Apple Butter Business

Two weeks ago  I started a campaign on craigslist for canning supplies. Preserving is my cause du-jour at the moment. I am getting super excited about things like canning, fermenting, and dehydrating. Oh the possibilities!

During my quest for free canning supplies, I was contacted by a person that worked for an older gentleman with a plethora of canning business cluttering up his shop since his wife passed on. Boss and I immediately planned a trip out to the nether reaches of the county to pick up our free swag and start the canning fun times.

When we got there, we found the COOLEST gentleman either of us have had the pleasure of meeting since our own grandpa's (who are both extremely awesome mind you). Farmer Jim had not only canning supplies, but an industrial rock tumbler, gads of shiny rocks from all over the US, a stuffed owl and so many amazing handy craft projects I think etsy would blow up if it allowed him to post to their site.

Farmer Jim loaded us up with jars and a canning set up and also sent us home with a HUGE bucket of apples to start off our adventure in canning. Boss now has his old gentleman mentor, and I now have my canning supplies...all in all, a prosperous trip.

[caption id="attachment_943" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="above: a veritable shit ton of apples"][/caption]

When I got home,  I couldn't decide what it was I wanted to DO with these nifty canning supplies and all of these apples. We are big fans of apple muffins in this house, but it seemed a little silly to make 600 of them just to use up my apples. After a quick offering to the Oracle, it was decided that apple butter would be the coolest thing we could make with the ingredients we already had on hand.

The process begins with a veritable shit ton of apples. We used two bags from the grocery store as well as 10 of Farmer Jim's far superior apples. We filled the crock pot with tiny chunks of apples and thought smugly...this shall make thousands upon thousands of gallons of delicious apple butter! MWHAHAHAHAHA! It of course made...2 pints of delicious apple butter. According to the interwebs, if youw ant to make gallons of the stuff, you will need to keep adding apples as it cooks down and you will need far more than like 30 apples. SO the recipe I am posting here is for a small yield batch that you can do in a weekend with your crock pot. The apple butter purists will do it in gigantic pots over fires and such. I am no apple butter purist.

Let us begin.

Ingredients:

A bunch of of apples (30 or so) -cored and chopped. I leave the skins on because they cook down and it doesn't make any difference to me. Plus...the lazy...

[caption id="attachment_944" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="like-a-so"]

Sprouted What Now??

Have you ever heard of sprouted grain bread? Yeah, me either, until Boss mentioned something about it one night whilst basking in the romantic light of my laptop. Apparently he was quite fond of a certain type of bread called "Squirlley Bread". It is a bread made with sprouted grains, which according to http://www.organicsproutedflour.net is like the best thing ever. The website has a big ol' list of health claims most of which amount to "this is both tasty and good for you!"

Boss began waxing poetic about this bread, making me desperately want to try them. At $3.00 or so a loaf I of course was skeptical (and also cheap). So rather than rush out to the Co-Op searching for this bread, I did what I now often do and said "Shit, I can do that. To Google!"

Whilst Googling, I found a recipe for making your own sprouted grain breads, the method for sprouting said grains and the tools with which to grind the resulting sprouts. I had all of the things, shit was gone get sprouted up in this joint.

The recipe for sprouting grains is located HERE  at the mother of all DIY awesomeness, Mother Earth News . The basic principle is to get the grains to sprout little tails, which means they are rehydrated and growing again. You can apparently do this with any unprocessed seeds or grains. Our first endeavor involved red wheat berries. The resulting bread was...damp? but sweet and nutty, also delightful with soup. The next goal was to make a gluten free version of this delightful buisness so we tried our hands at Quinoa sprouting.

Thing the first: Do not use the jar method that is mentioned in the Mother Earth article. Apparently with the smaller grains like quinoa  (and possibly others but for sure this particular grain) it is easier to sprout them, and drain them by laying them flat on a cookie sheet. Please see below for step by step pictorial instructions!

Step One- Pick a grain!

We picked Quinoa becuase its gluten free and  I have a fetish for feeding the starving. A cup of grains will sprout into about a cup and a halfish of sprouts and that will make one small loaf or 8 small rolls.

