Its Raining Oatmeal

Let’s continue our breakfast research for the SNAP challenge. Remember, I am trying to make breakfast for $0.75 or less with all organic and/or local ingredients from Common Ground and/or the farmers’ market and I want it to include some protein and fresh fruit and/or vegetables.

I planned to move on from oatmeal already, but I have found myself unable. Since my previous post I have fallen in love with oatmeal. I use to like it just fine as a kid but as an adult I’d pretty much ignored oatmeal. This rediscovery has become something of a love affair and I’ve mixed up a few more batches with different ingredients I’d like to share with you here.

Why do I love oatmeal? Its so very filling and nutritious and cheap all at once. Honestly, what’s not to love? Well, maybe plain oatmeal isn’t so loveable, but there are so many fun nutritious things you can add to it. This next oatmeal recipe doesn’t meet my fresh fruit or veg criteria for breakfast, but it’s a very fast, simple option that will appeal to the kids.

PB&J Oatmeal
½ cup organic rolled oats from the bulk bins ($0.14)
1 scant cup water
A pinch of salt
1 T peanut butter ($0.16)
1 T all-fruit jam of your choice ($0.25)

Instructions:
Put the oats, salt, and water in a small saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat with a lid on. Once it reaches a boil, turn it down to a low simmer and let do its thing for 10 minutes. Give it a good stir, turn off the heat, and pour into your bowl. Top with the peanut butter and jam and stir well. Eat up!

Total cost: $0.55
Total calories: 309
Total time to make: 12 minutes

I tried this one with 2T jam and that was just way, way too much sugar for my tastes, I’d stick to 1T. This next recipe blows away my $0.75 or less criteria but could be fit into the budget once in a while to use up a peach that’s starting to go or just as a fresh fruit treat.

Peach Dream Oatmeal
½ cup organic rolled oats from the bulk bins ($0.14)
1 scant cup water
A pinch of salt
2T slivered almonds ($0.22)
1 small peach, diced w/peel on ($0.54)
1 T local honey ($0.14)

Instructions:
Put the oats, salt, and water in a small saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat with a lid on. Once it reaches a boil, turn it down to a low simmer and let do its thing for 10 minutes. Give it a good stir, turn off the heat, and pour into your bowl. Mix in the almonds and honey, then top with the fresh peach and serve.

Total cost: $1.02
Total calories: 366
Total time to make: 12 minutes

I actually spent this whole week eating oatmeal with a different topping every day. Other notable oatmeal bowls were Chocolate Banana, Cinnamon Pear, Cherry Almond, and Crabapple Honey. All costed out to under $0.80.

In planning for this challenge I thought over the rules carefully. One of the rules was no free food from others. Hmmm, okay, but what about free food from Mother Nature? If we’re talking about eating in C-U there is a *lot* of free fruit to be had in this area from mid-May until late Septmeber. Its amazing for how many years I never noticed this and then my friend Jessy pointed out the sour cherry trees in front of the south side of Lincoln Square Mall full of fruit just begging to be picked and something clicked for me. I began to see free mulberries everywhere and to learned that if you spread a sheet beneath a laden mulberry branch and shook you’d have pounds of berries for 10 minutes of effort. Then I learned about the blueberry’s Illinois-native cousin, the service berry. There are service berry trees all over C-U where pounds of berries can be obtained for free, my freezer is full of them! Then there are the sour cherries, the crabapples, the apples, the plums, and the pears. When you start looking for these free fruits everywhere and acknowledging them as food, suddenly you have a whole additional food source.

Now I’ve heard the argument that if everyone were aware of these sources of free fruit there would not be enough for everyone. Fair enough. But I don’t think that is a reason to discount it because everyone noticing and bothering to pick this free food is not going to happen any time soon and because, well, my family uses this source every year as a way to keep food costs down so I know it works. And all that fruit is chockfull of nutrition and flavor. For a moment imagine that our park districts and cities made a policy to use a certain percentage of food-bearing trees and bushes out of every planting they did. Yum. I know the practical reasons many cities don’t plant food trees – they are hard to mow around with all that fruit on the ground under them that falls without being picked – but perhaps its time we changed our attitude about the value of food. Perhaps its worth a little more difficulty mowing to seed our towns with free fruit? Why not get the benefit of food along with our landscaping?

I’m going to move on from my beloved oatmeal before I bore you all, if you want the recipe and cost for any of the recipes I mentioned above but did not outline let me know and I will happily pass them on. What about those of you who cannot bear hot food for breakfast when it is warm outside, for those who feel oatmeal in summer is blasphemy. Don’t fret, you are not alone in your desire for cool food on warm summer mornings and I have some ideas. I haven’t costed them out yet, but we’ll do that together and see how it goes. Tonight, I make yogurt from scratch with local Kilgus milk! I’ll share details of how it went in the next few days.

