Welcome to Part 5 in the series on how I learned to cook from scratch!
Many of the homeschooling families that we met not only cooked a lot of their meals from scratch, they also grew a lot of their own food. Gardening was as foreign to me as cooking. We had a big garden one year when I was 10 (then we moved), but most of the time the only thing we grew were raspberries, and they were taken care of solely by my former step-dad. Though Mike grew up on nearly 4 acres, they never (!) had a garden.
If I had tried to start a garden right after another major move AND while still learning to cook, my head would have exploded. So I did the next best thing and we joined a CSA (community supported agriculture.) For those of you unfamiliar with how CSA's work, it's quite simple. You order a "share" of a farmer's crop before the season begins. Typically the CSA's here will sell 1/2 shares of full shares. Although they offer a myriad of different fruits and vegetables, how much you get of any one thing varies depending on how much ripened that week. If there's a bumper crop of something - prepare to be inundated! Which is what happened to us. Unfortunately, the bumper crop that year turned out to be lemon cucumbers. Mike is the only one in the family who likes cucumbers, and after a few weeks of me serving them to him in some way every night with his dinner, he'd had enough. The only problem was...we were still getting them. LOTS of them. Sometimes 10 lbs. a week! I began slicing them up and bringing platters of them to potlucks, loading bags of them to give to other families at park days, pawning them off onto neighbors.
I'm sure we all have a memory of a gardener who kept trying to give us zucchini, to the point where we'd avoid them because we just. didn't. want. any. more. That was me, but with cucumbers.
Otherwise, our experience was amazing! We ate our first blue potatoes, discovered scapes (now a favorite of mine), and relished the wonders that are heirloom tomatoes. In fact, this was the first time I had ever even liked tomatoes - other than in ketchup or pasta sauce.
Stay tuned for Part 6 - Recipes? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Recipes!
Other posts in the series:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Cooking From Scratch Part 4 - In the Land of Raw Milk & Local Honey
Welcome to Part 4 in the series! In Part 3, I talked about how I renewed my efforts to cook "real" food, all the while surrounded by extended family that were confused by, and generally not that supportive of, my efforts.
Although I made great strides - and my family was eating much better - it wasn't all smooth sailing. Although my son would eat just about anything (Locust Boy, remember?) my husband was a little harder to convince. He knew what he liked and I wasn't going to change him, dammit!
Or so he thought....
For instance, he and I were drinking a lot of milk at the time and I wanted to switch us from 2% milk to 1% milk. Most people would think it was a little change - no big deal. My husband saw it as sabotage of the most sinister kind. How dare I change the milk! He refused to drink it. To me, it tasted exactly the same. He swore he could tell the difference. Also, the color of the cap on the milk was a different color so don't try to fool me, he said. I did what any good wife would do. I found a brand of 1% milk that had the same color of cap as his beloved 2%. MUAHAHAHAHA! I'm evil that way. He was sucking down 1% for 9 months before I finally told him what I had done.
He unknowingly got me back, though.
My dear husband was totally in love with his mom's cherry cheesecake. I began experimenting with different cheesecake recipes, but none of them were "like mom's" according to my husband. (And whilst you may be thinking me stupid for not just calling her up and asking her for her "recipe," I should point out that she was completely unwilling at that point to share any of that kind of information with me. It took me 15 years to pry the coveted potato salad recipe out of her!) After consuming more cheesecake in a 3 year period than I had in all of the previous years of my life, you can imagine my surprise when I walked into her kitchen one day and spied the box of Jello No-Bake Cheesecake. Uh-huh. I had spent years trying to recreate a cheesecake recipe that only requires that you add milk to the powder in the box.
Anyway, after spending 5 years struggling to find a few like-minded people who shared my desire to eat foodstuffs that didn't include an ingredients list of unpronounceable and unidentifiable things, we moved again. This time we were going "home" to Oregon, to a town just outside of Portland. I was afraid that I would have to start from square one, searching out whatever support and real food I could find.
I need not have worried.