[caption id="attachment_875" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="nom nom various grains"][/caption]

Second: Soak the grains over night in a jar

(this is where the picture would go if I had taken said picture)

Third:

Drain said grains and move them to a flat surface with which to sprout

[caption id="attachment_876" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="cookie sheets are flat!"][/caption]

Fourth: rinse the grains twice a day shuffling them about so they don't congeal and make yicky mold thingys until they start to make tails. This takes about two days. There is not a photo of the tails because I only have a shitty point and shoot camera with no macro setting right now. So..here is a drawing of what they look like with tails.

[caption id="attachment_878" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="NOTHING else"][/caption]

Fifth:  After they have the tails, you can grind the ever loving shit out of them. We use the meat grinding attachment for my Kitchen Aid and it works perfectly. I am sure there is an alternative method so you don't have to go buy a Kitchen Aid...but you should just go buy a Kitchen Aid because they are seriously the greatest things ever in life. I hug mine when no one is watching...Anyway...put the sprouts in the grinder and smoosh them through creating this odd, hamburgery like substance, you can add some flax, some seeds, some other stuff, whatever sounds good to you. When we did the wheat berries, we added flax but when we did the quinoa we kept it pure.

[caption id="attachment_879" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="No one knows of our secret love Kitchen Aid..."][/caption]

What Step am I on?

Smoosh the resulting pulpy stuff together to make little balls or a loaf and place on a sheet pan. We also rolled ours in sesame seeds because...why not?

[caption id="attachment_880" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="even his hands are handsome...*sigh*"][/caption]

I have completely lost count at this point:

Put a pan of water on the lower shelf of the oven, and the sheet pan on the upper rack. This keeps your bread from drying out. Bake at 250 degrees for...well the recipe said to do it for 2.5 hours and we found that this worked fairly well with the wheat berry bread, but was a bit too long for the quinoa. So, I am going to say check it after 2 hours and push on the top, if it is crusty but springy, its done. If its still fairly smooshy, give it another 10 minutes. There really isn't an exact time to this. The resulting nibbles look something like this:

wait...I forgot to take a picture of that too... well they look like the ones boss is rolling only cooked.

The judgement:

So, we quite liked the wheat berry bread, particularly when paired with soup. It was nothing like the squirlly bread, we think becuase they not only sprout their grains, but then dry and mill them or mix them with other grains to make flour...basically its more like bread. These loaves taste breadish, but in the case of the wheat berry bread, its very wet on the inside and hard on the outside. We may not have squeezed out enough of the water from the grains before smooshing them. As for the quinoa, we over cooked them but they had this very pleasent nutty flavor that we think would make an excellent cookie. We plan to incoporate some brown rice syrup next time and see what that is like.

Over all, sprouting: successful! Using said sprouts to make bread: Moderately successful and definately boast worthy. I mean, who do you know that is running about sprouting things and making stuff from them? Not enough people that is for sure!

Give it a try, use some other grains and let us know how it goes. What works best for you? Any alternative grinding methods? Next up, sprouted grain tortillas Oh yeah...that is happening!

Food! F*ck Yeah!

Like many of my generation, I have spent most of my life eating what can only be called "processed food type products." Everything I learned to cook was either soaking in cream of stuff or smothered in cheddar cheese.

Oddly enough, I have often not felt like the healthiest person in town. Having one time been something of an athlete,  it was right surprising when I became a grown up and doing my own cooking coupled with far less of the sports things, and then found myself exhausted, breathing hard, and often unnervingly sweaty.

I have made many a half hearted attempted at healthy living, and have made a few full hearted attempts at self sufficient living. Usually I have given up after a few short weeks and a couple of misshapen bread loaves.  The reason these experiments fail varies, but overall I think the uniting factor has to do with my reasons behind doing so.  When I would try to eat healthy it was because I wanted to lose weight, go on a trip and look like what I decided pretty was. When I would try to make my own foods it was because I was broke or needed some kind of escape from a crappy life.

When Boss moved in, we both expressed our desire to start living more healthy lives. We wanted to have more energy, be less reliant on processed foods and have a better understanding of what it was that we were putting in our bodies.These seemed like better reasons than any I had had before.

The decision made, putting it into action became something else entirely. As I mentioned, I was raised on mayonnaise based salads and margarine, my idea of eating healthy was buying things full of health claims and shiny photos brought to you by Nabisco and Winston Salem. I was still desperate to find the food loop hole that would allow me to continue eating cheese as often as humanly possible and feel awesome about my choices while doing so. Unfortunately,  that loop hole does not exist, and believe me, if it did, I would have found it. I fucking LOVE cheese.