P.S. One quick tip about oatmeal – don’t ever let it harden in your pan or bowl. If you wash them out right away they are easy to clean up but dried oatmeal is much like cement. Learn from my mistakes and wash your pan and bowl right away to keep oatmeal a low-labor meal!

Week 1, SNAP Challenge planning

There are so many ways in which this challenge excites me but I’m trying to quell the urge to talk about all the ways at once. Let me instead start with a personal hypothesis about food, which is this: we’ve been sold a line that real food, organic and local food, is too expensive for all of us and if we could find a way for most families to afford it, it would take slaving in the kitchen constantly. We’ve been told that real, wholesome food is out of the reach of our resources, whether it be money or time or skill or all of them combined. Decades of big ag and food conglomerate propaganda has worked it magic on us, but what they have been selling us is not the truth. My belief is we've been sold a destructive myth.

The very nature of a hypothesis is that it is an idea, a proposal meant to explain certain facts or phenomena observed. You develop a hypothesis as a starting point and then you test it. I’ve been testing this hypothesis in various ways for a while now in my home life and in my development work on the “Eating Healthy on a Budget” class I offer at Common Ground, but this SNAP challenge is giving me a chance to test it in a whole new way.

But enough of my theories, let’s take this back to the kitchen! The SNAP Challenge is to eat for an entire week on the average food stamp allotment of $30, or a smidge over $4 a day. The way I see it, that means we’d better start our day with a breakfast, the most important meal of the day, on $1 or less. And our solutions have to be fast, because who’s got spare time in the morning most days?

I’ve got three ideas for fast, easy, nutritious-as-heck breakfasts: oatmeal, yogurt, and quiche. I have not costed these out beforehand, we’re going to do it right here, together. Will these fit into our $1 budget? I’ve decided its non-negotiable that I must fit in some healthy protein and fresh fruit into each of these meals. I’m thinking like a momma while doing this, and there’s no way I’d let my little boy out the door in the morning without either of those things to start his day right.

And so we begin with oatmeal. Ahhh, boring old oatmeal, the meal you can eat or use as spackle when it gets cold. Love it or hate it, you can’t beat it’s nutrition. Let’s take a look:

½ cup uncooked rolled oats
190 calories
7 grams protein
5 grams fiber
lots of iron and calcium

This is a great food to start the day with, especially for growing kids. Now, how do we make these oats the center of a well rounded meal for $1 or less and how do we make it interesting enough that kids from 1 to 99 will eat the darn stuff? I’ve got four different recipe ideas for how to do it. I made batches of two of them up this morning to test out on my willing partner and myself. We give them two big thumbs up. All prices listed in the recipes are from Common Ground Food Co-op.

Apple-Zip Oatmeal
½ cup organic rolled oats from the bulk bins ($0.14)
1 scant cup water
A pinch of salt
½ T Organic Valley butter ($0.13)
2 T Plank’s apple butter from Arcola, no-sugar-added variety ($0.20)
2 T walnuts from the bulk bins, diced ($0.16)
1/4 tsp cinnamon powder from the bulk bins ($0.01)

Instructions:
Put the oats, salt, and water in a small saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat with a lid on. Once it reaches a boil, turn it down to a low simmer and let do its thing for 10 minutes. While its cooking, mix the apple butter, cinnamon, and walnuts in a heat-proof single-serving bowl. When the oats are done pour them into your heat proof-bowl and mix well with the other ingredients. Put the butter on top to melt and serve.

Total cost: $0.66 per serving
Total calories: 397
Total time to make: 12 minutes

What I love about this oatmeal recipe: Its so easy! But then, all oatmeal is. Well, let’s talk then about how the walnuts add essential fatty acids to your day that are crucial for everything from heart health to brain function (especially important for young, developing brains) as well as more protein and calcium and a nice dose of mood-balancing B vitamins. The apple butter boosts the fiber count of the whole meal and makes the dish sweet without added sugar. My first batch was sans butter, but Mike felt it needed a creamy-salty note and that butter would fit the bill. We added it and felt it really did make a big enough difference to be worth including. Vegans, feel free to sub this out with Earth Balance, the cost is very similar. Mike felt the cinnamon flavor was a little intense at the original ½ tsp suggestion, so we cut it back to ¼ tsp. Perfection.

