About food; shopping and cooking

Thought I'd share a little bit about our food systems. We've gone through quite a transformation, the last couple years in particular.

It's a wonder we are where we are now with our eating habits, considering we were on food stamps for the last six years (we gave them up a couple months ago, determining to trust our Father for our provision - while acknowledging that that was his provision for season). They always gave us well more than we needed and we could easily have lived entirely on convenience foods. I won't lie, we did consume a lot of prepared/frozen dishes. And still had enough left that we often bought groceries for others (though we weren't supposed to). Anyway, like I said, it's a wonder I learned (or even desired) to cook wholesome, inexpensive meals for my family.

About a year ago we began to feel it was time to get off food stamps. We began to really cut back on the convenience foods and stock up on non-perishable staples. We had started grinding our own grain (with our Nutrimill, which quickly paid for itself) and buying staples in bulk, as well as shopping and scratch & dent food stores (even cheaper than ALDI's).

I can't say enough for buying in bulk! I realize it's hard for some of you (and will be harder for us now) to spend much money all at once. But I intend to make it happen somehow. We save so much money just by not having to run to the store every week. Bobby will pick up an item or two for me on his way home for work, otherwise I really only shop about once a month. It saves on gas and saves on impulse buying. One month I might buy extra baking items, another trip I'll stock up on canned goods. Make it work for you!

You can find room in your house to store extra food. We started with a couple shelves in the laundry room for the overflow. I ended up getting rid of a bunch of kitchen gadgets I don't use (I hate things that only serve one purpose. The hot-air popcorn popper is an example. It's so much tastier popped on the stove and I use the pot for other things! And we regained valuable space when the dishwasher died) and installing some extra shelves in the pantry (well, Bobby did it for me) and now there's not much I can't store right in the kitchen. If you can buy food in bulk packaging it helps a lot. Packaging takes up so much space! We save space by not buying boxed cereal, for instance. We decided it's a) expensive, b) space-hogging, and c) bad for you (yes, even the granola type stuff). We haven't yet found a hook-up for bulk pasta, but when we buy a several of boxes we dump them into one plastic container and burn the boxes. (There, we save on our trash bill, too.)

We buy grains in bulk (25 and 50 pound bags) from a friend's healthfood/garden store in the next town over (they're a little expensive, but accept food stamps, so we were able to stock up) and keep them in our pantry in 5 gallon buckets. They're not food-grade buckets, just free paint and drywall mud buckets from construction sites, cleaned out and sanitized. I figure since the goods are dry, and the storage is relatively short-term, it doesn't matter too much. The lids are impossible to clean, so I buy new lids at China-Mart for a buck something. I'd love to get the Gamma lids for the buckets we're into daily, much easier to open and close, but can't swing the cost just yet.

My sister-in-law had the clever idea to have the children decorate the buckets. I may let them do this soon, even though they're in the pantry and not on display. A sort of color code would be nice.

Here's the list of bulk grains, all organic, that we keep on hand:

• rolled oats - quick for most purposes (oat porridge, quick breads, cookies), regular for granola (typical Sabbath breakfast)
• popcorn - our favorite snack and comfort food. Bobby doesn't care for it, but the kids and I often make it a meal by serving it with a chunk of cheese and side of fruit (typical Sabbath lunch).
• corn - right now we grind it for cornbread and Johnny cakes, but soon I intend to try my hand at hominy and masa for tortillas (the Encyclopedia of Country Living explains the process of soaking corn in a lime or baking soda mixture which releases an important nutrient you wouldn't otherwise get from corn)
• rye - figured I'd use it for sourdough, and I do sometimes, but now that I've figured out how to use wheat (and prefer it), I probably won't buy more rye.
• rice, long grain, brown - please don't bother with white rice! You really do get used to brown rice, and soon prefer it. You won't go back to that bland, diabetic's nightmare stuff. Among the usual uses, we sometimes grind it course for porridge in the morning
• hard red spring wheat - our choice for bread and tortillas. The store I mentioned now carries an organic animal grade of this wheat which is perfectly edible and half the price of the "human" stuff they carry. I'm very pleased with it.
• soft white spring wheat - pastry wheat. Our choice for biscuits, pancakes, muffins, desserts, cream-of-wheat, etc. High in protein and wonderfully soft, but not enough gluten for yeast bread (we ran out of hard red last week and I tried soft white - terrible!). Allow me to tell you all about how we purchased this wheat this year.

