Dark Days 14 - Grocery Store Paralysis

This is my last post for the Dark Days Challenge.

I joined for two main reasons, to make more careful food choices, and to see if I liked blogging on a regular basis.  On the latter, perhaps not so much.  My ‘weekends’ are the two short days that my youngest kid is in daycare, and they tend to be filled with errands and construction projects (Crown Molding – DONE, Seed Starting Boxes – DONE, Bunny Poo Box – DONE, Mammoth Compost Bin – DONE).  I don’t want to be using power tools while distracted with “Mom, can you help … ? “

I also don’t want to be rushed to post if I don’t have a well formed point of view, and it’s really rather silly to be taking pictures of my food.  It seems like everyone and their pets are prosing on about their raw, sustainable, and whole food diets.  Now don’t get me wrong, I love reading along, dreaming the homestead dream.  It’s a great way to learn about making your own cheese or bread.  I try a few recipes, tweak them for my busy life, drop a few and keep a few.  The journey has been great.

Along the way, however, I frequently found myself at the grocery store with decision paralysis.  I would go to the store with a list, which mainly just listed “food” (helpful, huh?), and would walk up and down the aisles not finding any.  Michael Pollan has reported the same.

My youngest son is an extremely picky eater, now wanting only bagels and cream-cheese for breakfast, but I cringe when I picked up the package:

• Enriched wheat flour,
• water,
• dark raisins,
• brown sugar,
• dough conditioner (wheat flour, mono-diglycerides, guar gum, corn syrup solids, soybean oil, enzyme),
• salt,
• canola oil,
• cinnamon,
• malt syrup,
• yeast, and
• vinegar.

I’m sorry, but my recipe has only 5 ingredients (high-gluten flour, water, barley-malt syrup, yeast and salt), thank-you-very-much.  The cream-cheese was no better.  Frequently, I find myself sighing and putting things back on the shelf, because I can make it better at home.

The trade-off is time, however.  My contract on my last job ended last summer, and I am lucky enough to stay at home for a while.  I have time to putter in the garden, get flats and flats of vegetable seeds started for summer harvests and canning.  I have time to plan a week’s meals, shop once, and create stock on one night for soup two days hence.  I hate going to the store multiple times a week; such a chore with whiny kids when you’re trying to make decisions about whether or not you can buy that package of bagels.

I have time to start a new batch of sourdough bread each time I notice that we’re down to half of a loaf, and I have the energy to knead it at 10:00 at night after putting the kids down for bed, because I haven’t just spent 12 hours commuting, working for someone else, and taking care of my family.

It is a full time job to feed a family.   We ended up with convenience food when the mom went to work (whether it was Rosie the Riveter, Working Girl, or newly-divorced-mom).  Now?  It takes two working parents to support a family.  Aren’t we lucky.

And just this morning, my youngest begged for whipped cream in a can.  What?  When I actually had homemade whipped cream, left over from last week’s tea party?  Who can resist this morning’s breakfast?

Crepes with Nutella (for the kids) or Lemon-Marmalade (for me) and Whipped Cream.

Simple Breakfast Crepes

• 1 1/2 cups AP flour (Ours is from Stone Buhr in Eastern Washington)
• 1 1/2 cups whey (left over from my first attempt at making cheese.  Milk from Twin Brook Creamery in  Lynden, WA)
• 1 T sugar
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 eggs (backyard chickens)
• Homemade whipped cream (cream from Smith Brothers Farms dairy, powdered sugar)
• Lemon Marmalade (recipe below)

Whisk the flour, sugar and salt with the whey and eggs.  Pour into small buttered frying pan and cook both sides.  Spread with marmalade or nutella and roll up.  Yum.

My marmalade was adapted from Melissa Kronenthal’s mandarine marmellata:

• 1 lb meyer lemons (OK, not local, but very seasonal, so in the spirit of putting things up …)
• 1 cup sugar

Zest the lemons and set aside.  Peel and pith the lemons, saving the juice and pulp.  Whir the pulp in a food processor, then put into saucepan with sugar, reserved lemon zest and remaining juice.  Cook for 20-25 minutes, taking care it doesn’t burn.  Pour into jars (1 lb makes about 1.5 cups … 2.5 lbs makes about 4 cups), and process in a hot-water bath for 20 minutes.

My final thoughts on this is that it’s easy to get discouraged by what you find at the grocery store, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the tasks to get a wholesome meal on the table.  But it’s doable in small steps.  Map out a weekly task list so you know when you’re making stock, or canning jam, or baking bread.  Put an extra loaf in the freezer.  Can small batches of tomato sauce for pizza-night or spaghetti-night.   And remember that pancakes freeze well, so if you can’t make a deluxe meal in a hurry, at least you can pop a pancake into the toaster and fill it with some nut-butter and jam, as you rush out the door.

Hang in there, keep reading blogs, try a new recipe each week, or each month.  Stock your freezer and free yourself from grocery-store paralysis.

{ part of Dark Days Challenge at Not Dabbling in Normal }

{ part of Simple Lives Thursday at Sustainable Eats and A Little Bit of Spain in Iowa }

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