Oh, leave us alone and let us eat

The Deputy Headmistress posted a response to this article, "The Joy of Cooking?", which is an academic-style paper with this as its abstract:

"Sociologists Sarah Bowen, Sinikka Elliott, and Joslyn Brenton offer a critique of the increasingly prevalent message that reforming the food system necessarily entails a return to the kitchen. They argue that time pressures, tradeoffs to save money, and the burden of pleasing others make it difficult for mothers to enact the idealized vision of home-cooked meals advocated by foodies and public health officials."

The DHM made several comments ("Aliens in the Kitchen") based on the body of the article, but I could stop right there with the abstract. I don't cook for either the foodies or the public health officials, any more than I homeschool for the magazine publishers or the school board. My inspiration these days is mostly my own inclination and imagination, combined with what we are able to buy in an increasingly expensive food market, and my motivation is my family.

And yes, besides living on a limited income (for anyone who doesn't know, my husband has been self-employed for two years and we were living on one rather low salary for years before that), I have cooked and continue to cook for picky eating, food intolerances, adolescent meal-skipping, and medically-required diet adjustments.  Not to mention a budding vegetarian and some vegan extended family members. Let me put it this way: as one of the main family cooks and grocery shoppers,  I have my own set of challenges; you probably have yours.  I meet mine as best I can, and I limit myself to occasional gripes when prices go too high or something I sweated over turns up the family noses.

Big deal. That's how you cook for a family.  We have food in the fridge and the freezer and the cupboard.  All the food groups are there.  It's more than enough to keep us going.

And it's only when I start listening to the "foodies" as the authors call them, or to the so-called public health experts, that I get out of whack.  Those public health experts, would those be the ones who want to ban not only peanuts (I'm okay with that) but dairy and other so-called problematic foods from the school system? Leave us alone and let us enjoy our occasional quart of chocolate milk.

As far as preparation goes, North Americans have never had it easier. Low budget or not. See the little casserole dish above? Can you identify the contents?  I bet you can't.  That's butternut squash "butter," like pumpkin butter or apple butter.  I made it last night with a containerful of leftover squash, mixed with some honey and spices. You put it in a pot on the stove or in your slow cooker, and cook it on low for awhile, then mash or puree it to your liking.  What did I really have to do?  I pulled the cooked squash out of the fridge and put it in a pot. (I didn't even have to grow the squash, although I know people who do.)  I squished the honey out of a plastic container.  I stuck a teaspoon into the cinnamon jar and the ginger.  How hard is that?  Not exactly a burden.

And if I didn't want to make squash butter myself, I could have made the choice to go to the store and buy something else to put on my bagel.

But it's only when researchers make what we eat too complicated that we suddenly think we have a problem.  It's not about enacting anybody's idealized vision, it's just about eating.

Related posts:
Keep Your Nose Out of My Lunch Bag
This Doesn't Tug My Heartstrings
I'm Not an Anomaly, I Just Make Dinner
On Not Throwing Out Food, or, Let's Rustle Up Some Grub

What's for supper? Really cleaning out the fridge

(Groceries tomorrow)

4 bone-in chicken breasts, cooked in the slow cooker with sauerkraut, Thousand Island dressing, and leftover carrots--it tasted like roast chicken
Mashed potatoes
Leftover bean-pepper salad
Tightwad Gazette Cuban bread (a homemaking lesson from this morning)
Applesauce

Dessert: choice of pears cooked in apple juice (with yogurt or milk), canned pineapple, bran muffins, pumpkin cake  (I had a can to use up)

When the fridge is empty...or full...(What's for supper?)

The week after New Year's is sometimes a strange one, grocery-wise. As Cardamom Addict pointed out, you may be using up the last of unusual holiday ingredients; in our case, we're also short on/out of a few things. Groceries tomorrow.

So what was in the fridge/freezer/cupboard for supper?

Well, there was quiche, left over from last night. But I was also thawing a package of ground chicken. My plan was just to cook it with a can of no-salt tomato sauce, and serve it over spaghetti. Easy if not inspired. But there wasn't anything extra to put into meat sauce--no mushrooms or peppers. So what about some kind of a white sauce? There was half-and-half cream, the last bought-on-sale grated Romano cheese, sour cream, mixed herbs that I had put together for a food gift (what was left afterwards), Scoobi-doo pasta, frozen peas...all of that went together in a skillet dish loosely based on Chicken Alfredo. It didn't look as fancy as Chicken Alfredo, but it tasted good. It could have maybe used a stronger dose of the herbs, but I was being cautious. Mr. Fixit added hot sauce to his.

