Heavenly Homemakers

Encouraging women in homemaking, healthy eating and parenting

Compromising Our Whole Foods Diet

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Tonight we’re hosting Elias’ 9th birthday party. 

You know how our house is always full of boys? Tonight there are even more of them. Right now they are all running around shooting each other with laser guns and Nerf guns and somehow I think there is a hallway basketball game going on at the same time. Now that takes talent.

We always let the birthday boy choose his party food. He usually takes into consideration what he thinks his buddies will like. And, surprise – surprise, he usually doesn’t choose “Tossed Salad” or “Spinach Smoothies”.

I was recently asked by one of you (but for the life of me I can’t find the comment to quote it exactly):  “Laura, can you tell us what foods you will occasionally buy at the store for convenience…and which foods you will NEVER buy?”

This probably doesn’t answer that question as specifically as the commenter was wishing for, but well…here’s what I bought for Elias’ birthday party dinner tonight…

If that’s not a compromise I don’t know what is.

I have to say that it was more than a little bit painful pulling them off of the freezer shelf and paying actual money for them. Incidentally, I also had TWO GALLONS worth of vodka in my cart on this shopping trip as we’re getting ready to start yet another big round of Homemade Vanilla Extract. Yep, it looked like one BIG party in my shopping cart tonight. ;)

The pizza rolls were Elias’ choice and while the ingredient list is longer than my hand (I am not even kidding), I have to say that it was a nice relief to just throw them in the oven and put out some paper plates and call it dinner. Besides, I was in the middle of baking his birthday cake and getting Whole Wheat Cinnamon Rolls ready for tomorrow’s breakfast for all the boys. The ease of dinner (if we can actually call it dinner) was really nice.

Here’s why I feel okay (not great, but okay) about buying and feeding my family these pizza rolls tonight:  We eat a really healthy diet about 357 days of the year. On those other few days or moments of the year when we are traveling, eating with others, hosting parties, going to parties or attending any event that has a meal comprised of chips and candy…we go with the flow. We don’t act all “weirded out” about the fact that we’re being served food that doesn’t meet our normal healthy eating criteria. If I’m offered Nacho Cheese Doritos at a get-together, you better believe I’m going to have a few and I’m going to enjoy myself.

We try not to go over-board and pig out because yikes…our tummies aren’t used to eating that kind of stuff. But we really cannot be enslaved by healthy eating.  Being paralyzed by these fears can be unhealthy in and of itself.  Compromising used to be a huge fear of mine, especially when I was first learning about what was healthy and what was SCARY and unhealthy. But I’ve “come down off the ledge” and realized that a few crazy junk foods here and there are not going to kill us. Especially when we follow it up as soon as possible with good, wholesome, nutrition-filled foods.

Which we will, by the way…tomorrow.  Those spinach smoothies will be making their appearance.

And for the record, while there are many things I just close my eyes and compromise on occasionally…I will never, ever knowingly or willingly purchase or eat margarine. Can’t do it. Won’t do it. Can’t even think about it.

Blech. Helgpaht. Mliiegylk. Pgvughhha.

Eeek, I get very gaggy when it comes to the thought of the yellowed tub of chemically created fatty-fattness spread that we’re told is better than rich cream whipped into golden goodness…otherwise known as REAL butter.

But a pizza roll or a Dorito…yeah…I’ll eat one here and there. That doesn’t even make sense does it?

So what types of “food” will you compromise on sometimes?  And which “foods” make you screw up your face and say Helgpaht-blephln?

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The Real Foods Grocery Budget Week Wrap-Up

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Thank you all SO much for the wonderful interaction this week during the impromtu Real Foods Grocery Budget series! I usually have a plan for the week for what I will be writing about, but somehow, with all of your comments and questions after I wrote about our 2011 Real Foods Grocery Budget, I got off course and just kept talking about food and money. :)

What I loved most about this week is how so many of you were reading through each other’s comments and offering suggestions of what works for YOU. While I can write about what works for ME and for our family, I don’t live where you live or have the same food sources you have. It was great to see all the comments coming in from those of you willing to help others find great sources for food in your communities. Isn’t the internet cool?

