. 

These days, I spend half the day reading cookbooks/food theory and cooking. The other half is spent writing for clients, mom-ing, and starting this initiative.  

So why the focus on food and finance? Well, I’m glad you asked. Beyond housing and transportation, food is the largest monthly expenditure in a budget. And it’s the one most prone to abuse. You wouldn’t set out to buy a house with a budget of 150k or 700k. You wouldn’t lease a car with a monthly payment of $199 or $800. So why are we all over the map with our grocery spending? Well, there are myriad explanations for this-most of them psychological. The good news is they are not so hard to remedy. Fear not, we will get to all of this in subsequent newsletters.

As my elevator pitch goes, STOCKED is a pantry-building service that helps women save money on their grocery bill and invest the savings. Said more practically, I get women to buy one pork chop instead of four and take the $15 savings and put it into the stock market. Also, so she doesn’t have to feel weird about feeding her family with one lonely pork chop, I teach her how to razzle-dazzle that piece-o-swine and fan it out over Caramelized Cabbage with Sliced Pork Ginger Dressing and Crispy Shallot. BAM. Take that family. Take that pork.

For now, what you need to know is I am going to hold your hand every step of the way. We will create great meals centered around pantry staples and inexpensive bits or produce and protein. Once you begin to save your money (usually $100 per family member per month…babies not included), I’m going to hand you over to the biggest, baddest bunch of female finance professionals who will help you get started with investing your grocery savings.

Let’s do this thing,

Kate

P.S.

Caramelized Cabbage with Sliced Pork, Ginger Dressing and Crispy Shallot

(Serves 2-4)

Cost: $9 + pantry staples

Prep time: 2 hours to marinate pork chop and 15 minute to prep ingredients

Cook time: 20 minutes (to cook both pork and stir fry)

Ingredients:

One large bone-in pork chop (room temperature)

A medium head of cabbage (Chinese or purple) 

A large yellow onion

3T. Olive oil

2T. Grapeseed oil

1 Shallot (fried)

2t. Black sesame seeds

One scallion (green part only)

Marinade/Dressing:

Sesame oil (three drops)

1/3 cup Chinese vinegar

1T. Soy sauce

3 Cloves minced garlic

One knob of minced ginger (size of a giant thumb)

2T. Brown sugar

Black pepper to taste

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Prepare your marinade/dressing with all listed ingredients. Take half and marinate your pork chop for at least 2 hours.

Pat dry and deeply brown a (room temperature) pork chop on both sides with olive oil on medium heat starting with a cold pan. Cover and rest. Use oily pan drippings to crisp up sliced shallot. Drain and set aside.

Mandolin or hand slice your cabbage and onion until you have a pile of 1/4 inch ribbons/rings. 

Add grapeseed oil to white hot pan and wok toss the onion and cabbage until they begin to soften. Add in the pork marinade and continue stirring until a bit of char forms on the vegetables. Remove and put on platter.

Slice resting pork. If there is more pink than you like. Throw slices in the still hot wok for :30 seconds. Otherwise place pork on top of cabbage and sprinkle with sesame seeds and crispy shallot.  Add 1T of olive oil to remaining dressing/marinade and serve with dish for those to use as needed.

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Newsletter Thank Yous:

The very bizarre Bringing In The Sheaves for helping me kick off this newsletter with a Protestant hymn about gathering grain. 

AB for being my first paid subscriber…I love you.

The 1998 ATM on 57th and 5th for telling me I didn’t have enough money in my checking account to take out $20.

Allison Robicelli for her unfailing mentorship and take-no-prisoners approach to all things that matter, especially food.

Ruth Tobias for her continued encouragement of my writing skills.

Pork for being the first of many ingredients to take it in the chin.