Ever since we started our project to eat poor but not poorly, our friends have been worried about us. They want to know if we are facing desperate financial woes where it's either cut the food bill in half to make the mortgage payment or face losing the house. We have assured them that we're doing fine. The house is paid for, and we don't need to cut the food bill in half (although whose budget couldn't stand a healthy cut in expenses--who among us who turn down a $1,000 per month raise?). We're dedicated to seeing the project through the whole year, in no small part just to see if we can do it. Can we reign in our desires and our spending and be creative enough to make it all work? And can we improve our nutrition and health while doing it? At the end of the year, perhaps we will have discovered some ideas that we will carry with us. The lessons of frugality and health can only really be learned by doing.
SNAP Debit Car
Several friends have asked if we are on Food Stamps (no one seems to know the snappy new name of the program; to the over thirty crowd it will always be known as 'Food Stamps'). No, we aren't, but one in seven Americans are. Over 40 million of our fellow Americans are now part of the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program--an all time high. The old Food Stamps program used brightly colored paper bills that looked more than a little like Monopoly money. The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 replaced the paper paper coupons (and the stigma of handing them over to pay for your food) with a sleek debit card called an Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) card, thus allowing the rich and the poor alike to swipe through the checkout, no one being the wiser as to their financial status.
Anyone can apply for Food Stamps. To qualify, you must have a monthly net income below the poverty level (currently $1,838 for a family of four and $2,773 for a family of seven like ours) AND have less than $2,000 in assets. Your house doesn't count into this calculation, but just about everything (including your car) does. In order to be eligible, you pretty much have to have almost nothing. And over 40 million people have qualified and are in the program. Times are indeed tough.
Our oldest daughter Elisabeth recently proclaimed that she had become a vegetarian. Her brother instantly responded with a classic 'law of the jungle' cry: "More meat for me!"
We have toyed with vegetarianism over the years. Real vegetarianism, mind you, not just the usual junkatarian who eschews flesh in favor of ice cream, cookies, and pasta. We've toyed with veggies in their raw, steamed, brazed, and juiced forms. But mostly we've excelled at backsliding. The chef at Adobe Systems' cafe used to taunt us with his carefully crafted meat dishes. Meat is easy to pass up if you're a veg-head, so he really had to work at it. But his persistence paid off upon occasion, and he was rewarded with the throwing in of the culinary towel: "Emil, you have awakened me from my vegetarian stupor!"
So now we're partial vegetarians.
We've even got the children buffaloed into believing that a dinner without meat on the table is normal. It's certainly good for the budget. It doesn't last long though. With the exception of our lone holdout, we cave after a few meals and take the .50 caliber down to the market to hunt down some ground beef and a dead chicken or two. We make steaming hot plates of fajitas and torment Elisabeth. She's showing signs of cracking.
Mediterranean Pasta Salad
Mediterranean pasta, roasted veggies, and mystery mush
Cook 8 oz of dried farfalle according to the package instructions. Meanwhile, combine zest and juice of 1 lemon and 2 tsps olive oil in a large bowl; whisk.Add a can artichoke hearts, drained; 8 oz fresh part-skim mozzarella cheese, chopped; ½ cup cherry tomatoes , cut in half; and ¼ cup chopped bottled roasted red bell peppers; toss to combine. Place 1 cup frozen peas in a colander; drain pasta over peas. Add pasta and peas to artichoke mixture; toss. Garnish with chopped fresh parsley if desired; serve.
Roasted vegetables
Set oven to 375 degrees. Take one small eggplant, remove skin and chop up in small cubes;cut 1 large onion in half and then cut into slices; seed and quarter 1 large green pepper; slice thin 2 carrots; peel at least 6 garlic gloves; take 1-2 small zuccinis, cut them in half and slice them up like the onion. Spread all these vegetables onto a large nonstick baking sheet. Drizzle at least 2-4 tablespoons of olive oil on top and make sure to mix the oil all over the vegetables so they don’t stick to the baking sheet while cooking. Sprinkle the vegetables with some salt, pepper, and rosemary( no more than a couple of pinches of each). Roast for 20 minutes in the oven, then turn them over and roast for another 10 to 20 minutes until tender.