We went back and forth and in and out of good habits, nothing really sticking for any significant amount of time. We would buy the better versions of boxed foods, skinless boneless frozen chicken parts, and things smacking of Omegas and what not. We didn't feel any better, our wallets were still pretty damn empty and we couldn't tell you from one day to the next what exactly it was that was going into our foods. This seemed counter productive.

*Tangent*

As poor people, we have been told again and again that we don't deserve to be healthy, that we don't deserve to have delicious, healthy foods to put in our bodies that don't come from brightly colored boxes. Healthy, organic foods are not affordable, not readily available and not marketed to your "average" family making only slightly more than minimum wage. The shelves at Wal-Mart (where all us poor folk shop) are chock full of chemical laden sugar drinks and vegetable flavored fried corn puffs. As there is no money to be had in actual carrots, rarely will a carrot be seen (the carrot lobbyists are few and far between).

As fat people we are told that its our fault we are fat, that we can't possibly be both healthy AND fat. Society tells us the two are mutually exclusive. We are told that the only way to be healthy, is to be thin. That the only way to be thin, is to give our money to a diet organization, or subscribe to some new chemical fad that will change our bodies to work in a different way. Does NO ONE see how FUCKED that is? If we give money to someone to make us thin, does that someone benefit in any way from actually making us thin? If we are all thin and staying that way, where will they get their money? Will Jenny Craig just brush her hands off and say "ahhh, now that was fine days work, on to cure cancer!" WHY would we willingly alter the chemistry of our bodies and reroute our internal organs in order to eat less shitty food, but shitty food all the same, instead of leaving our bodies the perfect energy plants they are and filling them with real, actual food that is also fuel? And why can't that be fun?! and social?! instead of a source of contention and angst?

We as a society have been told that we are helpless slaves to multinational corporations that know what is best for our families and that the food we have always eaten isn't good enough, or healthy enough. That their lobbyists and scientists know better than our bodies and our ancestors do. Do you see Charles Ingalls eating re-hydrogenated food type products? HELL NO! Charles Ingalls would be like, I want chicken, I'm gonna go get me an actual chicken. Caroline, grind me some flour! You know why? Because Charles Ingalls is THE MAN....

*End Tangent*

SO the point I was getting at is, we got sick of it. We started making changes.

Change the first:

Stop buying what has commonly been referred to as "bread" but is really a mishmash of refined chemicals and flours and a metric ton of sugar compressed into a bread like shape. That one was easy. I love making my own bread. Its this very zen thing for me. I knead the dough and become one with it, there is nothing but me, and the dough. I have begun the search for the most epic of all bread recipes. Stay tuned for that adventure.

Step the second:

Vegetables are expensive and keep spoiling before we eat them, this is both wasteful and annoying. Solution? Don't buy any meat, then you have to eat the vegetables and also have more money to spend on them! We also turned to the family oracle (Google) and found better ways to store our veggies and things to do with the bits we don't eat (stay tuned for this also!) So no veggies are going to waste!

Step the third:

Foods that contain less chemicals seem to be more expensive, this is what we in this house refer to as "bull shit". Solution? figure out how to make it yourself. Again, the family oracle provides us with solutions. Want gluten free bread? Don't want to pay 9bazillion dollars for 12 kinds of flour? Make sprouted grain breads.  Have a hankering for egg salad, don't know what "disodium edta " is and don't particularly want it to be part of your dinner? Make your own mayo. The internet is literally SWARMING with people aching to share their recipes and tips for making the perfect whatever. This has become what I call culinary truth or dare, and what Boss calls "Food Alchemy". I have saved about $100 a month by cutting out meat, and making my own everything but vegetables, yeast, almond milk, and flour. And if that grain mill comes in for my kitchen aid at a reasonable price...

