'Possum Patch: Eat Better and Cheaper

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Eat Better and Cheaper

Save Money-Eat Better-Stress Less

“Oh Lord!,” I can just hear my grown kids groaning now.

I'm always giving advice that nobody wants and NEVER takes but for what it's worth....

Grandma’s Rules Are as Follows:

1: Quit Eating Junk

2: Treat Your Kids Like They’re Important

3: Keep Your Eye on the Goal

Just to clear the deck I will admit, and assume that everyone knows, that I was a lousy mother, my children were often starved for junk food and were forced to wear homemade clothes well into the mid-years of elementary school. My oldest son spent his first hard-earned paycheck on a store bought haircut. Of course these aren’t the only examples of my lousy motherhood but they are the ones I can bear to share publicly and the only ones pertinent here.

I was also blessed with kids that were notorious for eating three times the amount the children of my friends and relatives did and challenged with having to care for them on about a quarter of the resources.

But from all that deprivation and struggle I did learn a few things just in case anyone is interested.

Quit Eating Junk

Feed Your Family Real Food:

First of all let me suggest that you only use those fancy cookbooks that you bought at all those garage sales or got as birthday gifts, anniversary gifts etc. for night reading. About all they are good for is to make a person set such high standards for cooking that they never get any real cooking done. On top of that they make a person feel so inadequate. I have a whole shelf full and a drawer full to boot and I am totally inadequate.!!

To feed your family real food you must buy real food not what ADM (Archer Daniels Midland) and the American Cardboard and Plastic Industries want you to think is food. Don’t go up any center aisle of the store except the baking and condiment aisle. (Flour, Sugar, Lard, Tea, Coffee, Ketchup, Mustard..well you get my drift) and the canned food aisle.

The periphery of almost all stores is where everything you really need is located. That’s meat, milk, cheese, bread, vegetables and fruit. If it’s in a box, bag, or frozen it should be a small addition to any meal and/or a rare treat. Treat it like a treat and don’t do it often.

Treat Your Kids Like They’re Important

Your Children Are Not Family Pets.

Expect Them to Help. They will surprise you if they think what they’re doing is important.

Keep Your Eye on the Goal:

Don’t rob Your Family of Good Meals or Your Precious Time

The goal is to provide a fast, pleasant, nutritious meal with the time to enjoy it. For good or ill, if there are children, the home is a training ground. Good food is better food. Less stress is better than more stress.

If you work outside the home, (and who doesn’t?) don’t cook more than an hour or two a week. Here’s how: Crock Pot, Crock Pot, Crock Pot. Grill, Grill, Grill. Bake, Bake Bake.

Sample Weekly Shopping:

Buy two whole chickens, one five-pound roast, five pork chops, ten pounds of hamburger and a package of either short ribs, spare ribs or pork steak for BBQ. One pack of meatloaf seasoning (McCormicks or store brand), 5 pound bag of small red potatoes, a two pound bag of carrots, four cans green beans, four cans carrots, four cans creamed or whole kernel corn, a stalk of celery and a bag of salad greens, the darker the better, (Iceberg lettuce has little food value.) four boxes mac and cheese, one pack of spaghetti, four boxes instant brown rice, one package frozen noodles, 3 packages of pre-baked hot rolls, a big package of frozen french fries, two cans of your favorite beans, a dozen eggs and a couple of jars of Ragu.

This will give you…

2 chicken dinners

1 beef roast dinner

1 meatloaf dinner

1 grilled hamburger dinner

1 spaghetti and meatball dinner

1 Grilled Pork Chop dinner

1 Barbecue (pork or beef)

None of the above will take any more time to fix than you would spend waiting in a fast food line or waiting for the Pizza delivery boy.

This list allows for a couple of throw-out recipes (AKA My-family-wouldn't-touch-that-with a- 10-foot-pole) and one night of carry-out or eating out. They should even each other out.

In The Kitchen

The following should take about ten minutes.

Well, you've made it home from the store. Divide hamburger into five two-pound portions, put each of three portions in separate zip lock bags and freeze. These you can use to grill. Take them out the night before to thaw in the frig or..remember..the nuker does have a “thaw” thingy on it.

Take one portion and toss into a bowl with a handful of oatmeal, an egg, (be sure and break the egg) salt and pepper, and a dollop of milk. A dollop is what you get if you start to pour milk and catch yourself just in time when you meant to pour beer. Roll into little meatballs, put back into a quart freezer bag. Now I know you can buy little plastic bags of little plastic meatballs but they are about four times the cost and four times the added chemicals besides being frozen in plastic for a month or two. This process will take you about four minutes if you don’t have to hunt for the salt and pepper, or the egg etc..