 Back in the spring our friends, the Fourniers, invited us to get in on a deal they had partaken of the year before. Their neighbor harvests his soft white wheat and sells them as much as they want (fresh from the field, before it’s cleaned) for market price (though they usually pay him more than). Market price this year was $4.20 a bushel. A bushel. That’s 60 pounds. I’d been paying over a dollar a pound for this stuff! We paid him $5 a bushel.

 We ordered twelve bushels (and our friends at least three or four times that since there's 13 of them and they also they feed it to their animals). They had 55 gal drums ready when he delivered it and after the wheat dried for a couple days they took it to a local mill to have it cleaned and bagged. Total cost: $7 a bushel. If my math is right, we paid about eight and half cents a pound.

 We filled two 55 gallon drums (food grade - $10 each from an ice cream factory two hours away - also a Fournier hook-up; these folks are da bomb.com) with wheat for eighty-four dollars. What a huge blessing! We’re not even halfway through the first drum. We haven't any outbuildings besides a small (full) barn, so we have one drum in our laundry room and one in the corner of our living room. We fill up our 5 gal pantry bucket from there as needed.

 I look forward to many more sources like this in the coming years. I love to buy local, direct from the grower. (I'll save my anti-merchant rants for another time.)

We also buy sucanat (stands for "sugar cane natural" - sugar cane juice that's been dried and ground, but otherwise unprocessed) by the 25 or 50 pound bag. We don't use white sugar and have played around with alternative sweeteners, and sucanat is our preferred sweetener for most baked goods (cookies, brownies, cakes, etc - which we limit to once a week and special occasions).

We do like honey for our other sweet needs. Some day I'll convince my husband we can handle bees. Still looking for an inexpensive local source. For now we buy a couple quarts at a time from our friend's store. It's raw Michigan honey. We bring in our own jars and save a little cash there.

Maple syrup is a real treat, one we allow ourselves occasionally since we found a family outside town (on the other side) that bottles their own.

Not everyone needs or has a place to store 50 lbs of salt, but since we have the space and it was so inexpensive, I bought some. Like the wheat above, this is also animal grade, but it's from a good source, is not bleached and has no additives. It's like "Real" salt, for those of you familiar with that. It's courser than your average table salt (and is like biting into sand, if you use it in bread), but the children enjoy grinding a month's supply in our hand-turned coffee grinder. The price for 50 lbs was less than $15. That's like 3 cents a pound. Can't beat that. Not that salt is one of the bigger grocery expenses.

I bought about 20 lbs each of red, black and pinto beans, but still need buckets for them. We're learning a lot about legumes and are acquiring quite a fondness for lentils, so I'll be buying those in bulk, too. I'm going to try growing my own dry beans next year. I've really learned how to stretch our meat by combining with beans and also making tasty meatless dishes. The "More With Less" cookbook has been a real nice source of recipes and advice for yummy economic cooking. We didn't eat beans much (ever?) growing up, so this is new territory for me.

I'm still learning about putting garden produce by. This coming year I'll be focusing on root veggies and other staples, since my experimenting this last year was so successful. I've been reading about root cellaring and, although we don't have one, I now see many areas around our place where I can store root veggies and squash and things. I'll be pleased if I can put by a goodly amount of the things we use regularly: potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, beans, tomatoes and squash. And I plan to extend the growing season with early and late plantings of greens and brassicas. We buy alfalfa seeds (and sometimes other types) for sprouting during the winter and summer when lettuce isn't growing.

The pantry still holds home canned green beans and a few jars of salsa and BBQ sauce. Next year, more puree, me thinks. More beans. I'll be working on some fruit and nut bearing trees and shrubs (apples, pears, strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, pecans, hazelnuts) in the future. While I'm getting those underway I'll try to do the U-pick places and buy a lot of in-season-on-sale fruits at the store, freezing and canning as I'm able.

In the meantime we buy limited amounts of fruits. Fresh fruit is becoming quite a treat. We pick up all-fruit spread and canned fruit at the scratch & dent store. We also buy spices there (it's always my intention to grow more herbs, I just never do!), though the tiny containers drive me nuts, we go through them so fast. I'll soon be buying spices in bulk online. My mom was impressed with SpicesEtc., so I'll check there first. We also pick up odds and ends like canned olives, canned tuna, canned veggies and the occasional chocolate bar at the s&d store.

