Three Plus Two

More posts at And the Kitchen Sink!

A few Advent and Christmas posts, including a recipe for grain-free St. Lucia buns and a bonus grain-free Christmas "cookie" in the New Year's post...

and

I'm doing the Whole 30 this month, eliminating dairy and all sugars along with grains.

Also working on moving this blog off typepad (still)... but the photos are a giant problem.  Does anyone have any experience in importing blogs with lots of photos?  I had to use Wordpress, as my blog was too big to import to Blogger using the free converter without breaking it into pieces.  But the photos show up only as links. Help?

 

Plan It, Don't Panic: Progress and Menu for Week 2

I'm participating in the Plan It, Don't Panic! Meal Planning Challenge at Keeper of the Home.  This is Week 2.  If you're curious, you can also read about my preparations and menu for week 1.

How did last week go?

The hardest part about this challenge seems to be... blogging it on Monday!

I have lots of ideas for blog posts that never make it to the blog.  Sometimes (often) it's due to lack of time, but sometimes...

 

It's the lighting.

In real life, a Spanish omelet looks much yummier.  Much less... Dayglo.

(And I know what you're thinking about this huge cooktop, because I thought it, too, when I first saw the house. But the grill does not work. I sometimes use it as a prep space by laying a cutting board there. Back in 1980, though, this thing rocked!)

Anyway, having the menu plan helped keep me on track, but there was still some unplanned pizza.  We were all sick with colds last week, and one night every time I tried to make dinner the baby pulled up on my leg and bit me.  He was not happy with his sisters or brothers either.  So pizza it was.  I just readjusted the plan and we had almond flour pancakes on Saturday instead of Friday. 

I didn't grind up any nuts and seeds for breakfast, and the chocolate coconut bark was a complete flop.  I was trying to use unsweetened chocolate and then sweeten the whole concoction with honey, but it just wouldn't combine.  We were left with a much too sweet layer on the bottom and a bitter layer on top.  I tried stirring my raspberry syrup in, but it didn't help much.  None of that seemed to matter to my 4 year old, however, as he came back for seconds.

The hardboiled eggs were lifesavers -- mostly for me as snacks in the afternoon, especially on meatless days.

Menu Plan for Week 2

Breakfasts:

I'd like to have some grain-free breads made up this week to use for breakfasts.  I also need to make yogurt. And I've had one request for soaked oat porridge, which we'll have on Weds.

Lunches:

Standard lunch fare.  Leftovers.  (On Monday I had a decent salad made from leftover cold chicken sausages, romaine lettuce, and tomatoes, dressed with oil and apple cider vinegar.  Simple, but good.)

Monday: Chicken cacciatore over zucchini, green beans from the garden, fruit

(Ok, so the almond flour I used to coat the chicken pieces turned mushy and my cast iron skillet was too small to hold everything, which meant I couldn't put it in the oven without it bubbling over onto the oven floor.  My small wall oven has no vent and functions mainly as a steam oven, so when anything bubbles over, even more steam comes out the top of the door -- yes, really.  In clouds.  I finished cooking it on the stove.  It didn't look anything like Ree's, but it sure tasted good! I'll have to keep experimenting with the almond flour. And ask for a cast iron dutch oven for Christmas.)

Tuesday: Crockpot Tacos/Taco salad (for me) using stew meat, with homemade fermented salsa, fruit

Wednesday: Butternut squash soup (enough to freeze some)/almond flour zucchini bread (to be planned over for breakfast), fruit... I'll probably cook some breakfast sausage as a stir-in for the soup, but I'll freeze the "planned over" soup without it,

Thursday: Slow Cooker Coconut Curry Chicken (without the rice, using free-range chicken), salad, peas maybe, fruit

Friday: I'm sticking this in as our pizza night, because we are going to be cleaning for family on the weekend!

Saturday: Crockpot roast beef w/carrots and assorted veggies from the garden,  potatoes for my dad, fruit

Sunday: We have some important family events going on, so we'll have a BBQ lunch with family and pick and snack leftovers for dinner

 

 

 

Plan It, Don't Panic: A Meal Planning Challenge

Keeper of the Home is hosting the "Plan It, Don't Panic: Meal Planning Challenge" for the next six weeks to give those of us who need it (ahem) some accountability in the meal planning process.  Lately life has been so busy that grocery shopping gets smushed into whatever time slot happens to be available, and meal planning has been rudimentary.  As a result, we've been eating way too much pizza, and I end up feeding the kids toast for breakfast every day.  A low point happened at Costco two weeks ago when I bought a giant box of packaged granola bars to feed the kids snacks in the van on the way home.  Obviously they did not need 60 + granola bars to eat on the way home, so they ended up gorging on them for breakfasts and snacks, at which point it became apparent that my boys had eaten 60+ granola bars in less than a week.  (Like -- a lot less than a week.)  Granted, we were just coming home from vacation, but 60 granola bars??

I signed up with the Plan It, Don't Panic Challenge as soon as I saw it.

Our vital stats:

• Family of 9
• 6 boys, ages 14-1
• 1 nursing mom
• grain-free diet (at least for some of us)

Since I know that people are curious about the grain-free diet, I thought I would try to blog this challenge in a little more detail.  I hope to post not only my meal plans, but what we (and I, the most grain-free of our family) actually ate during the week.  As usual, I'll be keeping it real.  I like Mark Sisson's "Don't Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good"  and 80 %  principles when it comes to eating a grain-free/paleo/primal diet.  I am not perfect.  I have 7 kids. Things are going to fall apart sometimes.  They probably fall apart at your house, too.  But that's okay.  You don't have to be a superhero to make changes in the way you eat.

This what I'm hoping to accomplish with this challenge:

•  Stop eating so much pizza for dinner just because I haven't figured out dinner or managed any prep work.
• Make better use of my (minimal) garden produce as well as the store produce
• Start working in more grain-free breakfasts and lunches for the kids.
• Make it a regular habit to have some real snacks on hand that are a change from the everyday fruit and cheese, which are starting to get a little boring. In addition, I need snacks that I can eat, with a bit of protein in the afternoon.
• Start making my own yogurt and kefir again.
• Keep the grocery budget at a decent level.  I'm not aiming for the lowest level, but I do want to keep a top on it by weeding out the impulse buys (like 60+ granola bars). 

