Confessions of a (Food) Shopaholic

I am not a man but I probably have
 that blissful look on my face while shopping.

There, I admit, I am a food shop-a-holic.  Even though I just live in a little town with not much variety for shopping, I feel my day is not complete unless I do some grocery shopping, no matter how little.   It is so easy to shop and fun.  It gets me out of the house for a little while, I am able to be in different surroundings, I bring home food and I enjoy it.

What's wrong with that?

Well, one thing is we really can't afford it.  Some days I spend more than others and since switching to gluten free, I find I spent a lot more this week than I should of.  It just seems like we never have anything to eat, mainly because there are a lot of days I just don't want to cook!  I am trying to get away from packaged foods in general but right now I'm using them as a bridge (crutch?) to a new way of eating and hoping to wean us off soon.  Unfortunately, these foods are more than what we usually spend and it's adding up.

Second is I realize that I am getting more and more away from local eating.  Our family will never be 100% for a number of reasons, availability and cost are the two big ones.  But while the cereal the kids like is made in Canada and so are other things, I know I need to make more of an effort to make things from scratch and try to get more local ingredients.

Another is I should be finding other things to do to occupy my time to get out.  That is hard.  I'm a very shy, introverted person.  I find it hard to make friends and when I have friends, I don't like doing things.  There, I said it.  I am also getting too old to feel terrible about it.   Yeah, I said it, lol!   I am not going to be a fakey person for the sake of having friends, IYKWIM.

Well the reason I'm thinking about these things again is I submitted my application for our CSA on Saturday.  A deposit and a whole years worth of post dated cheques.  Mark wasn't very thrilled but he consented.  Right now because of my shopping habits, we tend to waste more food than I care to admit.  Some is from cooking disasters, other waste is from not planning.  Some of it is a case of it looks good in the store but we either forget about it when we get it home or we don't feel like eating it.  So yeah, he's scared of the waste.  Waste of food and waste of money.  I only signed up for a half share, which is $68 a month which I think will be plenty for us.

See, my thinking is if we get a CSA I can cut down on a lot of my shopping.  I won't have to run to the store to get overpriced produce, some that isn't local, I won't have to buy it from the farmer's market and since we are signed up for a full year, we will have produce available in the winter too.  We won't have to go on produce hunting farmers market trips, which often end up in wasted food (as what happened last year).  I expect to have to supplement it some, like fruit, but I think it will cover most of our needs.

If we get a side of beef and a side of pork or two and figure out a way to afford pastured chicken, we would almost never have to shop in a grocery store!  I would do some bulk shopping for my baking needs at the health food store or bulk barn and watch the sales for our dairy. Oh and I found someone with cheap free range eggs (Dad told me about him; it's where he gets his eggs and they're a dollar cheaper a dozen than I was paying!)

That brings me to my biggest problem; I don't plan well enough.  I have been suggesting to Mark for a long time we need a grocery budget.  I don't even know how much I spend right now.  A lot.  It is for groceries and entertainment, my entertainment.  I need boundaries or I will rebel and spend.

So I am hoping it all comes together that we can get real food, spend less money than we're spending now and instead of shopping for my entertainment, I can plan, cook and clean with the delicious reward of knowing I am feeding my family well.  Sounds good, let's see if I can stay on task with that!!

Monday Market Report November 8th

Well, I don't have pictures and I don't have a total accounting of what I spent and what I bought.  I am trying to set some real food goals and this month I wanted it to be to buy nothing with any more than 5 ingredients.  I failed with tomato soup.  It is so hard to find things the kids will eat in their lunches and they always eat tomato soup, but, of course, there are more than 5 ingredients (8 to be exact).  In the mornings it is so rushed and I like putting something hot in their lunch so they usually have it two or three times a week.  I am not going to beat myself up over it as overall I'm doing much better.

At the market, I bought a large lovely leek, a big bunch of green onions, a bag of zesty salad greens, a bag of sweet potatoes, 4 of the most delicious red delicious apples I have ever had, a big bag of cranberries and something else that is not coming to mind.

