We have been making everything from scratch now for six weeks, minus a few slips. We do not have careful records to compare our costs before and after, but there are several factors worth noting:
- Our major source of money saved is our refusal to eat out. Not only are there no restaurant bills, but since eating out was always an impulse purchase for us, there are not little financial bombs going off when we look at the checking account.
- Because we are cooking so much, we are also running the dishwasher more. We have gone from two loads of dishes a day to three or four loads of dishes a day. If I washed these by hand as well as doing our won cooking, I would never leave the kitchen. This has already affected our water bill.
- We waste less food. We still sometimes find that we have not used that eggplant or that ground pork before it goes bad, but without fast food as an option, we are much more likely to use what we have on hand rather than wasting it.
- We eat less. Not significantly less, but mindless snacking is not really possible. We eat because we are hungry, not because we are fidgety. This saves us a little money on food.
As for the ingredients themselves, sometimes they are cheaper than prepared food, and sometimes they are not. It is unpredictable. But as we continue int this experiment, we find our tastes are getting more expensive. The difference between a good tomato and a cheap tomato now seems worth the extra cost, a cost we have managed because we are no longer buying fast food. Making our own hamburger is significantly more expensive than buying a burger off the dollar menu, but our homemade burger also tastes better.
This cost/benefit analysis of flavor is personal, not likely to be shared by everyone. I can’t imagine my mother, for instance, caring whether her parmesan came out of a can or was grated fresh from a block, but we have become snobs on that subject.
Day 48
This is a bad day for describing actual meals, because it has been roughly a month since this post. So here are the random foods I consumed today and shared with my family:
granola
homemade chocolate chip cookies (yes, there are chocolate chips in them, because my husband prefers me not to scream at him and IT WAS NECESSARY)
sweet-potato chips fried in bacon fat (USDA food pyramid, you are not the boss of me)
asian coleslaw
beef cabbage rolls
bread and butter
apples
grapes
We ordered a pizza tonight.
When Az hurt his ankle last weekend, we were trying to complete a re-arranging of our household. Two new beds bought, old beds moved, and new combinations of children in them. The task has proven much more time-consuming than we had planned, and the constant interruptions of meals slipped by us today. We finished disassembling and reassembling a crib, and then it was six o’clock, and we had nothing ready.
Convenience foods are not evil. They free people to do other things. When I was pregnant, I kept a large store of frozen meals in the fridge because I knew there would be many days I was too exhausted to make something. Would we be trying our experiment if I were still pregnant? No. Not for all the soy sauce in China.
Mmmmmm, soy sauce.
But the trouble with the time that convenience foods give us is that it goes unnoticed and I fritter it away. When I am preparing a meal from scratch, I am a) home, b) in the company of my kids, c) not watching tv, d) not playing on the computer. None of those things are bad, obviously, but the amount of time I can waste on the last two is astonishing.
Before Az and I had kids, we spent 8 months without a car. We took the bus everywhere, or asked friends for rides. Living life by a bus schedule gave time a different feel. I learned patience. I learned forethought. If I forgot a needed item, it was not easy to go back home for it.
I think slow food is teaching me something similar. To accomplish a project like we did today, I need to plan ahead. I need to have a meal already prepared, or make twice as much the night before. Cooking everything from scratch means that not only meals, but all of life becomes much more deliberate.
We are still working our way through that.
Day 42
Breakfast: Eggs, toast, bacon
Lunch: bread, granola with milk, leftover pork
Dinner: forbidden pizza
My children will eat anything that comes disguised as a mini-muffin. And what’s not to like? Warm from the oven, with just a little firmness on the outside and fluffy softness inside. When I don’t know what to make for breakfast, when the oatmeal is gone or cannot be repeated one more day, I take 20-30 minutes to whip up a batch of mini-muffins.
The best part of a mini-muffin is that even if one of the kids does not like it, she is only wasting two tablespoons of food. Our everything-from-scratch experiment has made me much more conscious of how much food the children waste, and even at my most neurotic, I can’t get worked up about wasting one mini-muffin. The kids prefer to only eat the outside of a muffin anyway, so when a give them a mini-muffin – which is all “outside” – I have successfully duped them into eating the whole thing.