 So how am I doing this first week?

Thursday night I sat down and got some coupons together.  I don't spend a lot of time couponing, and am probably one of the more un-extreme couponers you'll find, but I do find that coupons help us on paper and cleaning products and our Whole Foods shopping especially.  I wanted Andy to make a run to Whole Foods after work on Friday, so I had to get everything together for him.  Our standard Whole Foods run usually includes whole fat yogurt, unhomogenized whole milk (not raw), good quality heavy cream (minus the carageenen), and whatever organic fruit is on sale for a good price.  We also stock up on free-range chicken and pastured butter if we need any (we didn't this week).  This week, in addition to the dairy, Andy bought a little over 4.5 lbs of plums, some chocolate for coconut bark, and got a deal on Clif bars by stacking some manufacturers coupons with Whole Foods coupons.  (He'll take the Clif bars with him when he travels.  No, they aren't grain-free.)   

 On Friday night I watched the videos from the Cook More Real Food Challenge (taking inventories of pantry, freezer, and fridge, and meal planning, all of which are good), so I was ready to jump in Saturday morning as long as Katydid and Andy helped by watching Leo, who was sick and prefers to live outside these days.  (Fortunately, they came to my rescue).  I finally got around to cleaning out the fridge, which I have needed to do for a few weeks now.  We recently bought a second fridge to store veggies and milk and cut down on trips to the store, but the luxury of space brought with it a disturbing habit on the part of all of us to disregard all former organizational rules for using the fridge in the kitchen.

(There are some pictures of a seriously organized fridge and freezer in this post from I Heart Organizing.  My fridge does not look like that, but it's a lot better.)

On Saturday afternoon, I finished up the grocery shopping at Kroger.  (Sure seemed like they raised their prices again.  Their "mega-event" didn't seem so mega to me.)

Stuff in the fridge and freezer I'll be using in my meal plan this week:

• black bean salad (homemade)
• romaine lettuce
• carrots that are looking a little hairy
• baby carrots in a giant bag from Costco (mainly for lunches)
• shrimp stock (freezer)
• chicken broth (freezer)
• stew meat (from a side of beef, freezer)
• gluten-free chicken sausages (from that Costco trip)
• almond flour (which I buy in bulk from Honeyville Grains)
• raspberry "syrup" -- organic frozen raspberries from Costco that had thawed and refrozen into a giant block, cooked down with honey because I had to do something with 3 lbs of raspberries at once... a yummy and sugar-free topping for yogurt and pancakes

Snacks and sweet stuff for the week:

I have the Healthy Snacks to Go e-book and am excited to try many of Katie's ideas.  But... everybody in the house (including me) is sick right now with a cold, so we'll see how much gets accomplished. 

Some simple ideas for this week:

• hardboiled eggs
• chicken broth (good for a cold!)
• apples and bananas with peanut, almond, or sunbutter
• applesauce rollups (from the Healthy Snacks book)
• coconut bark (from Primal Blueprint Quick and Easy Meals)

A Note on the Calendar:

Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday are Ember Days in the Church.  We'll be meatless for those days. Meatless and grain-free can be difficult, especially when your family doesn't like beans or lentils.

Breakfasts:

I am not awake enough in the morning to cook.  What I am aiming for this week is to grind up some nuts and seeds ahead of time in order to make grain-free porridge, which will be a nice change from my regular eggs.  (Our chickens are only beginning to lay, so I'm still buying cage-free eggs from the store.) Hopefully some of the kids will enjoy it, too.

Lunches:

My goal is to have leftovers.  With 6 boys, sometimes you plan for leftovers and in spite of your best efforts, you realize what you have left over is crumbs.  My own go-to lunch for days when there are crumbs is a peanut or almond butter/coconut milk smoothie.   

In other words, I'm still working on lunch.  I'll be getting up to speed on dinners first.

 

 

Dinners:

Sunday -- Black bean soup (leftover black bean salad, stew meat from the freezer)

(I did make this and it turned out well, but the little boys refused to eat it again for lunch on Monday and had cheese sandwiches instead.)

Monday -- chicken wings with baby carrots, fruit, possibly some bleu cheese dip if I feel up to it

Tuesday -- shrimp bisque (I'll be altering this recipe, since I don't have cognac or sherry, and I won't be adding flour) and salad

Wednesday (meatless)  -- Spanish Omelet (I add some cheese to mine, and of course, I use more eggs!), roasted eggplant from the garden, fruit

Thursday  -- gluten-free chicken sausages, green beans from the garden, fruit

Friday (meatless) -- almond flour pancakes with raspberry "syrup"

Saturday (meatless) -- cheese pizza out

Well!  I'm not sure how I spun a menu plan into such a long post, but if you're still with me, check out all the other menu planners at Plan It, Don't Panic! Week One !

 

 

Seven Quick Takes - Gardens and Floods

One

I have declared war on crepe myrtles.  I know they probably don't deserve it, but I have this thing about plants that everybody has.  And down here, everybody has crepe myrtles.  It's like monoculture landscaping, and it can't be good for the bees.  Anyway, the thing about crepe myrtles is that if they are sufficiently ignored for long enough, they will create many, many volunteer trees, most of them in places they have no business growing.  And the other thing about crepe myrtles is that many people regard them as bushes and plant them accordingly, smack up next to the house in the front flower bed.  But the crepe myrtle is a tree, and if you ignore it (sufficiently), it will turn into a tree, and there goes your gutter.  Our neighbor has a gorgeous, huge crepe myrtle in her front yard, but most crepe myrtles are never given that amount of space or time.  Instead, they're planted in the wrong places and then cruelly topped.  All of which is to say that I spent a beautiful late summer day wielding a pair of giant pruning shears against dozens of juvenile crepe myrtles growing in every single landscaped bed we have.  I even bravely made a start on the two trees in the front of the house that make eerie, creaky noises against the gutters when the wind blows.  Those, I'm afraid, will require a hacksaw.