Freeze meatballs, chickens, pork or beef for BBQ and beef roast.

Sample Fast Meals

Weekend Day One.

This should take about 7 minutes max.

Meat loaf, potatoes, salad and hot rolls

Mix one unfrozen portion of hamburger with meatloaf seasoning mix, a handful of oatmeal, an egg and a blob of salsa, taco sauce, ketchup..whatever. Place in loaf pan or round casserole. Drizzle catsup on top and put in 350 degree oven.

Take four potatoes, grease with any grease but motor oil, poke holes in the top with fork and put in oven with meatloaf.

Cook about an hour until meatloaf is no longer bleeding. Serve with some WASHED salad and encourage eating the skin of the potato. Potato skin is loaded with good stuff.

Toss a half dozen store bought hot rolls in to heat for about the three minutes it’s going to take you to throw the salad into a bowl. I don’t care what you put on the potato or the salad. You have already worked off any fat you might get from sour cream, Ranch Dressing etc. poking holes in the potatoes.

Weekend Day 2:

This Should Take About 7 minutes actual work and another 20 to sit and contemplate the grill and listen to the neighbor’s dog bark.

Grilled pork chops, grilled potatoes, green beans and bread and butter

Slice and boil (do not peel) five red potatoes for about ten minutes. Pour off water and put potatoes on a piece of tinfoil that you have greased with oleo. Drop a blob of oleo on top of them, salt and pepper, fold the foil around them and stick on grill.

Take pork chops and do anything fancy you want to with them..dip in dressing..season with lemon pepper..lay a slice of pineapple on top after they’ve been turned once or just grill the dang things with salt and pepper. Don’t overcook but make sure they are done. Raw pork is a real no no.

Put a blob of oleo in a sauce pan and dump in a can of green beans.

Serve with bread and butter.

Any Weekday:

Before leaving for work put whatever meat you bought for BBQ in crock pot and pour BBQ sauce over it, set crock pot on low.

Serve with your favorite canned beans and baked fries.

Any Weekday:

15 minutes

Stewed chicken. Brown rice, salad and corn or green beans.

Put frozen chicken in crock pot on low before leaving for work. Add salt and pepper,

and a branch of celery. (You can take the bag of guts out of the chicken right before serving when it is all cooked and juicy and no one will ever know the difference. In fact in later years your children will think people are crazy who don't do it like that.)

As a safety measure set crock pot on metal surface such as your stove or a cookie sheet across one side of the sink. Remember do not run water with a plugged in crock pot in the sink. If you're really paranoid put the dang thing in the garage on concrete. When you get home, ladle off about a cup of broth into a sauce pan and bring to a boil. Add some instant brown rice (follow the box direction here.) Serve with salad, corn green beans or whatever.

Any Weekday:

About 7 minutes

Roast beef, red potatoes and carrots.

Put frozen beef roast into crock pot in the morning. Peel an onion and put in whole. Peel three carrots and put in whole. Wash and put in four or five red potatoes, unpeeled and whole. Do crock pot on low as you did with the chicken.

Serve with anything else you want to.

Any Weekday:

About 15 minutes

Grill Hamburgers with mac and cheese, pork and beans etc.

If you forgot to take the hamburger out of the freezer thaw it in micro wave for grilling. Serve with cheese, cheap iceberg lettuce, sliced tomatoes etc…Mac and cheese from box per directions takes about ten minutes so start it before you put the hamburgers on. Pork and Beans..Applesauce..whatever..

Any Weekday:

About 20 Minutes

Roast chicken and Noodles, corn, salad and/or fresh celery

Plop a whole frozen chicken, salt and pepper, a branch of celery and a chunk of onion in crock pot before going to work. Set on low. When you get home remove chicken to bowl or platter and cover to keep warm. Dig out the slimy cooked celery, onions etc and do whatever you want with them. Dump a bag of frozen noodles in broth in crock pot and cook on high ‘til noodles are done. (My crock pot will come to a boil on high and the noodles cook quickly. If yours doesn’t, dump noodles and broth into large pan and boil until done.)

While noodles are cooking put a blob of oleo into a sauce pan and dump in a can of corn.

Serve chicken and noodles with corn and salad or raw celery.

Any Weekday:

15 minutes

Spaghetti and meatballs.

Set a package of spaghetti to cooking. (Just break in half and put in a large pan of water. Poke periodically to keep it from glomming together. Brown hamburger balls, (remember you made the little suckers the day you bought groceries?) turning occasionally, in a fairly large skillet. Turn skillet on low and cook with lid for a few minutes. Ad Ragu and heat until hot. Serve with Italian bread and salad or broccoli or something green.

Well, I got that off my chest!!