Most of these people were way ahead of me! Yay!! I was not only surrounded by good food, I was also surrounded by people who liked to eat good food, grow good food, and raise good food. It didn't take long before we were one of the few families we knew who didn't have chickens in our backyard. (Now we have 7.) We had 3 farmer's markets within 4 miles of our home. Grass fed beef, local honey, and farm fresh milk are easy to come by. Food co-ops, farmer run stores, u-pick farms, and restaurants that specialize in local ingredients are everywhere.
It was like we hit the real food jackpot!
It was also a little overwhelming. I discovered organic veggies are to me what shoes are to some women. There were many times that I would be so dazzled by something at the farmer's market that I would bring it home and it would languish, untouched, before ending up in the composter. (I swear one day I really will learn what to do with sunchokes!) Bronze Arrowhead lettuce and Cherokee Purple tomatoes will get me salivating the way a pair of Christian Louboutin heels will make some women's heart go pitter-patter. (Not that I would turn down a pair of Lougoutin's if somebody wanted to give them to me, they just wouldn't be very practical footwear when I'm hanging out by the chicken coop.)
Stay tuned for Part 5!
Although I made great strides - and my family was eating much better - it wasn't all smooth sailing. Although my son would eat just about anything (Locust Boy, remember?) my husband was a little harder to convince. He knew what he liked and I wasn't going to change him, dammit!
Or so he thought....
For instance, he and I were drinking a lot of milk at the time and I wanted to switch us from 2% milk to 1% milk. Most people would think it was a little change - no big deal. My husband saw it as sabotage of the most sinister kind. How dare I change the milk! He refused to drink it. To me, it tasted exactly the same. He swore he could tell the difference. Also, the color of the cap on the milk was a different color so don't try to fool me, he said. I did what any good wife would do. I found a brand of 1% milk that had the same color of cap as his beloved 2%. MUAHAHAHAHA! I'm evil that way. He was sucking down 1% for 9 months before I finally told him what I had done.
He unknowingly got me back, though.
My dear husband was totally in love with his mom's cherry cheesecake. I began experimenting with different cheesecake recipes, but none of them were "like mom's" according to my husband. (And whilst you may be thinking me stupid for not just calling her up and asking her for her "recipe," I should point out that she was completely unwilling at that point to share any of that kind of information with me. It took me 15 years to pry the coveted potato salad recipe out of her!) After consuming more cheesecake in a 3 year period than I had in all of the previous years of my life, you can imagine my surprise when I walked into her kitchen one day and spied the box of Jello No-Bake Cheesecake. Uh-huh. I had spent years trying to recreate a cheesecake recipe that only requires that you add milk to the powder in the box.
Anyway, after spending 5 years struggling to find a few like-minded people who shared my desire to eat foodstuffs that didn't include an ingredients list of unpronounceable and unidentifiable things, we moved again. This time we were going "home" to Oregon, to a town just outside of Portland. I was afraid that I would have to start from square one, searching out whatever support and real food I could find.
I need not have worried.
Most of these people were way ahead of me! Yay!! I was not only surrounded by good food, I was also surrounded by people who liked to eat good food, grow good food, and raise good food. It didn't take long before we were one of the few families we knew who didn't have chickens in our backyard. (Now we have 7.) We had 3 farmer's markets within 4 miles of our home. Grass fed beef, local honey, and farm fresh milk are easy to come by. Food co-ops, farmer run stores, u-pick farms, and restaurants that specialize in local ingredients are everywhere.
It was like we hit the real food jackpot!
It was also a little overwhelming. I discovered organic veggies are to me what shoes are to some women. There were many times that I would be so dazzled by something at the farmer's market that I would bring it home and it would languish, untouched, before ending up in the composter. (I swear one day I really will learn what to do with sunchokes!) Bronze Arrowhead lettuce and Cherokee Purple tomatoes will get me salivating the way a pair of Christian Louboutin heels will make some women's heart go pitter-patter. (Not that I would turn down a pair of Lougoutin's if somebody wanted to give them to me, they just wouldn't be very practical footwear when I'm hanging out by the chicken coop.)
Stay tuned for Part 5!
Other posts in this series:
Sunday, January 15, 2012
The Treat Fairy Struck Again!
Some of my readers know that I have a dear friend in England (Hi Emma! :waves:) who sends us treats on occasion. Well, she has once again caused a suger-laden smackdown in our house!