Two

I'm working on crepe myrtles because my garden is defunct.  When we came home from visiting my parents Labor Day weekend, one of my bean towers was blown over and the other was leaning drunkenly.  It's not like I got a lot of beans out of them anyway.  Time now to get another load of dirt for the raised beds and plant some fall crops, like lettuce and kale.

Three

The blackberry bushes are bearing nicely, especially considering that this is their first year.  I love blackberries.  I often wonder about our big blackberry bush in the garden in New York.  Hurricane Irene devestated Schoharie County, but our old house was not in the way of the worst floodwaters.  Still, I wonder, did all the water coming down that hill demolish the orchard? What about the blackberry bush?

This is the risk of planting things.  A piece of you stays in the ground, too.

Four

Which is to say, we have been horrified by the news coming out of upstate New York.  Some of Andy's coworkers lost their homes.  The towns that formed the place we called home for 5 years are some of them completely obliterated.  It's all very surreal when you're this far away and friends send you photos and videos.  You just thank God that there was no loss of human life.

Five

Because I am a worrier, I wondered what Tropical Storm Lee would do if it dumped 10 inches of rain on my parents' house.  If the power went out, would we have enough food to feed our big family? Was there enough Chunky Soup in the pantry?

These are the things that will keep you up at 3 AM when you're trying to sleep in the 6 inches of space left on the bed beside the baby.

Fortunately for us, the rain and wind weren't that bad, although it was cold for the second week in September -- unheard of cold! 60 degrees and raining! -- and a dead tree did fall across the sidewalk. Of course they had to evacuate again in upstate New York. 

On our way home, we drove out of the rain into sunshine.  The rain gauge in our front flower bed held less than a half inch of rain.  The azaelas in back look wilty and parched in spite of the cooler weather.

And the wildfires in Texas... good night. My dad says this is how they make averages: floods and droughts cancel each other out. 

Six

Well, this didn't start out as the natural disaster Seven Quick Takes, but I guess it's been on my mind.  I went to Costco the day after we got back and stocked up on some things we were out of, or almost out of: canned salmon, olive oil, paprika.  (I guess sometimes I use a lot of paprika.)  They had tortellini, which I should have bought more of in case they don't have any when I go back, and I also saw organic strawberry spread, which I haven't seen in a year.  So I bought 3 jars.  If we were to have to eat out of the pantry now, our meals would consist of nut and seed butters, salmon, canned beans, tomatoes, pineapple, Goldfish crackers, and strawberry jam. 

Seven

In case you're wondering, I am still eating grain-free as much as possible.  In a little over a year, I've lost about 50 pounds.  20 pounds was cheating because it was baby weight, but 30 pounds was baby weight x the 6 previous babies.  I am getting to the point where I have been forced to buy new clothes.  I miss bread and my corn allergy annoys the heck out of me because I can't eat corn on the cob or Chinese food at a restaurant because there's cornstarch in the sauces, but otherwise, I'm ok eating this way.  My kids, however, are not.  Having enough meat on hand to fill them up with a grain-free dinner is a real problem, especially considering that my 14 month old has begun eating the same amount as the 4 year old or the 5 year olds.  That said, I saw a lot of benefits to the kids with grain-reduced eating, and I want to reduce the grains they're eating again, but I can't seem to stop feeding them toast for breakfast.

 

Seven Quick Takes Saturday

One

After a lot of back and forth debating, I've finally decided to switch to blogger. I started working on the new blog this week and will hopefully have it ready soon.  I realized recently how much I missed blogging.  I'm trying to find that balance in my day that will allow me to have the laundry at a manageable level and a couple of minutes available for not working, too.

Two

What reminded me that I like to blog?  Elizabeth's knitting posts.  I have been sort of casually dipping in and out of them for a while, but this week it really hit me: it sounds like she's having fun.  Fun knitting and fun blogging about it.  I like learning about new things (like marine biology and physical geography and quantum physics) so I can give my kids some structure for the things they want to learn about, but I really, firmly believe that one of the most important roles of a teacher (especially a mother-teacher) is to model what it means to be an active learner.  Kids want to see their mothers learning interesting stuff.  Too often I think that having all the work done and keeping everyone on a perfect schedule means that I am being a good mother.  But what good is having all the work done if my patience is short, and I don't have time to do the things that will nurture our souls?     

Three

The work isn't done, by the way.  In case you were wondering.

Four

I keep meaning to update my Grocery Project.  When I started keeping track of my grocery expenses, I was amazed at how much we were really paying for food, household items, and common over the counter medicines and vitamins -- even as I was trying to cut costs.  And then food prices started going up, and I wasn't sure how much I ought to be paying for food.  What I ended up doing was taking a portion of our medical budget (medicine and supplements) and attaching it to our grocery budget (food and household products) to account for the stuff I was buying at the store.  It took too much time to separate that stuff out, and I had started using this nifty savings tracker from The Coupon Project and wanted to track those savings, too.   I've been able to cut $100 to $200 a month off what we were actually paying to eat a grain-reduced, organic, real food diet when buying primarily from stores. (This masks the fact that I'm also getting more food for my money, which is important when all your boys suddenly hit a growth spurt!!) Now that I have some experience with the stores here and with coupons, I could cut more by eliminating some of the organic processed and convenience products that we buy (almond milk, Stoneyfield whole milk yogurt, Larabars, and the gluten-free chicken sausages at Costco, for example), but a) my husband likes to try new things; b)he travels a lot and sending him with a grain-free packaged bar like Larabar keeps him from eating junk on the road; and c)I have four kids playing baseball right now.  Paying a little more for good-for-you convenience saves us from paying a lot more for not-so-good-for-you fast food.

Five

We haven't totally eliminated fast food from our diet either.

