Breaking Up is Hard to Do

A few months ago, Mr. Scrimp and I made the decision to break up with our CSA.

I wish we could say "Hey, CSA, it's not you--it's us." But that wouldn't be true. Well, not completely true, anyway.

The CSA model is wonderful, and I still recommend it if you are just beginning with real food/local food as an idea, or if you don't live in an area that is as local-food friendly as ours. I just think that for us... well, we've sort of moved beyond it. We ended up throwing out a lot of food last year because we had too much, or got things we didn't/couldn't eat, and we found new ways to eat locally and seasonably that didn't require a middleman.

And that--cutting out the middleman between my dollar and the farmer who grows my food--is a really important thing to me.

Recipe: Pureed Cauliflower (Mashed Potatoes Substitute)

So, I know I've mentioned before that Stupendous Man and I eat a low-carb, primal diet. Primal here means cutting out sugar and grains (we still eat dairy) and we modify that further by making it full low-carb.

So far, we've both seen a lot of success with it. We've each lost about two pounds a week since we started, with no hunger and not really any stress to speak of. But the weather has been cold, and sometimes you really just want something warm and comforting and salty and buttery and... well, let's just be frank. Sometimes all I want to eat is mashed potatoes.

But, since I can't eat mashed potatoes, I've had to find substitutes. Enter the humble cauliflower.

I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that pureed cauliflower tastes exactly like mashed potatoes, but I will say that it honestly tastes close enough that if you can't or won't eat potatoes but are missing some of that delicious mashed potato goodness in your life, this is a totally acceptable and delicious substitute. 

Menu Planning Monday & Free Menu Planner

Every Thursday, we get a big load of food from our CSA. On Saturdays, we go to the farmers market and fill in any gaps that we feel like our CSA didn't fill for the week. Then, it's time to eat!

However, if we don't plan out what we're going to do with all of our delicious produce, I know we're going to lose some of it to rot. Food from a CSA usually doesn't last as long as food from the grocery store, because it is almost always perfectly ripe when picked. So, it's important to have a plan for how we're going to use the delicious bounty of our local harvest without letting any of it go to waste.

I used to plan a menu and then go grocery shopping based on that plan. Now that we eat almost exclusively local, seasonal foods (at least during the harvest months, when the only non-local things we eat are organic canned beans and coconut milk), I have to reverse the process. Someone else picks the food I'm going to get, and I have to be creative to make it all work for us. It's been an exciting adventure trying to figure out how to do that.

Eventually what I did was to come up with a dual-function shopping and menu planning list (as you see above). It works in either way--you can fill in all your available ingredients and then make a menu plan from those, or you can write a menu plan and choose the ingredients you'll need to buy to make it. But it's all there together so you always know exactly what food you have or need, and what you're going to be eating.

I've included my list (a knockoff of the Anthropologie style "What to Eat" and "All Out Of" notepads) at the bottom of this post as a downloadable file so that you can print it out and use it too! It's been formatted to fit a full 81/2 x 11" page so you have plenty of room for writing and can store week-by-week copies in a binder if you want.

Want to see how I do it? Below the cut, I've shared this week's food supply and the menu I made out of it so you can see what I'm talking about.

CSA

It's cold here in Ohio, so things grow slowly... but, at long last, today is the first delivery for our CSA (community supported agriculture) program! I won't be picking it up till about 4:30 this afternoon--nevertheless, I am so excited!

We got an email with a list of what we'll be receiving, so I'm going to share it with you in the hope that it will inspire you to look into a CSA in your city, too.

Unpackaged, London

So I got a link today to an article about a small grocery shop in London that doesn't sell packaged food. Just about everything they have is sold in bulk, and customers are responsible for bringing their own packaging, eliminating waste and long-term plastic storage of food. This is brilliant, and I desperately want a store like this to open here in Ohio so that I can shop there.

In the world of my daydreams, someday shopping will universally go back to this--recognizable food, sans plastic or styrofoam, that you can buy in exactly the increments you need, no more, no less, from a small store.

Totally apart from whether hardcore environmentalists have got it right, it seems to me that this is just a more desireable way to live, and it's what really lies behind the Scrimpalicious ethos. I have no problem with home-processed, dried, frozen, or otherwise stored food, but it's time to do away with all of this fake, processed stuff, wrapped in plastic, sterilized, and totally disconnected from its source.

You can read the full article about Unpackaged and see more photos at the Inhabitat website.

On Food

I am a big fan and proponent of eating healthy food. It's part of why I started this blog, in fact. Food is, to me, one of the most important facets of our lifestyle. But I realized today that, apart from posting recipes, I've done very little talking about food and what we feel it ought to be.

Put very simply, it's this--we don't eat "health food," we don't eat processed food, we do our best to eat local and/or organic, and we try not to eat a lot of fat or sugar. We've been doing that for six and a half months now, and we've both lost weight. More importantly, though, we have more energy, fewer aches and pains, I sleep better (I used to have terrible problems with insomnia), and we both feel just generally better.

I spent about two hours walking around the grocery store today. It normally only takes me about 30 minutes to get all my shopping done, but Mr. Scrimp was at work, and I didn't have a list with me, so I took the time to browse and really enjoy myself.

