Autumn Returns

You always know it is coming, but still, fall always takes me by surprise, especially after a summer as wicked as the one we've had this year. The summer was very early, very hot, and there was a bad drought. It was the kind of summer you couldn't wait to put behind you, but also the kind you began to wonder if would ever end.

But end it did, and with pretty timing too. Just a day or so before the autumnal equinox, on came the cool cool nights. Walking with E to the farmer's market around 7:30 this morning, we were bundled in fleece-lined hoodies and knit hats, and our fingers and noses got quite cold. The first very fall market of the year I cannot resist all the autumn vegetables. After getting E his muffin from the Muffin Man, we rounded up some red cabbage, green beans, turnips, salad green, new potatoes, and winter squash. Most of the veggies went into a basic vegetable stew, but the winter squash I had other plans for. Potluck plans.

For E's 1st birthday, years back now, I went a bit nuts and made a lot of food for everyone. I love making up food for parties, but back then we were broke, I was working constantly, and E was a high-demands kid. It really was nuts, but maybe getting to do something I take so much pleasure in actually helped keep me sane. It was for that party that I made up the Winter Squash Spread, based on a vague memory of my friend Jessy making some sort of butternut squash spread for pizza when we both worked in a natural food store kitchen together. From this experiment the Squash Spread was born.

I always make it with butternut squash and it always comes out perfect. This time, I let the beauty of a red kuri squash lure me in and I used it instead. I'd never had a red kuri before and the flavor of the flesh was wonderful, but it had a grainier and drier texture than a butternut and it showed in the end results. I'd recommend using the butternut for this, it can't be beat.

Winter Squash Potluck Spread

1 medium butternut squash
2 bulbs of garlic
2 T grapeseed oil (or other oil that does well at high heat)
2 medium yellow onions, coarsely chopped
1 cup raw hazelnuts
salt and black pepper to taste

Pre-heat the oven to 375 degrees.

Chop the butternut squash in half lengthwise and scoop out all the stingy guts and seeds, place on a lightly oiled baking sheet. Break the bulbs of garlic into cloves and remove all the papery bits. Put half of the garlic cloves in the cavity of one squash half, the rest of the garlic in the cavity of the other half of the squash. Flip the squash halves over onto the baking tray with the garlic trapped between the squash and the pan. Poke the backs of both squash halves with a knife in a couple of places, this will allow the releasing of steam and help the squash cook more evenly. Bake for 45 minutes, then prick with a fork, if it slides in easily the squash is done, otherwise check again every 7-10 minutes until done.

While the squash cooks, place the hazelnuts on another baking tray with sides so they don't slide off and place in the oven for 3-5 minutes. The hazelnuts should become fragrant and darken just a tad. Take them out of the oven and pour them onto a dry dish towel. Let cool until just cool enough to handle the nuts in the towel, then use the towel to agitate and rub the hazelnuts, loosening their skins until most fall off. Don't worry about getting them all off, but you do want to get off as much of the skins as is possible without tons of effort. Put the nuts sans most of their skins in the food processor and process until very fine.

Put 1T of the oil in a skillet and add the onions over medium-low heat. Toss in the onion, stir in the oil, then turn down to low heat. Stir every few minutes and allow the onion to slowly caramelize. This process will take around 20 minutes to complete, the onions should be tender and lightly browned all over. Add the onions to the food processor bowl.

Once the squash is done cooking let it cook until you can touch it safely, then flip it over. Put the garlic in the food processor bowl, then scrape the flesh of the squash out of the skin and into the food processor bowl as well. Add salt and pepper, then process until very smooth.

Serve with baguette or pita chips, or use as a spread on pizza in place of the usual tomato sauce. If you have left overs you can thin it with a bit of broth and serve it with bread as a soup the next day. The soup freezes well for future use.

I feel silly, but I forgot to take a picture of the pretty end product all gussied up in one of my spouse's handmade pottery bowls. Ah well, trust me, it turns out a lovely golden color. Put it in a pretty bowl, put the bowl on a large place, and surround the bowl with your chips or bread slices, and then head off to your potluck party! Trust me, you'll be getting requests for the recipe for this tasty and healthy nosh!

To the Beat of the Knife and Skillet

Food sucks up time.