No comments:

A Bedtime Story for Chickens

Once upon a time there was a little red hen. Each morning she woke early and left the special chicken house and worked hard scratching all day and laid very nice eggs in the special nest in the special house for chickens. But she had one bad habit. She did not like to go to bed at Chicken Bedtime with the other chickens. One morning she did not wake early. She did not wake at all. Fluffy red feathers blew in the breeze beneath the apple tree where the racoon liked to perch at night.

The Moral of the Story is: Go to bed when you're supposed to.

Memoirs

These are my memories and even though others have their own, perhaps contradictory, memories these are mine.

Memoirs Chapter 1

Our House

Unlike many people, I spent my childhood in the same house in which I was born. My childhood was encompassed by the sameness of each room, the never-changing porches, ragged lawns and roughly wooded acres and the multiplicity of a neighborhood comprised of families with names that told the history of the Midwest without even trying.

As an adult I’ve been fascinated by those old names: West, Woods, Rogers, Yates, Mathews, Alexander, Shields, Faucett and of course ours, descendents of the Lewis’s, Allens, Bakers and McDonalds, all reaching back to the English and Scots Irish Kentucky and Tennessee immigrations of the very early 1800s.

The other names were newer, German or Irish and with German and Irish mores: Rittermeir, Rintschler, Stock, (Dad’s name), Ostertag, McGosker, Kirkpatrick, O’Dell, Coopersmith, Mylars.

Many of these German and Irish families, fleeing hunger and conscription, lured by land and wages, came a decade or two later in the 19^th century during and shortly after the building of the railroads and stayed to build the Midwest after the end of the Civil War.

Dad built most of our house. I understand it was just two small rooms sitting on a brushy five acre lot at the edge of a dirt road when Dad, Mom and my six older siblings moved in. He later bought an adjacent forty acres.

He dug a basement, added two upstairs rooms and two downstairs rooms and a porch at the back. The path from the back porch wound down past the walnut tree and through the tall weeds to the out house. A very large family of spiders owned one whole corner of the outhouse so I never sat on that side.

Dad had a lot of help from friends that worked with him as laborers at different building sites that evidently had a lot of “left overs.” His friends were generous fellows and made steady contributions from those sites in the form of left over buckets of nails, left over gravel, left over lumber and so forth. The day the guy came with the concrete truck with the left over concrete for the basement floor was a banner day. Thank heavens for left overs because we really needed the room.

I can just barely remember a pot bellied stove into which went old newspapers, little sticks of wood and sometimes bigger chunks of wood or a scuttle of coal. Dad’s big heavy coffee pot sat on the stove top and the smell of the coffee mixed with the smell of the burning wood and the steam from the coffee made the rooms seem a lot warmer than they were.

Before long the house was modernized even further and a monstrous coal stove taller than either of my parents lurked just under the basement

stairs. Heat rose into the house through a large grate in the living room.

A few steps away from the furnace was the coal bin accessed through a low basement window that opened onto the driveway. The coal truck would be backed down the drive and the driver, usually a black man, would shovel the coal by hand through the window.

Many people say that they can’t remember anything before they were four or five years old and I don’t know why. I remember a great deal before that. They say people remember intense experiences and that is probably true.

My first actual memory was of standing, crying in my crib, gripping the top rails, dressed in a little white flannel gown that tied at the back of the neck, and being very scared. It was bedtime and my crib was in my parents’ room. Mother came to me and lay me down and pinned the blanket to the bottom sheet on each side of me so I would not get uncovered in the night and told me, “Shhh”.

Soon after that my bed was moved into what later became the bathroom. It was a tiny room that opened off of my parents’ room with just enough room for my crib to fit along one wall. This was the room in which I slept during the Chicken Wars.

We had no well and water was saved from rain or hauled in I guess but stored in the cistern near the back porch. It had a large square concrete top with a smaller concrete square that could be moved to check the level of the water and to remove anything unsavory. Two cinder blocks placed on this cap kept it in place.

Frogs and toads lived in the inside rim of the cistern and Daddy said they never hurt anything but the snake he found once had to be removed. He did not like snakes.

During the Chicken Wars of my infancy me and my brother, just a couple of years older than I, would run to the concrete of the cistern top to evade the old Banty rooster. The rooster was very protective of his hens but the hens always came to people expecting to be fed. It was a no-win situation for us.

Even though we were forbidden to hurt the old rooster my brother always fought back hard, throwing dirt clods and sticks and even once throwing a pan of water on him that had been set out for the dog but we always lost and wound up high tailing it for the cistern top.

There we would wait until either someone came to rescue us or the old rooster forgot we were there and wandered off.

My nightmares at that time always involved that wretched rooster and the safety of the cistern.

