This was our dinner last night!!! Pork loin chop with BBQ sauce and apple sauce, jasmine rice and and amazing spinach salad! It was sooooo delish!

This meal is a prime example of how easy it is to eat inexpensively, yet eat like a king!  It’s also the absolute best time to talk about one of the most important  lessons we learned from S.E.Asia. Eat less meat along with more real food!! You see…I love meat!  I have always said I could be a vegetarian if it wasn’t for meat! LOL! My husband also loves meat! So you can only imagine how sad we were when my beautiful husband Ron was diagnosed with Gout! For those of you who don’t know much about Gout, it’s all about the amount of purines in your food, which your body converts to uric acid! If your body can’t get rid of the uric acid, it will deposit it into your joints!  If you haven’t seen my husband I’m attaching a pic!  He’s slim, he’s active, he eats sooo healthy, He’s gorgeous…ooops got carried away there…guess that last one is all about bias and not too much about his health! My bad!! Aaaaanyway…He isn’t exactly what you’d call the poster boy for Gout, so you can imagine our shock when the diagnosis came through that Ron’s painful foot was caused by Gout!

What does this mean?  How will our eating life change?  Well…Meat has purines …so we now had to rethink our meals each day so that he didn’t exceed 3oz of meat per day! We were both bummed out…and what horrible timing…right before our trip to S.E. Asia! Anyone who knows Ron and I, they will attest…we don’t just look forward to eating on holiday—we actually plan our entire trip around the food we’ll eat!! We couldn’t imagine limiting ourselves right before this amazing trip! Have you ever felt at times you are supposed to be exactly where you are at exactly the right time?  Weeell get this…  If you have ever been to S.E. Asia you know that going to a large grocery store is quite the experience!  Specifically relating to meat, there is the equivalent of only two large cooler doors in the entire store (The type of cooler door that they store milk in, at a convenience store, here)!  The only large grocery stores that have more than that, are in the tourist areas catering to, you got it…westerners! What was most fascinating to us was both the cost of our meals (cheap, cheap cheap) and how meat was more of a flavouring than a hunk of something!  Even when we made Sate in Bali at cooking school, we were amazed how little went onto each skewer. Yet in combination with rice and veggies it was always enough!  When Ron and I arrived home we couldn’t stop talking about the whole trip and how amazing it was!  Not only for the obvious reasons, being with our daughters, but also the lessons we learned!  In S.E. Asia you can eat cheap!  Is it because you eat less meat!  Can we do this here?  I have been putting it to the test!  I have always been a bargain hunter (with seven kids you better be)!  Grocery shopping is no different!  I have an app on my phone called Flipp  My sister got me hooked on this amazing app! At my fingertips I can see all the flyers.  This week, whole, Canadian pork loins were one of the sale items! The loin was about 7 lbs and it cost me $12.50.  I sliced off 3, 7oz chops from the end-froze two for another night then grilled the third with BBQ sauce and Ron and I sliced it right down the centre and each had half! That’s 3.5 oz each of meat (which is actually .5 over what Ron should normally have)! Later in the month I’ll show you what I did with the rest of the loin! We served our chops with jasmine rice and a huge spinach salad with all the things we love. Feta cheese, pine nuts, red slivered onion, wild organic blueberries, carrots, cucumber and our favourite maple balsamic dressing!  Applesauce for the chops?  Of course…no pleasure spared! We even had a small piece of focaccia each, with oil and vinegar,  while we were making dinner so added that into the cost and calories!

To get to the cost we had to measure and weigh every little thing!  It’s a lot of hassle to measure everything out, but from now on I am going to do my best to include this in my blogs, so that all of you don’t have the hassle of doing it!  I’ll do it for you!   Conclusion…we were full, it was spectacular, we felt great and it was cheap! What an eye opener!   Bottom line…if you love meat like we do,…have it…just have less of it with a little rice, potato or quinoa and tons of your favourite veggies! Eat like the S.E Asians do…Save a bundle and who knows, it may get us closer to their size as well!!! xox