I touched on this a bit in my last post, the fact that we pay in extra dollars and loss of nutrition (usually) when we have others prepare our food rather than spend the time and develop the skills to prepare food ourselves. And I talked about how I am trying to get honest with myself about this and the way I chose to pay - in dollars and lost nutrients or in precious time I could be putting to many other things.

Our ancestors spent huge gobs of time preparing food. Whether they grew the food themselves or not, they still spent great amounts of time cleaning, trimming, mixing, and cooking food. Food was central to every day, almost every minute of the day. It was a constant focus between obtaining the food, preparing the food, consuming the food, and preserving the food. I'm not the first to observe this, I know. But I've been thinking about this a lot, the way I even remember my grandmother just 30 years ago being seemingly always in the kitchen. I know I've got rose-colored glasses on when looking back to that time, I am sure I do, but I don't remember grandma being miserable when in the kitchen and I do remember how happy and honored I felt on the occasion she'd give me something to do to help with the big meal she was working on. This only happened a few times as my grandma was very sick by the time I was 7 or so, but those memories stuck.

My father's mother had a tiny kitchen in a house where she was raising 11 children on a tight budget on 100% homemade food, some of it grown in her own garden. The steam of food releasing moisture as cooked seemed a constant in the background as my cousins ran around the house and in and out the backdoor that was located in that kitchen. Who could doubt, when grandma was still alive and well, that the kitchen was the heart of that house? My mother and aunts would crowd in it on holidays or family birthday parties, peeling vegetables, washing dishes, and talking and singing together. I resisted the kitchen duties after grandma died and as I grew because I began to see that only the women were expected to partake in these tasks while the men sat around or played sports. I decided I would not do kitchen work either if the Y chromosome types of my family deemed it not their job and got to play. Looking back, I see I kind of shorted myself on sharing the warmth and work of the kitchen, on overhearing the family stories and tales but I empathize with that young girl and rather respect her spunk.

My mother's mother had a very different kitchen and prepared very different food. She never baked and her cooking was more all-American, full of casseroles and such (my father's mother was Italian and her cooking reflected it) but still, the kitchen was the heart of the house. We'd go over to her house after school on Wednesdays and no matter where we roamed in the house or yard, there would be grandma making dinner in the kitchen, the anchor in the center of the house. She had this wonderful little bar you could sit at in her dinning room that looked into the kitchen and you could nibble on after-school snacks and chat with my always-smiling grandma as she peeled the potatoes or mixed up the meatloaf.

Cooking is work, a lot of work, and when it is left to us whether we want the task or not by societal expectations I can understand why it could be a drudgery. I think this idea, that preparing our food is drudgery forced on women, seeped into me and I missed how much food preparation was at the center of so many happy memories for me. When the work is shared or there is someone sitting nearby keeping you company and telling you about their day, perhaps the work is transformed.

I am thinking about this a lot because this will be my third week in a row of working around 60 hours and when all you do is eat, sleep, WORK, go home for a quick dinner, WORK again, come home to put your child to bed and then crash on the couch for an hour before sleeping society tells you you deserve to eat out. We hear it again and again, we're much too busy to cook, I've had a hard day so I'm dragging the family out for pizza, etc. I've had many, many days like this. But what I've started thinking lately, without noticing at first, is that if I am going to work this hard what I deserve is a healthy meal that is going to nourish my body and help me wake up alert in the morning. What I deserve is the fun of sitting at the dinning room table with my partner chopping up the cheap produce of the season to freeze and to savor the idea of how good it will taste to serve it up later and how proud and happy we'll feel doing so. What I am starting to think is, making food isn't some drudgery I have to wedge into my day and do on top of everything else, its a constant and comforting rhythm that turns my days into a dance of movement and planning and nourishment.



It was a joy to sit at my dinning room table tonight and peel and chop up two dozen mangos with my partner while my son played in the background. We didn't even talk really, we just enjoyed the companionable silence and the task in front of us. There is something really satisfying about the feel of a very sharp knife skimming down the curve of a mango, the skin falling away in smooth petals. There is something deeply satisfying about the full bowl of juicy fruit ready to be spread on cookie sheets and frozen for future enjoying, about the idea of stocking your larder for future meals. There is a pride and sense of simple accomplishment in getting a few things chopped up just before bed and stocked away in the fridge so you are ready to throw together a quick and healthy dinner for your family between commitments tomorrow. There is a part of me that say, "yes, this is good, this is not drudgery, this is a gift we get to partake of every single day."

