Shop at Gelson's for deli and some frozen and at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods for prepackaged. Make separate meats and side dishes or make meats with pre-made salads and/or fresh veggies. Find some high quality inexpensive restaurants, buffets included, which are plentiful around LA.
Coronavirus Impact
- Thread starter thefilmaddict
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With roughly 40% of manufacturing for consumer electronics shut down globally, I'm more concerned about not being able to get the gear we need to install jobs when the time comes. Many of the commercial AV products we sell are manufactured here in the USA but still dependent on China, Korea, and Japan for components and sub assemblies. Virtually all our flat panel displays come out of Korea though.
Trader Joe's is your friend if there is one nearby. Lots of options in frozen foods easy to prepare or stir fry in a few minutes. Tend to have spicier and better recipes for ethnic foods, mexican, italian, oriental, indian, french.
NorBro
Major Contributor
What about the question of who's going to need your AV products/installations if your clients/businesses aren't operating? Is that possible?
We are typically building out systems in new construction. Right now we are backlogged on bids to do, but installations are slowing as job sites close down in response to the pandemic. Installations are likely to ramp up faster than manufacturing after the crisis passes. Flat panel displays are perpetually in tight supply most of the time. We often have to switch models between the time we sell a job and the time it's installed.
nutmegger
Well-known member
Here in Connecticut my local Trader Joe's got cleaned out last week. They were finally starting to restock today after 4-5 days of bare shelves.
Eric Coughlin
Veteran
Well I just somewhat significantly changed up my diet within the last three weeks, but this is what I've been doing now. I went to Reddit and Google for ideas. I'm no health expert and learning as I go (while it often feels like others were somehow born with knowledge of what's healthy), so me in the grocery store Googling everything I buy to see what's healthy is what I was doing a couple weeks ago. The trick with health, weight loss, etc., I feel is finding healthy foods you like that you can eat as much as you want of, such that the health and dieting is not a painful burden of eating small portions of gross food that leave you feeling hungry. I'm 5' 11", 170 lbs now. A month ago I was around 176-178, and three years ago I was around 190. I'm wanting to get to around 165.
Breakfast: Baked oatmeal. Turned to Google for a recipe, first result was this: https://cookieandkate.com/baked-oatmeal-recipe/ Mostly stuck to that recipe, eliminated honey the last time I made it to reduce sugar intake, been using coconut oil instead of butter but may try olive oil or just skip that ingredient. I'll eat that with Oikos Greek Yogurt with raspberries and almond pieces mixed in. Pretty good breakfast. Most cereals are unhealthy despite saying healthy on the box, but Google did approve of some whole grain cereal such as Grape Nuts and Post Great Grains, so those are the two I'm eating now when not eating baked oatmeal for breakfast. The baked oatmeal with yogurt is definitely a heartier breakfast than just cereal, though.
Lunch: Dave's 21 grain bread used for peanut butter and jelly, tuna fish sandwich, or ham and cheese sandwich. Sometimes I'll grill them with extra virgin olive oil. Getting a healthy bread is important. Processed deli ham I've read isn't that healthy, but I haven't found a good alternative at this point. I Googled for what store bought peanut butter was healthiest and came up with Richard's 100% Peanuts, and switched to olive based oil for mayo with the tuna. Jelly is Smucker's Natural jelly. For sides, been doing an apple a day, sometimes change up with a peach or kiwi. Also, pistachios.
Dinner: Chicken. I made chicken marsala off of a Google recipe, just did the same for lemon chicken. Chicken tenderloins for the marsala, white breast meat for the lemon chicken. Paprika flavored chicken with BBQ sauce, but BBQ sauce isn't healthy so that was a cheat cause I didn't find the paprika, salt, and pepper were providing enough flavor. With the chicken, sides such as unsweetened apple sauce, microwaved (baking takes too long) sweet potato, green beans, cottage cheese, and/or corn. Sweet potatoes are better than regular potatoes mainly because they're more edible plain, while regular potatoes need butter which isn't so good, but I want to try some healthier ways of preparing regular potatoes, perhaps grilled with extra virgin olive oil. I didn't even realize I liked sweet potatoes until last week. I hear fish is healthy so I may incorporate that more to get more variety. And lean pork isn't so bad I'm told. I'll be trying some other chicken recipes as well.
Dessert: One or two pieces of 86-93% cocoa dark chocolate. Healthy chocolate.
Snacks: Grapes and cashews.
I live alone and typically cook enough proportions of my dinner food to last the week. I don't mind eating the same thing a few days a week, but if I did I guess that would either mean cooking more often, or you could meal prep different types of food and then freeze them, that way you could cook a week or two worth of food at a time but cook say seven different types of food and still be able to eat a different dinner every day of the week. I have been meal prepping food for freezing for awhile now; when I go on a business trip I take the frozen meal prepped food, stick it in the fridge of my RV and I'm all set. One of the best benefits of having an RV for traveling is being able to eat healthier rather than relying on fast food or restaurants. Heck, don't like the food the client provides for lunch? Head off to the RV fridge. With meal prepping, taking an hour to cook dinner once a week, compared to driving say 20 minutes round trip to go out to eat each night, is actually a time saver.
For drinking, I'm down to pretty much water exclusively. I've never drank alcohol in my life, which is great for health and the wallet. I was drinking Martinelli's apple juice which is healthy as far as apple juice goes, but still a lot of sugar and no fiber to go with it so can be fattening. A few years ago when I was at my highest weight I was drinking two gallons of milk per week, which I did for a lot of my life (but before 25ish I could stay thin while doing so), but now I mostly use milk for cereal and cooking. I guess I still do drink fresh squeezed orange juice occasionally which tastes great but it's a lot of sugar so I've been cutting back on that.