And there was a head of iceberg lettuce, bought for economy, not for taste. The middle of the head was too yellow to eat, but the outside was fine. There were half a dozen carrots rolling around the crisper; I sliced one thin for salad and made carrot sticks out of the rest. To the lettuce and carrots I added the last of a bunch of celery, and a sprinkle of sunflower seeds. I also opened a can of no-salt chick peas and put them on the table for them that wanted.

There was a rare can of refrigerated crescent rolls, bought last week when the supermarket had them for 99 cents. Ponytails put those together.

I wanted to make cookies today, but we are out of butter and close to the end of the margarine, so it had to be an oil-based recipe. So I mixed up a batch of Sesame Cookies, made without the raisins but with chopped candied ginger added instead. (I used the end of a box of raw sugar too.)

There was some leftover gingerbread cake. And canned peaches if anyone had wanted them, but we were all full enough.

Sometimes you feel like you're starting with nothing. But you end up with something...and leftovers as well.

Life outside of homeschool posts: thinking dinner as you cook

Dewey's Treehouse has always been somewhat eclectic--we go through seasons of posting mostly frugal stuff or food stuff, and other times when we're more about homeschooling or something else. If you're not into reviews or Charlotte Mason, thanks for your patience.

Yesterday we got home from an errand at shortly after four; I had an hour to get dinner on the table and I wasn't sure yet what I was going to do with the pound of ground chicken that I had left thawing in the fridge. I started it browning while I preheated the oven and mixed up a large pan of brownies, since we didn't have even one cookie or anything like that in the house (well, there was some Jell-O in the fridge, that I'd made up from the other package I bought for the disastrous Gummy Worms experiments). I also cut up some sweet potatoes and put them in a casserole, sprinkled them with pepper, drizzled them with olive oil, and added water to the bottom of the pan; they went in with the brownies. (I should have cut them even smaller because they were still a bit hard at the end; I had to finish them quickly in the microwave.)

When the chicken was pretty much cooked, I added part frozen green beans, one chopped-up cauliflower, and this combination of sauce ingredients: 1/4 cup white salad dressing (what we use instead of mayonnaise), 1/2 cup of cottage cheese (because the recipe I was thinking of calls for sour cream or yogurt and I didn't have either), a bit of garlic powder, and a teaspoonful of chicken bouillon powder. I put the sauce stuff on top of the vegetables, and it didn't look like much, but I was figuring there would be some liquid from the chicken and the frozen beans. In the end I did add a bit of milk: not enough to be soupy, just enough to keep it moist. I just let this cook for awhile on the stovetop until the cauliflower was cooked and it smelled done. I also added in the measly bit of cheddar cheese we had in the fridge. (We are not starving, we just need some groceries.)

And I cooked a potful of Basmati rice.

So: Cheesy Chicken Cauliflower Un-Casserole; baked sweet potatoes; rice; brownies; and the remains of the Jell-O. That was dinner, and the Squirrel family approved it.

Food Salvage (What's in the cupboard?)

I've been trying hard to use up some bits and pieces in the cupboard and the fridge, and work with what we had since we didn't do a full grocery trip last weekend. I cooked up a couple of bags of dried beans and froze them. I froze some yogurt in ice cube trays so that I'd have it for starter. I made a batch of Brannies (a brownie recipe including bran cereal), which are much better than they sound. I made extra loaves of pumpkin bread and froze them.

This morning I made Apple Raisin Baked 10-Grain Cereal, but without the apples, raisins, or nuts. Just one of those things I bought that never seemed to get used the ordinary way--but I did like the baked version. I let it sit in the fridge overnight in a bowl, poured it into a 9 x 13 pan this morning and baked it for half an hour. The recipe recommends an 8 inch pan and calls for baking it for 50 minutes, but I preferred it being a little flatter and getting done sooner.

Last night we had farmer's sausage baked on a bit of sauerkraut (add half a cup of water, bake for about an hour and a half depending on how frozen it is), with a can of no-salt green beans stirred in at the end, and served with baked potatoes. Tonight's dinner is a casserole made up of black beans (from the freezer), chopped celery (the end of the bunch), sliced sausage, a couple of sliced leftover potatoes, and a can of tomato paste-plus-milk poured on top. The tomato part is optional; broth would have given it a different taste. There are cheese perogies in the freezer, so I'll cook those as well; but if I hadn't had those, I would have cooked rice to have with it. And I'll cut up the last of the carrots and have those raw.