Now if only I can start to see preparing food through that lens more days than not, wouldn't that be something?

We Pay Either Way

As most who read this know, I teach a class at Common Ground for free every month that I developed starting in January of '09 called, "Eating Healthy on a Budget" (EHOB). In the process of gathering the information from that class I learned a great deal and I've learned just as much if not more from the hundreds of people who have taken the class now.

With the community awareness of the class growing over the last two years, I've started to get requests to teach the class outside the confines of Common Ground. I've made forays into teaching the class in front of low income audiences full of folks who rarely if ever go to farmers' markets or natural food stores and I've bombed there. That's a very interesting story in of itself and one worthy of discussion, but not the one I'm planning to talk about today. Today I want to talk about the other kind of EHOB presentations I've done outside of Common Ground. I've put together a very abbreviated version of the class in powerpoint form that I can do as a talk in 25-30 minutes because I kept getting requests from University of Illinois groups, local churches, local environmental organizations and the like to do so.

One thing I've added to the presentation version of EHOB is more price comparisons. I already show folks in the full class a can of organic black beans and tell them the price, then make them guess how much the bag of dried beans I also have with me that would make the same amount of beans in the can would cost and the students are always pretty impressed with the difference. (It's around $2.00, by the way). But in need of a few more exciting visuals for the presentation version, I costed out a few things people tend to buy pre-made and what they cost to make from ingredients at the co-op. The results didn't surprise me *that* much at first, but they did make me curious. If it only costs $0.78 to make with all organic or local ingredients the same amount of lentil soup I get in a can at the store for $1.89 (conventionally, $2.49 organically), what about what it would cost to make favorite restaurant dishes?

I've not gotten around to in-depth costing I am ready to share in final form, but the process has already pointed out to me what a dramatic difference it makes to cook at home, even when you use the really "pricey" ingredients. We'll say to ourselves, "oh, that organic cheese is too expensive to use as our everyday cheese around the house!" but not blink at paying $7 at Panera for half a sandwich and a small cup of soup made from conventional ingredients in a factory and just heated up in a pan. We're not having an honest conversation with ourselves about food when we tell ourselves organic and high quality ingredients are too expensive but we then go out to eat several meals a week.

The truth is we live busy, busy lives. Sometimes, convenience is worth the price, just to have someone else make lunch or dinner. Thing is, we pay not only a lot out of our pocket books, we pay nutritionally too, are we really aware of that? Even when we get a big salad and some low-fat soup at the restaurant, the ingredients are from factory farms, shipped in plastic, full of pesticides, and often made months ago. And we pay far more for it than we would have paid to make the food at home with the very best, fresh ingredients.

And there's a reason prepared food costs more - because making food is work, time-consuming work. That's why we're often eating out in the first place, right? The salads you buy in the Common Ground deli can be made at home from the same ingredients for far less than you'll pay for a co-op deli salad and for good reason. Half or more of the cost of prepared food, in a restaurant or at home, is in the preparation. The preparation costs when you buy food out because people have to be paid to put in the minutes and hours of preparation we decided you couldn't afford (or didn't know how to) put into the food. At home, the time costs because we have to have it to put into the making of the food instead of other things. The cost of food is not just about the ingredients so, honestly, do we feel we its worth it to our health and our pocketbook to invest the time?

The answer isn't always "yes" for me. I work 40-60 hours a week depending what is going on at the co-op, right now, with a major expansion of the co-op looming, I'm working closer to the 60 end of the spectrum. My husband works 32-40 hours a week. We have a four year old son. Sometimes, despite my best intentions, I forget to coordinate the meals, make the meal plans, buy the ingredients. And sometimes I am just too damned tired and decide I don't want to make the food. I'm working to be honest with myself about this, about my choices, and to look at the real cost of them.

This weekend I am having one of my more food-ambitious swings. Despite a crazy long work week and having only one day off, I am feeling like making some food plans and executing them. So, today, I started with salad.



I pre-made these salads so they are ready to grab for lunches at work, already portioned out. All the ingredients are from the co-op.

I used:
- head of lettuce
- 3 green onions
- 1 medium carrot
- 1/8th of a head of red cabbage
- 1 pkg of baked tofu from the co-op deli
- 3 T of slivered almonds

This made 4 lunch portion salads. Without dressing, these are costing me $1.81 a piece, I am guessing 1 T of homemade dressing for each will cost me around $0.35, taking it to $2.16 a salad. A similar-sized salad at Common Ground's deli costs $3.95.