At the grocery store, I loaded up on marble cheese (for the kids lunches), bought some eggs, milk, raisins, natural cheezies, chips, and french fries,  Gah!  I get in the store and I am totally like the girl from "Confession of a Shopaholic" (I am currently reading the whole series and I can totally relate to her, except for me it's food shopping).  It is crazy.

I really want to get into meal planning.  It is FlyLady's habit of the month.  I hate to say it but we waste a lot of food because either I forget we have it or I poorly plan our meals around what we have on hand.

Today I spent around $60 grocery shopping, but $30 of that was for boots for Shaylee and a notebook and pens that I bought (half my shopping trouble is you can buy everything you need at the grocery store!) and $10 for boxes of  Pot of Gold chocolate for Christmas.  I am going to try not to buy any thing else this week, even though it will be haaaaaarrrrrd!  I will have to force myself to use up what we have on hand.

(clipart from http://www2.free-clipart.net/ )

Monday Market Report October 4th

I think this is my favorite market report ever! I had so much fun shopping this week :). I didn't report what I got at Bulk Barn because I decided that from October on, I would be accountable for all the groceries that I buy, not just what I buy at the farmers market. I am trying to build up our storage with healthy food and hopefully posting it all will give me motivation to stay on track.

Good news! This week we are getting our quarter of grass fed and finished beef! It was the last one and I almost didn't get it. I feel it was a great blessing that it was freed up for us, with God knowing how important it was to me and our health to buy it. It is going to the butcher on Thursday so it should be interesting to see how much it is and how I handle placing the cut order (I never know how to do it!).

This is what our kitchen looked like when we got home late Friday night. It was a full day of shopping and buying lots of yummy vegetables (and other things). (don't mind the mess; things just kind of got thrown around and I've been slack in the housekeeping department lately :) ).

I was so happy to go to Meadowbrook meat market. They were having a sale of buy two get one free shoulder bacon and frozen sausages. We got 6 packs of the shoulder bacon and 6 sausages. 3 packs of sausages were breakfast sausages and the others were donair, maple and honey garlic. We also bought a slab of salt pork (Mark loves this fried up but it's also good on bacon and rappie pie), a couple packages of back bacon plus a little pack of goats milk Parmesan cheese. Now I really don't care much for goat milk products so I'm taking a leap here trying the cheese. I think it will be interesting. I don't want to break down the cost of each item but all this plus a $2.50 bag of ice to keep it cold was $49. We've had some of the bacon and a pack of breakfast sausages and it is really good!

I love Forsythe's Farm Market but didn't get much. At this point we already had most of our produce (even though carrots were $3 cheaper a bushel here but we didn't know). 2 spaghetti squash $2.50 and two zucchini for $1.50. Total: $4. They had 2 liter jugs of real maple syrup for $27-something so I may get that our next time through. They only take cash and I didn't have that much on hand.

Here are our Foote Family Farm findings, a gallon of unpastureized honey and a gallon of fresh pressed cider (we had to have some before we got home, lol! It's the one in the red cap ;) ). $26; $5 for the cider and $21 for 12 lbs of honey.

The next two pictures are from Gouchers Farm Market. I wanted to go back and get more! So much wonderful food at great prices. The acorn and butternut squash were 49 cents a pound and I wish I had bought more! 50lbs buttercup squash $15, 4 acorn squash $2.11, 2 organic garlic $2.17 ($10 a pound), 1 butternut squash $1.79, 2 sweet dumpling squash $1.50, 2 pie pumpkins $2 for both, big bag of dulse $1o, 5 cucumbers $1, 3 bunches of green onions at 69 cents each, mushrooms $1.99, romaine lettuce 89 cents, red onions 50 cents a pound (my favorite and usuall $2 a pound! 2.25lbs so $2.25 for onions), bunch of bananas for $1.10 and we each got an ice cream that were $1 each, cheapest around for real local ice cream (Mark and I had Oxford blueberries and cream, so divine on such a hot day!)

