Another Month of Dinners

Here are the dinners (main courses, not including side dishes, like salad) I had from April 16 to May 15. This survey is perhaps a more typical month dinner survey I did, since I could eat breaded items all this month--hence, more tortillas are incorporated.

Enchiladas were more frequent this period because, as noted above, I couldn't use leaven for a week or more, so they took the place of a couple of other dishes I usually eat. What surprised me was that I ate out five times during this period, three times at restaurants; I don't think of myself as eating out the often--but friends wanted to get together.

Typical Weekday Meals by Food Group

I've been reading a bit about food habits lately. I need to incorporate more vegetables into my diet, as I've long known. I tend probably to overdo the carbs. Here's a typical breakdown of breakfast, lunch, and dinner:

By contrast, the breakdown should look like this:

That grain side should be even with the fruits and vegetables side, and the meat and dairy should be even with each other (although I do tend to think Americans generally overdo the eating of meat).

One Month of Dinners

My friend Al claims that I eat spaghetti every night. It's not quite true, but I do have it very often. Here are the dinners (main courses, not including side dishes, like salad) I had from March 16 to April 15. They're skewed a bit because this period included the Days of Unleavened Bread, so I was trying to get rid of bread just before the days and then wasn't eating certain things I usually would have eaten during them. Hence, I'm extending the survey one month further so that I can compare later. The first survey breaks down this way:

Enchiladas were more frequent this period because, as noted above, I couldn't use leaven for a week or more, so they took the place of a couple of other dishes I usually eat. What surprised me was that I ate out five times during this period, three times at restaurants; I don't think of myself as eating out the often--but friends wanted to get together.

Restaurants by Nationality of Cuisine

My favorite international cuisine is Indian, but I rarely have it. In fact, according to this chart, I haven't had it in the past two years. That's not true, though. The statistics for this chart are drawn from my budget statistics at home; when I'm on vacation, I don't keep track of expenses in the same way, and so that last time I ate Indian (last fall), I was not on my standard budget. Still, the chart makes some interesting points.

Outside of standard American grill and home cooking cuisine (American on the whole takes up nearly half the table), when I go out, I tend to eat most often Mexican (indeed, I love it) and Italian (though that's mostly pizza places).

High on the list here is also Thai and, among the American restaurants, vegetarian. That these show up so high is the result of my friends, who tend toward these cuisines, which shows also that much of my eating out is done for social reasons more than because of my love of any kind of food. Missing, in addition to Indian? Japanese--something I used to dabble in more regularly but for which I now lack the Japanese-food-loving friends.
And if you wish to engage in some international home cooking, you can check out some cool recipes at Cook Eat Delicious. Here's a great recipe for Szechuan green beans.

Number of Items on My Refrigerator Shelves

I go grocery shopping every two weeks.

Here are the number of items on my shelves as they stand three days after grocery shopping:
If regular consumption holds, here are the number of items on my shelves as they stand three days before grocery shopping:
The top shelf apparently stays full--just the milk typically gets depleted. The reason is that water and extras stay on that shelf; by extras, I mean that those items move to other places as I run out of those items in the other places