My worst rooster nightmare was probably my last as it occurred during one of my parents’ weekly Pinochle game and I was taken up to sit on Mom’s lap and be made over by Aunt Opal and Uncle Frank and the Mylars from next door who had been fortunate or smart enough to leave their kids at home.

And Daddy took noisy little sips of coffee from his saucer and clicked his false teeth at me, making the bottom ones slide almost out and it was always the best of jokes although Mom found the saucer sipping thing and the clicking teeth disgusting.

On Saturday nights we, that is the family, went to Nelsons Tavern where Mom and Dad and sometimes my older siblings and their friends would dance to the juke box and Dad would drink how ever much beer he could afford, generally one or two, and Mom would drink Coca Cola out of cool green bottles, slowly so it would last.

Mostly they danced with each other but occasionally a careful ritual would transpire. During a lull when they were not dancing, someone might come to our table and ask Dad if it was alright if he asked his wife to dance and Dad would always say they could and they would ask Mom to dance and she would leave her Coca Cola to dance. She particularly loved the Polka and the Schottische.

Although both Dad and Mom loved music and loved to dance, they did not dance well together. Mother, a very reserved person, danced rather stiffly and with considerable rigidity. Watching them was a little like watching a happy bee cavorting around an upright zinnia blossom. The bee is busy but the zinnia never quite participates.

Daddy said she danced like she had a poker up her butt but I don’t think he ever said it to her face.

And sometimes Dad would turn to Mom and ask if she cared if he danced with so and so and Mom would say no, she didn’t care and Dad would do the ritual. He would go to the table of the lady with whom he wished to dance and he would ask her husband if he would mind if he asked his wife to dance. Dad would turn to the lady and ask her if she would like to dance and off they would go.

A request was seldom refused within reason. But the ritual was always observed. No man approached another person’s wife without that permission. It made for the most orderly and friendly of situations wherein everybody could have a great time and the risk of misunderstandings was minimal.

Up to the time I got bored with party life and was considered old enough to be left at home with the bigger kids, I had lots of partners myself. Johnny Spoons, known for keeping time to the juke box by rapping out the beat with two spoons held between a thumb and two fingers, often partnered me to the poignant strains of Good Night Irene or Sentimental Journey but we both liked the polkas better. Even though he was very old and because of an injury, unable to keep up with polka steps, he seemed to enjoy it.

Shorty, however, was my favorite partner, partly because he wasn’t much taller than I was as a four year old. Shorty wasn’t really short but he too had been injured and was unable to stand erect. This meant we could pretty much look each other in the eye and Shorty’s eyes were always merry and happy.

Sometimes he would stand me up on the bar and everyone would clap and holler and I would do my four-year-old version of the hootchy cootchy to the music of the Sabre Dance and be rewarded with a bag of chips and an orange Nehi soda.

But I tired of the party life. I didn’t like sleeping on a pile of coats on a hard table and was finally allowed to stay home. I’m the only person I know who gave up the bar scene at such a tender age.

##############

Memoirs Chapter 2:

A Different Kind of Mother

Our mother was not like other mothers. She was hard to love and harder to like. Independent and unbending, she had few friends and regarded most of the world, including her children, who mostly reciprocated her lack of natural affection, as unworthy of her interest.

She was meticulous about her person and of a late evening, winter and summer, in those days before indoor plumbing, we were all ordered to bed and she began her bath.

The night I, having slipped quietly downstairs on some forgotten errand, saw Mother at her bath changed her forever for me.

Pale and naked in the moonlight from the window above the sink and its small pan of hot water, her body gleamed like the inside of a sea shell, cool and incandescent. The flesh of her breasts, flattened by the needs of seven infants, was only a shadow against her upper body and the smooth roundness of her abdomen shone starkly white in the silverness of the window’s moonlight.

The scent of her bath soap and the vinegar she used to rinse her once-red hair filled the room.

Her very luminescence, in the dark kitchen of our home that night, seemed out of place and time,..a visitor from some powerful other world that valued more a stricter code..a cooler hand and heart..that did not belong here with us and certainly not to us. The hot winds and dry suns of the Midwest were anathema to such a one.

Before me was a person meant for harsh and vicious winters and the pale meagerly glint of a Celtic summer. Such a one required friends more fast and foes more ferocious than the weak genetic pool she was stuck with.

Of course I could not come anywhere near verbalizing these thoughts at the time, even to myself, but the experience was a powerful one and it stayed with me to be pondered upon and sorted out as facts came later, drifting into my life as our lives unfolded.

'Possum Patch

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Eat Better and Cheaper

No comments:

Post a Comment

Did I Mention?

About Me

Winter Set

Sorting and Sfting

Followers

Labels