research

More from livejournal, written September 23, 2008

As with any experiments, a bit of research is in order. Cheap meal ideas? Ways to cut corners? Other people's experiments?

First off, a useful summary of eating organic foods on a budget:
http://naturalmomstalkradio.com/blog/eating-organic-tips-to-help-you-save-money/

More reading:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FKA/is_10_67/ai_n15631506
http://www.greenfeet.net/newsletter/eatorganic.shtml

And I was hoping I'd come across similar efforts. Here is one person's attempt to do just what I'm doing.
http://www.rebeccablood.net/thriftyo/2007/04/the_organic_thrifty_food_plan_1.html
I think I'll spend some time reading that this week and getting ideas. Taylor turned me on to lentils and rice in the rice cooker, which has become a busy day staple around here, and that's cheap and filling. I've found that putting a bit of honey and flax oil makes it almost decadent. But of course, with the cost of flax oil, it IS decadent, I suppose.

Farmers markets are wonderful things. The lady I buy chicken from now sells bags of bones and scraps for making soup. Well, that's just dandy, I say. I have a bag in the freezer waiting to be soupified, but of course that won't count next week, so I'll buy a new bag this weekend and do a big batch of soup. I'm anticipating a couple of big struggles: a picky kid who barely eats but needs to be fed, and a husband who needs lunch at work.

I'm trying to figure out how to be very realistic about this. It's not like i ever go out and buy every kind of oil and vinegar and condiment and stuff all in one go. If I did it would be a huge amount of money up front for things that will last a long time. Same with bulk, obviously. I'm not sure how to tally that kind of thing, and for this one week I just won't, I guess. But does that mean we'll have bland food with no spices or herbs (from the garden, even!), no oils, etc? That doesn't really make sense. Maybe if I had a chunk of money at the beginning of a month-long period or so, then I could make sense of it. And the 90 pounds of apples in my kitchen! Maybe I'll just "buy" some of them off the top at the rate we paid when we picked them.

A week is a hard amount of time to do something like this because I never buy small amounts of anything. It works out so much better to buy greater quantities and use them over time. So I'll just have to go into this with the understanding that it won't be entirely typical. It's more to prove a point--or not, depending.

And I have to say, that if this does work out, I will probably be even more insufferable when it's over.

Just talked to Jake and we're now thinking about using some of what we already have, but calculating what each serving costs. We just bought something like 20 pounds of oatmeal--still have the receipt--and we have oatmeal every morning for breakfast. We won't be going back to Ithaca to buy more just for this experiment, so it makes more sense to figure out exactly how much each breakfast costs.