There were 10, count 'em, 10 Curly Wurly bars in the package!! OMG - these are our favorite candy bars! See my happy face? Yes, this was right before the realization hit that I had swore of sugar for the entire month of January as part of my 101 goals. ARGH!!
Hubby foolishly assumed that he was going to get to snarf down all of the Curly Wurly bars. Silly man. Mine are safely waiting for me until February 1st. And if he gets any ideas about sneaking into my stash, bloodletting will ensue.
Now to finish her box of goodies (I see Pixie Stix in her future!)
There were 10, count 'em, 10 Curly Wurly bars in the package!! OMG - these are our favorite candy bars! See my happy face? Yes, this was right before the realization hit that I had swore of sugar for the entire month of January as part of my 101 goals. ARGH!!
Hubby foolishly assumed that he was going to get to snarf down all of the Curly Wurly bars. Silly man. Mine are safely waiting for me until February 1st. And if he gets any ideas about sneaking into my stash, bloodletting will ensue.
Locust Boy didn't get left out - he got a big pack of his favorites - Black Jacks! Emma was also kind enough to include 2 Lego packs. Sugar and Legos - what more does a boy need? (He'd say "a girlfriend" but let's not go there...)
Now to finish her box of goodies (I see Pixie Stix in her future!)
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Cooking From Scratch Part 3 - 2 steps forward, 1 step back
Welcome to the third in the series on learning to cook from scratch. Or rather, how I learned to cook from scratch. I promise that I'm almost to the part where I can cook really well! But we're not quite there yet.
In Part 2, I talked about how our financial situation pushed me in this direction, and had the added side effect of beginning to heal our son. I would love to say that from that point on I cooked everything from scratch, ground our own grain, baked all of our own bread, and we all lived happily ever after.
I'd also love to tell you that we won the lottery jackpot and now spend our days sipping Mai Tai's on the beach.
Alas, they'd both be lies. Even after all that I learned during that time, it took longer than it should have to become second nature. After getting transferred...this time to Texas...our finances improved. A lot. Guess what crept it's way back into our fridge and our cupboards? JUNKFOOD!! That's right, boys and girls, once the belt loosened a bit we were all eating crap again. It started with things like: "Oh, it's only one bag of chips. It's not going to kill us." and quickly morphed into boxed pasta side dishes with our dinner and cheap-ass pizza from a pizza chain. Guess what else happened when I stopped cooking real food? Cody's issues came back, only worse.
Ugh.
A year later we were transferred back to California (we've moved a lot!) and I really started trying again. Only now I was surrounded by the, ahem, support of my mother and Mike's extended family, who's cooking prowess matched my own family. In other words, I. Was. Screwed. You'd think that people who've eaten that many preservatives would be better, um, preserved. I'm just sayin'....
Anyway, I really began to try harder. I took a cooking class. I started hunting down cookbooks that didn't involve ingredients that came from cans or packages. I'm not going to lie, it was very slow going. Partly because I had no confidence in my own abilities - especially when surrounded by people who didn't eat, or even necessarily like, real food. And we were spending a lot of time eating with these people!
Just to give you a glimpse at what it was like, my mom used to come over and lament: "You never have any food in this house!" Of course that wasn't true. What we had was real food in the house. You know, the kind that you have to actually prepare. So she'd head to the grocery store and come back with (I'm sooo not kidding!) $60 - $70 worth of crap. The healthiest thing she'd buy was a jar of Jif peanut butter. The rest was cookies, crackers, chips, at least 2 different kinds of ice cream. She would then proclaim: "There! Now you have some food!" After spending all of that money graciously filling my kitchen, can you guess where she'd head? Out to eat. Yep. I was spending $100 a week feeding 3 people - one of whom didn't come by the nickname Locust Boy by accident - and she was easily blowing through $250 a week just to feed herself. And can you guess who was eating better? Yup. We were.
Stay tuned for Cooking From Scratch Part 4 - In the Land of Raw Milk & Local Honey
Previous posts in my Cooking From Scratch series:
Part 1 - In the Beginning
Part 2 - Out of Necessity
In Part 2, I talked about how our financial situation pushed me in this direction, and had the added side effect of beginning to heal our son. I would love to say that from that point on I cooked everything from scratch, ground our own grain, baked all of our own bread, and we all lived happily ever after.