As I wrap up the week and the series, I just want to encourage you all to be prayerful about how you feed your families and to do whatever you feel God is calling you to do. HE can make it happen!

AND DON’T GET DISCOURAGED!! Some of you have mentioned that you are very new to the Real Foods way of eating. If you’re interested in making some changes that’s great, but changing everything at once can be very overwhelming, as can the idea of increasing a food budget. You may find that you can make Real Food changes and not increase your food budget at all…or you may find that you need to slowly figure out ways to at to your food budget to fulfill the desire you have for feeding your family a Real Foods diet. 

Take small steps.  Don’t feel like you need to change everything at once. Read through my Simple Steps to Healthy Eating posts for some ideas on where to start. There is no order to these steps and no right or wrong way to make changes. Just pick a step and take it! (And guess what, by the way? I really do plan to add to that series soon, even though I haven’t posted a Simple Step in a while!)

simplesteps

Also, if you haven’t read through Our Journey to Healthy Eating, please click on over so that you can find out more about why my family chooses to eat the way we do and what our journey looked like along the way. 

Just so you know, we’re still on the journey! There’s still a lot I need to learn and some other changes I need to make and shucks…sometimes I still get hungry for Nacho Cheese Doritos. With a beef hotdog.

Anyone else feel like sharing something “not so good for you” that you have a hard time giving up?!

Thanks again everyone for your participation in this week’s series!!

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Ways to Stretch the Real Foods Grocery Budget

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strawberries

Today I am (finally) going to share a few ways our family has made our grocery budget stretch as we’ve been on Our Healthy Eating Journey. My husband and I strongly believe that if you truly desire to do something for your family, through prayer and hard work, you can make it happen. There are creative ways to save, creative ways to earn, creative ways to come up with food sources. Nothing is too weird…think of some ideas and give them a try!

I loved this comment that Cery left on my Very Limited Income for Real Food Purchases post:

I am a single mom with 2 teenagers and haven’t worked a “real” job for a year and a half. Since then I have done mostly cleaning and odd jobs, so I don’t really have a monthly budget, since income varies. I pay the bills first (electric, rent, and house phone) and then buy food. I bake all my own bread and barter that with friends for organic, grass fed beef and free range chicken (it’s cheaper to buy baking supplies than meat, and I use a sourdough starter). I have also recently started selling baked goods. I am blessed with friends who have fruit and berries and allow me to pick all I want to can, and another friend who keeps bees and gives me honey in exchange for cleaning. I have a garden in the summer and can and freeze as much as I can. I even have friends that buy fruit and veggies in bulk at the Farmer’s Market and let me have half if I will can it for them! I am truly blessed! Strangly enough, I think we eat healthier now then we did when I worked 60 hours a week and had a grocery budget. God is good!

I love how God works and I love how being creative and working hard can provide your family with exactly what they need. How inspiring!

Here are some of the ways we have found to stretch our grocery budget:

