With the summer here, light and simple meals are once again on the menu!
Sunday – breakfast – rice and milk, cherries; snack- watermelon chunks; dinner – chicken rolls ups, roasted red potatoes, eggplant curry
Monday – b- pumpkin pudding, kefir; s – celery and peanut butter; d – succotash, tri color pepper salad
Tuesday – breakfast tacos (beans, vegetables, cheese); s – green popcorn; d – sauerkraut bean soup (will use some of the curried carrot sauerkraut)
Wednesday – b – muesli, milk, fruit; s – celery and peanut butter; d – chicken tacos
Thursday – b – coconut flour pancakes, homemade strawberry preserves ; s – sauerkraut bean soup or cheese and nuts; d – CORN (clean out refrigerator night)
After seeing how the last couple of weeks I didn’t make a lot of the meals that I planned, I realized I need to adapt how I’m making menus for the summer. So I’m doing two things this week – cooking extra of each dinner meal so there’s something filling for the next day if anyone wants it at around lunch time, but planning snacks instead of lunches. Because our summer schedule is more relaxed than during the year, everyone goes to sleep later and wakes up later. We end up having a late breakfast and by the time lunch rolls around, no one is interested in eating, and it makes more sense to have a snack instead of a meal late in the afternoon.
Today I’m soaking 4 pounds of walnuts, and will dehydrate them overnight. I’m also hoping to discover where 5 pounds of cheese disappeared to – my freezer is malfunctioning and forming a thick wall of ice over the foods, so it’s hard to find things that I know are there – when it’s time to take something out, I send the kids down with a hammer to chisel the ice away!
Last month I spent a big chunk of my monthly budgeted funds towards expensive bulk goods (lots of nuts, nut flours, and dried coconut), so I don’t have much left for this week to spend on fresh fruit. That’s fortunately not a big deal, since we have all of the canned fruit that I put up last summer to enjoy now – peaches, pears, apples, cherries, and blueberries. I also have some frozen blueberries and strawberries (yes, in the ice encrusted freezer :)), so there won’t be much opportunity for deprivation in the three days before I restart my monthly budget. This is one way I see the benefit of shopping and cooking the way I do – even when the money budgeted for food is finished but the month isn’t, I’m never out of food.
After I go vegetable shopping this week I’d like to make a couple more fermented vegetable recipes. I haven’t made pickles yet this summer and my kids love those. If I find some inexpensive tomatoes and peppers then I’ll make tomato pepper relish from Nourishing Traditions – that was also popular last time I made it. These supplement our dinner meals as written above, even though they aren’t noted. Fruit and milk or kefir supplement the breakfast meals.
Avivah
How do you can apples? Is it similar to pears? What’s the texture like? I always just made applesauce.
My mother and I bought 4 quarts of sour cherries and 4 flats of black raspberries when she visited me today. She was going home to make jam.
You wrote that sunday’s breakfast was rice and milk- how do you make that? Like rice pudding?
Also, most of the suppers you mentioned would not fill me or my husband, no matter how much we ate. Is your family smaller eaters?
>>How do you can apples? Is it similar to pears? What’s the texture like? I always just made applesauce.< < I canned apples the same way as pears. I did a lot as applesauce but it was easier to can pieces than to have to mash them. The texture is is like compote. I hope you get some of that jam your mother is making - there's nothing like homemade jam! >>You wrote that sunday’s breakfast was rice and milk- how do you make that? Like rice pudding?< < It's just cooked brown rice, served with cinnamon and milk, with sweetener for anyone who wants it. It's served like a cold cereal. My kids like it better than rice pudding and it's lots faster and easier, too! >>Also, most of the suppers you mentioned would not fill me or my husband, no matter how much we ate. Is your family smaller eaters?<< LOL, no, none of my kids are small eaters at all! I make large amounts and everyone takes as much as they want, but honestly, it's not quantities that fill a person but the fats. If you didn't eat fats you could eat all day long and still feel hungry no matter how many calories you took in. I cook most of our grains and stews with a rich broth as a base, roast/saute all vegetables in coconut oil, and we try to use use whole milk products. It's because of the fats in the snacks that I planned for this week (except the watermelon) that it will hold everyone over from breakfast to lunch. If I gave them plain carrot sticks they'd be eating nonstop! Also, it would probably help you to know what the ingredients in a dish are to estimate how filling it would be. So for example, pumpkin pudding for breakfast would have eggs, milk, and coconut oil; sauerkraut and bean soup is meat, beans, and sauerkraut in a stock base.