I turned the rest of the cabbage into homemade sauerkraut, but that's another post!

Next up, making a simple cold tomato and basil soup. That costs me about $1.22 a portion (1 cup, same as a "cup" at Common Ground's deli.) So lunch of a green salad with tofu and a cup of tomato soup from home will cost me around $3.50 with all fabulous organic ingredients, not attempting to use budget-conscious ingredients at all.

Is it worth the time? This week it is, to me. And it'll sure taste just as good if not better than the same sized soup-and-salad lunch at the restaurant around the corner from work that will charge me $7.99 and use non-organic ingredients. But, depending on what stresses next week brings, don't be surprised to see me at that same restaurant when you go out to lunch next Tuesday. We all do our best.

Something for Nothing

I'm not actually very enthusiastic about gardening. Well, no, that's not fair. I love watching the garden come to life, I love checking on my little garden beds, and I love most of all harvesting food from my very own garden beds. But I am a lazy gardener who does not, at least doesn't yet, enjoy the work that goes into a garden all that much. But I love the results and even my half-hearted efforts of the last four years have born some very rewarding fruit.

I planted radishes, a mescilun mix, red lettuce, white russian kale, arugula, and beets this spring. Soon after I planted, we started investigating a house. We weren't really looking to buy, but this house had everything we were dreaming of and . . . well, next thing you know, I was thinking to myself, "should I really bother with the garden, all the weeding and such? I mean, soon, this might not even be my garden." And, soon, the weeds started taking over. Everything still grew (other than the arugula, which didn't even start,but it was my first year trying it in the garden, c'est la vie)but other than harvesting the rewards, I've done nada. No weeding. No watering. Nothing. Its getting rather specularly wild back there.

I left several beds unplanted where I'd usually have bell peppers, onions, and tomatoes planted by now because it turns out we will be selling our home to the park district (we live right on a public park and they'd like to make more park out of our property) and buying a lovely new home right at the height of garden season. In these unplanted beds one of my very favorite weeds has taken over: lambsquarters. I have one whole bed so full of it and little else it looks like I purposefully planted it that way.

Many of us weed this stuff out all the time not knowing it is a tasty powerhouse of nutrition. Seriously, its a mild but delicious green, grows just about everywhere with no effort on our part, and is amazing for you. If you doubt me, check out the nutritional analysis here.



You can use lambsquarters any way you would use spinach, although I think of the taste as more like a mild asparagus. Here's a pic of it in its natural habitat, looks familiar, doesn't it? And here's a recipe for my favorite way to use it, in pesto.



Baa Baa Pesto
2 packed cups of fresh lambsquarters, leaves and very thin stems only
1/2 cup flat leaf parsley, no stems, chopped up a bit
1/2 cup walnuts (toast them a bit in a skillet first for even richer flavor)
2 T extra virgin olive oil
2-3 cloves fresh garlic, minced
2T crumbled sheep feta from Prairie Fruits Farm in Champaign (feel free to sub in any other feta or 1/4 cup grated hard Italian cheese like Parmesan or Asiago instead)
salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste

Throw it all in the food processor or bender and blend until it forms a paste. Tada!

The feta and walnuts in this recipe aren't super cheap on first blush, I admit, but I love feta because you need so little of it to get a flavor punch that I think it is more useful ounce for ounce than most cheeses. Its what I call a high-impact ingredient - a lot of bang for your buck. Two tablespoons is less than 2 ounces, leaving you plenty of extra feta for fancying-up your eggs in the morning and tossing in salads. And yeah, walnuts aren't cheap, but they are nutritionally fabulous, full of omega-3 fatty acids, and again, add a lot of flavor for your buck.

All said, I made this pesto for about $4 and it will be enough for two meals for our family, easy. I am tossing it with quinoa, cherry tomatoes, and summer squash tonight. Later this week I will slather it on as a base for homemade pizza and top with lots and lots of veggies.

Three more quick notes on this recipe:
1. Vegans, sub out the cheese for 2-4T of nutritional yeast (to your tastes), absolutely yummy!
2. This pesto freezes great, I put it in 1/2 pint Ball canning jars and throw it in the freezer for up to 3 months. Just make sure the container is freezer-safe and air tight and you are good to go.
2. If you are going to store the pesto for a day or longer the very top of it will darken and discolor. There's nothing wrong with it, but if you don't want it to discolor top it with a thin layer of olive oil after packaging to prevent it.