The children like them so much, I have started doubling the recipe so there will be a few left over for lunch. Not that I exactly have a recipe. Mostly I surf the web for ideas or make up something on my own. I rarely make the exact muffin twice.
This morning we tried these Apple Pie Muffins. I left out the raisins and apricots and just used the apples. I was a little concerned that the apples would not soften in time, but I used Jonagold apples that were a little past their prime, and they baked perfectly inside the muffins.
Instead of regular muffin tins, I used two non-stick mini-muffin tins. I filled each cup only half full to leave room for the topping. Even the mini-muffins took twenty minutes to bake, so the time may be a little off in the original recipe, or my oven may be off. The recipe as written still made 48 mini-muffins, so there was no need to double the recipe.
They were wonderful. We ate them at breakfast and then warmed some up for dessert after the dinner. There are none left. If I do them again, I would probably cut down the brown sugar in the muffin batter, because they are very sweet, but Az thinks that is sacrilege.
These will definitely go on the list of muffins to repeat, right next to the Lemon Poppy Seed.
Day 41
Breakfast: oatmeal, Apple Pie Muffins
Packed lunches: beans and rice, raisins, blue cheese, walnuts
Lunch: Granola with milk, mashed potatoes
Snack: blue cheese
Dinner: Pan-fried pork chops with roasted sweet bell peppers, steamed cauliflower with garlic-cheddar sauce, mashed potatoes, Apple Pie Muffins
This was my weekend.
And how was yours?
Az spent Thursday and Friday on crutches, waiting to see the orthopedist. Those were not good days. He could barely hobble around, and I had to do all my usual work as well as his. The baby had a severe diaper rash the previous week – really bad: open, bleeding sores on her little tushy – and before Az’s fall we had been working desperately to get her healed, changing her diaper every hour and slathering her in ointment. The stress of having a little baby in pain had already been wearing on us, and Az benching himself from the parenting team made me a little desperate. All I could see was a month or two in a cast and no rest, no rest, no rest for me.
I did not handle this well.
Az, in fact, informed me I was “mean” and “sour.” So now I had an adult in my home who could contribute no actual work to our household, BUT wanted to discuss my character flaws.
Good times.
On Friday a friend drove Az the Vicodin-Impaired to the orthopedist, who pronounced Az’s ankle “not broken,” and prescribed an orthopedic boot for a month. It is a black contraption of velcro, metal and rigid plastic that looks like something grafted onto a human by a Borg who happened to be a big fan of Jack Sparrow.
So Thursday and Friday we ate take-out and junk food. Do you know what Dunkin’ Donuts are like after a month of everything-from-scratch? The taste is fine, but my total abstinence from commercial grease left my stomach completely unprepared for the experience. I tried a nap after Az was de-crutchified, and the merciless pressure of my innards kept waking me.
Bllleeeeeeeaaaaaaarrrrrrrggggghhhhhhh.
(Sorry, Mom.)
When we started our experiment, I thought I would miss Coke, but I haven’t even thought about it much. Returning to corporate food for a weekend reminded me why I used to want a Coke so badly: it provided relief. Since we started eating exclusively slow food, I have not felt the need.
My children showed no signs of unhappiness, so I concluded my aging digestive system was at fault. They stuffed their faces with the forbidden treat and then tripped happily along to play. I watched, remembering childhood’s passionate devotion to sugar. My four year old saw me watching her. She turned to me and opened her sweet lips to smile – and let out a burp that would have made a teenage boy stand up and salute.
We are back on the slow-food wagon since Sunday, and it has felt like coming home. One month was enough time for me to grow accustomed to making everything we eat, and I missed the freedom to determine precisely what taste and texture my meal has. I did not miss the work, but I missed the outcome.
The photo of doughnuts above was taken by ReneS and is licensed through Flickr’s Creative Commons.
Day 40
Breakfast: buttermilk pancakes with butter and maple syrup
Lunch: pineapple fried rice; apples and peanut butter; Pioneer Woman’s prune cake
Supper: Tilapia baked with onions, bell peppers, garlic and cream; steamed rice; prune cake
A month before I started the Slow Food Experiment, we bought a pair of bunk beds for our kids. I had chosen paint months earlier, and I was going to paint the room and put up bunk beds and make it a Wonderful Playland of Happy Joyful Childhood Fun!
