The sun is setting and I am sipping Elderberry tea with a snoring little dog by my side. Today has been a combination of sorting through crafting supplies to decide what I really need, doing laundry, and compiling a spreadsheet of all of the meat, veggies, fruit, grain, spices, condiments, etc. we use in a year. Then I will be breaking it down weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly and calculating totals to store for household supplies and dried goods and calculating totals for veggies and fruits for canning. Possibly also for meats and soups, but I don’t know how to do that yet…
A couple of things come to mind. Even though it seems like we are always cooking or cleaning up from cooking – when I look at the year as a whole, we really don’t cook as much as it seems and we eat fairly simply. We usually have oatmeal for breakfast, lunch is generally salad or soup – something easy – and most dinners we make end up being leftovers another night during the week. Sunday dinners generally end up as some other delicious dinner (Jambalaya) on Monday. One day of the week we make pizza. We switched this to Saturdays while we are paying off debt and not spending money out. Pizza and a movie or gaming on Saturdays is a perfect alternative! =)
The spreadsheet isn’t complete, I have it open on my desktop to add things as I think of them. Even if it is something we only have once a year on someone’s birthday, it is on the list. All of this is in preparation for an experiment I would like to do starting in October of this year. I would like to have a supply of food ready – stored, canned, etc. to get us through for at least eight months and if possible, through a whole year – harvest to harvest. Being home and having the time to focus on our garden planning, as well as getting to know the farmers and farm stands in the area, I think this is a reasonable goal. We are very fortunate to be living in a place that gives us access to local, organic food year round.
We just need to take what we have been doing on a small scale
and multiply!