Comfort Food

We've all got them. I'm talking about comfort foods that bring back a very specific memory or warm feeling from childhood. Many of mine are not-so-healthy, but one of the big exceptions is my great grandma Fiocchi's Italian bean soup. While I have vague memories of my still-agile great grandmother bustling in her kitchen making this soup when I was very, very young, my real memories of this soup are from my mother's kitchen. I adored this soup, the tender bits of potato were my very favorite part, my mom always cut them very small and uniform and there was something about that exact way she chopped them every time that made the soup extra special for me. And there was this flavor, this one really rich flavor in it that I couldn't put my finger on as a child or teen. I now know it was the flavor of gobs of fresh parsley, adding it to any soup or sauce is still an almost guaranteed way to make me fall in love with a dish.

All of great grandma's recipes that had been transcribed directly from great grandma by one of her daughters and my mom photocopied them all and gave them to me to use in my own kitchen when I got married. Even though I only use a few of the recipes now as a vegetarian (many contain meat)and others I just haven't gotten around to trying, this collection of recipes is to this day my most treasured wedding present. The food processor died long ago, the towel sets wore out, but this collection of recipes still has a special place on my cookbook shelf. I've made adjustments to the way my great grandma prepared the soup, but the happy warm feeling it brings me to taste it is just the same. I look forward to passing the recipe down to my son some day. Maybe on his wedding day.

Below is the recipe as I inherited it, exactly as my great grandma dictated it, meat left in. Its a very simple recipe with few ingredients, like all recipes for the best comfort food. There are lots of recipes that are complex and intricate that we can bring out to enliven a celebration or holiday, but comfort food is meant to be easy, everyday food. I've added my adjustments and comments in parenthesis.

"Italian Bean Soup

In about 3 quarts of water, cook about 1 cup of rice, or diallini or salad macs (I use whole wheat macaroni) and 1 medium diced potato (skin left on.) Add the sauce (the sauce refers to the rest of the recipe, below.) Salt to taste. Cook until rice or ditalini are cooked. Add 1 can kidney beans or Roman beans (I use 1.5 cups kidney and add 1.5 cups garbanzos to replace the meat in the recipe.)

Bean Soup Sauce
2 T cooking oil or chopped salt pork (I use cooking olive oil)
1 T ground pork (again, I leave this out usually, although Gimme Lean "ground beef" is a great veggie substitute in this recipe if you want to leave that element of flavor/texture in the dish)
1 large or 2 medium cloves garlic
1 cup chopped parsley
1 cup tomato or tomato juice (my mom always uses juice, so that's generally what I use, but this is a great place to use up some over-ripe tomatoes in the summer too)
salt to taste

If chopped salt pork is used, saute it a bit before adding the ground pork. With oil, you can start right off. Saute until ground meat is dry (mom's note is to add the garlic with the meat, it was left out of the recipe by great grandma). Add the parsley and tomato. Allow it to simmer about 1/2 hour. (Add the "sauce" to the water, potato, and pasta, then do the simmering.) "

And yes, it is very, very affordable to make, even with the ground pork. To make it a truly "Food for All" recipe, steal a page from the Italians by putting a piece or hunk of stale bread in the bottom of each serving bowl and ladling the soup over. Not only do you get to use up bread that otherwise might have gone to waste, it adds a delicious heartiness and texture to the soup.

Sloppy Georges!

I’ve been wanting to come up with a good vegetarian sloppy joe recipe for the Food For All recipe series for a while now. I thought it wouldn’t be that hard, I’d just look up a sloppy joe recipe and switch out cooked lentils for the ground meat and “tada!” I’d have another easy and tasty FFA recipe. My motives were a good part selfish. I loved my mom’s sloppy joes as a kid and I’ve been wanting to develop a vegetarian version I really enjoyed for many years now.

I started with calling up mom and asking for her sloppy joe recipe. Turns out, its made mostly of bottled ketchup and when I added up the cost, even after substituting lentils for the ground meat, it was too expensive to be a FFA recipe when made with organic ingredients and well, wasn’t all that healthy either. I try to get some nutritional balance into FFA recipes and make sure every one of them contains at least one vegetable. Unless you counted the tomatoes in the ketchup as a veggie, my mom’s recipe, while super tasty, wasn’t going to cut the FFA standards for price or for nutrition.

