Hello. My name is Teresa and I am a new contributor. I am married with two children and have recently moved to a 10 acre farm. My strategy for eating healthy and affordably revolves around 1) making my pantry a personal “food bank”. This allows me to buy in bulk when there is a sale or to ask for a 10% bulk discount for something I know I will use a lot of, 2) growing as much of my food as possible, 3) coming up with a weekly meal plan I repeat for a month or season, and 4) eating poor food for several days so that we can afford to spend more several times a week.

This year I planted many small fruit trees and a big garden. I will have the fresh and preserved luxuries of raspberries, strawberries, herbs, peaches and cherries all year. I may try building a root cellar in the future to store potatoes, carrots apples, and cabbage. I am also raising sheep. Not everyone can do this, but I have made it a priority. Explore trying to provide even a small percentage of your food. It will humble you. Even one apple tree in your yard can be a big boon, providing applesauce and apples all winter and most plants generously and affordably reproduce themselves.

Our menu for April:

Breakfast: rotates between these and a good cup of coffee:

A Plain Yogurt, Granola, Fruit

B Oatmeal, Honey, Milk

C Scrambled Eggs, Ezekiel Toast w/butter

D German pancakes, Jam

Lunch for kids is a sandwich, fruit, vegetable, wheat-free oatmeal & cookie (freeze big batch to slice-n-bake)

Lunch for me is generally leftover dinner, or cheese, bread, fruit

Dinner: Here are three of my favorite poor dinners. With a good beer, they taste divine.

Irish poor: real mashed potatoes, sauteed veg (cabbage, broccoli, kale, etc) and 1/2 a sausage

Latino poor: homemade pinto beans (freeze extra)
homemade red rice, and extras such as shredded lettuce to jazz it up

Asian poor: fried rice or Pad Thai and cucumber salad
(this time of year I buy non-organic English cucumbers)

I buy potatoes, cabbage, onions, apples, sausage or bacon, beans, rice, oats, flour, butter, yogurt in bulk. I freeze the excess sausage and butter. I also hit the pasta aisle and buy the on sale pasta and sauces. At my co-op they bring in so many new brands and eventually many of them go on sale in a big way. Buy extra food instead of putting that money in the bank.

For two dinners a week I have fish/vegetables/rice and steak salad with feta, tomato, onion (1/2 steak per person) since I have eaten cheap the other nights.

A good source for recipes is RecipeSource.com. Let me know if you want any of my recipes.

Welcome to Nitty Gritty, a small project of Low Mileage Food. The idea for Nitty Gritty has been bouncing around in my head for awhile. Often, when I mention that I cook most of our meals at home, I hear that cooking every day is too hard or too time consuming or too boring. Also, people who are working on eating more locally and more organically often hear charges that this way of eating is elitist, that it’s too expensive or too much work or just not possible on a day to day basis.

So, I propose to put it all out there for a year - what we eat, how much it costs us, how long it takes me to cook, how I cook and how I plan and how long the dishes take. In other words, the nitty gritty of eating more locally and more organically, and cooking at home most days of the year. I may be preaching to the choir, since most of our readers at LMF already do most of these things, but maybe I’ll change at least one person’s mind about all of this. If nothing else, it will be an interesting record for Jeff and I, and maybe we’ll think a bit more about where our grocery dollars go and how we’re eating. We decided to start a sub-blog for the project because we didn’t want these details to overrun the main blog. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys reading other people’s grocery lists (and I’ll confess, I’m one) then you’ll probably enjoy this, and I hope you’ll enjoy following us in this project this year.