The Cost of Groceries and Other Stuff

I hear people complain all the time about the price of groceries, but yet that’s all they do – complain.  I’ve decided to offer the tips that I use to help curb rising prices.

1.  Buy directly from the farmer.

I used to buy just plain ol’ white eggs.  Then I read about how inhumane chickens are treated and how they are in cages that are so small that they can’t even turn around.  So I decided to go for the cage free or free range eggs instead.  They run about $2.99 a dozen at the local grocery store.  I pulled into a driveway that had a sign advertising eggs and decided to buy them there instead.  They were only $2.00 a dozen and they are truly cage free.  The kids can get out of the car and see the chickens and everything.  So we don’t only get a dozen farm fresh eggs, we get entertainment too.

The farmer’s market is another place to go.  Fresh, local, and in season. Get extra when you get a good price and freeze it.

We also do the U-pick thing.  We’ve done strawberries a couple of times this year and will do blueberries, peaches, apples, and pumpkins.  We got enough strawberries to make 9 pints of jam and froze a lot too.  Honestly, making jam isn’t hard.  It took me about an hour and that includes the time it took to clean up.

I’d much rather pad the pockets of the farmers.

2.  Cook from scratch.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say “how can you have time for that?”  I bake my own bread.  If I use the bread machine, it takes literally 5 minutes.  I measure out the ingredients and press a button.  3 hours and 50 minutes later I have a hot, fresh loaf of bread.  It even has a timer on it so I can make it when it’s convenient, imagine that.   I figure its about $1 per loaf for 100% whole wheat.  Mine doesn’t have additives or fillers or HFCS either.

My meals usually take me less than 45 minutes to make from start to finish.  Most are only around 20 minutes or so.  Last time I checked it took about that long to make a box of Hamburger Helper.

3.  Care about what you eat.

People don’t get this but I guess it is a hard concept to comprehend.  If all you eat is junk, that’s how you’re going to feel and you’ll pay for it in more than one way.  Junk food doesn’t “stay with you” for very long.  Well, it does, but not in the way I’m talking about.  It will stay with you in the form of fat and Type 2 Diabetes, but it won’t keep you satisfied very long when it comes to hunger.  Eating wholesome foods with lots of fiber and vitamins and minerals will keep your body satisfied longer.  You wont eat as much and won’t need to buy as much food.

That’s it.  3 simple steps that will make you healthier, happier, and will hopefully keep a little extra money in your pocket.

Ok, now the other stuff.
Ryan learned to ride a bike yesterday so he’s been all over the place.  He’s already trying to pop wheelies and he even told me that he bets he could do a back flip on his bike if he had a ramp.  Um, no.

Austin and Ryan decided they wanted me to “homeschool” them for the summer.  Ok, whatever.  Austin’s teacher mentioned that he had a hard time with fractions and to work on them over the summer.  He said he wanted me to teach him social studies too – just for fun.  So we have been doing math worksheets and learning about a “hero”.  Ryan also has spelling words.  They are loving it so far.  We picked Benjamin Franklin as the “hero” for the week so I went to the library and found some books.  I had Austin make a timeline and Ryan got to color a picture.  I’ll let them pick a new hero on Friday for the next week.  I could never do this instead of public school though, no way do I feel smart enough to teach them.  Hats off to those who have more patience than I do.

We went strawberry picking again today and got 4 more quarts.  We ate some, used some for dinner, and froze the rest.

For dinner we had whole wheat pancakes with strawberry topping and scrambled eggs.  I made the pancakes from scratch using the recipe in the Tassajara Bread Book.  Wow, they were awesome!

Strawberries!!

I’ve been waiting for U-Pick strawberries all spring.  I have been patiently waiting for the sign to go up that tells me that the farm is open and strawberries are in season.  When Jason got home from work today, he said that he saw a sign on his way home for a U-Pick strawberry place.  It’s not the place I had in mind, but after dinner, the older boys and I went there to check it out.  They were open until 7, so that gave us about an hour.

We picked 7 quarts!  They were only $1.10 per pound so I ended up paying $8.45 for them.  After we were done, we went and borrowed my mom’s canner and went and bought some jars, pectin, and sugar.  I got 8 pints of strawberry jam and still had almost a quart left over for the kids to eat.  They pretty much finished the whole thing.

I’m so excited.  It’s so hard to find jam at the store that doesn’t have HFCS in it and the stuff that doesn’t is freaking expensive.  It will be nice to have the homemade stuff for a while.  Plus, blueberry, raspberry, and peach season is still coming up so there will be plenty!

It was my first time canning and I’m happy to report that all of the jars sealed properly.  We’ll just see how well the jam sets up.  It has to sit for 24 hour first.

Canning was super easy though.  Since it was a highly acidic fruit, I was able to do it without the use of a pressure canner.  I’ll have to borrow that when it comes time for green beans and stuff like that.

I might even go back in the morning and get more.  I wanted to keep some to freeze for things like smoothies and strawberry shortcake.  The farmer told me that if it rains tonight and tomorrow, their season is done for and if not, they’ll be open until Saturday.  I forgot to ask, but I have a feeling these strawberries were organic too.  There were lots of weed and lots of bugs around the plants and some of the berries had obviously been chewed on by some sort of critter.  They sell the berries at the Ann Arbor Farmer’s Market too and it seems that most of the vendors there are either certified organic or they advertise that they don’t spray.  So I’ll ask if and when I go back tomorrow.