This was from a neat farm. The farmer was old, probably in his 80's. He looked like what you expect an old time farmer to look like. I wanted to buy everything he had as his prices were very reasonable and he was pretty nice. The bushel of carrots were $7.75, 25lbs of turnip $7. 50, 2 lbs of green peppers at $2.50, 5 gourds for 20 cents each ($1), tomatoes were 70 cents a pound (3lbs so $2.10) and no spray strawberries were $2.50 a box. The strawberries aren't there because it wasn't until we got home I remembered I sat them down to carry stuff out and didn't go back to get them. Grrrr. I was so looking forward to nice fresh strawberries! Total spent: $24

We usually get a lot more at Avery's but they didn't have much and we didn't want to shop around the other ones. 3 bunches of celery at 77 cents each and two grapefruit at 59 cents each.

These aren't really a farm goodie but they are the best chips! I especially love the burlap bag they came in. These chips are made in New Brunswick (technically in our 100 mile zone even though it is across the Bay of Fundy) and can be hard to find around here (Bridgewater's Appleberry's is the closest place I know that stocks them). They make awesome sweet potato chips! Small hand batches of kettle chips are the best (even though they are made with canola). These were $3.99 at Winners (at Pete's Frootique they are nearly $5 and you don't get an awesome burlap sack with them!).

This is what I got at the Saturday farmers market. Almost 2 dozen pullet eggs for $3.75, 2lbs of grassfed beef for $5 and a pound of ground pork $2 (I think it's pastured but probably fed grains/feed too). I got the meat before I knew we were getting the beef, otherwise I wouldn't of bothered!

And finally, I got this at Sobeys. 2 blocks of cheese ($3.99 each) and a bag of spinach ($1.99). No one had spinach in the valley and I still crave greens. There weren't even any at the farmers market because it was pouring rain and the lady I usually get them from wasn't there. I will buy more cheese when they don't only have skim mozza. I also need to get milk and go to bulk barn again.

So an extremely productive shopping week! If I can remember how, I am going to put our grocery tally in the sidebar so I can keep track of our expenses. Remember that this isn't just for the week, but I am attempting to store up some food for winter. I have been doing a lot of reading on how to store food for winter use, even if it is different in this modern day than it was over a hundred years ago.

gnowfglins

You may be wondering what the title of my post means. "God's natural organic whole foods grown locally and in season". I love it! It is a blog I've been following for a while now: gnowfglins.com . For a while, I was drooling over the fact she has e-courses on her site. As you may have figured out, we aren't exactly in a postition to pay a lot of money for things right now. I am using all our resources to source local, healthy, nourishing food to sustain my family.

However, she offers a "pay what you can" option for the courses. I hesitated for months because I knew we could not afford much. So I paid what I could. If we can afford to, I will pay more later because it is an enormous resource! I am blown away by all the information and the awesome way it is presented. It has helped me understand why we need to do certain things to food to make them more digestable and allow maximum absorption of the good things while cutting out the bad.

Since I have "lots of free time" (as so many seem to think, but not really) and I really want to get into real food, I thought why not. I should learn to do it properly. I follow lots of real food blogs but it gets time consuming and a lot to wade through and I rarely get to the fundamentals. Speaking of which, there is a fundamentals course and a sourdough course. I will be working through them all (except the ones where I can't afford to get the cultures, like kombucha, for example). I'll be doing the best I can.

I have my first project soaking right now, brown rice. We are going to have a "Chinese" supper of soaked rice, vegetable egg rolls and a stir fry. The egg rolls aren't really considered "traditional" but it is a locally made food so it could be worse, I guess. I need to transition my family into better eating and I know it will take time.

I bought some sunflower seeds today which I will be making into sunbutter. It's like peanut butter but since it is not a nut, the kids will be able to take it to school. I am trying to find out about soaking and dehydrating. I also bought a few pounds of raw almonds that I plan to soak and dehydrate. I've done it before and they are yummy! I got a few other natural foods at the bulk food store and will go back to get more. They have a coupon to save $3 if you spend $10 or more plus you get a free reusable shopping bag if you spend $10 or more. Win win!.