Step the fourth and final:

Quit fucking apologizing for being awesome at life. We feel amazing since we have started instituting these changes in our lives. The energy shift in our home is palpable. Pinkone is happier, cleaner, and is far less of a goth kid in training. Boss and I are playing with her again, teaching her how to do the things we are doing and are able to use every meal as a science experiment or math lesson. There are some days where I start to feel silly, or self conscious for going to the co-op buying bulk quinoa or grinding my own oat flour or...whatever. Like suddenly I am one of those people from California Woody Allen makes fun of. Then I stop and think about it. Fuck You Woody Allen! (not really, I seriously love you Mr. Allen) But, really, that kind of thinking is me apologizing to (someone?) for living the kind of life I want to live. Living this way only looks ridiculous and feels like work when I decide it is ridiculous and feels like work and don't remind myself that not only is being relatively self sufficent super fun, but a great way to keep my brain in shape learning new things. Fuck Yeah Learning!

So basically what I am saying here is that my family is making the choice to engage in food related anarchy and non conformist living. We would like to share that with you, the people of the internet in the hopes that you might find it informative, entertaining, or at the very least, amusing. If you have any awesome ideas for self sufficent living, food related anarchy, or just a general comment or gripe, please feel free to send it to the following address: pinklilybit@gmail.com

Stay tuned for more adventures in MediocreParenting, in which your hero continues to feel less Mediocre by the day!

29 Full Steam Ahead!

This may come as no surprise to anyone who regularly reads my blog, or knows me in anyway, but sometimes I feel like I might be a crazy person. As I age, I care about whether or not this is true less and less, but the thought still crosses my mind from time to time.

Tonight I was reading bits of a blog that Boss linked me to, The Non-Conformist Family. In reading Josh's familial manifesto, I am starting to feel a bit like less of a crazy person, and a bit more like one of the lucky people in the universe that has managed to start figuring out that our world is actually more than just the next thing on the to do list. Boss calls this tapping into the universal love stream. I love that. We aren't out here alone being nuts, we are part of the stream of people out here being nuts together!

Over the past couple of years I have made some really insane choices. I decided that living genuinely was more important to me than living safely. While this was not an easy choice to make, and resulted in the end of my marriage, the end of several friendships, and skeptical eyebrow raises from many a family member, I wouldn't change that decision for anything. In NCF, Josh talks about taking risks, and by coming out, ending a crappy marriage, and taking a flying leap off the love cliff with someone that lived impossibly far away, I think I may have one or two things to say about risk taking.

So yesterday was my birthday, and as is my custom, I looked back on the previous year, looked forward to the next year, and did a little of the "yes this, no that" game with myself. What did my life look like this time last year? quite different for sure. What did I want it to look like this time next year? Similar but better...so as you can see, I'm totally deep.

For my birthday this year, I asked for one thing. Boss and I don't have any money to speak of, so lavishing me with furs and jewels was not totally in the realm of possibility. Rather, I asked him for a weekend of us time, or as we say, "mantics". We spent the weekend baking, cooking, talking, watching movies, and just being together. In doing this, not only did we get some prime 'humpin' in, but we also managed to really connect on a deeper level. It was super awesome to remind myself exactly why I took the insane risk of moving this person out here to live with us from a foreign land, with full knowledge that they would not be able to work and may possibly turn out to totally hate everything about me. It reminded him why he left a comfortable job, socialized healthcare and a boat load of friends for a capitalist dictatorship populated with individualistic hate mongers, I might be paraphrasing there a bit, but you get the jist. The point is, in my 28th year I took some crazy ass risks, many of which did not sit well with those I love. In the end, the most important thing was that I went in fully informed and came out into 29 the best version of me I can be today.

Birthday List of Awesome Things I Plan to Continue into 29

1) Making as many things from scratch as humanley possible

Cooking has become the ultimate game of double dog dare with myself. Being super poor, but also something of a foodie poser, I like to pay close attention to what I stuff in my face hole and that of my little family. I have grown to LOVE making things that normally come from a box or a can or a bag, myself. There are few things more cathartic than kneading bread. I also love finding vegetarian and vegan alternatives to favorite foods. I feel like I plant a giant middle finger in the face of corporate greed every time I master a new recipe.