The boys had a blast picking them and it was great to get them out there to see the work involved in harvesting and to be able to talk about why getting berries from a local farm is so much better then buying them from some farm in California.

Baking Bread

I usually like to bake my bread the old fashioned way, using one of the recipes in The Tassajara Bread Book.  This book really does have some great recipes for making all kinds of breads the old fashioned way.  You have to mix up the “sponge” and let it sit for an hour, then knead the dough and let it rise for an hour, then you have to punch it down and let it rise for 40 minutes, then you have to shape it into loaves and let it rise for another 30 minutes and then bake it for 60 minutes.

I normally love the process of kneading the bread and mixing everything by hand.  It’s almost therapeutic.  If I’m having a bad day, I can take out my frustrations on the dough instead of elsewhere. The only problem doing it that way is it’s an all day process and it’s just too hot to be kneading bread and having the oven on for an hour.

So today I decided to break out my bread machine since I’m down to 1/2 a loaf.  I don’t have a good bread machine recipe, so I just adjusted one of the other recipes and I’m hoping for the best.  I’m also going to attempt a loaf of banana bread when the wheat bread is done.  I’ve never made a quick bread in my machine and I’m curious as to how it will turn out.

Food Rules

We kind of lost sight of eating healthy over the winter and started loading up on carbs and junk again.  The kids were especially bad which boils down to laziness on our part since we’re the ones who buy the food.

A little over a month ago we decided to overhaul our diets and change them for the better.  I got back to reading my foodie books and with the help of Michael Pollan and some ideas I got from watching a special on Discovery Health, we put some food rules into place.

Our rules are as follows (I’ll elaborate on them a little later):

1.  If it contains high fructose corn syrup, don’t eat it.

2.  If it contains any hydrogenated oils, don’t eat it.

3.  If it contains any enriched flour, rice, etc, don’t eat it.

4.  If my great grandmother wouldn’t recognize it as food, don’t eat it.

This pretty much means that I have to accept the fact that I’ll be cooking from scratch a lot more.  There aren’t a lot of processed foods that don’t contain HFCS, hydrogenated oils, or enriched flour.  I’m also trying to steer clear of processed soy as it works as estrogen and we all know I don’t need any more of that.  Since we’ve been following these rules we’ve noticed that we have more energy, feel all around better, I’ve lost weight and I think Austin has too, my arthritis symptoms have disappeared, my cycle isn’t quite so screwy (even though I’m on the pill because of the screwy cycles, they were still screwy), we’re not snacking nearly as much, and according to Austin, he can run faster and farther without getting so tired.

So with the first rule, we try to find things that are sweetened with honey or another natural sweetener.  Sugar is fine, but we try to stay away from corn syrup.  It’s really hard to find things without HFCS, especially bread and buns and stuff like that.  Walmart does not sell any hot dog buns without HFCS, none!  I’ve been making all of our bread the old fashioned way and we don’t even seem to like store bought bread anymore.

Hydrogenated (or partially hydrogenated) oils are in just about everything too.  We don’t eat margarine or vegetable oil spreads.  We eat butter, just less of it.  Our bodies have been metabolizing butter for thousands of years.  Margarine has only been around for just over 50 years and that pretty much coincides with when we all started getting fat.  We also don’t use Cool Whip, we buy heavy whipping cream and make it ourselves.  Have you ever seen the ingredients in fat free Cool Whip?  Sugar, Corn Syrup, Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, High Fructose Corn Syrup… So it doesn’t have any fat per serving, but when your body just turns all of that sugar to fat anyways, what difference does it make?

Enriched flour isn’t the worst thing you can eat, but the fact that it’s so refined, it pretty much just becomes a filler.  There really isn’t anything to it so they add a bunch of vitamins to compensate.  Just eat more green things and you’ll be fine.  We opt for whole grains when it comes to flour, rice, and pasta.

My great grandmother wouldn’t recognize margarine, processed cheese, yogurt in a tube, etc.  We eat real cheese, not any of that processed crap that is supposed to taste like cheese.  Also, yogurt isn’t supposed to have fillers.  It’s supposed to be milk, cultures, and something to flavor it if needed.  It shouldn’t taste like bubble gum or cotton candy.  All that does is add artificial junk to it.

The first two weeks were the hardest for the kids.  They missed their Oatmeal Pies and Cheese Its.  Now they snack on fruit, cheese, homemade bread and jam, Kashi granola bars, etc.  Ryan has shown the greatest improvement.  He’s a kid who pretty much only eats hot dogs and pb&j and the other night I made veggie burgers from scratch and he ate the whole thing.  He even said it was awesome.  Today I put 2 Brussels sprouts on his plate thinking he would never eat them.  He ate them both and went back for more.  I put kale in the lasagna and he ate the whole serving even though he knew it was there.

We’re down to eating red meat once a week.  We also do at least 2 veggie meals a week and one fish/seafood meal.  The rest is chicken or turkey.  We’re buying more organic produce and other products we use a lot like ketchup and olive oil.

It’s actually been a lot of fun to work out the menu and shop.  It’s definitely a new way of thinking.  I just wish more people would get on board.  It makes me sad to see people buying Wonder Bread and Sunny D…