I’ve always been a cook from scratch kind of girl. I grew up in South America where convenience food was not available. We were excited to get a box of cornflakes several times a year as a “treat”. My mom made just about everything from scratch, so I learned to cook this way. Cakes and brownies never came from a box, cookies never came from a bag, doughnuts were made the night before and raised overnight (and were so delicious), and pizza came from our own oven. I loved oatmeal made from oats in a big tin, never the instant single serve packs, they are too sweet and taste kind of raw to me when I had them. All of our birthday cakes were homemade and decorated lovingly by my mom (and they were AWESOME!).
My mom was also an adventurous cook, she kind of had to be. The grocery store was filled with tropical produce like yucca, plantains, mangoes and guanabanas. She was also fearless, not batting a eye when we had to make paella for a group of 20 coming for a meeting. When someone would bring us a freshly caught 20 lb catfish, my mom would cut it up, send some to the neighbors and cook up the rest. As a result of this, I never was a convenience/processed food kind of a person. This isn’t to say we never bought chips and candy, we ate our share of Pringles and drank a serious amount of Coke. We had a huge garden whenever we were living in the United States growing tons of veggie and spending all summer canning & freezing for winter eating. My dad’s always been a big hunter, so our freezer was always full of venison and other wild game. Part of the reason my parents did is because they couldn’t afford to buy processed food. It was much cheaper to grow your own and make things from scratch.
Mr Chiots on the other hand grew up with in a household where nothing was made from scratch. He ate toaster pastries for breakfast, mac n cheese for lunch, and pizza from the delivery guy for dinner and a vegetable rarely crossed his plate. He had a bit of a hard time switching to the made from scratch healthy lifestyle when we got married. We had an adjustment period, merging our two tastes. For a few years we ate a mix of processed food and from scratch (and from scratch made from processed ingredients). Every year we would delete a few more processed foods from his palate. Now he proudly says he can’t handle the taste of processed foods because they taste “chemically”, we were even able to nix the Heinz ketchup from our pantry (except a bottle of organic kept for visitors), which was the last stronghold for him.
In the past few years we’ve been focusing on taking our diet to the next level. We switched to a mostly organic, mostly produced at home or locally food chain. We have successfully deleted just about everything made in a factory from our diets. We try to buy things in their least processed forms and use those to cook at home. We now buy wheat berries, grind them and use sourdough starter for our bread. We make ketchup and various chutneys, sauces and vinaigrettes at home. Our butter is made weekly from raw milk cream we get at a local farm. I no longer go the grocery store, I go to the farm each week for milk, eggs, chicken, I hit the farmer’s market several times a month, the garden out back produces veggies in the spring/summer/fall, the pantry is chocked full of tomatoes, fruit and pickles for the winter, I use the co-op for bulk grains, sugar and other staples, and occasionally the internet, the local health food store or a Whole Foods for items like fresh ginger and coffee which I can’t purchase locally or grow myself. We even tap our maple trees and keep bees.
You may wonder what exactly I’m going to do for the Real Food Challenge since we already eat a mostly unprocessed diet (I know what you’re thinking, these people make their own maple syrup & keep bees, what more could they do?). I’ve been trying to transition to a more seasonal diet for the past couple years, and haven’t been doing super well so I figured this would be a great chance to really work on it. The main reason I want to try to eat more seasonally is to reduce the amount of processing on our food even more. I’m sure fresh winter greens are much healthy than the home canned green beans from my pantry. Not only will our diets be healthier if we can eat more seasonally, but I’ll save tons of time and energy in the summer by not doing a lot of canning.
Instead of my winter diet being basically the same as our summer diet, I’d really love to get to a point where our diet is different each season. Because we’re still in winter here in Northeastern Ohio, it looks like we’ll be eating more bitter winter greens (which we’re not super fond of yet) and those veggies that store well without processing, like squash (which we’re also not super fond of). I think the big challenge for us during the month of March will be trying to find ways to prepare foods we don’t particularly like. The good thing is that it includes onions, potatoes, mushrooms and other things we really love!
I’ll be blogging about our challenges at learning to love new foods (they say you have to eat something 10 times before you can rule it out as a dislike). I’ll also be posting about taking it to the next level. For those of you that eat a fairly homemade lifestyle already, I’ll be talking about switching to the least processed options of foods you already eat. Perhaps switching out your morning oatmeal or granola with some soaked oat groats or barley. I’ll talk about using wild yeast (sourdough) instead of quick yeast in breads and pancakes. I’ll talk about finding places to buy the least processed options of staples like wheat berries, nuts, seeds and spices. I’ll also talk about learning cooking from scratch without spending all your time in the kitchen!
How seasonal is your diet?
I look forward to what you have to share. We’ve been trying to make the transistion to a more seasonal diet but need to adjust our tastebuds as well.
Those cakes are fabulous! You were one lucky kid to have been able to sample such a variety of different foods!
