I’ve got one month left on my $600 in weight-loss bets, and an important tool that has helped me success is portion control. This way, I can still enjoy most of my favorite foods while still losing 1-2 pounds a week. Even naughty things like pizza, pasta, and yes even the occasional chips or french fries. (Of course there are also lots of fruits and veggies to balance things out.)

The National Institute of Health has a page on portion distortion, which outlines how our idea of reasonable portion sizes have changed over the last 20 years. (The slides appear to be from 2004, so make that 30 years?!) Everything from bagels to pizza slices to soft drinks used to be much smaller…just like our bodies! The average American man weighs 195.5 lbs now, which is 30 lbs more than in the 1960s. The average American woman weighs 166 lbs now, 26 lbs more. Here are their slides for cheeseburgers and french fries.

Just this week, I saw a McDonald’s commercial offering a cheeseburger and small fries for $2.50. They look so small now, but would have actually started out as an oversized meal (due to the extra meat patty).

The double cheeseburger has 430 calories, 24g protein, 21g fat. (The single cheeseburger has 290 calories.) The small french fries (2.6 oz.) have 230 calories, 2g, 11g fat. Bring your own water bottle and you’ll have a meal with 660 calories, almost exactly 1/3rd of a 2,000 calorie day. I’m not recommending this as a daily healthy meal, but I found it interesting that you can still order a 1960s-sized meal on their menu which doesn’t completely blow up your nutrition plans for the week.

This NY Times article has many more ideas for meals at restaurants under 750 calories. What do they say is the “most valuable trick”? Don’t eat an entire portion.

Instead of splitting an entree between my wife and myself, I prefer to order two entrees (we like variety and enjoy sharing) but make sure that we leave enough food for lunch the next day. I do the same thing for meals cooked at home; I cook around the same amount as before (due to habit and my use of recipes) but split it into two meals. At the same time, rarely having to pay for lunch saves me money.

I also pulled weight-loss tricks from other sources like eating less “empty” carbs, including enough protein and fiber to feel fuller longer, and keeping healthy snacks like fruit and nuts around at all times. But realizing that my previous portion sizes were simply too big has definitely helped me the most.

If I wanted to stretch this idea further into personal finance, I could point to how the square footage of US houses have doubled since the 1950s, even as average household sizes have shrunk.

Update: ATK just sent me a new review that considered newer chef’s knives that have come onto the market, and the same knife won again! They say it has now been on top for 20 straight years. You can see the methodology and full rankings here, but it requires a free registered account. There’s also a good embedded video that doesn’t require registration.

Original post:

Some of you may be familiar with the PBS cooking show America’s Test Kitchen. The same company publishes the magazines Cook’s Illustrated and Cook’s Country, which you can think of as Consumer Reports for cooking in that they do not accept any advertising and are entirely subscriber-supported. I happened to find a bunch of back issues on sale at a community garage sale a few weeks ago for a dollar. Wow, I can only describe the content as heaven for cooking geeks! Lots of good tips inside.

Common frugal wisdom is that you don’t really need a 15-piece knife set with a fancy wooden block that costs hundreds of bucks, it’s mostly marketing. The 8-inch chef’s knife is often recommended as the most versatile and useful knife. (I’m partial to the Santoku-style knife or hefty Asian cleaver, myself.)

Cook’s Country tested the 8-inch chef’s knives from all the major brands that cost under $50 – Wusthof, Henckels (various), MAC, Calphalon, OXO, Chicago Cutlery, Victorinox and Farberware.

The bargain chef’s knife winner? The Victorinox Fibrox 8-Inch Chef’s Knife outperformed many more expensive competitors including a $50+ knife from the Wusthof Gourmet line and everyone else. The knife was judged to be sturdy, stayed sharp, and had a well-designed, comfortable handle. Amazon has 700+ now 3,000+ reviews with a 4.8/5 star average.

Another frugal chopping tip is that you don’t really need expensive cutting boards, let alone multiple ones for food safety reasons. Simply buy a set of flexible cutting mats to place on top of one cutting board or durable surface. They are thin yet sturdy, and can be rolled up like a funnel for transferring ingredients easily. You can get a set of four CounterArt Flexible Cutting Mats for only $8.50, which are the current best-selling ones on Amazon. Comes with Microban antibacterial stuff and is dishwasher safe.

I’m still trying my best to cook at home at least 5 times a week, mostly avoiding the pitfalls in my cooking at home flowchart. We make pizza at least once every other week, as it tastes better than anything from the frozen aisle and is very flexible. We’ve recently topped one with leftover corned beef from St. Patrick’s Day.