To address the cost I tried mixing up a sloppy joe sauce recipe I found that used tomato paste instead of ketchup. Despite all the things the recipe called for adding to the sauce, it still ended up tasting just like tomato paste and having the same unfortunate texture. After eating a bowl full of tomato paste slathered lentils on bread, my enthusiasm for this culinary project severely waned.

After finishing up the SNAP Challenge of eating on only $4.50 a day last week, my enthusiasm for creating new FFA recipes renewed. During the Challenge the only thing that kept me sane was having those FFA recipes to fall back on, which answered the question, “what’s for dinner?” without having to do crazy spreadsheets for each meal I cooked to make sure it came in on budget. The FFA recipes are already costed out and nutritionally balanced and after using them for the SNAP Challenge I truly realized what a helpful tool they are for people trying to eat a healthy diet on a tight budget. I was mulling a few ideas over in my head for FFA recipes while in Indianapolis this weekend celebrating my 5th wedding anniversary with my husband, Mike. For lunch on Saturday we went to one of our favorite Indy dining spots, the Three Sisters Café. Three Sisters serves meat, but has an extensive vegetarian offerings section that we consistently find delightful.

And what did I find on the Three Sisters menu? I’d always past over an offering called, “barbequed grains.” It just didn’t sound that appetizing and when you read the description of mixed grains in a apple butter barbeque sauce with sweet potato on a wheat bun it didn’t sound much better. Mixed grains on a whole grain bun? Sounded boring as heck. I continued down the menu when suddenly it occurred to me, maybe it’s like a sloppy joe! I asked the waitress and, indeed, she confirmed that the unfortunately named dish was a vegetarian sloppy joe type of deal. I ordered it and was convinced that whole grain berries on a wheat bun actually works quite nicely. I went home armed with a plan for a new FFA recipe.

I made my own version of the Three Sisters barbequed grains tonight and it turned out delicious. Its not quite a sloppy joe flavor, so I’ve renamed it Sloppy Georges (G being for both George and grains.) I’ve costed it out and what would otherwise be a very cheap meal still barely qualified for FFA ($2 a serving or less) due to the high cost of the organic bread it is served on. When you get into processed food products like bread, organic food really does get pretty darn costly. I’m kind of amazed I was able to fit it into a FFA recipe at all.

I’d like to try this recipe with lentils in place of the wheat berries sometime soon to make the dish more nutritionally diverse, instead of serving wheat berries on wheat bread. Its still nutritionally pretty darn great, but lentils would make it even more so. At this point I need to cook it still to check that the texture works and that the lentils don’t take the price too high for FFA. Once I try it I’ll post how it went.

Sloppy Georges
1 cup dry wheat berries (bulk bins)
1 T canola oil
½ a large onion, any color, sliced in thin half moon slices
1 medium carrot, shredded
½ a medium yam, shredded
8 slices of any Rudi’s whole grain organic bread

the sauce
1 T canola oil
½ a large onion, any color, minced fine
¾ cup prepared apple butter
¼ cup ketchup (Muir Glen is cheapest per ounce)
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
1 T liquid smoke (not available at the co-op)
¼ tsp red pepper flakes (bulk herb bins)
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
Salt and pepper to taste

For the sauce: heat the oil in a small saucepan, then add the minced onion, stirring frequently. Cook for 3-5 minutes, then add all other ingredients and turn off the heat. Set aside.
For the topping: place the wheat berries in 2 cups water in a small saucepan with a pinch of salt over high heat with the lid on. Once boiling take down to a simmer and let cook 50 to 60 minutes. They will still be chewy and hold their shape. Drain the berries and set aside. While the wheat berries are cooking, place the canola oil in a fry pan and add the onion. Cook over medium heat for 3-5 minutes and the onion is translucent, then add the shredded carrot and yam. Cook, stirring frequently, for another 5 minutes. Turn off the heat, then mix in the wheat berries and sauce. Toast the bread and serve each person two slices of the toast topped with an 1/8 of the wheat berry topping, open-face style.

My camera either got seriously misplaced or stolen this weekend in Indy, so I apologize for the lack of pics, I would have loved to have shared snapshots of our delicious dinner with you!