  • I make just about all of our food from scratch. Occasionally I buy something “pre-made” if I’m in a bind (and for the record, I feel like there are certain seasons in our lives where boxed/packaged foods can be a lifesaver, if used sparingly). But if at all possible, I make our breads, tortillas, cookies, muffins, noodles, sauces, pizza, dairy products, peanut butter and salad dressing from scratch. It saves loads of money to do this and is much, much healthier. Even organic processed food isn’t the best nutritionally and WOW is it pricey! Making homemade food REALLY isn’t hard, and it tastes SO delicious (except for when I burn things, but let’s not talk about that.)
  • We garden. We’re blessed with a large yard – one that’s big enough to handle soccer games and a garden too. We grow tons of tomatoes so that we can make all of our own tomato sauce, spaghetti sauce, pizza sauce, tomato juice and tomato soup for the year. We also grow and freeze a year’s supply of green beans and peppers each summer. We eat up all of the lettuce and spinach we grow, but that sure saves money in the late spring!
  • We keep our ear to the ground and have formed many wonderful relationships with people in our community who have an abundance of produce and other items they’re willing to give away or sell at low cost. This is how we have been able to acquire so many delicious berries and peaches and apples and pears that we freeze and preserve. This is also how we’ve gotten our hands on venison. Sometimes the meat has been free, sometimes we’ve paid for processing…either way…what a fantastic deal on great meat!
  • We’re willing to work hard and go about finding food sources non-conventionally. We love that our kids are learning that food comes from trees, animals, farms, gardens, fields and bushes….not just from the top shelf at the store. Yeah, sometimes our food comes off of a truck, but you know what I mean.
  • We’ve done what we needed to do to stretch and grow our income. I’ve almost always done something (from home) to supplement my husband’s income. We felt this was extra important once we decided that Real Food was a high priority even though it would increase our grocery budget. When there wasn’t any wiggle room in our regular budget, any money I could earn from home went to help buy healthy groceries. One summer I sold baked goods each week at our local Farmer’s Market, earning enough to buy our Nutrimill Grain Mill, fresh produce all summer and quite a few of our other grocery needs. (In case you’re wondering, these Soft Pretzels were a huge Farmer’s Market hit!)  I’ve had babysitting jobs, mended clothes for people, sold Stampin’ Up! products…just about anything I could do to help add a few extra dollars to our single income. Starting this blog and writing ebooks three years and a half years ago was another way I decided to try for a little supplemental income. I sure am glad I did…otherwise I wouldn’t have met you! (That sounded cheesy, but I really did mean it.)  Deep down from depths of my soul.  (That added bit of cheesyness was on purpose and written just to make myself sound ridiculous.)  Be sure to read this post for more ideas on great ways to earn extra money for your family’s needs!
  • We’ve turned our Swagbucks and Shop it to Me  “earnings” into groceries. These two are great because it doesn’t cost anything for anyone and you can earn points toward gift cards by referring people. I’ve been blessed to share these with you here on my blog, and through referrals have been able to earn some lovely Amazon cards and Whole Foods Gift Cards. While I could have turned my points in for other fun things…I really just wanted to be able to buy organic groceries. Does that make me a geek, do ya think? Don’t answer that. I highly encourage signing up for Swagbucks (a search engine that helps you earn points that can be turned into quite a few things – I just always turn mine into Amazon cards to use for groceries, or books if it’s school time). You can read more about Swagbucks here. AND…Shop it to Me  is a very fun (and free) way to earn gift cards. I’ve turned mine in for Whole Foods cards because who could pass that up? Not me, because I’m a food geek.

What other ways have you found to creatively save money or earn money to stretch your grocery budget?

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Do You NEED to Cut the Grocery Budget?

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lettuce

Thank you all for adding suggestions and sharing your various circumstances in my last Real Food Grocery Budget post, Very Limited Income for Real Food Purchases. I think it’s great that we’re all helping each other think of new ideas for saving money on good food.

What I’d like to address now is that while I think it’s great to learn ways to cut down on food costs when you’re going through tough financial situations, I also feel like it is very important to make sure our families are getting the nutrition they need. Again, we are investing in our bodies when we spend money to eat whole, real food. Some foods we can cut back on, but there are some things we really, really need to be eating so that we can stay healthy.

That’s why I had such a hard time sharing what I’d cut back on or cut out of our diets. I have a hard time recommending that many people NEED to cut down their grocery budget. If you’re spending money on processed foods or splurging all the time on specialty items and buying food that isn’t in season or buying stuff to eat that will simply fill a hole but not offer any nourishment…then we need to talk about ways for you to cut your grocery budget.

But if you have $X amount in your grocery budget and you’re carefully spending that amount on real, whole foods that are nourishing your family…I think you should keep doing what you’re doing. Sure, let’s keep trying to find fair prices and good deals and shop wisely so as to be good stewards of what God has given us to take care of our families. But if you have the money for plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables or any of the high quality healthy foods you feel convicted about eating…buy them for your family. Don’t cut out necessary nutrition just so that you can say that you’ve lowered your grocery bill.