Normally I shop with a list, but even when I don't, I try to be guided by a few simple and easy-to-remember rules:

• Don't buy pre-made food. It will almost always be better if you buy the separate ingredients and make it yourself, even though it will be more time consuming. You will also have the benefit of knowing exactly what you're eating, all the time.
• Don't buy food with ingredients you can't pronounce or find at the grocery store. Chemical additives in food are a relatively new addition, and are mainly present (or have been up until recently) in American diets. There aren't enough data yet to solidly lay the blame for the terrible health of Americans on chemical food additives yet, as far as I know, but the circumstantial evidence continues to mount up, especially as highly processed food begins to make its way into Europe and previously healthy countries experience similar spikes in their rates of certain health problems. I am simply tired of putting things into my body that have only been eaten by humans for the last 20-40 years. It strikes me as folly.
• Don't buy foods that are artificially low-fat, fat-free, or "lite". This is especially true of things like "fat free half & half" or "fat free sour cream". Half & half is half milk, half cream. Sour cream is, well, sour cream. By their very nature, those products have fat in them. What that means is that in order to make them fat-free, they have to be so chemically tweaked and altered that what you're really eating or drinking is asoup of seaweed, starches, sugars, thickened skim milk, chemicals, and sugar, sugar, sugar. Fat is one of the things that makes food taste good. Sugars are one of the others. Diet food products might be low in fat, but they almost always have huge amounts of added sugars and sodium to make up for it--otherwise you'd be able to taste all the chemicals you're eating. 
• Don't buy imitation foods. This is sort of an addendum to the last rule--margarine, tofurkey, American "cheese product", and all those other bizarre foods are terrible for you. They are unhealthy. They are heavily processed. They are full of sugar and chemicals that are probably someday going to turn out to be toxic. And they don't even taste good. 
• Don't buy canned when you can get fresh or dried. There's evidence coming out that food stored long-term in aluminum cans gets chemicals leached into it. I was actually advised away from canned foods and beverages by my doctor a few years ago because most of the cans are lined with soft plastics in order to keep the food from developing a metallic taste, and the plastics can leach into food over time. Instead of canned beans, buy dried. Instead of canned tomatoes, buy fresh. Or at least buy foods canned in glass, or frozen.
  

 It's been long enough now that Mr. Scrimp and I can both tell the difference. Maybe not every day, but when we have occasion to eat processed foods or foods that contain a lot of chemical additives, it takes him about 30 minutes and me about 2 hours to start to really feel unwell as a result.

During some of my Christmas vacation, we didn't have time to go grocery shopping and so ended up eating a lot of pre-made, restaurant, or even fast-food for a few days. By the end of it, I felt terrible.

"Did I used to feel like this all the time?" I asked Mr. Scrimp, staring in the mirror at my puffy eyes and wan face as I downed a couple of Advil to kill the headache that I couldn't seem to get rid of. "Why did it take me so long to stop?"

He shrugged. "We were just so used to it that we didn't notice anymore, I guess."

You might read this and think, "You know, that's true for you, but I feel fine eating processed food. I don't feel like it's affecting my health or my sense of well-being. I've lost weight on my lite-foods diet and I think it tastes delicious."

I challenge you to cut those foods out completely for two months (it takes about that long to get over the food cravings and feeling constantly hungry), and then tell me you don't feel better.

Maybe you're just so used to it that you just don't notice how you really feel.

PSA

So, this message is really only relevant to those of you in the Ohio area, but the spirit of it extends beyond that.

Husband and I were at Whole Foods doing a grocery run this afternoon. We're big milk drinkers, so we'd put a gallon of the Whole Foods brand into our cart and were leaving the dairy aisle when we were stopped by a guy at a display table with samples of organic milk. I was thirsty, and I am always up for organic milk, so we chatted with him and got a sample of the 2% milk.

That was about half an hour ago and I can still taste the delicious milky aftertaste in my mouth. I kid you not, this stuff was the best non-raw milk I've ever tasted. It comes from a place called Snowville Creamery, which is down by Columbus. They don't ultra-pasteurize; they only heat it to the minimum allowed temperature, which retains a much better flavor in the milk, although it keeps the shelf life at only (only!) 14 days or so. I was sort of shocked to learn that the milk we were buying, because it was ultra-pasteurized, had an expected shelf life of up to 60 days! That just seems.. wrong.

The milk is also non-homogenized, which means that when it's been sitting in your fridge, you need to take it out and shake it before you drink it, because the cream separates out. I used to spend my summer vacations on a working dairy farm, so that brings back happy memories for me.

We put our gallon of 1% milk back and picked up a half-gallon of Snowville Creamery 2% instead. It's $2.99 for a half-gallon, so it's almost double what we usually pay for milk, which is a problem, because we drink milk everyday in fairly copious amounts. We're in the process of deciding whether this is a special-occasion milk, or if we're willing to cut spending somewhere else in order to be able to afford to drink this stuff all the time.

If you live in the Cleveland or Columbus area, you've got to try this stuff out. I haven't even told you everything about their rad sustainability practices or natural milk philosophy yet.