Being on a budget makes you creative. You start looking for ways to supplement your food supply. This week we attended a seminar that had a table heaping with food, much of which was left over. We asked permission of the staff (it's good form), and when they heard that we have a gaggle of children, they were happy to send it home with us (it's also less for them to clean up and throw away).
Catered windfalls being rare occurrence, supplementing our food supply takes on other forms. We have tried for several years running to grow a family garden--with varying degrees of success. It's a matter of finding what grows well in your area, and then being more persistent than the bugs and the weeds (and the squirrels and the birds and the deer).
So far we've had no success with blueberries. Oh, we found the right acid soil and plenty of sunshine for our row of blueberry bushes, and treated them with the fertilizer they love. And they've reciprocated by sprouting some good-looking berries. Whether they taste good or not is something we couldn't tell you, because right before they are ripe, they squirrels and birds tag-team it and decimate the whole crop in a single day. Next year we're going to imprison the bushes in mesh and then sit back and laugh at the miserable would-be thieves.
Buried Treasure
Our friend Josef assures us that that he has grown a wealth of broccoli and blackberries. Other things that
we've grown with modest success include potatoes, tomatoes, and beans. The children especially love the potatoes. "Look Daddy, 'tatoes!" they gleefully shout when we're digging the shovel into the ground and turning over the harvest. They're so impressed to find all that food waiting for us under the soil. The adults take turns turning the earth, and the children paw through each pile looking for the buried treasure, screaming with delight with each discovery. We've rarely seen them get so excited about anything.
Once our meager gardening skills are exhausted, we head to the farmers' market. For fresh, locally grown produce at a decent price, it's hard to beat a farmers' market. We've gotten to know some of the farmers, so it has become something of a social event too. We try the latest crops in season, and swap recipes for how we're going to process whatever we don't eat raw. Hat tip to our friend Laura for the idea of scooping up the bruised $4/lb tomatoes for $1/lb at the end of the market to make into sauce for pizza, pasta, etc. This stretches the food budget almost as well as bringing home the catering.
Kristie soaked dried pinto beans and made a delicious pot of home made chili in the crock pot. Upon seeing dinner simmering away,our youngest daughter said, "Mom, I want the REAL chili, the kind in the can." We pointed out that the homemade chili was the REAL kind. She still wanted the chili that comes in the can. What has happened to us when our expectation is that food comes from a can? How did we get here?
Preserving the harvest has been a concern and a goal since there were harvests. How do you keep food available year 'round when most of it only grows for a short season starting in late spring and going until early fall? Drying food has been around since beyond memory. Beef jerky, dried peppers, dried beans...Hey wait a minute, that's starting to sound like the ingredients for our dinner!
Canning food, however, is relatively young. It dates back to the early 19th century when Napoleon's quest to feed his armies led him to offer a reward to anyone who could find a better way to preserve food. Frenchman Nicolas Appert took up the challenge. He found that food could be preserved against spoilage by first sealing it in an airtight glass jar, and then heating it. Appert set up his own factory to produce and distribute his preserved foods. The French government gave him an award of 12,000 Francs. Although Appert's method clearly worked, nobody knew exactly why at the time. It wasn't until the end of the 19th century that it was found that bacteria were the cause of food spoilage, and that these were destroyed by heating.
Formerly the domain of the wealthy, food in cans is now enjoyed by all--except perhaps the wealthy. Food in cans has become cheap and easy. And since World War II, eating food out of metal cans has become ubiquitous. But by adding the layer of processing to our food, we have become that much more distant from the food itself. Our little girl thinks chili comes from a can. If you ask her what chili is made of, she'll tell you "chili," as if that is an ingredient.
"Where does chili come from," we query.
"The store."
"Where to the ingredients in chili come from?"
"I don't know. May I open another can of chili?"
Economics: Feeding our family of seven a pot of chili for dinner costs $13.65 ($1.95 per can times 7 cans). Starting with dried beans and adding spices and fresh ingredients to make our own chili runs less than $8.00 . Money wise, it's a no-brainer. In fact, this meal is a microcosm of our whole food/economy project. If we can reduce the bill for this one meal by 40 percent, and extend this throughout everything we do, we'll just about hit our goal.