In addition – and I’m guessing that I probably don’t really need to be saying this to any of you but I’m going to say it anyway – before you talk about needing to cut your Real Foods Grocery Budget, please make sure you’ve cut every other un-necessary item out of your budget first. My family has always done without cable TV and expensive cell phone plans and frequent eating out and going to movies and expensive clothing and all kinds of other things I can’t think of because we don’t spend money (or rarely spend money) on them so I probably don’t know what I’m missing.  I’m NOT saying that you shouldn’t ever have or do these things. If you have cable TV, I’m fine with that and will probably even enjoy watching the Food Network with you when I come for a visit. I’m just saying that you really shouldn’t complain about not being able to “afford” real, whole food…and then turn around and fill your grocery cart with frozen pizza, soda, twinkies and chips, 24 new pairs of high heeled shoes and a big screen TV for your bathroom. Kapeesh?

My point ultimately is that we all need to be as careful as possible with how we spend our money…but I think that spending money on good, whole food for our families is wise and even necessary. It’s an investment in our health for today and for years down the road. Good food costs money…but I think we need to caution ourselves against feeling like, “ugh, healthy food is SOOOOO expensive.” Is it…really? I don’t look at it that way anymore. I look at healthy food as…healthy. And the price that comes with it?

Well…I’d rather not pay the price of eating cheap, empty food. To me…that is what is costly.
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Off and on all week I’ve said that I would share about some creative ways our family saves, earns and comes up with great sources for food. I’ve sprinkled some of that information throughout these posts, but really and truly I have a whole post devoted to sharing ways to stretch and grow your grocery budget. Other topics keep popping up this week as I’ve written this series, but I promise (probably, mostly for sure, I think) that I’ll post tomorrow about stretching the budget. And sometime soon…I’ll even post about stretching a chicken.
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What are your thoughts about the “cost” of nutrition-void food?

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Very Limited Income for Real Food Purchases

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farmers_market

Apparently I have declared it to be Real Food Budget Week here at Heavenly Homemakers. There’s just a lot to say about real food and money…so I just keep going with this subject. :) If you missed the other posts, be sure to read Our Real Food Grocery Budget 2011 and No Grocery Budget Comparing Allowed.

Several have asked me to offer suggestions for how to eat a Real Foods diet while cutting back on the budget because of a super low income. This is a hard question for me to answer because I feel that it is very important to invest money in good food. Very important.  If you recall, I used to be a Coupon Queen and spend only about $100/month on groceries back when we had only two kids. I’ve come a  long way since then, learning about real food and health. I now understand that food is NUTRITION for our bodies…and we need to be careful and intentional about what we feed our families. It costs money to eat well, there’s no way around it…more money than it costs to feed our families food that contains little or no nutrition. 

At one point during our family’s Healthy Eating Journey, we were making less than $29,000/year (with no benefits) for our family of six. We were still able to eat a healthy diet, because we made it a priority and because we were creative and because God is good and provides…all the time.

For some of you, $29,000 sounds like peanuts…for others,$29,000 sounds like a fortune. If you’re barely making ends meet, what are you to do?

The question has been presented to me from a reader with a very low income and a family of five:  How would you eat a whole foods diet on only $50/week?    What would you cut out? What would you keep?

First let me say that whole foods or not…it would be very hard to feed five people with $50/week and I would encourage you to find a way to supplement that budget if at all possible. In my next food budget post (because this truly is turning into a little series!), I’ll talk about food budget creativity and share how I was able to help supplement our family’s grocery budget when we needed to spend more on groceries but didn’t have the cash flow!

For now I will address, as best as I can, what I would do if I was only able spend $50/week on groceries….

Food I’d Keep:

  • Eggs – free range if possible
  • Raw Milk – though we’d likely cut back to 1- 2 gallons a week
  • Butter
  • Fresh fruits and vegetables – in season and rationed – and I’d look high and low for free sources and I’d garden like crazy
  • Venison – hunters often love to hunt but don’t always like the meat
  • Beans – I’d likely get much more creative with my bean recipes!
  • Rice
  • Potatoes
  • Wheat to grind and make my own flour

Food I’d Cut Way Back On:

  • Meat – which is tough because we LOVE meat and feel like getting good protein is very important! I’d likely focus more on buying chicken than beef, because I can stretch a chicken to last six meals if need be. Or I’d skip the ground beef and buy soup bones and oxtail so I could make rich beef broth and stews.
  • Cheese – this would have to be a special treat

Food I’d Cut Out Altogether:

  • Sweets – these would be VERY limited – birthdays and Christmas only maybe?
  • Purchased snack food – I hardly buy these anyway, but occasionally I splurge on a bag of chips or a box of Cliff Bars for a trip. 
  • Juice – again, I rarely buy juice anyway, but if I only had $50/week to spend on groceries, this would never make the list.

