Today’s post is part of the Pennywise Platters blog carnival, hosted by The Nourishing Gourmet.

pennywiseplatter

One complaint I hear often (even from my husband) is how expensive a Real Food diet can be. It is true that as a society, we are spoiled by paying, on average, a low 9% of our income for food. When we adopted a more traditional diet, my food bill immediately increased. Especially at first, paying more for locally made artisan bread than the sale loaf at the megamart, organic and/or local only produce, and raw milk rather than the $2 a gallon variety put a dent in our budget. But the biggest expense was switching over from buying processed foods to buying organic versions of processed foods. It took me some time to take the next step: from buying foods to buying ingredients.

Gradually, I’ve been looking at my kitchen differently. Instead of it being like a pot for mixing together the pre-processed ingredients brought in from other sources, I see my kitchen now more as a family-run factory: turning raw materials into food. So, instead of reading labels and looking for the healthiest sauerkraut, I seek out the finest head of local, organic cabbage and the best quality salt and make my own. Making sauerkraut takes days, but only about ten minutes of effort.

Look around your kitchen. Chances are there are processed foods you could make yourself. Doing so will reward you with a higher quality and safer food product, a reduced food bill and that glorious “I made it myself” feeling.

Here’s what we make in our home processing plant:

  • From raw milk we make butter, buttermilk, clarified butter, cottage cheese, cheese, kefir, yogurt, sour cream, whipped cream and ice cream.
  • In our mill we grind grain for bread, biscuits, rolls, noodles, flour for breading and thickening. By the way, my $20 coffee grinder that grinds my coffee and spices does this job nearly as well as my mill.
  • In my food processor I make mayonnaise, salad dressing, pesto, grate cheese and slice mounds of veggies quickly and easily.
  • In the blender we mix smoothies and slushes and make soaked pancake batter.
  • The dehydrator gets a workout making fruit leather, dehydrating fruits and veggies and providing a uniform heat source for some cultured foods. It’s even stood in for my microwave for defrosting meat from time to time!
  • My slow cooker almost always holds a batch of stock cooking itself down. If the batch is too big, I use the stove and monitor it a little more closely.
  • I have a special area of kitchen counter that is full of canning jars in which foods are lacto-fermenting or culturing, kombucha is brewing, herbs are infusing into oils, vanilla beans are soaking in liquor, water and dairy kefir grains are growing, sprouts are coming alive, grains and beans are soaking.

Each of these processing functions takes seconds to minutes of my time while the food does the work in almost all cases. As long as I remember to plan ahead and to start the soaking, sprouting or fermenting on time, I spend very little time actually working in the kitchen and less of my food budget goes toward paying other people to do jobs I can do for myself, better, safer and faster.

Making your own is local, nourishing and pennywise!