But the day I started painting was one of the most humid we have ever had. The first wall took days to dry. The paint miasma gave me a headaches and we decided to put the painting on hold until the weather cleared. Then we all got sick. Then we had inclement weather again. Then our experiment began and all our time was eaten up by, well, eating.
Now that we have adjusted to the demands of our new cooking habits, we decided to finish the room. I finished painting this week and today Az the Husband helped me put together the first bunk bed.
At least, that was the plan.
It started out okay. We got two major portions of the bed put together – with no snapping at each other! no recriminations! we were groovin’! – by 11:30. We still had to finish this bed and put together the other, too. It would be difficult to get it finished in one day.
“I think this is one of those days where we should break the rules and just pick up something,” Az said.
I was reluctant. “What do we have in the kitchen? We have some bread…”
The bread in the kitchen was the first loaf he had made himself (from the Artisan Breads in 5 Minutes book) and he was proud of that bread. He had more dough in the fridge waiting to be baked, so he changed his mind and suggested we set out another loaf to rise. Then we could pick up some lunchmeat at our favorite butcher shop. We agreed to this plan, and then he headed downstairs with the baby.
And then he fell. He fell down the steps with the baby. The baby was fine, but Az lay on the floor, moaning, sputtering and apologizing. He did not want to get up. His ankle began to swell.
So I piled the youngest kids into the van, walked back to the house for Az and drove to the hospital. Our lunch was the McDonald’s fast food we picked up on the way. Do you know how fast food tastes when you have not eaten it in five weeks? Not terrible. But it had a creepy uniformity of texture and it sat in my stomach like peat moss. Ugh. And soda? How did I ever enjoy that burning sensation in my throat (from something that isn’t whiskey)?
And then there were the hours of waiting in the ER, interrupted by a necessary school pick-up. The ankle was broken. Az came home on crutches and a splint. We are waiting to see the orthopedist.
I told him he could choose anything he wanted for dinner. He picked Thai food, and I scuttled off to the restaurant. The children feasted on crab rangoon and Az had a bellyful of basil beef. I had been planning to make pineapple curry that night and was apparently too rattled by the events of the day to let loose of the idea, so I ordered pineapple curry. Dumb. I could make that at home with very little trouble.
So back to everything-from-scratch tomorrow. But we are now short-handed. Az hobbles around on crutches and cannot even carry the baby or chase down a toddler. We plan for now to continue with our food experiment, but the workload is now almost entirely on my shoulders. I reserve the right to quit this whole thing if I find myself spending a significant portion of my day fantasizing about breaking my own damn ankle so I can get some rest.
Hedidnotdoitonpurposehedidnotdoitonpurposehedidnotdoitonpurposehedidnot
Yesterday I took my four year old on errands with me. She wanted to spend time with me alone, and she is a fairly calm child, so I brought her along on my downtown errands, walking from building to building.
The trouble with my plan was that she is also a child completely uninterested in walking. When I take all the kids for a walk somewhere, the two year old wants to run, but the four year old wants to ride in the stroller. She would quite happily spend every day snuggled under a blanket, cuddling me, watching a movie or playing a video game.
Still, she did alright for the first six or seven city blocks. Then she got tired and began to whine. I had decided to take her with me at the last minute, and I had not adequately prepared. When she went boneless on the way to one office, I bribed her. I told her if she behaved well, I would buy her a cup of hot chocolate when we went to buy coffee beans.
And it worked. She straightened up a little under the promise of cocoa, and she walked as much as I expected of her. When we got to the coffeehouse where we buy beans (fair trade and yummy), she happily sipped her cocoa while I drank a glass of tap water. A technical breaking of the rules, but purist thinking is the enemy of parenting.
(I solace myself in the knowledge that the cocoa was made with (are you ready?) local milk. The coffeehouse where we buy our beans uses local dairy and sells local baked goods. They also compost their own used coffee grounds and use 100% biodegradable cups and lids. All of that would mean nothing if the coffee was bad, but it is the best in the city.)