I know I’m not doing a great job of making these lists and there are a lot of holes. What about oil? Spices? All kinds of other things I’m leaving out? 

In my next post, I’ll address some creative ways we save, earn and come up with great sources for food. In the meantime, help me round out these lists!! What would you keep, cut back on and cut out altogether if you had about $10/person/week to spend on groceries?

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No Grocery Budget Comparing Allowed :)

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azure_standard

I am so glad so many of you are sharing about your grocery budgets and talking about what works for you in the area of food spending. I’m loving how we are all able to interact with each other in the comments and encourage each other as we look at sources for real, whole foods to feed our families.

One tiny concern I have and would like to address, is that sometimes I feel like we can look at what others spend on groceries for the month and either feel like a failure because “there’s no way I could keep my grocery budget that low” or feel like someone else is overspending because “wow, what in the world  is she buying with all that money each month?”

Neither kind of comparison is okay.

We’re all in different circumstances. We all live in different places. We all have different food sources. We all have different dietary needs. We all have different income levels. We all have different sized gardening spaces (or a lack thereof). We all have different sized kitchens and different storage situations. We all have a lot of laundry to do – oh wait…that has nothing to do with grocery budgets. Well, we don’t get to compare height of laundry piles either.

I was hesitant to post about our family’s grocery budget for several reasons, but mainly because I really didn’t want anyone to see what we spent on mostly organic, whole foods and feel like they weren’t doing a good enough job of keeping their costs down if they spend more than we spend each month.

And on the flip side, I occasionally receive comments or emails from people who can’t believe we actually spend $500/month on food because $500/month seems frivolous and outrageous and all of the food we eat just seems too high priced.

My intent is not to have anyone compare how much they spend each month with what our family spends or with what any family spends.  And please don’t be critical of me or of anyone if we happen to spend more than you spend on groceries. 

What I did intend is for us all to be challenged about what we spend and about what we’re eating and about where we get our food. I want us all to use this blog as a forum for sharing with each other and helping each other. I have no idea what the great food sources are in any place but my little neck of the woods, which is why it’s so fun to see you all sharing with each other and offering food source suggestions when you “meet” someone who lives close to you. THANK YOU for doing that for each other.

But please let’s nobody look at anybody’s food budget number and feel icky. (That may be one of the most poorly worded sentences I’ve ever wrote.)  (Okay, no…that one was.)

And also, my laundry pile is shrinking as we speak, but tomorrow it will be back up again and I’ll be right back where I started. What does your laundry pile look like? Oh wait…I said we WEREN’T going to compare laundry height. Never mind.

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Our Real Food Grocery Budget 2011

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azurenov092sm

I’m trying very hard to write a post about how much our Grocery Budget is for 2011 for our family of six. Many of you are curious about how much money it takes to eat the way we do (especially with four growing boys) and I’d really love to be able to share.

My problem with giving you a “We spend $X on our groceries each month” statement is that I don’t feel like any number I come up with will be accurate. I’d say we probably spend an average of about $500/month for our family’s food needs. But some months I spend $400 on meat alone…other months I don’t buy any meat at all…sometimes my Azure Standard co-op order is really huge…other months I barely buy anything.

I rarely shop at a grocery store, so I hardly ever have a store receipt to guide me on our food budget keeping. We get milk and cream from one farmer, eggs from our friend, chicken and beef from a farm, venison from hunters, lamb from a teenager raising lambs, raw honey from a local bee keeper, maple syrup once a year at the farmer’s market, bulk wheat once a year from a big bulk order a friend organizes. We get sweet corn in a huge batch once during the summer and put it up in the freezer.

And so, our grocery spending each month depends on what we need and when we need it. (We are blessed to have extra freezers and storage space to support our bulk purchases.)  If I were to buy what I need each month, then look at the budget and say, “Ooh goody…we have an extra $105 in our grocery budget that I haven’t spent yet…now I have money to splurge on extras like pizza and juice!” then I wouldn’t have enough the following month when we’re out of ground beef.