Six

The grain-free experiment is going well.  Since mid-January I've lost 30 pounds.  My husband has lost about 20.  (I'm still nursing, which he thinks is an unfair advantage.)  I feel a lot better.  All the candida related problems which were so bad after a year of inhaled steroids for asthma and 30 days or more of antibiotics at #7's birth have improved quite a bit.  I also made a huge discovery: my depression is diet related.  After cutting out grains, sugar, and starchy vegetables, I am sometimes discouraged but I do not get really depressed.  I have much more energy.  My face does not break out (which has been an ongoing problem with me since I was 10).  And some of the real evidence of the benefits our new diet came recently when Andy had his physical for Scout leadership: his blood pressure, which had been high, dropped 15 points into normal bounds.  Part of the reason for his success is exercise, but diet seems to count for a lot.  In particular, he gave up the large amounts of soda he was drinking; large amounts of high fructose corn syrup in the diet have been linked to hypertension. 

Seven

I'm sitting next to a 10.9 lb. cabbage here at the breakfast table this morning.  It came from my garden, which makes it doubly amazing. It's about 14 inches in diameter, and I had to hack off the root with a butcher knife like a machete.  I wish I could take a picture, but we've lost the battery charger and are awaiting a new one in the mail.  (I miss my old camera with its old-fashioned batteries.)  The coolest thing about this cabbage is that it came from a plant my neighbor gave me, and she got it for free from a program an Alabama plant farm sets up for 3rd graders to grow giant cabbages.  I didn't have a 3rd grader this year, so this plant is technically an "extra".  Maybe next year we'll participate in the competition.  This year, it's just going to make a lot of lacto-fermented sauerkraut (or cortido or kim chi).    

 

Almost a Pantry Challenge

Maybe it looks like one of those miniscule nouveau cusine salads of the 80's, but I thought it was pretty.  I snipped some baby greens from our raised bed before it snowed, mixed in some purchased spinach, and we had a nice salad with our homemade chicken soup on Sunday night.

I hope no one got the wrong impression from my last post on eating from the pantry.  As Marjorie pointed out in the comments, sometimes a well-stocked pantry is literally a lifesaver -- as when your entire city is shut down for a week because of ice.  Unlike Atlanta (which is still frozen) or Jen, who got 11 inches of snow, here in northwest Mississippi we only got about 3 or 4 inches, which melted off the roads in orderly fashion.  So we have been able to run to CVS all week to pick up sore throat pops, and, uh, ice cream (which I have categorized as a medicinal expense in this instance).   I should have had more of a store of things like children's ibuprofin, though, because we are almost out.  And I hadn't set aside any elderberry syrup either (but if you can get out, there is a coupon for Sambucol elderberry syrup at coupons.com and our CVS had it on sale this week, so I managed to get it for $8.99 instead of the ridiculous $12.99 regular price.  I'm not sure how that compares to vitacost because I haven't checked.) 

(A little aside about Northerners, Southerners, and winter weather...)

When we moved down here, Andy and I talked about how we would need to be prepared for power outages, winter storms, etc. more than in New York.  New York may get a million times more snow than Mississippi, but that means that New York also has the equipment to handle the snow.  Since snow and ice are a relative rarity in the South (and it never sticks around like this -- all week!), it doesn't make sense for cities to buy the kind of snow-moving equipment that is necessary up north.  The South also gets more ice than upstate New York.  Ice is crippling no matter where it falls.  The ice storm that hit Albany, NY a couple of years ago pulled down trees, knocked out power for a week or more in some areas, and resulted in an enormous number of burst pipes and flooded basements.  One family we knew had to fill their toilets with water from their creek, because their well pump was electric.  The roads may have been clear, but the roads were the least of anyone's problems. 

So, no, I am not going to make fun of Southerners and snow.  Although when I walked outside the other day to chase the recycling that was blowing down the street, and the sun was shining off the snow, and the birds were chattering in the trees, I think I said, "Hey! It feels just like April!"

Ok, so maybe that was making fun of upstate New York.

(Back to the point, whatever that was...)

Anyway, I have been following a sort of half-hearted pantry challenge this month, a little less half-heartedly this week as Andy and a couple of the kids have been sick, and of course -- the snow.  I needed to use some of the meat and fish I had in the freezer before buying more; I couldn't get to Whole Foods, which is farther away and where I buy meat; and the cupboards were decently stocked.  I've been grocery shopping twice since January 1, mainly to buy fruit and dairy, which we eat in insane quantities, but I've only done so-so with going grain-free.  It's tough to figure out what to feed my boys.

Grain-free meals I've made this month:

• Baked fish in Spaghetti Sauce (idea from Once a Month Cooking)
• Roast chicken/chicken soup (adapted from Ina Garten's Perfect Roast Chicken)
• Taco salad (for Andy and I), no corn chips/ Taco Soup with the leftovers
• Pork stir-fry (I cook with olive oil, leading me to remark that this was Italian-Chinese, which Andy promptly named "Marco Polo")
• Blueberry-Hazelnut Pancakes (adapted from Elena's Pantry Gluten-Free Pancakes

I have to say something about the pancakes, because they were awesome.  I substituted honey (local, raw) for the agave nectar, hazelnut flour for almond, stirred in some frozen blueberries, and cooked them in butter.   Heavenly.

 Grain-full meals this month:

• Vegetarian lasagna
• Homemade pizza/cheesy bread
• Macaroni and Cheese
• Spaghetti
• Soaked Flour Pancakes (adapted from Joy of Cooking, with the added step of soaking the flour)
• Salmon patties

Not Grain but not Grain-Free:

• Bacon Potatoes (Chop up a package of bacon and fry it. Cut up some potatoes, onions, and garlic. Fry in bacon drippings.  Season with salt and pepper.  Stir in bacon pieces and sprinkle with grated cheddar.  Now you have "Bacon Potatoes".) 

Extras:

• Muffin Bread
• Pumpkin Custard

Eating from the pantry, unschooling, and the liturgical year

The beginnings of our new garden -- garlic and greens, planted in late October to overwinter.  Some of the greens contributed to our Christmas dinner.

