This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays, hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.
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The two most frequent comments I get when I explain our foodstyle are:

Isn’t that like, crazy expensive?

and

I don’t have time to cook from scratch!

I want to address the second question today because I feel pretty strongly about it. I’ve discussed it briefly before in posts like
…and everything in its place
Real Food Wednesday: Looking back and ahead
and
Best time saving tips

This time I want to get down to some nitty gritty specifics. When I found out this would be the topic for this week, I started keeping track of my time in the kitchen and what I was doing there. Just for comparison, I spent the first day cooking and eating the Standard American Diet and the following three days cooking and eating the traditional diet we have adopted. I separated out active and passive cooking time so you could see the difference between time I spent actually cooking vs. the time I spent allowing a “servant” cook for me. Here’s the day-by-day breakdown:

Day One (Standard American Diet)
Breakfast: Chocolate chip pancakes (from mix), orange juice (from frozen concentrate)
5 minutes prep, 20 minutes active cooking
Lunch: Blue Box Macaroni and Cheese
10 minutes prep, 10 minutes passive cooking
Snack: Fluffernutter Sandwiches
6 minutes prep
Dinner: Bowtie pasta with frozen meatballs and parmesan, bagged salad
3 minutes prep, 20 minutes active cooking
Dessert: Frosted Brownie from mix
15 minutes prep, 35 minutes passive cooking
Other kitchen prep work: Soak nuts for crisping later in the week
2 minutes prep
Notes: I wash the bagged salad and spun it dry. I dressed it with bottled dressing. The frozen meatballs were cooked in the microwave. The dessert is an exception for us, it was a birthday “cake.”
Total time for the day: 41 mins prep, 40 mins active cooking, 45 mins passive cooking

Day Two
Breakfast: Orange Muffins, glass of milk
5 minutes prep, 17 minutes passive cooking
Lunch: Sliced leftover roast beef sandwiches with lettuce and tomato
8 minutes prep
Snack: Glass of Kombucha tea, one sliced apple
3 minutes prep
Easter Dinner: Leg of Lamb, Steamed Asparagus, Artichokes with butter sauce, Mashed Potatoes, Mint Chutney
10 mins prep, 30 minutes active cooking, 2 hours passive cooking
Other kitchen prep: Rinse, pat dry and put nuts in dehydrator overnight.
2 minutes prep
Notes: The mashed potatoes were from fresh, raw potatoes. The mint chutney had been made several days ago and was ready and waiting for this use. The orange muffins prep time included juicing three large oranges. The Kombucha tea was ready and waiting in the fridge, having been made earlier.
Total time for the day: 28 mins prep, 30 mins active cooking, 2 hrs 17 mins passive cooking

Day Three
Breakfast: Scrambled eggs, bacon and toast
5 minutes prep, 10 minutes active cooking
Lunch: Black Bean Burritos, cortido
3 minutes prep, 10 minutes active cooking
Snack: Fresh fruit
2 minutes prep
Dinner: Broiled Cobia, Butternut Squash Puree with pecans, Cottage Potatoes
7 minutes prep, 15 minutes active cooking, 1 hr passive cooking
Other kitchen prep: Make raisin chutney, dry bread for crumbs, put tea bags in sun tea jar on back patio
16 minutes prep
Notes: I made the tortillas for the burritos from sprouted grain flour I had ready and waiting for this purpose. The black beans and rice were leftover from previous meals. The cortido was made earlier and waiting in the fridge. The sun will make the tea we will have at lunch tomorrow, without any effort from me. The bread will dry in the dehydrator overnight and I will use the blender to crumb it tomorrow.
Total time for the day: 33 mins prep, 35 mins active cooking, 1 hr passive cooking