Suzanne Lenzer of the New York Times recently shared her own pizza dough recipe in Homemade Pizza, Easier and Faster.

So let’s assume you already know that homemade pizza is better and quicker and cheaper than what you can buy at the neighborhood pizza place. You know the reasons to make your own, which are as obvious as they are appealing: You can top a pizza with virtually anything (from special ingredients to leftovers) or almost nothing (one of my favorites is little more than a smear of caramelized leeks dotted with taleggio). You can bake it in minutes — it takes longer to heat up the oven than to bake a pie.

The recipe is from her new book, and it differs from the 5,000 other recipes out there in these important ways:

1. No kneading! Use a food processor instead. Pizza dough by hand isn’t hard, but this makes it stupid easy. Dump stuff in food processor and turn on for 2 minutes. Done.
2. Takes 30 minutes all-in on the weekend. Yes, you’ll want to make it ahead for busy weeknights. 20 minutes includes the minimal prep, using the food processor, the rise, and cleaning everything up during the 20-minute rise. Clean counter to clean counter, 30 minutes.
3. Make ahead, store in freezer. You keep it in the freezer until you need it. Throw it in the fridge to thaw in the morning. Take dough out and preheat oven when you get home. In under 20 minutes, food can be on the table!

Here’s a direct link to the dough recipe, and another NYT article with easy pizza topping ideas. I made the NYT dough last weekend, froze them, and ate them later in the week. We liked it! Here are our comments, which I actually think make it even easier:

• We used all-purpose flour. The recipe says bread flour and we’ve used it in the past, but AP flour worked just fine and it’s less hassle.
• We used a rolling pin to roll out the dough. The recipe says to stretch the dough by hand and specifically says “not flat on a work surface”, but we use a floured, flat surface and a rolling pin. It still works and takes nearly zero skill! Here’s a good, simple YouTube video that describes the stupid-proof method. I like stupid-proof.
• Parchment paper for the win. We bought a baking stone. It got all nasty after a few months. Now we just use a half baking sheet that can preheat in the oven and parchment paper. Also stupid-proof, as it always results in no sticking! Although if you bake 550 degrees, the paper may turn black. We bake at slightly lower temps.
• Double the recipe. Assuming your food processor isn’t one of those tiny ones, I like the article’s tip to double the dough recipe. Now you’ll get four balls of dough in 30 minutes.

Side tip: Don’t got half an hour on Sunday? You can also freeze pizza dough from the supermarket. You can buy a ball of pizza dough for $1 to $2 at places like Safeway or Trader Joe’s. If you look at the ingredients, many of them are quite simple with minimal questionable additives. Freeze it ’til you need it.

Back in 2007, I wrote about cast iron skillets as the ultimate frugal cookware? To this day, I still think they can play a regular role in the home kitchen. America’s Test Kitchen (ATK) has recently released to free e-mail newsletter subscribers the results from their extensive test of various cast-iron skillets. They made everything from scrambled eggs to steaks to cornbread. (Must sign-up and log-in to view. Did I mention it’s informational and free?)

Over the past 30 years, nonstick skillets have taken the place of cast iron in most homes. But with disturbing reports about the effects of nonstick coatings on the environment and our health, we decided to take another look at cast iron to see if it’s worth bringing back into the kitchen.

Cast iron has always been known to have a few advantages over other types of cookware. Its material and weight give it excellent heat retention for high-heat cooking techniques such as frying and searing. You can use it on the stovetop or bake with it in the oven. Its durability is legendary—many people are still cooking with cast-iron pans handed down for generations. Unlike most consumer products, cast-iron pans actually improve with time and heavy use.

Cast iron also has disadvantages. It’s heavy and needs special care. […]

As to the special care, I suggest reading this link about the many myths about cast iron pans. A bit of soap is fine. You do want to keep them dry when not in use to avoid rust spots, though.

The winner? Why, the same model and size I bought myself back in 2007, the $34 Lodge L10SK3 Pre-Seasoned Skillet, 12-Inch with a 4.6/5 rating and over 5,000 reviews. (This 10-inch version is only $15.) Read the full article for the details and rankings of other brands. Here’s a screenshot of my Amazon page when logged-in as proof:

These days, my workhorse cookware is my enameled cast iron dutch oven. Soups, stews, chilis, short ribs, pork shoulder, and so on. Eggs, searing, and cornbread can be done as well. Less maintenance but a little costlier. Well, Le Creuset and Staub are high quality and high price (we got one as a gift and love it), but this $70 Lodge dutch oven also gets good reviews. Tramontina dutch ovens are another well-reviewed and cost-conscious choice; you can find them sometimes at Wal-Mart and Costco physical stores.