2) Becoming more socially aware

There was a time when I was a bright eyed, idealistic little college queerling with lots to say about lots of things. I read newspapers (remember those kids?!) and I had witty and insightful comments to make about the things I read in them. That time passed with the discovery that the amount of weed I was smoking at the time directly correlated with the level of wit that my comments actually contained. Also, I had a kid and stopped caring about anything other than the contents of her diaper for like...5 years. So  I made a pledge to myself at 28 that I would start taking care of myself intellectually and in doing so, be more aware of the world around me. I'm getting better, I learned about the Occupy movement only like, a month after it started so thats better than most of my country men. In my 29th year, I plan to learn about things as they happen and start forming opinions again, this time without the aid of recreational drugs whenever possible.

3) Be the most involved parent and partner I can be

I modified this one slightly because going into 28, i had recently been unceremoniously dumped by my last girlfriend so i wasn't really thinking in the partner realm at the time. Luckily however, I was e-ogled by a charming young thing  a mere 3 days later which turned out to be the gentleman I am currently sharing my life with. Last year I decided that I would do everything within my power to be the best parent I can be. That means to me, answering questions, taking time for Pinkone and I to be together just us. Encouraging her special brand of awesome, taking time for myself so that I can be better prepared for mommying when the time comes. Also, to be the best parents we can be, Boss and I need to be the best partners we can be. We have both dealt with tons of life altering crap this year, and chances are there will be more in the near future. Our relationship has to be a priority because we have a little person that is counting on us to be together and with it so there will always be two happy people helping to guide her through life. The best gift we can give our daughter is a happy and healthy set of parents.

4) Be nice to myself

I am terrible at this. I don't like to buy myself things, I say awful self deprecating things about my body and my various issues and I don't take time to just relax and be. Going into 28 I promised myself I would start to work on this. I would make peace with my body, I would find time and energy to center myself and I would take time to just BE for once. It was really hard, because  I am not good at that kind of thing. Going into 29 I am renewing my commitment to myself. I am changing the way my family eats, doing things I enjoy for not reason other than I enjoy them, learning to say no when I simply don't feel like doing something and not apologizing for it, and taking time to meditate and reflect on a daily basis.

5) Be the change I want to see in the world

God, so trite, but whatever. I am a person that has always been into the flakey hippie dippy BS that my dad would roll his eyes at. I would get super into energy healing and tarot cards and aura reading for like, 6 months, start to feel stupid and back off. Well, no more. I know that we in this world are all one, we are all apart of a greater, universal energy and if i sound like an idiot when I say that, its only because the person hearing me isn't ready to hear me. So what this means for me this year is that I am going to live my life knowing that the energy I project into the world affects everyone and everything around me. I am going to tap into the love stream as Boss says, and I am going to throw love out my every pore to everyone around me. I am going to say wonderful things to the wonderful people around me and I am going to find a way to give back to the world in a very real way.

So those are my personal goals for 29, I also plan to learn to sew and master sourdough at last, just in case you were looking for something less abstract. What are your goals for this year?

Nouveau Poor

I have been formulating this blog post in my brain goo for awhile now. The other day, Boss and I were standing in line at the food bank (yep, the food bank) and I was watching the people come and go with their boxes of food. One woman shoved her way to the front of the line, dressed to the nines, entitled as hell, loudly proclaiming without saying a word that THIS (the food bank) was only temporary. SHE was not one of US (the poor). As I silently slam her head against a rock with the power of my thoughts, I start to think. In college, I was like, cute, bohemian poor, college poor. Living on ramen because my education forces me to work shitty jobs poor. Then, i was new parent poor, all my money goes to diapers poor. Then, I was single mom poor for a little bit, noble poor. Now, standing in line at the food bank, I'm like, dude, i am almost 30, and I am just poor. I wasn't raised poor, so I prefer the term "nouveau poor" I was actually raised quite well off, which is probably why I am poor now, I never really learned how to be frugal or budget. I'm like, dumb white girl poor, which is a totally different world of poor from people who actually suffer.

Believe me, I hear all of the white whine in this blog post.

Because we live in a relatively affluent city with a high population of organic markets and Trader Joe's, our Food Bank is surprisingly well stocked. Sure, you get your potted beef tounge from time to time, but you also get a large selection of farm fresh produce, eggs, soy milk and a surprisingly wide selection of vegetarian options. So we are quite lucky in that regard. The rest of the time, when we can actually afford to buy food, we try to do so, so that the stuffs at the food bank can be there for those who just plain can't that week. Here is where we run into issues. How many of you have tried the following:

Being healthy

Eating a predominately vegetarian diet

Eating more organic and additive free foods

Being fucking poor

These things are not congruent. You want to know why (Western Society) poor people are generally fat? Its because food that is healthy, is expensive as hell.