I don’t spend money just because I happen to have surplus in our monthly budget.  I spend the money I need to spend at the time I need to spend it and that’s it. Sometimes I go over budget, sometimes I’m way under…it all averages out.

Does that make any sense at all?

In addition, we tend to feed a lot of company each month. We LOVE having people over for meals and do this regularly. The money for this sometimes comes out of our “Giving” budget instead of out of our regular “Food” budget, but it’s all food so it’s hard to keep track of separately.

So…this is why I’m having a hard time sharing what our grocery budget looks like. I apologize for being complicated. I actually feel like the way we do things is simple, because we just spend the money for the food we need when we need it. It’s fun and it’s delicious and I love knowing where our food is coming from. But it doesn’t look very pretty on paper…or rather on screen.

As best as I could I broke down our food budget for each month with a rough guess of how much I spend on average for our groceries:

  • Raw Whole Milk and Cream:  3 gallons of milk at $4.00/gallon + 1 pint of cream at $3.00/pint each week =$15/week; $60/month
  • Free Range Eggs:  4 dozen a week at $2.50/dozen= $10.00/week; $40.00/month
  • Chicken, Beef, Lamb and Venison:  $150/month
  • Azure Standard order:  $150/month
  • Grocery Store/Walmart/Farmer’s Market (summertime):  $75/month
  • Bulk Wheat  $210/year = $17.50/month
  • Amazon Groceries:  Free with Swagbucks (more about this tomorrow)
  • Garden Produce:  Lots of hard work and sweat

We grow and preserve all of our tomato products, green beans and many other vegetables from our garden each year. We almost always have a chance to pick (for free) all the strawberries and raspberries and peaches and apples and pears and cherries we can get our hands on. We work very hard in the fall to can and freeze enough of these items to last us the entire year. This food is “free” but labor intensive. That’s okay, we get a big kick out of having dirty fingernails.

So, now that I’ve given you all of this information…I’d love for you to tell a little bit about what your food budget looks like if you care to share. Do you spend a certain amount on groceries each month, or do you just buy what you need as you need it? Do you feel like you should cut your grocery bill…or do you feel like you are buying high quality food at a good price?

Be sure to hop on over and read this too: No Grocery Budget Comparing Allowed

Tomorrow, I plan to address several questions I’ve received about eating Real Food on a very limited income. How can you eat a healthy diet when you barely have enough money for groceries?

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Homeschool Curriculum and Unhealthy Soccer Snacks! Podcast #2

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It’s podcast time again! Matt and I are still working out some of the kinks, but overall I think we’re getting things figured out. We WILL be asking to boys to “keep it down” in the next room as we record future podcasts. You may or may not hear a little rough housing in the background.  And a bird might chirp here and there. My children I can control (usually)…birds? Not so much.

On a completely different note, and don’t ask me why I feel the need to share this with you, but ever since I lost my mom to ALS six years ago…there have been random moments when I sing or speak that I am able to HEAR her voice through mine. I think the older I get, the more I sound like her. I am her daughter after all. Occasionally at church I’ll be singing away and suddenly notice…WOW, that sounded just like Mom! And then I melt into a puddle right there in the pew because “hearing her voice” makes me miss her so much more.

That’s what happened when I listened to myself at the beginning of this podcast. Not the whole thing…just when I open with the word “Hello!” It completely took me by surprise and I immediately began weeping all over the computer right there in my headset. Whew…I was not expecting that. It’s amazing how the pain fades, yet the tears and yearning are always there. Perhaps God has given me a gift today in being able to “hear” what my mom’s voice sounded like. Yes, it is amazing really.

Thanks for letting me share that. You all are really, really great and I appreciate all of you so much. {She says, as she pauses to blow her nose again. Man, I’m weepy today.}

I really am okay.  :)  {deep breath}  In today’s podcast, I address the question of which curriculum I recommend and how in the world to keep curriculum affordable!! Also, I talk about how to handle it when our kids are handed sugary, food coloring filled snacks after events such as little league games. Isn’t that counter productive to the exercise they just participated in to keep them healthy?!