One of the challenges of our experiment has been the bribery factor. I can no longer say, when it’s time to leave the park, “If you want to get ice cream on the way home, get into the van right now!” That was a motivating promise (and threat). the promise does not have the same force if I say, “Who wants to go home and make cookies?” Depending on the day, they might be excited by that offer, but it means a lot more frustration for me. You ever try to make cookies with four small children “helping”?
I don’t know yet whether diminished bribery will be a good thing or a bad thing for us. I do know that I already miss reaching for that handy tool in the parenting toolbox.
The photo of coffee beans above was taken by Refracted Moments and is licensed through Flickr’s Creative Commons.
Day 34
Breakfast: oatmeal, bacon, coffee, milk, orange juice
Packed lunches: bacon, granola, carrots, cranberries
Lunch: baked potatoes, tomato and mozzarella salad, last of the Halloween candy
Snack: granola, apples
Dinner: eggplant parmesan, steamed broccoli, apples and peanut butter (guess who ate that)
Once on Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s radio show, a caller asked her to describe her most deliciously memorable meal. I don’t remember what she said, but it made me try to recall my own most memorable meal. I could not come up with one single meal, but rather remembered pieces of meals, particular dishes.
And they were not fancy. The cucumber and onion salad that my grandmother commonly serves at lunch, made from store-bought dressing and cucumbers harvested from her own garden. I tried to recreate it with store-bought cucumbers, but it can’t be done. My mother’s strawberry pie. The pecan pie I made from the pecans my mom-in-law harvested from her own tree. That pecan tree does not produce every year, but when it does, it is magical. The nuts taste like they were soaked in butter.
But one dish that zipped immediately into my mind at the question was an heirloom tomato salad. Years ago Az the Husband and I were vacationing on Kelley’s Island, and the restaurant we had chosen for dinner served obviously garden-grown red and yellow tomatoes with basil and mozzarella. That is an easy dish we have eaten many times, but it was the tomatoes that made it memorable – and unrepeatable in my kitchen. The memory of those tomatoes has stayed with me for almost a decade.
We don’t grow our own tomatoes. Somehow my grandmother managed to grow a garden while having babies, but I honestly don’t know how. Babies and gardens do not go well together, especially when my “garden” is a yard so full of chiggers that I must immediately shower after working in it if I want to avoid nickel-sized welts around my waist and behind my knees. I realize that makes me a whiny city girl. So be it.
But now my youngest child is over a year old, and we are having no more babies. I can step outside for five minutes to cut some basil or lavender without the children completely melting down or harming each other. I think maybe I can manage a tomato plant or two, and I am looking forward to the spring.
In the meantime, we do the best we can with store-bought. They aren’t all bad, even if they aren’t Kelley’s-Island good. Even the baby – yes! the baby! – eats the “vine-ripened” ones, taking a raw slice in her fist and happily stuffing it into her mouth. In fact, I think I will close the post so I can follow her example.
The photo of gorgeous tomatoes above was taken by jacki-dee and is licensed through Flickr’s Creative Commons.
Day 32
Breakfast: Omelette with fresh tomatoes, cheese and spinach; chocolate-banana muffins
Lunch: church potluck
Dinner: risotto florentine and Halloween candy
Because I am AWESOME. That’s why.
Yesterday after I made the usual school pick-up, I took all the kids with me to Trader Joe’s. I don’t usually shop at Trader Joe’s because it is so far away and expensive, but a kind reader (I’ve forgotten who now – Sherri? Kimberly?) told me there was canned coconut milk there that met our experiment’s rules. And there was. Thank you.
Even when I have shopped at Trader Joe’s, I have never taken all my children with me. Trader Joe’s falls into the same category as craft stores and botanical gardens: a place where other customers regard one child with amused indulgence, but stare at FOUR children as though they were a kind of vermin. Look at that woman – she’s infested with them. This day was no exception, but I soothed myself with the reminder that offending bigoted idiots is actually a good thing, and continued shopping.
There wasn’t much I could buy. Trader Joe’s sells primarily convenience foods. Only a small portion of their stock are single ingredient foods, and those are often wastefully packaged. Even their ginger root came on a styrofoam tray, wrapped in plastic, a waste that Kroger does not imitate. TJ’s did not carry local milk or local butter.