As I sit down to write this post, it is January 6th -- Epiphany, the 12th day of Christmas.  The Christmas tree still stands in the corner of the family room, the front porch remains festooned with Christmas lights, and all the nativity scenes (many of them homemade, from clay and Lego and Playmobil) are still artfully arranged on the console in the entryway.  "We Three Kings" has been heard sporadically throughout the day.  The twins woke up with sore throats; the baby is teething.  The weather is gorgeous: cold, say the locals, and our kids laugh.  I thought we might be able to start a light school schedule again this week -- math and maybe Latin -- but by today I've given up and rescheduled the school schedule for next week.  Katydid got her math book out anyway, and we have all been talking about ducks... because I might have ordered 6 of them yesterday (along with 21 layers and 25 French meat chickens).  January is like this, I guess. 

Lately -- and by lately I mean in a focused sort of way, during Advent -- I have been contemplating this unschooling post by Leonie and her emphasis on living the liturgical year and on prayer as the basis of an unschooling life.  (She just put up another post today that I am going to be thinking about a lot, Contemplation, a New Year's Resolution.)  Coming out the other side of a tumultuous six months in which our habit of morning prayer gave us a foundation for shaky days, I can see how such a simple act -- praying along with the calendar, along with the emergencies and crises and other events of our lives -- really formed our life at home in this period.  We made no special feast day recipes -- Katydid, in fact, made all the Christmas cookies this year; I planned no special feast day crafts -- head gear for the boys arose unbidden on St. Lucia's Day, using some foam stickers we picked up at a Hobby Lobby sale; but instead we prayed novenas, we asked St. Joseph and St. Therese to pray for Daddy and Grandpa and for the sale of our house; we prayed for the poor souls in November; we went to the Baltimore Catechism in Advent and talked about confession and the Act of Contrition; and now we have had Twelve Days of Christmas, because I can't make myself pick up a schedule again on January 3.  

Be patient with me, because in my own rambling fashion I'm getting to the "eating from the pantry" part.  In posting about my grocery project, I had hoped to start the year with a clean slate to some extent.  I threw out all the grocery receipts that I had been collecting. (Which may or may not have been a good idea, since now I can't check prices.)  I noticed a couple of "eat from the pantry" challenges in the blog world --  No Groceries Until February at Nourishing Days is the kind of thing Andy and I aspire to but haven't managed yet. (Maybe next year, if the chickens work out and the garden grows.  I won't venture to conjecture about the ducks.)  I thought I might like to take part in one, because the December grocery budget had derailed just a wee bit... and there might also have been an argument about coupons, made up for by the dozen roses that walked in the door the night the toilet flooded the bathroom, the hall, and the doorway to the boy's room.  

I even took pictures.  (Of my pantry.  Not the toilet.)

I don't really have much of pantry.  This is one of my food cabinets.  You can see some of the "deals" I got in December: organic chocolate chips from Whole Foods, bought with coupons I "stacked"; organic pumpkin from Amazon on sale for $.85 a can... if you bought a case.  (Did I need 6 packages of organic chocolate chips, though, when Ghiradelli chocolate chips are vanillin free?) The rest of this stuff is mostly from Costco: peaches, kidney beans, organic tomato sauce and paste (yes, I know - BPA in the cans), a stack of salmon cans, free range chicken broth and roasted red pepper and tomato soup in cartons on the top shelf.

My actual "pantry", in need of some reorganization.  The bin that looks red is really bright pink.  I used to put Katydid's school books in it.  Now it holds bags of sugar and sea salt. The basket on the top shelf is for garlic and onions.  The empty aqua basket is for potatoes and sweet potatoes.  Ziploc bags, paper plates, and plastic silverware go on the very bottom, which is cut off in this picture.

But then I started making out a menu plan and I was brought up short.  "Why does this feel like Lent and not Christmas?" I thought.

I goofed this year.  Because we're close to family now, I didn't have to cook for Thanksgiving or Christmas -- which is not the goof, but plays a role.  I didn't cook and I didn't bake and so there wasn't anything really special to eat after Christmas Day -- which is really Christmas.  (Ok, so there was a little bit, but not too much)  And then I started to jump into a "pantry challenge" with the limited offerings of my current pantry, which cannot compare to the freezer full of local, pastured meat and frozen green beans and salsa from my garden in New York. 

It's no wonder I felt off.  Here I was, wondering how to fast in a feasting season.

Now let me be clear.  I am not saying that eating from the pantry is a bad thing.  On the contrary.  I would rather eat from my pantry than go to the grocery store any day.  And I am not saying that you should go out and spend way too much money and put yourself in debt just because it's Christmas.

What I noticed in myself was an attitude that was misplaced in time.  I should have been thinking more sacrificially in Advent, leaving Christmas for rejoicing... and perhaps eating out of a pantry that I had stocked intentionally with celebratory food.  The bridegroom is here; it's not the time to fast.

The whole fasting/feasting cycle of the Church is interesting to me, and I'm just starting to really learn about it.  For instance, last year I did a little digging into the way the Lenten fast has changed, and I started thinking about what it would really mean to give up all animal foods (as Catholics did in the past and the Orthodox still do) during late winter/early spring.  Eggs are the food that highlight the spirit of Lent like no other, I think.  We have a steady access to eggs in grocery stores year round.  But if you raise chickens you know that they lay eggs according to a yearly cycle.  As the light fades in the fall, their production dwindles and is at its lowest in the dark days of December and early January.  Then, as the light returns, the number of eggs increases until it reaches its peak in June and the summer solstice.  March is typically the first month that egg production really picks up.  Suddenly you have more eggs than you know what to do with, and you think you will probably need to eat quiche every other meal.

And this is the season that the Church has said (in the past): "No eggs".

People today will try to say that the reason eggs are associated with Easter is because they are associated with rebirth -- resurrection.  That may indeed be the case.  But you try letting your hens lay and lay and lay for 40 days in the spring time and see what food you need to eat when the fast is over.  And what powers of self-denial and self-sacrifice you would need to store all those eggs in the cool of your cellar, eating instead the wizened apples, the hairy carrots, the crocks of sauerkraut that mark that time when winter is over but nothing is ready for harvest in the garden yet.

Thinking about what it really means to eat from the pantry, to eat with the seasons, to eat with the liturgical year, I am struck by how much awareness I've lost as a modern-day American... but also I'll be more aware next year. 