Boss and i were sitting down tonight to discuss the state of our pantry. Its not awful, but it could be better. There is a wide assortment of boxed side dishes, several cans of cream of stuff, and some white rice. The fridge isn't much better, housing a cavalcade of 80% fat meat product, chicken pieces, and more cabbage than my intestinal tract would care to admit. Also, many beets. We like beets.

Our poor diet has often troubled us, as well as or sedentary lifestyle (but that's another blog post all together) and so we sat down to make a plan, a list, a budget out next weeks pay check for food stuffs.  In doing so, I did what I always do, and turned to the Internet, our family oracle. When entering in the sacrificial search term to google of "how to eat healthy on a budget" I learned something startling.

Anyone who write for these websites has never been poor, has at least one parent working from home, and has apparently never entered a Wal Mart.

Not every suggestion is bad. Eating at home rather than out, is one obvious, but still valid idea, other than that, I'm just as lost as ever. All suggestions are coming from the same article, because 1) i am lazy 2) i was super pissed after reading it and began immediately blogging and 3) this article is pretty representative of every other article about eating healthy whilst broke. All suggestions can be found here

Suggestion the first:

1) "Skip the processing. Steer away from foods with lots of additives, chemicals and packaging; they're often not as good for you, and they can drive up the cost of your groceries. Instead, opt for foods that are as close to their natural state as possible. That may mean you have to spend a little more time preparing your meals, but I've included helpful tips below on how to make that more convenient."

Okay, totally. That is EXACTLY what we want to do...but wait. Have you ever looked at the boxes of brightly colored crap that adorne the Wal-Mart shelves? Have you noticed that two boxes of store brand MacNCheeze food product costs you about 75 cents a box, and you use about a half cup of milk  and a half cup of butter to make sauce (about .50 cents give or take), add a can of tuna (89 cents) and half a cup of peas (25 cents) and you have dinner for a family of three, relatively balanced, for under 5 bucks.

As opposed to say, making your own mac-n-cheese for dinner. Noodles, if you don't use the whole bag, will cost you about a dollar, half a cup of cheese ($1-1.50 i like  a lot of cheese) Cream or in some cases Velveta to make it "saucy" is going run you another 3-5 dollars, and if you don't use all the cream, you have cream sitting there being all "use me" and you're like...for what? Mustard powder, becuase that's regualrly around the house, again with the special ingredients ($2 and you are only going to use like, 10 cents of it so again, its like what else can i make with cream and mustard powder? so already, this one dish has surpassed our processed nightmare of a dinner by several dollars, and doesn't even have a protein or a vegetable involved yet.  You see where I'm going with this. Shitty processed foods are super cheap because they cost like half a penny to make, contain very little actual food, and can be replicated in a lab rather than on large tracts of land with sustainable farming practices and chickens that are regularly hugged.  Beans from cans are cheaper than beans from bags, are cheaper than beans from plants. The less actual food, in your food, the more of it you can cram in your mouth hole for the least amount of money. Thanks capitalism!

Suggestion the Second:

Demote meat. Beef, chicken, pork and fish often take a starring role in American meals, whereas in less-wealthy countries they're often supporting players or make only cameo appearances: Think bowls of rice or grain topped with lots of veggies and a few bits of meat or seafood. Or you can skip meat entirely for much cheaper protein sources, such as eggs or beans (a half cup of beans has as much protein as 3 ounces of steak).

She isn't wrong here, but please also note that in other countries they also eat bugs, which i could totally get behind if only i could catch the little fuckers. Again, we come across the problem where the bulk of foods she suggests purchasing, are not, in anyway, cheap. If I had my own garden full of farm fresh veggies I would eat the hell out of them every day and night. But I don't. I have the local grocery mart. In the summer, we were able to load the fridge up no problem with local, inexpensive organic produce from our local farmstand. Seriously, we could get a weeks work of fruit and veggies for like 30 bucks at this place it was amazing. It isn't so easy in the winter months though. Beans and legumes are time consuming to soak and prep and not as cheap as you might think to buy canned, one can is about 1.35 and it takes at least 2 or 3 for every meal, so, again it adds up when you only have say, 50 bucks for the next week. That said, I am fortunate enough to have a partner at home that can spend his days soaking my beans so at least there, I am ahead of many families.She also suggests nuts as a viable source of protien. Go to the store. Price nuts. Come back and tell me about it. Seriously, go. I'll wait. EXPENSIVE!!! Almonds are INSANELY overpriced, pine nuts are like, 7 bucks for a 1/2 cup! Nuts? screw you nut conglomerates!