Day Four
Breakfast: Coconut Pancakes, milk
4 minutes prep, 20 minutes active cooking
Lunch: Salmon Salad, Sun Tea
7 minutes prep, 15 minutes active cooking
Snack: Cheese cubes and crispy nuts
4 minutes prep
Dinner: Pot Roast, Stuffed Mushrooms, Ginger Carrots
16 minutes prep, 15 minutes active cooking, 1 1/2 hr passive cooking
Other kitchen prep: Soak porridge for tomorrow’s breakfast, soak rice for tomorrow’s dinner
5 minutes prep
Notes: The salmon salad started as raw fish. I made the dressing for the salad from scratch as part of this prep time. The ginger carrots were ready and waiting in the fridge.
Total time for the day: 36 mins prep, 50 mins active cooking, 1 1/2 hrs passive cooking

In summary:

Standard American Diet Total time for the day: 41 mins prep, 40 mins active cooking, 45 mins passive cooking

Average other three days: 32 mins prep, 38 minutes active cooking, a little more than 1 1/2 hours passive cooking

Other than the passive cooking time, I’m just not seeing a big difference here. Part of the difficulty in determining times is that a lot of the food I make is that preparation takes place over days, not minutes. So, the chutney we will eat on Friday is started on Monday. Friday I just open a jar and serve, leftovers are assigned to another meal when they will require no preparation at all. A snack of crispy nuts is started two days in advance. I don’t spend any time actively making them other than the length of time it takes to put them in a jar with water and salt to sit overnight, drain the water and put them in the dehydrator the next day. You can see how this would speed food prep during the week to have one item on your dinner menu already made and waiting. Your “servants” (dehydrator, soaking, sprouting and fermenting jars, crockpot, oven) can work while you are sleeping or not home. I don’t bake our bread right now, as I am still looking for a good recipe using soaked, sprouted or sourdough grain that yields the kind of loaf my family enjoys. But for all the flour I use, I purchase wheat berries and grind them into flour at home. It takes about 4 minutes to get 5 cups of freshly ground flour in my mill, and what I gain in nutrition and flavor is worth the time trade-off to me.

The largest chunk of time I spend in food preparation is meal planning and shopping. But by planning carefully, I can minimize the time I need to spend cooking. I have the luxury of being home all day and can break up cooking into smaller jobs to be done throughout the day instead of a long hour on my feet at dinnertime. If I were still working outside the home, I would use my crockpot much more often than I do now. I am also immensely blessed to have a family full of children who can rinse veggies, slice, grate, grind, saute, blend, sprout, and do dishes! This division of labor in my house really helps and teaches them how to prepare good, nutritious food for themselves. But for this experimental week part, I enlisted no help at all to ensure accurate timings.

The other part of the time issue I want to address is the perception of time. For the first time in the history of mankind, we don’t need to spend 16 hours hunting and foraging and cooking each meal. Plopping a frozen entree in the microwave for seven minutes while you do something else might seem like a more time-efficient way to prepare dinner than washing, cutting and steaming fresh vegetables and pan-frying a piece of grassfed meat. But take a step back and think about your priorities for a moment.

What in your life do you really, truly have to do in order to live? We’re talking about breathing here, not maintaining a lifestyle. Most people’s list is: Eat, sleep, work. If you don’t go to work, there will be no money for paying the rent, buying the food, or keeping the electricity on. That’s important. If you don’t sleep, you’ll start having hallucinations and fall ill rather quickly. That’s high on the priority list, too. But what about eating? Is it enough to fill your stomach with whatever is fast, convenient and moderately tasty or do our bodies require more from us? Will your body function at a higher efficiency if you feed it the best quality food you can find prepared in a way that maintains its nutrition than if you feed it empty calories designed to fill you up with no regard to nourishment? Mine does, but I didn’t know the degree of improvement in my quality of life until I tried it for myself.

What in your life can you put aside for a short season while you are learning to cook and eat the most nutritious foods available? Is there just one TV show a week you can give up and devote that time to making menus? Can you visit one less social networking site to do some advance prep work on the week’s meals? These are unpopular questions, and I bristled when I was asked them. “If it’s in the grocery store, it’s food, and if it’s food I can eat it. Why should I spend hours making something I can just buy?” But the difference in the way my body is working since I started eating homemade foods is amazing and I know, regardless of convenience, I can never go back.

And the “hours” I envisioned it taking? I was wrong about that, too.

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