Next year I'd like to make my pantry challenge of dribs and drabs for Advent -- setting aside the cookies and special meats and desserts to eat in the Christmas season.  I'd rather have December as the fast, January the feast.

 

 

The Grocery Project

 

Every year I start out with a project.  Sometimes it's intentional, sometimes not. One year January came and I was hooked on reading about life in the country.   One year I read Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dillemma and started clearing processed food from our diet.  One year we spent New Year's Eve by painting our kitchen.  Last year I decided I wanted to read more classics... but, gee, what with having a baby and getting ready to move, that kind of got hung up at Jane Austen.  (As in, I read two books.)

This year's project is back in familiar territory.  Food again.

I find that this whole "switching to real food" thing is a long, slow process, in which one reads and make changes, reads and makes changes, reads and makes even more changes.  Moving may set you back a ways.  Where is the farmer's market?  Are there any farms that sell pastured meat or eggs in your area?  Or will you have to buy practically everything at the grocery store?

We're still in the "buying everything at the grocery store" phase.  There is more wiggle room in the budget now that our house in New York has been sold (St. Therese certainly had her hand in that one!), but there is not so much wiggle room that I feel happy about plunking down $11.99/lb for strip steak on sale at Whole Foods.  That's why it's cheaper to buy from a local farmer.  You'll get about 200 pounds to the side for beef, which will run you about $900.  If you can free up the funds, that's a deal: $4.50/lb for all cuts, which is cheaper than I can buy grass fed ground beef at my local Whole Foods.  ($5.99/lb is the usual price and sales seem to be rare.)  You might say that those prices are still higher than standard ground beef at Kroger's, but have you cooked with that stuff lately?  Beef fat is not supposed to be sludgy and orange!

Anyway, my goals are not to eat as cheaply as possible, but to eat real food at a reasonable cost.  Lately we are dealing with some health issues and food allergies -- mine, actually, as lately I have had a couple of itchy, wheezy episodes after eating maple syrup (sob) and I am beginning to suspect that my sensitivity to corn may, in fact, be worsening.  I have 2 kids with mild peanut allergies, so I buy the more expensive nut and seed butters in addition to organic, natural peanut butter from Costco for the other kids.  One of the children who is allergic to peanut butter is also allergic to anything weird on his skin, so I have to use the free and clear stuff, and not whatever is on sale in the laundry aisle this week.  And, oh yeah, there's also ADHD, which means no BHT, TBHQ, vanillin, artificial dyes, or conventionally raised fruit or vegetables with heavy pesticide exposure.  (An article about studies linking ADHD to pesticide use here.)  Another necessity is raw, fermented cod liver oil supplemented with Nordic Naturals Ultimate Omega, which keeps me depression-free on a daily basis.  (I'm not a doctor and make no claims, yada yada, just saying what works for me.)

I want to make it clear that we are not scraping by here financially. But everybody has financial goals they'd like to meet, beyond the realm of basic subsistence.  Ours include saving for college (for 7) and paying off our house, in the long term, and collecting enough money to redo our kitchen (which is literally falling apart) in the short term.  In addition, I woke up one morning recently and it occurred to me that at some point we will have five boys from the ages of 10 to 17 in the house at the same time.

Ok, so that scared me.

In any case it's time for me to figure all of this out.  Coupons?  Sales? Costco?  Shopping multiple stores?

Have I mentioned lately that I'm not organized by nature?

Fortunately a person can learn.  I will never be as highly efficient at saving money or making everything from scratch or canning all my own produce as many women you see on the internet, but the point is that slow improvement makes a difference.

 So here are the basics:

• I'm feeding 9 people, including 2 adults and 1 teenage boy.  One of us isn't on solid food yet, but that means I'm nursing exclusively.
• We're moving toward a grain-free diet... or at least a graid-reduced diet.  I doubt I will be able to have everybody completely grain-free, as there are a lot of us.  But we'll be cutting out as many grains as we can.
• We will eat organic, pastured, unprocessed, antibiotic and hormone-free food as much as we can.  And local, if possible.
• We will endeavor to use non-toxic cleaning and health/beauty products.  Homemade or store bought.
• I will not drive myself crazy trying to pick up "deals" from every store every week.  I don't have time for that. Two stores is my limit.
• My monthly budget is $1250 -- for everything.  That includes food, diapers, paper products, cleaning products, vitamins - etc. (When I was grocery shopping this weekend, I had to pick up lightbulbs.  It's too hard for me to keep all that stuff separate.)  That may seem high to some of you, but remember -- slow improvement makes a difference.

I'll do my best to blog about what I'm doing.  Maybe I'll even take a picture of a grocery haul or two... if I can stop my kids from putting it away too fast... or from eating it too fast!

(A side note: I will be moving my blog some time in the near future.  More about that when I get my act together!)

Seven Quick Takes Saturday

 

One

So... Rocky Road is really nutty, isn't it, not nitty?  Would you believe that every time I woke up last night I was thinking about that?  Sheesh.

Two

I must get some cheesecloth.  I have a couple of dairy cookbooks, but how did I miss that ricotta was this easy ?  I think I am still hung up on the idea of making yogurt so I haven't yet graduated to thinking about cheese.  (I haven't yet attempted yogurt, by the way.  It's the incubation that requires too much planning for my disorganized brain.  Well, that and the fact that we are always about to run out of milk.)

Three

Over the past several months I have become addicted to grocery blogs, the kind where the blogger takes a picture of her insanely cheap grocery haul and posts all about how many coupons she used and what everything cost.  I notice that most of these women do not have large families, which is probably why they can get away with buying in quantities like, "3 apples."  I thought about this quite a lot a couple of weeks ago when I found ripe bananas marked down to $.39/lb.  I bought 14 lbs of bananas, and they were gone in 3 days.  I did not cut them up and freeze them.  I used 3 ( not lbs, bananas) to make banana bread.  The rest were gobbled up mainly by the little boys.  Adjusted for family size, time constraints, and organic/unprocessed eating (which means fewer coupons), though, I have found many of these blogs to be quite helpful, which is probably why I have become addicted to them.  (The other reason is that I am constantly in need of a challenge.  If I don't actively have a problem to work on, I start making them up.) 