Sit back and relax…or get some dishes done while you listen. (Actually if you’d like to get some of my dishes done while I sit back and relax and we can listen together…that would be great!)

Heavenly Homemakers Podcast Two

Links refered to during the podcast:

Thanks for taking the time to read and listen to the podcast!

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Local Food is THE Best!

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I love this time of year best!! All winter long I have lived without sunshine and fresh, local produce. Parden the whine, but I neeeeed the sun. I neeeed a fresh tomato. That’s all there is to it.

This week, our local farmer’s market had its opening night! Selection is limited at this point, because the growing season in Nebraska is just beginning. But lookie what I got…

farmers_marketCost for everything…$7. 
Value to me right now to fulfill my desparate need to eat fresh food…priceless.

Right out of our garden (for free), we’re enjoying all kinds of salads! 

lettuce

Joy of joys…my friends with a huge strawberry patch 
invited me over for some strawberry picking fun!!!! 

strawberriesOh yes…I did have fun.

I then proceeded to trade my friend some strawberries for some fresh eggs. What a deal!

eggs

And well…while he isn’t produce or eggs…this little fella does happen to be locally grown too. After our travels over the weekend and a busy day playing hard in the sun yesterday, he just laid down on the floor and fell asleep. On the floor.  Now that’s one tired kid.

malachi_asleep_sm

Great food…cute kids. Isn’t summertime the best?

Have you scored any great deals on local food lately? 
What’s in season where you live?

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How to Store Bulk Grain

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Remember that 500 pound order of hard white wheat I ordered and brought home a few weeks ago? (Yeah, like you could forget.)

bagsofwheatsm

You may be happy to know that I’m down to only 447 (give or take) pounds of wheat now. And you were worried that I wouldn’t use it all up quickly…

Anyway, many of you asked how I would store all my bags of grain…and several of you suggested that I “critter proof” it. Yes. Very, very good advice. If it’s one thing I can count on having at my house…it’s critters. {shudder}  Although I don’t think snakes or birds should care too much about my wheat…we do see our fair share of bugs and the occasional mouse. Eeeww.  I do NOT want mice getting into my big stash of wheat. That would just be maddening.

And so, ever since I brought home all the wheat in February…I’ve been on a quest for big huge buckets for my grain storage. I needed some with lids that seal very well (obviously). The fabulous buckets with gamma seal lids I found online are pricey! Great quality, no doubt…but I needed around 20 buckets. I could have spent at least $80 for what I needed, and that was JUST the lid…not the bucket! Ouch.

Instead, I began asking around at my local grocery stores. Did you know that the frosting used in a bakery often comes in big five gallon buckets?! Yes indeed. That’s a lot of frosting! Did you know that most bakeries go through several of these big five gallon buckets in a month? Yes indeed. That’s a lot of frosting! And did you know that bakeries generally don’t want to keep their empty buckets after they’ve used the frosting out of them? Yes indeed. That’s a lot of empty, unwanted buckets.

One store asked me to “fork over” an entire dollar per bucket with lid that I took from them. Big buckets with lids for a dollar each? Okeedokee!

The other store practically threw their buckets with lids into my cart and wouldn’t let me pay one penny for them. They were almost giddy about the fact that I was so happy to take the buckets off of their hands. For free. Yes indeed.

And so…long story longer…I came away from my grocery store bakery departments with 20 buckets with lids for a total of $6.00. Yes, that was SIX dollars. Total. 

wheat_bucket_sm

I washed and dried the buckets thoroughly, then got busy scooping all of the wheat into them. I found that it took two – five gallon buckets for each 50 pound bag of wheat. 

I now have a big stash of white frosting buckets full of hard white wheat just waiting to be turned into bread, tortillas, muffins, pancakes, cakes, pies, cookies, pretzels, donuts, buns, bagels…the possibilities are endless!

And the critters? They can go pick on someone their own size. 

Huh. I’m suddenly remembering another time I bravely and fearlessly used big buckets to defend myself from attack. Wow. Who knew buckets such as these would be such a helpful aid for a wimpy woman such as I. Between big buckets and cottage cheese containers…I’d say I am well protected. What do you think?

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