the project :: part the second

In the two weeks between B-Boy's due date and his actual birth date, I needed something to take my mind off the fact I was still pregnant, so I turned to Hulu.  My show obsession quickly became Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution.  Oliver travels to Huntington, West Virginia, which was named America's fattest city, and attempts to educate the morbidly obese residents (and those who aren't so morbidly obese) in the principles of healthy eating.

Several things in this show troubled me, but the three most notable were that 1) many of these families only ate brown, fried food, 2) french fries count as a vegetable in public school cafeterias and 3) children could not correctly identify vegetables.  Oliver held up a potato and the children identified it as something ridiculous, like a carrot.  When he explained that it was a potato, from which french fries come, the children said, "Oh yeah, french fries. I know those."

An acquaintance of mine works in the food & nutrition industry and has often blogged that children with whom she works in Missouri can't correctly identify produce.  So apparently it's not just Huntington, WV.  Children everywhere are so steeped in chicken nuggets and french fries, they don't know a tomato from a banana (they do, however, know ketchup).  I was-- and frankly, still am-- shocked that so many youth don't know food.  Real food.  Which of course means their parents aren't teaching them, which begs the question: do the parents know real food?  I'd say by the heaping plates of deep fried yuck depicted on shows such as The Biggest Loser (which I'm a huge [ha! no pun intended] fan of, by the way), likely not.

So I've been thinking: how well am I feeding my family?

Generally, I shop in the perimeter of the grocery store: lots of time in the produce section, a quick jaunt by the (fresh) meat section, perhaps a visit to the dairy case, and then a few passes up the aisles to gather a few canned goods, dried beans, flour, sugar, etc.  Once a month, I travel thirty minutes to a local dairy, Happy Cow Creamery, to purchase four gallons of non-homogenized milk, two pounds of butter, a pound of sour cream, and perhaps a block or two of cheese.  The hubs and I have a small garden plot in the backyard, in which we've grown snap peas, peppers, tomatoes, okra, corn, squash, zucchini.  We grow peppers and herbs in containers on the deck.  My father regularly supplies us with produce from his large and prosperous garden plot.  And when we visit Aaron's family, we bring back a cooler full of raw milk and raw milk cheese from the family dairy, and fresh eggs and produce from his aunts' & uncles' personal farms. 

So we're doing pretty well, right?  Compared to Huntington, WV, yes.  We are.  I can't remember ever putting a plate of all brown, fried food on the table.  However...  I buy chips.  I sometimes drink a Coke (well, more than "sometimes" when the B-Boy isn't sleeping well at night).  We may eat fast food a time or so a month (if we include Subway, then, okay, more than a time or two a month).  And we definitely eat out at least four times a month.  I buy our sandwich bread, our tortillas, our naan, our French bread.  I buy ice cream.  I buy jarred spaghetti sauce.  I buy jarred salsa.  I buy jarred yellow curry and Tikka Masala sauce.  I buy...  Well, you get the point.  I buy things I could easily make at home.  Things I know how to make.  Things I have made. 

Why?

I recently complained to my husband about store-bought desserts, particularly store-bought cakes.  Making a cake takes like, twenty minutes (plus cook time), maybe.  You throw some flour, some eggs, some sugar, vanilla, etc, in a bowl, you turn on your mixer, mix for a minute or two, pour the batter in a pan, cook it, and done.  Probably in the time it takes to put on your shoes, find your purse, crank up the car, drive to the market, look through the cakes, choose a cake, stand in line, pay, remember where you parked, drive home, you could have at least assembled the batter and put it in the oven to bake.  Best of all, you'll be able to pronounce every ingredient in your cake, unless of course you decided to make some really exotic, foreign recipe, in which case that's your own problem...

But the thing is, what is so different from a cake and a loaf of bread?  Or a jar of spaghetti sauce?  I tout the merits of from-scratch baking, claiming that even working mothers can find the time to bake a stinkin' cake, but here I am, stay-at-home-mom, buying spaghetti sauce and pouring it over boxed noodles.

So I started thinking.  Even though clearly most of my time is spent eating bon-bons and watching soap operas, surely I can just turn the volume up and set to work in my kitchen, creating totally scratch-made meals.  And I can create those meals without spending 95% of my time in the kitchen, slaving over a hot stove.  And I can actually cut my grocery budget, right? 

Right.

So that is the second ingredient of my 2011 project.  I will make 365 unique meals, from scratch.  The third ingredient is unprocessed foods (which really is very similar to "from scratch," but I feel deserves its own explanation), which I will discuss in the next post.

the project :: part the first

I have always loved to cook. I believe I started with sweet tea (which may or may not constitute "cooking," per se) and chocolate chip cookies when I was somewhere between child and adolescent. My mom said both my sweet tea and my cookies were better than hers, and while this was likely just a mother's overly-kind praise, it certainly did encourage me to continue in my endeavors.

Fast-forward a few years, and during the summer, when I was at home with my younger sister (who, by the way, has a blog, Sewaholic Summer, which is mostly about sewing, but occasionally about cooking), both parents at work, I would pull out my mom's battered copy of Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook and look for interesting recipes to try (admittedly, they typically came from the desserts section).  On multiple occasions, my mom received phone calls where the first thing out of my mouth was something like, "What is a rolling boil?"  She would ask why I needed to know, and I would say, "Because I'm making fudge," or "Because I'm making cream puffs." She would tell me to wait until she got home, and I would respond that I'd already started, and so she would explain whatever cooking vocabulary my call regarded.  And she would arrive home to not-quite-smooth fudge or small pastries haphazardly filled with cream. And she would look pleased.

I somehow never lost the desire to try new recipes-- success or fail, thankfully usually at least partial success.  After my mom died, I spent a summer during my teenage years, somewhat to my father's chagrin, trying my hand at cooking entire dinners for my dad and younger sister.  One particular evening, I decided to try fried chicken.  I had never seen anyone make fried chicken, so it was certainly an experiment.  Two hours later, I had perhaps one of four or so breasts fried-- the batter left behind in the oil.  Either we ate at 9:00 that evening or I gave up and just baked the chicken, I can't remember.  I'm pleased to report, though, that fourteen years later I am able to fry four pieces of chicken, start to finish, in perhaps thirty minutes.

And here we are, today.  I still adore trying new foods and following new recipes.  So much so that I have designated 2011 as the "Year of New Foods."  I will prepare 365 new meals, all completely from scratch (more on that later).  Most of the time, the new meal will be dinner, but because husband-dear really enjoys leftovers and gets a hankerin' for, say, chili, at least half a dozen times a year, sometimes the new meal may be breakfast or lunch.  And, because we often travel and sometimes eat out, I cannot promise that each and every day will pass with a new meal.  Some days will have a spankin' new breakfast, lunch and dinner.  No matter the frequency or the timing, at the turn of midnight on December 31, 2011, my recipe box will be 365 recipes fuller, and this blog will be 365(+) recipes richer.