Those are the only two I'm going to post for now. Feel free to read the rest of the article and tell me I'm nothing but a privileged white girl who is incredibly lazy, believe me, I've already thought it. The bottom line is, being poor in America is a very real thing for more people than ever. Even if we aren't like, "real poor" or "3rd world poor" we are still getting further and further away from what was once considered to be the middle class. It is harder and harder to find, good, healthy, inexpensive food that will actually nourish your body and not completely deplete your bank account.  The world needs to catch up and instead of throwing more money into cramming synthetic fish oil into everything we eat, how about subsidizing something OTHER than corn? How about working with farmers to grow organically on a larger scale? how about making it the standard to not inject our beef with hormones and antibiotics and whatever else it is they are cramming into our food that is causing 8 year olds to start menstruating? and i'm on a tangent.

The point is, Its not easy. All I want is to keep from getting to my "kill yourself weight" be able to say I am feeding my family the best food I can get, and do it for under $200 every two weeks. Is it really so much to ask?

Also, I tried "how to eat well when you are fucking broke" and that didn't turn up any better search results.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Quirky anecdotes?

this article is actually useful:

http://www.mainstreet.com/slideshow/smart-spending/where-find-cheap-fresh-produce

Most people's pantry. Also mine, minus the premium Red Mill flours, we use store brand in this house!

Apocalypse Training 101

Many of you may remember an internet fueled hysteria earlier this year regarding the inevitability of the fabled biblical rapture singling out all of Gods winners from the rest of us poor saps in an epic game of cosmic dodge ball. You may also remember that come the date of the supposed reckoning, a whopping "not a damn thing" actually happened, much to the delight of atheists and heathens everywhere.

We scraped by that particular threat of global annihilation, but another is on the horizon if you go in for the whole "Mayan Calendar 2012 Dooms Day" theory. In all likelihood, that day will pass just as quietly and with as many twitter trends as the last one. I may sound like someone who is skeptical of these purported prophecies, laughing it and joking at the rapture party with the rest of the heathens, but there is one global threat that wakes me up cold in the middle of the night...one potential societal down fall that gets me prepped to horde food water and guns and plot my over throw of the local Wal-Mart...

Zombies.

Boss and I have never really made a secret of the fact that we are prepping ourselves for the inevitable zombie apocalypse. Boss works on their hand eye coordination and killing speed by playing copious amounts of first person shooting games (though admittedly their training is falling behind due to a negligent lack of gaming system at the moment)  and PinkOne is often found working on her various zombie destruction devices along with honing her ninja skills.

When you watch as many horror movies as we do, and believe pretty firmly that biological terrorism is going to be one of the many downfalls of society as we now know it, its not hard to see the undead walking among us, hungering for brains as a very real possibility.

Are we ready? Not even a little bit, but we've started the process, and the process begins with freezer bags.

Zombie apocalypse or no, we are poor, and have started this new habit of hording food for the indeterminate future in which we may not have any. It all started with spaghetti sauce. I had this brilliant plan to buy a flat of tomatoes and solve the household sauce crisis in fell swoop. 60,000 tomatoes and like a bazillion hours later, we had a whopping 8 bags of sauce. Good sauce, but not exactly apocalypse hysteria resolution amounts of it. So I moved on to soup, tomatoes proving to be both time intensive and expensive, not to mention the possible lack of pasta come the day of reckoning. Soup however, needs no vehicle, it is a self contained food stuff.

We made Pea Soup, Chicken Noodle Soup and Red Pepper/Garbanzo Soup, all quite good, though the second batch of chicken noodle has now been re purposed as "cream of stuff" due to a soggy noodle disaster. After the soup, we have sort of gone...some might say overboard. Our freezer is now stuffed with bags of frozen concoctions. From noodles and beef to blanched and frozen fresh veggies, we are going to be sitting pretty when we finally run out of money/food/ability to go to the grocery store and I actually allow someone to eat my precious stores.