We bought the coconut milk, broccoli and cauliflower (both shrink-wrapped – why?), some orange juice, an over-priced gallon of non-local milk, and some apples. The apples were beautiful (obviously waxed) and sold in paper bags instead of plastic. The children were mesmerized by them, and I let them pick out the bag.
We passed the cereal aisle and the kids commenced begging. The one food they really miss is store bought breakfast cereal. They love the stuff. Cereal and ice cream are the two foods I feel a little guilty about not buying. The children miss them. Friends who came over for dinner last week forced ice cream on us, so the kids got their fix, but they still slaver for cereal.
I told them gently that we would not be buying cereal for a while. I told them that I had made homemade granola that afternoon and they could eat it in a bowl with milk like cereal. And when they still looked dejected I told them they could each eat one of the apples in the van on the way home.
You would have thought I had just announced that the Tooth Fairy had decided to hand out cash for the teeth still in your head. They grinned and oh-boyed and skipped through the rest of the store. Once everyone was buckled into the van, I passed out the apples. The entire long car ride home, I did not hear one whine or question or demand. The only thing I heard was crunching. One of the children actually ate the core, too.
They have always liked apples, but the wild enthusiasm of the day was the result of less snacking. The kids don’t get as many snacks now that we must prepare them all from scratch. They eat more of their dinners and they are more willing to try new things. Don’t get me wrong – they’re still kids, and therefore picky. But they’re not AS picky. That’s enough to give me hope.
Day 30
Breakfast: Bread and butter, goetta, milk, orange juice, coffee
Packed lunch: peanut butter and honey sandwich, dried cranberries, milk
Lunch at home: peanut butter and honey sandwiches, dried cranberries, leftover beans and rice
Snack: apples
Supper: granola cereal with milk (Az was working, and cereal is still one of the kids favorite meals)
Our neighbor Bob knocked on our door. He was holding a box from Perkins bakery, full of muffins for our children.
Bob is a retired veteran, a grandfather who has experienced painful loss. He feeds our pets for us when we are out of town, and lets my kids play on his porch while I carry in groceries. He is a good neighbor, and my kids love him.
Bob’s favorite place to eat breakfast is Perkins Family Restaurant, one of those corporate restaurants that feigns homey-ness while it serves super-processed food. I don’t like Perkins’ food, but Bob does. And sometimes when Bob has had his breakfast at Perkins, he brings home a treat for my children.
Many of you have asked what we do about gifts of food during our experiment. Do we reject them? Do I stringently impose the rules on the kids even as everyone else in their class gets a store-bought cupcake? Do we turn our noses up at unapproved food and, for good measure, throw in a lecture on the evils of corporate farming?
No. Slow food is a way of incorporating morality into our eating. If slow food really has any ethical value, then it should make us more ethical in the rest of life. I have no respect for someone who claims to do the “right” thing with regard to food while treating the people around them unkindly for not eating the “right” way. Beck’s example of the great-grandmother whose cookies were rejected pierced my soul, and I have never forgotten it.
Bob loves my kids. He gets joy in giving them treats. The treats are harmless, and the kids love them too. If I am genuinely motivated by a desire to do good in the world – rather than a puritanical need to be holier-than-thou about food – then the only proper response to Bob’s gift is gratitude.
We accepted his muffins. The kids ate them. Bob went home delighted.
Food is a matter of community. The way we eat should build community, not create more divisions. Az and I decided when we started this experiment that we would accept gifts and we would eat non-rules foods when refusing them would offend people. Ethical eating is not an excuse for being an ungrateful jackass.
The tricky part is not how to respond to a simple gift. The tricky part is that many of our friends know about our experiment and our commitment to loving accommodation of others in the way we live it out. And these friends get a twinkle in their eye and say things like, “I am going to buy you three gallons of ice cream and I will be offended if you say no.”
Our friends are tricksy.
The blueberry streusel muffin above is not from Perkins, but from a recipe baked and photographed by norwichnuts. Photo is licensed through Flickr’s Creative Commons.