So succotash… What’s in it? I had to look it up and it said beans and corn with other vegetables… Seemed so unfilling, especially combined with tri-colored pepper salad.
In terms of making rich broths, what makes them rich? What is your frugal healthy method of making broth to use for cooking?
Like, if I am cooking a chicken and cut off the bits and pieces of fat, as well as the carcasses, would you make a broth out of the fat and carcass? I would love the book nourishing traditions, but since i don’t have a copy yet, can you tell me- are animal fats, such as shmaltz, considered bad or good for you, according to that book?
And in terms of making the food fattier to be fuller, I was having stomach issues for a while and the gastro said that too much fat on an emptier stomach was causing the stomach issues. Any suggestions how to have filling meals without all the fattiness at the beginning of the meal?
What do you eat your tacos in?
And my last two questions, kinda connected and kinda not:
Would you be able to write a list of all the handy kitchen gadgets you own that help in your food preparation and preservation?
Also, I notice that a lot of the food you eat is healthy, but not necessarily the most frugal. Like, mac and cheese would probably be cheaper to make than stuff with nuts, etc. And that soy bean oil is cheaper than coconut oil. But, for the healthy food you buy, you make sure to buy it in the cheapest way possible. So my question is this:
Are you frugal because a healthy lifestyle is important to you, and this is how you make it affordable? Or would you be just as frugal if healthy food wasnt as important to you? If you had to make a choice between frugality and health, health would come first, correct?
I would love the recipe for pimpkin pudding please!!!!
I’ll post it later today or tomorrow.
Oh, and my last question for now:
If you fill up on fats, how do you not get fat?
>>In terms of making rich broths, what makes them rich? What is your frugal healthy method of making broth to use for cooking?<<
http://vibrantmoms.com/recipes/making-chicken-soup/
>>can you tell me- are animal fats, such as shmaltz, considered bad or good for you, according to that book?<<
Good.
>>And in terms of making the food fattier to be fuller, I was having stomach issues for a while and the gastro said that too much fat on an emptier stomach was causing the stomach issues. Any suggestions how to have filling meals without all the fattiness at the beginning of the meal? <<
If you have digestive issues, coconut oil is probably the best oil for you, since it doesn’t require bile salts for digestion. Also, broth is highly nutritive and healing for the digestive system – http://vibrantmoms.com/nutrition/using-up-turkey-bones/.
I’m not a nutritional expert but it would be interesting to know what else you were eating at the time you were having this problem, as well as <em>what kind of fats </em>you were eating. Were you asked that by the gastro?
>>What do you eat your tacos in?<<
Taco shells, or whole wheat or corn tortillas.
>>If you fill up on fats, how do you not get fat?<<
You’ve got to read up on how the body processes fats and what actually leads to overweight. The conclusion would surprise you. I loved the book Good Calories, Bad Calories- it’s about 600 pages of studies and some people find it too scientific but I thought it was excellent. The other books I recommended on fats in the coconut oil post will also answer this question.
The gastro was specifically asked by me why i kept on having a stomach upset after having chicken soup, and he said that having fatty soup on an empty stomach caused my stomach to start working hard, as fat activates the intestines or something like that, and because chicken soup is fatty, he suggested not having it on an empty stomach.
Alas, the book suggestions… I’m in israel, and english books are really hard to find here, not to mention expensive.
You don’t use any soup powder when making your chicken soup, do you?
About the books – I remember that limitation all too well – libraries are what I missed most about being overseas, except from being far from family! So look at the Weston Price website that I recommended; it has lots of articles on fats.
Oh – I just thought of this – maybe you’d find it helpful to read the comments about the books on Amazon – often the comments give a lot of details about what was helpful or educational about a book.
No, no soup mix. Actually, soup mix chicken soup (what we had at home) never gave me a stomach ache, but REAL chicken soup from real chickens, at school events or camp or things like that did. Which is how we figured out that its the fat… And often now, if i eat something fatty on an empty stomach, i get in pain. Oh well.