Currently I'm waiting on some info from the local co-op. From there I'll be ordering organic chocolate, oils, whole wheat pasta, and probably a lot of beans and grains that are rather expensive at my friend's store.

Right now our deep freeze is pretty well stocked with meat (beef & chicken, a little salmon) from our food stamps days. As that winds down and work picks up, we hope to buy beef locally. Food stamps really limit where you shop and the deals you can get! We might pick up some chickens in the spring just for butchering in the fall. We'll butcher all next year's male goats for meat. I would love it if Bobby would hunt, but so far he hasn't shown much interest. But when our meat supply dwindles and there are more beans than beef on his plate, he may change his mind.

We're blessed to have chickens for eggs. Chickens are so easy and inexpensive to keep, everyone should have them! Our flock of one rooster (I recently found out that fertilized eggs keep better and are better for you) and 15 hens (some older and molting, some new and not laying yet) were giving us a whopping two eggs a day. Now we get eight or nine a day, which is a good amount for us. We hope to enlarge the coop, double the flock and sell eggs to our neighbors next fall.

We also have the goats for milk. We're still milking our one doe, morning and night, but she and her daughter from the previous year are bred, due to kid in mid April. Dessy was giving about half a gallon a day and even with the cold she's only dropped back to a quart and a half. We'll dry her up two months before she's due to kid. It's just enough milk for cooking with, but not much else.

Our cheese and butter we're buying in bulk from Middlefield Cheese in Ohio. A friend of ours started sort of a co-op and orders for everyone, getting us a discount. The cheese is good and natural and half the price of what we buy at the store, but comes in 5 lb blocks (I think you can order smaller amounts, but not at the discounted price). The 2 lb rolls of butter cost a hair more than store butter, but is worth it to know it's natural... and the taste is wonderful! I didn't know butter could taste so good! The difference is quite like free-range chicken eggs and store eggs. Farm fresh is firm, tastier, and more colorful.

I used to plan meals on a weekly basis and really saved a lot by planning ahead. When we changed our eating habits I stopped planning and just cooked up whatever was on hand. Now I'm planning meals monthly, breakfasts and suppers (lunches are variable, but always easy, sometimes leftover and often meatless). I have a weekly guide that goes something like this...

1. pancakes, roast w/ veggies (beef, chicken or chevon)
2. quick bread (muffins, cornbread, baked oatmeal), soup/stew (from leftover roast)
3. porridge (oats, wheat, rice), Mexican
4. pancakes, random suppers that take a little more time (burgers, stir fry, fish)
5. eggs and toast, pasta
6. Preparation day: porridge, pizza, as well as Sabbath meals
7. Sabbath: granola w/ milk or yogurt, popcorn, bread, cheese, fruit and a casserole or hearty soup for supper. 

 There's a big note on the menu that says "Momma reserves the right to change the menu without notice!" We might have an abundance of eggs one week so I'll scratch one of the porridges and we'll have eggs and toast twice. Or I'll have miscalculated and be short an important ingredient so we shift a couple meals around. But having the menu as a guide is so nice! The dishes vary each week, but the months look pretty much the same. I tweak each month before printing, accounting for ingredients and weather (a hot stew might not hit the spot when it's 90° outside - we would probably prefer to grill). I started by making a categorized list of all the meals I cook regularly, or would like to. Some facilitate others very well, like the roast and soup/stew.

 If I can do all this, you can, too!  (Well, most of it.  I understand if you can't have a big garden or keep animals.) Use what you have and stretch whatever you can. And don't tell me that eating healthy is too expensive! Too often that means "I'm too lazy to work at it." Yes, "healthy" convenience food is more expensive than bad convenience food, but convenience costs no matter which way you go. Put your mind to it (and pray!) and put your back into it and you can eat better for less money.

  

In the way of encouragement let me remind you that this doesn't happen overnight. I'm not even saying you should, I just wanted to share what we do.  But if you're interested, take it one step at a time. Choose one day a week to cook from scratch, or one meal a day, or start by modifying one food group (grains, for example. Bake your own bread, even if you can't grind your own grains or stand the taste of whole wheat). I'll have you know that giving up boxed cereals was very hard for me! It was my favorite breakfast and favorite snack. Now I look back and don't know what the big deal was.

 

Lastly, don't underestimate the power of prayer in changing your eating, cooking and shopping habits. Lean on Yahweh for strength and wisdom.