Dessert could have been a cranberry crisp, since I had a can of whole-berry cranberry sauce and enough oatmeal and other things to make a quick topping. However, I know that the people who will be eating it aren't always as fond of warm cranberries as I am, so I decided on something different. I combined oatmeal cookie crumbs, oatmeal and oil to make crumbles, and layered those in a bowl with the cranberry sauce (mixed with homemade raspberry jam) and the frozen yogurt cubes. Like a family-size parfait, right? The two important parts of this kind of dessert are putting in something you can see through--it's much prettier that way--and letting the cubes thaw enough to eat but still keep things chilled. I made the dessert after lunch and put it in the fridge, but I'll probably move it back to the counter for the last while before dinner: don't want anybody crunching on yogurt ice cubes.

And tonight Mr. Fixit will be stopping at the grocery store to pick up more Squirrel Feed.

You use what you have (meditations on what's in the fridge)

One essential element of being frugal is that you use what you have, the best that you can. Other people have said this over and over too--Amy Dacyczyn said that she didn't want to print her recipe for pumpkin-blueberry muffins because those things were cheap/free for her but not necessarily for other people. (And yet people are still after her to write a cookbook.)

And that's one reason it's difficult for me to plan menus ahead of time, because the leftovers from pre-planned dinners have to get accounted for too. Coffeemamma just posted a very sensible week's plan and notes that it's based on what's available to her this time of year. We are in that same kind of waiting-for-the-fresh-stuff place right now.

I find the type of groceries we have really varies, depending on where we've been shopping. Last weekend the weather was bad, Mr. Fixit wasn't feeling well, so we were limited to a Giant Tiger trip plus a stop at Bulk Barn. I wasn't about to pay $2.89 for celery at Giant Tiger (although I've noticed that it's expensive at other stores right now too), and for the rest of our vegetables I had to settle for frozen peas, a can of mushrooms, and a head of iceberg lettuce. (I already had carrots and onions.) I knew we'd stock up better later on, but that was what we had to work with for at least a couple of days. Anyway, all that is to say that we had a few a-la-can dinners this week, which isn't necessarily a problem--it's just that sometimes what you have is fresh, sometimes it's frozen, sometimes it's packages, and you have to plan your meals on your feet, so to speak. (Remember my food-box menu plan? In a similar vein, I like what the new Hillbilly Housewife is doing with the Angel Food Menus, based on what's being distributed through another food box plan.) One night we had Giant Tiger's frozen cabbage rolls, plus a package of wieners that I put, frozen, into the oven with a bit of barbecue sauce over top; later I added a can of baked beans. Last night we had chicken spaghetti, with a salad made out of the iceberg lettuce, grated carrot, and sunflower seeds.

And sometimes you just do what makes sense. I've had a bunch of things to do today plus I have a meeting tonight and I don't want to leave a lot of pots and pans. (The Treehouse doesn't have a dishwasher.) We have ground turkey and I was going to make turkey loaf and maybe have mashed potatoes and vegetables with it...then I thought of the loaf of bread that just came out of the breadmaker, and the homemade cream-soup-mix in the cupboard, and the bag of frozen Japanese-style vegetables we bought last night (we did go on another grocery trip--worth a post in itself), and I thought--Hot Turkey-Vegetable Sandwiches. Or Turkey a la King on fresh bread, or whatever you want to call it. It's not a meal I'd make all the time, it's just what works today. (I also had a gi-nor-mous sweet potato from last night's trip, and I cut that up (so it wouldn't take forever to bake) and put it in a pan in the toaster oven.

That's not exactly a leftover story, but leftover-using-up works the same way. Last night's dessert was a what-do-we-have story: plain yogurt (frozen in cubes but mostly thawed by dessert time), one small blueberry yogurt cup, some frozen blueberries and mixed berries (leftovers of each), and graham crackers. Recipe: break up the graham crackers and layer them in a glass bowl with the yogurt and fruit. Let sit until defrosted but not entirely mushy. Call it trifle.

I could have skipped dessert for tonight, but I had some crushed pineapple getting forgotten in the fridge, and part of an orange that nobody finished at lunch. I cut up two bananas, spread the fruit all out in a small pan, and stuck it in the freezer. At dessert time we'll run it through the food processor--instant sherbet.

(Well, I guess that does leave a few dishes. But you get the point.)