I think we’ve always leaned towards seasonal eating. I grew up the child of people who’d grown up farmers and who’s extended family still farmed (sadly, none do now). We always had a big garden and helped with canning and freezing. We always got a half of beef from my grandfather’s herd. So my instincts lean toward garden produce in the spring/summer/fall, transitioning to storage veggies in the fall/winter (potatoes, squash, more meats). So that’s how I feed my family – my recipes, twice a year, are gone through to switch the “summer” foods for the “winter” foods or vice versa. Now that I’m creating our garden, I’m trying to incorporate seasonal changes in that, too (a winter gardening book is on it’s way to me right now!). I’m also baking all our bread, so I’d love to learn how to do that without using store-bought yeast!
I really look forward to these posts, we live a homemade life and make most of our food from scratch, but are looking to rely on the store for even less. We are making gradual changes to eat more locally. We have a lot available here, however no fresh veggies or fruit in the winter is a challenge we have not met yet.
-Brenda
Can’t wait to see how you deal with the local, seasonal food issue. (If it’s local for you it’s not too far away for me…) We are constantly looking for ways to like what we can grow or buy locally and ways to produce what we like. It’s one of the difficulties imposed on us by the current system. Much has been lost.
We began transitioning to a more seasonal way of eating a few years ago, when we bought our own home and turned the front and side yard into growing spaces and raised beds. I bake all of our bread from sourdough. The shift to seasonal eating has been in stages. Inspired in part by our garden, our Winter CSA and learning how to better store root crops and winter greens, etc.
It took some active experimenting with various recipes to find our favorite ways to eat kale and chard, what to do with beets, parsnips and turnips (all produce that we avoided in the past). They are now meals we look forward to! We also took a hard look at food miles and nutrition and decided to NOT buy out-of-season, non-local fruit anymore. It was a bit of a hardship at first but, we no longer eat bananas, or citrus since they do not grow in our region. We eat dried and alternately preserved fruit in winter along with our store of apples from the Fall. We absolutely can’t wait for the first strawberries and fresh asparagus in the Spring, and all the bounty to follow, but we know we’re healthier and getting happier for it.
A friend of mine transitioned her family by figuring out what percentage of their grocery money was going to out-of-season and long-distance produce. Then over time, she began cutting that number. The family became more connected with the value of what grew locally and more innovative with preparation.
We also look at our meat consumption as seasonal. Our local chicken supply is only available in Summer, we can get a share of a local pig in late Fall and local lamb in early Spring and Summer. So, we’ve become more adept at planning, storing and appreciating what is in season while we have it. (Our chest freezer is only so big!)
Now we need to hone our skills at preservation so that we’ll have more of our own produce and sweet fruits to turn to next Winter.
I’m looking forward to reading more about your journey!
My gardening goal for this year is to garden 12 months…I can never imagine giving up my canned tomatoes but I really have no excuse where I live not to use my garden to its full potential.
I can’t wait to see how you do eating seasonally…I hope to be inspired! Kim
What a wonderful post, we had a similar experience except it was both of us that slowly transitioned from junk food to “real” food. I’m looking forward to reading more about your seasonal diet endeavors. Thank you for sharing this with all of us.:)
Wow, I have only dreamed of my husband giving up Heinz ketchup, and the thought has never crossed his mind at all. He is getting more on board the ship that already sailed for me in regards to processed food, but thank you for giving me hope!
Our CSA is really helpful in staying seasonal, but we also moved from the frigid northland to balmy Southern California, so we cheated. I have become much more vigilant about buying LOCAL produce because in SoCal there is NO EXCUSE not to do so.
I can’t remember if you mentioned this in an earlier post — have you considered growing your own sprouts for fresh greens?
Mr Chiots was convinced on the ketchup last year when I made the sweet & sour sauce from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and a few chutneys. He started loving them so much on burgers and then announced one day it was way better than Heinz. After that I made some homemade ketchup: http://chiotsrun.com/2009/10/20/homemade-ketchup/
We both started to love this much better than the bottled stuff. Now I kind of think the bottled stuff is bland and has a weird texture, or I should say no texture.
I have considered sprouts. I bought some seeds at the health food store a few week ago and plan on working that into my Real Food Challenge.
I live at about 4000 feet, and the night temperatures are almost always below freezing so there is no winter harvest to consume around here. I had been planning on canning the summer stuff so I could still eat stuff I got locally. Right now I’m still eating stuff trucked in from Washington and California. Heck I just got my compost pile turned and some garden area tilled on Sunday afternoon only for it to snow 5″ or so on it that night. >_< Though home canned is a proper step from tin cans from the store. 😀
We eat a mostly from scratch diet. But really, there is always room for improvement. I absolutely agree with eating “seasonal.” It’s funny how accustomed we’ve become to eating bananas and avocados and mangoes…not to mention “fresh” fruit in the dead of winter. Don’t get me wrong…I love them. But when I think of my grandparents on their farm raising my dad and his siblings – they ate what they grew…and we should too. I’m looking forward to reading about your journey. -Debbie