Mighty Monkey Oatmeal
½ cup organic rolled oats from the bulk bins ($0.14)
1 scant cup water
A pinch of salt
1.5 T cashew butter from the bulk bins ($0.32)
1 T local honey ($0.14)
½ an organic banana, thinly sliced ($0.16)
7 organic dark chocolate chips from the bulk bins ($0.05)

Instructions:
Put the oats, salt, and water in a small saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat with a lid on. Once it reaches a boil, turn it down to a low simmer and let do its thing for 10 minutes. While its cooking, mix the cashew butter, half the banana slices and honey in a heat-proof single-serving bowl. When the oats are done pour them into your heat proof-bowl and mix well with the other ingredients. Edge the bowl with banana slices and use the chocolate chips to draw a smiley face on top and serve!

Total cost: $0.79 per serving
Total calories: 526
Total time to make: 12 minutes

What I love about this oatmeal recipe: This one was my pick for breakfast this morning and it was so delicious I was swooning! This is a super kid-friendly bowl of oats but lemme tell you, big kids can enjoy this too. I used cashew butter just because so many parents have concerns about peanut allergies but if that is not a factor in your house you can switch to peanut butter instead and save another $0.07 per serving. The chocolate chips are, of course, optional, but they add almost no cost and the way they start to melt into the warm oatmeal is a special treat. Plus, imagine the delight of kids waking up to that chocolate smiley face as breakfast! Those chips might be the deciding factor in getting a child to give oatmeal a try, you never know.

Nutritionally, the banana added a whole bunch more fiber not to mention a big dose of vitamin C, magnesium, and B vitamins. And again, the fabulousness of nuts! The nut butter, no matter which one you used, added essential fatty acids to keep those neurons firing great all day and if you added cashew butter there was a good bit of magnesium, if you used peanut butter there was an extra super charge of iron to keep your energy up for the whole day.

This dish is super filling and full of calories and that’s a great thing. I don’t often get to say its “great” that a dish is calorically robust, but when you are trying to feed adults with physically demanding jobs, teens, or growing kids of any age on only $4 a day, getting in enough calories is a real factor.

I took some great pics of this oatmeal dish this morning, then realized hours later that I didn’t have the memory card in my camera when I took them. Shoot. I promise, pics in my next post! Oh, and while it took 12 minutes from starting this dish to serving, most of that was waiting for the oats, I had plenty of time to wash a few dishes and set the table in there too.

We’re not done with oatmeal yet, I’ve got a few more good ideas for you: the kid-approved PB&J oatmeal bowl and the Peach Dream oatmeal bowl made with fresh, in season peaches. I’m sure I’ll have more ruminations to share on food and the cost of it then too. Got a favorite way to fix oatmeal? Please share in the comments!

Testing.

I've thought about starting a blog about food and local many, many times. I actually have a name in mind that I rather love for my blog about all things local and community that doesn't exist yet. But, right now, the thing that is going to get me writing is a very specific food project that is going to delve into the role of food in my family/home life, and so I've revived "The Hannah Cafe." This blog existed before and survived a few postings, then I deleted it. This is go 2.0 at it.

What's inspired me to start again was an invitation to take part in the Food SNAP Challenge. SNAP is the new name for food stamps. The awesome folks at our local food bank, whom I've worked with on many a food project or fundraiser through my job at the food co-op, asked me if I would take on their challenge to live on a food stamp allotment for one week. That's $30 per person. Being who I am and what I do, I want to do it all from food from the co-op, the farmer's market, my own garden, and wild harvesting. The additional rules are that you are not to accept free food from anyone and you are not to use food you already had in the house.

I am going to flout that last rule a bit, but I think I'll be sticking meaningfully with the spirit of the challenge. While I will be using food that is already in my house (it would be ridiculous to go buy more olive oil when I have a full container, etc)I am going to keep careful track of the cost of every bit of food I put in my body and/or serve to my family, down to the spices.

The challenge starts mid-September but I've been mulling it here and there for weeks already and I am starting my more focused planning now as I will have just returned from being out of town at a national co-op conference when this challenge begins, I'll need to be prepared to hit the ground running when I return.

So I am starting with breakfast. I've fired up my excel spreadsheets that I developed in 2009 when I wrote the Food for All recipes for Common Ground and I am going to be testing out the cost of two options this week: oatmeal with nuts and fruit, and homemade yogurt with nuts and fruit. I've never made homemade yogurt before and will be costing out whether it truly saves serious bucks when made with local, hormone-free milk over the cost of pre-made organic yogurt from the co-op. Fiscal details and pics of my experiments are soon to come!

I'd love for you to join me on this challenge and I am excited to say I've already gotten a few e-mails from co-op supporters that have spontaneously offered to give the challenge a try. As they blog their efforts I will be posting them here as well.

I love a good challenge. Let's get started.