Four

I actually took all the kids with me grocery shopping this past week, which is something I do NOT do frequently.  Most of my kids are little and although the little car carts are definitely an improvement over no car carts, 3 or 4 kids can NOT fit into them, no matter how hard they try. (And no, Pop, you are NOT allowed to ride on the roof!)  But Andy was in Arkansas for the day and there was a Mom's Night Out I wanted to attend later that night, so a morning grocery trip it was.  In order to combat some of the chaos, this is what I did:

• Made a super structured grocery list, including quantities and brands, based on the sales flyer and what we normally buy.  Katydid was in charge of the list.
• Gareth pushed the second cart.  The three year old got to drive the "car".  5 year old twins and 7 year old were designated as helpers to pull things off the shelves for me.  4 month old baby blessedly slept through most of the store.  That was nothing to do with me; that was divine intervention.
• Went as fast as we could, do not stop to read labels, do not wonder if you should buy the fish on sale, do not pass Go, head directly to the checkout.  We made it out of the store in 45 minutes.  I did buy a few extras (like Kozy Shack pudding) that were marked down for quick sale, but otherwise I think I actually spent less than I would have had I gone alone and been able to linger a while.

Five

A few of the grocery-related blogs I've been browsing lately (and note that these are all American):

Mama Says Food Stamp Challenge -- Big, Catholic family, very low budget.  This year  she's written a real food manifesto and changed the way her family eats somewhat.  Her manifesto is a useful guide to the compromises many of us must make in order to eat real food on a real budget.

Money Saving Mom -- not just about groceries, but she posts natural and organic deals and has a helpful series about lowering your grocery budget.  She hosts a Super Savings Saturday where people can link all the gory details of their latest shopping trips.  I think it says something about me that I enjoy looking at pictures of groceries, but I'm not sure what.  I thought about taking a picture of our groceries when we came home, but everything got put away too quickly, and anyway, it wasn't that amazing.

100 Days of Real Food on a Budget -- just found this one.  She's trying to feed a family of 4 "real food" on a budget of $125 a week.  Apparently this is less than what she would get with food stamps (and interestingly enough according to the data she links to, a family of 9 would be eligible for as much as $1350 a month.  We've been trying to keep ours around $1000 a month, including paper products, diapers, etc, and while I don't think we've come in at exactly $1000 yet, we're still way below $1350!)

Grocery Cart Challenge -- when I was sitting on the couch this summer trying to get my C-section incision to heal, I spent a while reading through her archives on my iTouch.  After we moved, I tried her system of just buying what we needed every week without trying to stock up on anything, but I found that our lives are just too unpredictable and I was far more likely to go out when there was only a meager amount of "emergency food" around.   So our budgets have been a little higher from time to time as I try to build up our freezer and pantry after moving. 

Healthy Life Deals -- She posts coupon match-ups to Whole Foods.

Six

When I was in the middle of writing Quick Take #4, I received a call from a new friend of mine.  They were going to be in our area for most of the day but they had a gap of a few hours before they had to drop off a couple of their boys for Scouts.  (My Boy Scout did not need dropped off because he decided he would rather go to a Civil War re-enactment than hike in the rain.  If you knew him, you would have been able to see that coming.)  The night before my husband mentioned that they ought to hang out at our house.  Could they hang out at our house?  Of course!  The kids and I spent the morning trying to make the house presentable and baking pumpkin bread, and we spent the afternoon talking and playing with our new friends.  One of the boys, about Farmerboy's age, likes rocks.  Once they discovered that (and our rock hammers), it was a match made in heaven.

So that is why I am now finishing up Seven Quick Takes Saturday.

Seven

Because I fell into bed quite early Friday night (after all the scurrying, talking, etc.), I woke up before 6 this morning.  It's amazing what you can see in the quiet morning if you're willing to be quiet, too.  The daddy longlegs have been invading my house recently.  This morning I saw one inside a jar of tempera paint I had mixed and left on the window sill.  I mixed it from powder, and the powder had all settled on the bottom, leaving a skim of water at the top.  The daddy longlegs clung to the rim of the jar with two of its long legs and lowered itself slowly to the surface of the water where it stuck out its mandibles to drink.  Once, twice, three times it drank, and then slowly, carefully, testing every step before it took one, it backed up and out of the jar.  The whole process took longer than it took me to write it, and certainly longer than it takes to read about it.  In order to watch, I had to slow down, too.

Then I came into the computer room and sat down at the computer.  I looked up "Costco shopping trip" because my new friend and I had been talking about Costco, and since I just spent 5 years in the frozen wilds of upstate New York, far away from any Costco's, I had to restrain myself from asking her too many questions.  Then I looked up from the computer screen and saw that the whole outside was pink.  Not just "tinged a rosy pink with dawn", but actually, really pink.  I got up to take a better look.  The eastern sky was clear and the sun was up.  But from the west, a front had set up a wall of gray and white cloud.  The sun reflected pink off the clouds, caught the glow from the yellow and crimson autumn trees, and colored the whole world.

Now it is almost 7 AM and I can hear the boys talking in their room.  The clouds have come in and the world has settled down to gray sky and the sound of the bathroom door slamming.  But I'll carry the early morning slowness, the pinkness, into my day.

 

Where Do I Start? Daybook

Outside my window: Sunrise.  I'm facing west and looking at the trees in my pasture, the small sycamore in the "back yard" area, the floodlight pole.  The windows on the back of the house are of the 1980 variety of just not quite big enough.  I miss my big dining room picture window.  In fact, I miss quite a few things about my old house, but at least this house does not make me wheeze.  Being able to breathe trumps picture windows.

Weather for today:  Ridiculously warm and sunny.  Back into the upper 80's and low 90's again. Temperatures dropped down into the upper 60's this past weekend.  We saw people wearing toboggans and laughed.  The weather has been a little beautiful, though... the land is parched and so in need of rain.  Leaves and grass crunch underfoot.  It looks like they are trying to predict a "few showers" for Gareth's birthday next week, so we can hope!