I'd also love to tell you that we won the lottery jackpot and now spend our days sipping Mai Tai's on the beach.
Alas, they'd both be lies. Even after all that I learned during that time, it took longer than it should have to become second nature. After getting transferred...this time to Texas...our finances improved. A lot. Guess what crept it's way back into our fridge and our cupboards? JUNKFOOD!! That's right, boys and girls, once the belt loosened a bit we were all eating crap again. It started with things like: "Oh, it's only one bag of chips. It's not going to kill us." and quickly morphed into boxed pasta side dishes with our dinner and cheap-ass pizza from a pizza chain. Guess what else happened when I stopped cooking real food? Cody's issues came back, only worse.
Ugh.
A year later we were transferred back to California (we've moved a lot!) and I really started trying again. Only now I was surrounded by the, ahem, support of my mother and Mike's extended family, who's cooking prowess matched my own family. In other words, I. Was. Screwed. You'd think that people who've eaten that many preservatives would be better, um, preserved. I'm just sayin'....
Anyway, I really began to try harder. I took a cooking class. I started hunting down cookbooks that didn't involve ingredients that came from cans or packages. I'm not going to lie, it was very slow going. Partly because I had no confidence in my own abilities - especially when surrounded by people who didn't eat, or even necessarily like, real food. And we were spending a lot of time eating with these people!
Just to give you a glimpse at what it was like, my mom used to come over and lament: "You never have any food in this house!" Of course that wasn't true. What we had was real food in the house. You know, the kind that you have to actually prepare. So she'd head to the grocery store and come back with (I'm sooo not kidding!) $60 - $70 worth of crap. The healthiest thing she'd buy was a jar of Jif peanut butter. The rest was cookies, crackers, chips, at least 2 different kinds of ice cream. She would then proclaim: "There! Now you have some food!" After spending all of that money graciously filling my kitchen, can you guess where she'd head? Out to eat. Yep. I was spending $100 a week feeding 3 people - one of whom didn't come by the nickname Locust Boy by accident - and she was easily blowing through $250 a week just to feed herself. And can you guess who was eating better? Yup. We were.
Stay tuned for Cooking From Scratch Part 4 - In the Land of Raw Milk & Local Honey
Previous posts in my Cooking From Scratch series:
Part 1 - In the Beginning
Part 2 - Out of Necessity
Monday, January 2, 2012
101 in 1001 - It's Good to Have Goals
A month or so ago I was perusing blogs looking for ideas. I stumbled upon one that mentioned a project called "101 in 1001" - 101 goals to be completed in 1001 days. As someone who hasn't done well with New Years Resolutions in the past, I still like setting goals. You should see the myriad of To-Do lists floating around my house. And really, a To-Do list is nothing more than a list of goals, right? I've also learned over my nearly-40 years that some goals ("lose weight!") are too vague. Better to be specific ("excercise for 30 minutes every other day.")
I've been working on my list for a couple of weeks now, slowly adding to it. My guys have added a few of their own to the list, as well. We're about 3/4 of the way there, and we'll be adding to it as we go. I've added a tab at the top of the blog (101 in 1001) and will be crossing things off as we complete them, so feel free to check on my progress! I've already been able to cross a couple off of the list. Woo hoo!
I tried googling the blog I originally saw this on, and instead found a website called Day Zero where you can keep track of your 101 - there's even a countdown, so you can see how many days you have left.
How about you? Any goals that you are working towards?
UPDATE: I found the blog that I got the idea from! The Lazy Homesteader
I've been working on my list for a couple of weeks now, slowly adding to it. My guys have added a few of their own to the list, as well. We're about 3/4 of the way there, and we'll be adding to it as we go. I've added a tab at the top of the blog (101 in 1001) and will be crossing things off as we complete them, so feel free to check on my progress! I've already been able to cross a couple off of the list. Woo hoo!
I tried googling the blog I originally saw this on, and instead found a website called Day Zero where you can keep track of your 101 - there's even a countdown, so you can see how many days you have left.
How about you? Any goals that you are working towards?
UPDATE: I found the blog that I got the idea from! The Lazy Homesteader
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