The genuine article
The home made chili tastes great, and the fresh ingredients (and lack of preservatives) have got to be much better for us than chili that's been sitting in a can on a shelf for who knows how long. But the real cost of canned food may well be in the disconnect from food's origins to what we eat each day. As we work to get back to basics in our diet--removing the processing plant as middleman and using fresh whole foods to create our own meals--perhaps we will discover that real food and real economy are in fact the same thing.
The look. You know, the one that children get on their faces when they realize (perhaps not for the first time) that their parents are flippin' crazy. Call us perverse, but we kinda like it. It's nice to still be able to surprise them. When we told them about our project for a large family to live (as if) off the largesse, their initial reaction was to wonder if we were putting them on. As it dawned on them that we were for real, they started testing the limits of our proposed madness. They were already mourning over the loss of Chinese takeout and 'fun' foods. The younger children asked if we were poor because we wanted to cut down our food bill. "Why would you want to save money" they asked. That was when we knew that this project had real value.
We had obviously set the example that there were no limits when it came to buying food. We bought whatever we wanted at the grocery store, and went out wherever and whenever we wanted. We're Americans. It's our right to eat, and eat well. We're entitled. Ok, that's nonsense. No one is entitled to anything. We know that. Hard work, responsibility, blah, blah blah. We've given the speech so many times even our eyes are starting to glaze over. But evidently our strong work ethic hadn't carried over all that well as a strong food ethic. Time to work on that...
When we decided to inaugurate our year of food thrift by splurging at a restaurant (way to confuse the kids!), we called it the Last Supper. Our literal child Katharine (9 years old, future District Attorney and Judge) earnestly wanted to know "Will we be eating any more suppers, ever?" Erik is a little more world-wise and has a few more years of experience with the Parental Units. He wanted to know if this was in any way a reprise of our foray into eating raw foods. He still has macrobiotic emotional scars from when we made and dined on most of the recipes in Alicia Silverstone's book The Kind Diet. What can we say, it's a rough economy, and we're doing our part to make sure that therapists have a little job security too.
Home made muffins
In addition to getting the message across to the children that culinary consumption and economic consumption share more than just a last name, we have already seen some healthy dividends from our brief investment: They've learned that spending less on food means the money we have set aside will buy more food. The children have begun to understand the idea of a unit price (price per oz or lb) by reading the labels and doing the math, or just looking at the unit prices that have already been calculated by the store. The older children have made it a challenge to discover the lowest priced item. We reward their success with what children want most anyway: our look of approval.
Erik said that he realized that homemade meals mean healthier food. If this turns out to be the only thing they get out of our experience this year, then it's all going to be worth it.
A lot of kids grew up with Wonder Bread. It's dirt cheap (Walmart: 98 cents), but at least it has no hint of nutritional value. Nearly all of the bread at the supermarket is the same sort of nutritional wasteland. If you can find healthy bread at the store, it's gonna set you back $3-4 per loaf. This adds up when you've got at least five hungry hatchlings. I say "at least" because the neighborhood 'village' comes and goes through our house. We gave up counting long ago; we just feed whoever happens to be there at mealtime. We might be feeding someone else's kid the same day as one of our offspring is dining at some other household. It all probably works out in the end, and even if it doesn't, we're doing our part to feed the world.
Fresh and hot: it won't last long!
The upshot of it all is that we go through a minimum of a loaf of bread every day. So for economy, health, and freshness (the Europeans quite properly show disdain for the American practice of bread stored in plastic for weeks rather than baked fresh daily as it ought to be), we have begun to bake our own bread. Do this completely by hand a few times, and you'll find out the knead that prompted the invention of bread machines. After we finished over-researching (it's a thing we do), we picked out a good one: the Zojirushi BBCC-X20 Home Bakery Supreme. It's got two paddles and bakes bread that actually looks like a loaf of bread, not some alien-looking bread cylinder that defies making a normal sandwich. Baking bread in the machine is easy and economical, but there's just something about hot, freshly baked bread that causes it to disappear with a rapidity that must be seen to be believed. Oh yes, and it makes a fantastic apple cake too. What could be better--and better for you-- than freshly made whole wheat bread? Freshly ground whole wheat flour, that's what. We have a hand grinder in the basement that does double duty. For the obvious function it is second to none: it turns human power and whole wheat berries into fine flour suitable for baking. It is arguably even better for its other purpose: punishment. When the children transgress the rules of the house and civil society, there must be consequences; we don't want to raise bad citizens. Sending them to their room is ineffective at best. Sending the iPod on vacation for a day makes them wince, but it's not causing any remorse-inducing pain nor is it productive in any way (other than the fact that your child can actually hear you that day). But grinding seems to be the perfect solution.