Oh, SNAP!

My SNAP Challenge wrapped up Friday, seven days of eating on only $4.50 a day. I was able to stuck to the budget eating only organic and local foods from Common Ground, the farmer’s market, and my garden the entire week with all food consumed paid for from that budget except one free bowl of soup. I was able to consume 1500-2100 calories a day every day and to prepare all the food I ate myself while working 40 hours plus a week.

So, eating organically and locally on a SNAP budget is no problem, right? If you’ve been reading along with my blog through the challenge you know this is not at all true. I worked my butt off to manage it and I have years of cooking experience and have already been focusing for the last year and a half on creating nutritious meals on a tight budget from organic and local ingredients. While I pulled off sticking to the budget and maintaining the rules of the SNAP Challenge for all meals but one, as the week progressed my lack of time to properly plan began to show. And as each meal passed where I had to scramble to figure out what to eat on my budget due to lack of time to plan, it got worse. I felt more frazzled, more worried about food when I was trying to work on other things, and that led to more hunger and distraction.

It became crystal clear to me how important good food and access to it is to our functioning over the week of the challenge. If I properly planned my meals, had my food ready for when meal time came around and made sure to have my meals and snacks at appropriate times I felt well nourished and did not experience hunger. When this planning slipped and I didn’t have affordable, nutritious food ready everything went to heck. If you’ve ever been poor, you know things go to heck a lot. When you don’t have money to put toward solving problems, when day to day things going wrong like getting a flat tire or your child coming down ill so they can’t go to school is likely to turn into a fiscal crisis, well, you have a lot of stress in your life. And, as we can all attest, stress tends to lead to no time to cook meals or take proper care of yourself. I often feel functioning well in my life is a tightrope walk now when I have the means to pay for the flat tire or take the day off to care for my son, it doesn’t take much to throw off my life enough to make it neigh impossible to find time to cook nutritious food. When I added the stress of a very tight food budget, it became much harder.

I wanted to take the SNAP Challenge to illustrate that it is possible to eat very nutritious food on a budget, at the same time, I wanted to take it to raise awareness about hunger and how it takes cooking and budgeting skills to make eating well possible for the majority of us. I often hear that eating healthy is expensive and I sometimes hear from people that they feel the food at Common Ground is “too expensive.” We could spend a great deal of time debating the cost of food and why it costs what it does (which I am happy to get into in the future on this blog or in person) but we need to look at why these nutritious organic foods like vegetables, fruits, eggs and the like are so much more expensive than trans-fat-filled, sugar-laden, processed food products. The answer can be found by looking at the Farm Bill that is passed every five years in our country that decides where the farming subsidies will go and what kinds of food production will be supported. I suggest that rather than shaking our fists at the cost of wholesome, organic food at community-owned stores like the co-op where no one is out to make a profit we instead channel our energy into understanding why the least nutritious food, the most health-damaging food, is the cheapest in our country and what we can do to change that.

Let’s also look at what we are teaching in schools about food and money. I am often heard to say that what I am really teaching in my “Healthy Eating on a Budget” class that I offer for free at the co-op every month is healthy eating home ec 101. Who amongst us learned how to budget in school? How to make a weekly meal plan? Learned how to make cheap nutritious meals and about what ingredients gave you the most nutritious bang for your buck? These are skills we need to make sure kids are gaining in schools and we need to inquire about what our schools are teaching now and do what we can to help them bring these critical life skills into their curriculums. In many cases, schools are no longer set up to teach cooking and that’s a travesty. If we do not know how to take care of ourselves, how to do the most basic and core things like feed our bodies in a way that supports our health, we can expect that we are going to struggle with illnesses and issues caused by poor nutrition.

I don’t have all the answers, not one of us does. But by asking questions, getting involved, having tough discussions, and sharing ideas and skills with each other I believe we can find them. The SNAP Challenge stimulated some tough discussions, the sharing of ideas and skills, and getting involved. I think that made it very worth doing and a great success. Thank you to the Eastern Illinois Food Bank for inviting me to take part.

As for the future of this blog, I am inspired now to keep blogging about affordable and nutritious meals. I'll be posting at least once a week with recipes, tips, and photos about making great food on the cheap with organic and local ingredients. If there is a topic you'd like to see me cover, a recipe or a tip you'd like to share, please let me know!