I have become the Gollum of the freezer. No one is allowed to touch my treasures. What if we need them? What if the day that the car explodes and we have none dollars and every last scrap of food in the house has been devoured and the zombies are groaning toward us at an alarming rate, and we say to ourselves "all that will fix this is some of Mom's Red Pepper and Garbanzo soup" only to open the freezer and find that we had frivolously eaten it one day because we were too lazy to cook something fresh. How will we all feel THEN I ask you?

I've already gone through my jam from last summer, and I haven't a clue what we will do with out that when the world comes to an end. Its dry toast for everyone since you didn't heed my warnings about squandering jam.

This latest bought of crazy is often met with eye rolling from Boss and PinkOne, not that I blame them, we all know in the end, the power grids are going to fail anyway and there won't be a way to heat my precious soup, but, its always good to be prepared.

A Poor Decision...

Sometimes I do things that in the moment, seem like a perfectly good idea. Most recently this list of ridiculous includes the cutting of my bangs at 6am…with dull scissors. So while in the moment, my only thoughts are “wouldn’t I look cute with betty page bangs again?” but a few seconds later I’m standing over a sink with a handful of hair and a look of sheer terror plastered across my face. The bangs could be worse, but this particular event illustrates perfectly the type of person I am.

 I am impatient and rather impetuous. I usually know what I want and rather than research it and hem and haw on it, I just do it. Sometimes this turns out poorly, other times, this results in some pretty awesome stories if nothing else. Most of the time, i'm fairly happy with the decisions I make, though others around me may doubt the capability of my decision making skills.  Below lies a list of a few of the less than perfect choices I've made on the spur of the moment and their humerous consequences.

 1) Once decided that because I couldn’t afford a wax, that shaving the arch of my eyebrows would be a good plan. As I’m working on this, my roommate walks in, startling me. This resulted in 1.5 eyebrows where two should have lived.

 2) At a party one night, I thought that I might take it upon myself to flirt copiously with a young man who had recently shown up. The last thing I remember was laying my head on his lap. From the accounts afterward, I was drug into the bathroom where I alternated vomiting and farting for about an hour. I know I woke up in my own bed and my friend had me buy her a new rug. Oddly, dude never called.

 3) Sisters and I decided to take an impromptu camping trip the day after my dad’s funeral. As the most grownup of all of us, I was kind of in charge of figuring things out. Well, we forgot food, pillows and wood. Eventually a parent showed up and helped, oh and don’t worry, we had the Coleman stove, no propane…but the stove was there.

 So, those are just a couple of prime examples why I’m not to be trusted to make important decisions. My daughter, being cut from a similar cloth, makes decisions in much the same way. Does it sound easier/faster/cheaper/more fun than doing it the way it SHOULD be done? Well…then you have your answer.

Room needs to be clean? Well it seems like it would be more fun to throw all of our toys out the window and into the yard than acctually pick them up and put them away. Time to eat dinner? Rather than enjoy our apple sauce, why not add garlic powder, maple syrup and cayanne to it? just to see what happens. Ooh and then ask mom to try it and look sad faced when she refuses.

 There is no actual reason for posting this other than to make sure everyone has just a little bit more to make fun of me about ;)

Best of Intentions

Anyone who knows me personally knows that my life is often surrounded by chaos. As of late we have added to that chaos in an extreme way. We now have a total of 5 adults and at times, 3 kids living in our 3 bedroom house, yes, were trying to find a bigger place with some land, don't worry.  We are creating what many in the know call an "intentional community". Visions of hairy armpits and larger than life compost heaps may be dancing in your head, and at least the compost heap portion is a necessity once we move, but there is a lot more to the whole vision than that.

Over the next weeks I'm going to be working on re-invigorating this blog. Writing about this journey we are embarking on, sharing our ideas and discoveries as we learn to go from wasteful, consumer driven convenience whores to natural, whole food eating, toothpaste making, frugal living naturalists. This adventure is going to be anything but easy and will likely result in a lot of swearing and yearning for taquitos from me, but if nothing it else it should provide the lot of you with some amusement.

Up next: Why were doing this, and DIY bathroom products...why bother?