Our household punishment usually takes the form of a stern look, a short(ish) lecture clarifying the wrong and proclaiming the right, and the finishing flourish: "Two cups." A major infraction (hitting in anger comes to mind) gets you four. And down you go, into the bowels of the house--the lonely basement where the grinder lives. It is there that our juvenile gladiators face off in physical combat with hard red winter wheat. Group offenders take turns grinding in a festive prisonyardlike exercise; solo offenders generally finish their work a whole lot faster because they are motivated by solitary confinement in a lonely basement to achieve early parole.
The end result of our efforts is a more peaceful household, children with well-developed upper arm muscles, and heaps upon heaps of freshly ground whole wheat flour. The bread we make then gives them the energy to invent new ways of exhibiting miscreant behavior. When we sense an infraction in progress, sometimes we even go so far as to taunt them: "Bring it on, short stuff: we need a couple more cups to make waffles tomorrow!"
We're lazy. We all are. The TV remote overtly reminds us of our slothfulness; if we had a remote that would work just as well with food, we'd use it. Enter the mega food processing companies and fast food chains. It's just good business to give the people what they want. Why is McDonalds (noun--death on a plate) so wildly popular? Because Mickey D's gives the people what they want: ready-to-eat jumbo doses of fat and sugar.
Food processing is about making the product appealing to the senses and shelf-life.The one ingredient foods in the produce section don't last very long, and many take a little work to make them look and taste appealing to the average person. Raw broccoli shoots, anyone? How about Chicken Broccoli Florentine? Now we're talking! But which will it be? Gathering all the required ingredients and then spending an hour slaving in the kitchen, or picking up a frozen package that you take home and nuke? It's hardly a fair contest.
Our own food processing plant consists of a well-stocked kitchen and a child labor force eager to make yummy food and have fun. They make messes, to be sure. And they break things. Especially our daughter Rebreaka. That girl has single-handedly taken out more glassware (and other glass items: we now know that a new windshield costs $289) than all the other children combined. But even accounting for the collateral damage, our little food processors are starting to be useful. They can crank out home-made pizza, tacos, and a variety of salads. Elisabeth has mastered the art of home made croutons atop a fantastic Caesar Salad.
With the children learning the basic tools and getting the idea that the best food processing happens at home, we are ready to discover what tasty things we can concoct from the edges of the store. We all love salad. We make a big bowl of it nearly every night for dinner. Each of us eats a whole plateful before moving on to the main course. The romaine salad with tomatoes and peppers is a standard, garnished with some small cubes of cheese. We don't do iceberg lettuce, because it's one of the 'white foods'--"The whiter the food, the sooner you're dead!" (more on this later). In the summer when fresh veggies are bursting out all over, we make a salad of sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions, with a Greek dressing. It goes fast.
Our current favorite of the salad genre is Orzo Salad. We can feed the whole family for $11.50with one large bowl. It varies according to what we have on hand, but here's the recipe for this crowd pleaser: Mediterranean Orzo Salad
1 lb orzo, dry
Mediterranean Orzo Salad
6 tbsp olive oil, divided
3/4 to 1 cup of pitted kalamata olives, each olive cut in half
3/4 to 1 cup of feta cheese, crumbled
10 basil leaves, thinly sliced
1/4 to 1/2 cup pine nuts, toasted
3 tbsp of lemon juice (fresh)
1 tsp kosher salt
1/2 tsp of pepper
Cook orzo in salted water according to package directions. Drain and place on a cookie sheet. Drizzle with 2 tbsp of olive oil, toss, spread out and let cool. Toss the olives and the rest (next 6 items) of the ingredients in a large bowl. Add cooled orzo and 2 to 4 tbsp of remaining olive oil and toss again.