I signed up for Invisalign (great, a $300+ expense per month to deal with in this economy) recently, and I've read that Invisalign discourages snacking since you have to take out and brush them and your teeth every time you eat, so many people lose weight as a result of Invisalign and decreased frequency of eating. I guess with my current snacking of grapes and cashews it may not have much effect, though.
The only green vegetable I've found I like so far is green beans and I still don't care for them that much. Still need to figure out how to incorporate more vegetables into my diet. I do like pea soup, but never really liked peas, so perhaps cooking pea soup is coming up to try.
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NorBro
Major Contributor
Blend them with frozen fruit. Although I love raw vegetables, I also blend them with protein powder. (That one is pretty gross, but I'm just used to it. They taste better with frozen fruit.)
rob norton
Veteran
I highly recomend chef john from food wishes:
- https://www.youtube.com/user/foodwishes/videos
- https://foodwishes.blogspot.com/
Not every recipe is unhealthy but a lot of it is comfort food, except if you're taking food away from a restaurant regularly it may be the same thing. The channel makes cooking so easy. I never thought something as simple as the format could make such a difference. You watch the video for the method then the blog post (found in video description) has the measurements. There's no waiting for them to measure on camera or flipping between pages on a site that contains pop ups. I think he has more than a thousand recipes, which you can easily scroll through looking at the thumbnails on youtube. Also, he is sort of lazy in a good way. He doesn't include any tedious steps unlike a lot of gourmet recipes, which sometimes try to make things difficult as a status symbol.
As far as being healthy, like Jack LaLanne said: "If it tastes good, spit it out." There aren't many foods that taste good without doing a single thing to them, fruit and some vegetables (also bacon) aside. People pretend they love potatoes. They love the salt, cheese and sauce it's swimming in. A potato completely on its own would be doable but it definitely wouldn't taste good. My point is if unsure about nutrition, there may be huge room for improvment by simply eliminating salt from food, cheese on everything, sugar from coffee and excess sauce etc.
A digital scale can be a huge help for weight loss, it takes the guesswork and emotion out of it. You figure out the amounts needed for foods then stick to the volumes.
Eric Coughlin
Veteran
As mentioned I've found I like sweet potatoes completely on their own. But yeah, regular potatoes, still trying to figure out what healthy things to add to it.
Sky’s the limit there. Baked potatoes are amenable to just about anything you can throw at them. Black beans (especially Cuban style) work well. I made a big pot of meat sauce... sort of like bolognese but without the cream... which can be used over pasta, as a sloppy Joe, or over a baked potato. That last one was tonight’s dinner here.
I’ve even mashed hummus into a baked potato and found it to be worth repeating. And homemade hummus is so easy and relatively inexpensive, and is great to keep on hand for snacks and other things, like hummus-crusted baked chicken.
On the topic of things to make to last the coming weeks, I’ve found that falafel freezes and reheats very well. Same with pancakes and Belgian waffles. I’ll make huge batches of those at a time and freeze most of them.
cyvideo
Veteran
combatentropy
Veteran
Thank you, everyone. This is awesome. I will bookmark this.
My only contribution is:
scrambled eggs + sliced avocado + corn tortilla
easy, cheap, filling, healthy, tasty (pick any 5)
My only contribution is:
scrambled eggs + sliced avocado + corn tortilla
easy, cheap, filling, healthy, tasty (pick any 5)
I thinly slice a fresh potato - OK, it's several of them - then bake them. I do use a small amount of canola oil but sometimes I can do without it.
As to fish, I do the "mashed fish" sandwiches. Which are sort of like tuna fish, except with other types. For big budgets, take a hefty slice of salmon, light fry it on the pan. (or, can just semi-boil it but I don't like the boiled taste unless you make a soup out of it), then use a fork and mash it into a paste. Add spices, sauces, mayo to taste.
Oh and PhotoKina got canceled. They say they won't be able to do anything until June as Germany is under a, emergency situation at the moment. There were rumors that a lot of manufacturers that didn't get to show much at CP+ or the NAB would make it to Köln. But that's not to be.
PS. The total count of positives in Florida is 329, with slightly over a half in three Southeast Counties. A quarter is travel related, a quarter is contact with those already identified and about a half is "under investigation".
Eric Coughlin
Veteran
I should try that. My mom has made similar but with the less healthy butter, so canola or olive oil could be the solution there. I guess slicing the potato rather than just straight up baking it gives it a bit more outer cooking on the actual potato and not just the skin, for lack of a better term.
I bought some fish a couple weeks ago but then forgot about it and apparently fish goes bad quickly, so goodbye $10-$15 worth of fish. Sad story.
Please don't pollute our food topic with off-topic conversation.
There are a lot quickies. I have a bodybuilding friend - mid-40's, 6'2", 230, jogs a lot. A few months ago, we ran into each other at a local supermarket and each picked two bags (on BOGO) of frozen Chinese food. I tell him, defreeze it in the microwave but then finish it on a frying pan or inside a countertop oven. He looks back, "It's faster in the microwave".
Then we went to Krispy Kreme and got a dozen each.
ahalpert
Major Contributor
Since we're broadening the topic -
Living through a pandemic and being short on work are a great reason to appreciate the people around us more.
The spouse, the kids, the folks... life is short. Never been a better time to work on and enjoy your relationships. Maybe get in a little extra private time with the missus.
Living through a pandemic and being short on work are a great reason to appreciate the people around us more.
The spouse, the kids, the folks... life is short. Never been a better time to work on and enjoy your relationships. Maybe get in a little extra private time with the missus.
combatentropy
Veteran
In 9 months will there be a different surge at hospitals?
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