Patting myself on the back for scheduling my programming surge during the dead of winter, I try to make myself lunch everyday. Using the sous-vide again has saved me so much time, cleaning and is proving to be a great dollar stretcher. Both my spouse and I do not have a steady stream of income, I am working on two startups (one is a team of two founders and the other a team of four founders) and getting some WordPress emergency and agency gigs. Stéphane is writing a book which will be self-published as well as developing a teaching contract. We are also developing a set of 10 inventions which we will have to put on a self-made Kickstarter.com type site (because Kickstarter doesn’t accept Canadian projects.) We both have kids to take care of as well. Working full-time would use up ALL our time and there would be no time left to develop anything. So our quality of life depends on being incredibly frugal all the time. The upside is that since I opted out of consumerism many years ago (buy mostly second-hand or make my own stuff), I get to consider other things luxuries. One of them is getting to eat homemade food everyday! In order to make use of our trash-rescued and recycled sous-vide circulator we purchased a huge 27L aluminium pot. This lets us cook 4-5 huge bags of food at a time and run the circulator at higher heat.

One of the interesting cuts to sous-vide every week is a beef shoulder palette. Cooked at 54.4 for 2-3 days it comes out perfectly pink like smoked meat. This huge inexpensive cut of meat could last someone a whole week (that’s 10$ of beef…)! My spouse lives on the warrior diet (he eats only once a day… the equivalent of three meals!) Still there are always leftovers and today, I made myself a small lunch with thin slices of beef and leftover rice cooked with liquids and dried fruit from the pork chop pouch. I am heating it up in the Chinese steamer over my wok to warm it us without cooking the beef more.

I have used all the time I save from having to wrangle meat to make fancy side dishes and desserts!