In my yard: The beginnings of a potager ... some unidentified red flowers (from bulbs) that have pushed up through the soil in  Azaela Garden ... pecans and persimmons falling... a mockingbird that sits in the magnolia tree in the paddock and sings to us in the morning.

In my kitchen: Oh my, the kitchen.  Where do I start?  The kitchen has been my focus in one way or another since we've been here.  First it was just trying to set things up so we could eat decent food instead of the fast food and convenience food we'd been eating since June.  It felt good to cook fresh hulled black-eyed peas bought at a local farm stand on rice, even if most of my kids turned up their noses and only ate the bacon and rice.  It felt good to find a farmer's market and eggplant and tomatoes and make ratatouille.  It felt good to discover that Hot Chow Chow is one of the more addictive foods on the planet, and a little mournful to realize that the lady you bought it from had just sold out her stock.  Cooking, though, has also become a little bit of something else for me in the time that we've been here.  It's the one thing I can almost sometimes control.

Here is where I have to begin again, and it won't be anything about the kitchen, except that it all links up in the end.  This is where I have to write down what has been ordering our lives -- or disordering them -- for the past two months, and it's not boxes.  On the day before we arrived in town, my father-in-law had a heart attack.  He did not go to the emergency room.  He drove to meet us at our new home the next day to give us the keys.  It was 103 degrees and about as humid as a steam room.  Andy's mom said that he was having chest pain and his shoulders hurt so he would not be wandering around our new house with us but sitting somewhere in the air conditioning.  That Monday, he went to the doctor and discovered he'd had a heart attack. 

Then began a month of tests, culminating in bypass surgery, 9 days in the hospital, a few days at home, then 4 more days in the hospital, and -- thank God -- now he seems to be recovering.  Andy has spent a lot of time with his dad.  I have spent a lot of time taking care of kids late at night.  And feeding them.  And trying to feed Andy, when he's here.  And sometimes making food for my inlaws.  And talking to Andy about diet.  And reading about food.  And thinking about food.

It's situations like this that make it clear how important the cook's role is in a family.  My husband (to some extent) and kids don't choose what they eat too much.  They depend on what I cook, what I buy.  Am I feeding them the right things?  Or is what I'm cooking going to contribute to heart disease down the road, to 13 days in the hospital and many weeks of recovery at home?

All my reading has convinced me that real food, real meat, real fat is best.  I feel better when I eat it.  My husband feels better.  My kids calm down.  (Give them a slice of commercial birthday cake and watch them zoom into the upper stratosphere.) 

But it's hard to ignore all the conventional, "expert" advice about saturated fat.  Hard to believe that all the experts are wrong in their touting of a low-fat diet, high carbohydrate diet, but then again, I do a lot of head scratching when I look at the data and wonder why all the "experts" seem to be ignoring it, too.  Gosh, it feels like deciding to homeschool all over again.

It leads to a lot of frustration at the grocery store.  We're trying to make two house payments right now (and don't even get me started on the situation with the other house).  We have some padding in the form of a savings account, but we want to keep the padding, so we're trying to be very frugal.  But how frugal do you get when it comes to food?  (I've been reading all the saving-money-on-groceries blogs, which usually just make me feel inadequate in completely new ways.)  Do you buy the cheap milk that says it contains skim milk even though it's sold as "whole milk"?  That has to mean it contains powdered milk.  So -- no -- I go out of my way to find better milk. (Note I'm not talking raw milk here or even organic milk, just milk that doesn't have "skim milk" or hormones added to it and isn't ultra-pasteurized.)  Do you buy the $.49/lb chicken leg quarters in the 10 lb bag?  I tried.  I couldn't.  They looked horrible.  Maybe I'll buy the $1.78/lb chicken breasts, although I stand there at the meat cases and think about conditions on industrial farms and food-borne diseases.  When we first moved in, we bought some "all natural" hamburger -- not grass-fed, but we had to eat.  The fat that came off that meat turned into an orange sludge.  Now I am never tempted to buy cheap hamburger. I often wonder if we shouldn't just be vegetarian for a while, but then I'm nursing a 3 1/2 month old linebacker and there are times when I really crave meat.

Fortunately we have found a nearby farm that sells grass-fed beef and lamb and pastured pork by the quarter, side, and whole.  If we can make it to January, we'll have some decent meat in the freezer for less than the price per pound of Whole Foods' grass-fed hamburger (including cuts like Porterhouse steak and all sorts of roasts.)  The moral of this story is: support your local farmers!

Coaxing order from chaos: Moving on... down from the soapbox... after a bit of a down point this week as I sniffled through a cold and we had to run Gareth to urgent care and I contemplated all the business trips Andy has planned... I've concluded that the best way for me to cope with the house at this point is to close the remaining book boxes and move them back into the garage.  We had to leave our two biggest bookcases in New York because nobody could figure out how to get them out of the hallway.  (They were moved into that hallway, but neither I nor Andy could remember exactly how.)  We were already pressed for shelf space, although I donated boxes and boxes of books before we left (including a few books I now wish I'd kept!)  So now I'm being even more ruthless and donating more boxes.  Hopefully at some point we will become proud owners of some new Ikea bookcases.

Are they learning anything?: Well, gee, I hope so.  I've been a little frustrated at my inability to keep the little boys to a decent schedule, but then I remind myself that I have a 3 month old baby.  He sleeps at night pretty well and with all the other stuff that's been going on, sometimes I forget how little he is.  But even happy, peaceful, good-sleeping babies need to be held and nursed and walked and played with and enjoyed.  So at those moments when I am frustrated that I am not accomplishing enough, I stop and take a deep breath and remind myself to be patient.  We've been saying our prayers every day, and the big kids are reasonably independent with their baskets and shelves of books.  For the twins and Farmerboy, I am focusing on reading lessons out of Phonics Pathways.  If I pray with them and work on reading, I know I've done the most important things.

A picture:

We have managed to set up some rudimentary art shelves.  The kids were happy to find the watercolors.