Kenton House Food

April 25, 2009

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The story of Kenton House food, like all Kenton House stories, is a little zygot of a story. It’s only just begun to form some sort of identifiable theme, but it’s off to a great start.

Our food usually begins with a morning of eggs (from the chickens) and fresh chopped organic veggies (although I’ve had an aversion to eggs for the last few weeks of my pregnancy). That’s usually paired with a kefir shake of homebrewed kefir, frozen organic fruit, raw honey, and an egg yolk. Snacks and lunches happen kinda spontaneously, from left overs or trips to a coffee shop or what not. Dinners are flexible too, but about 4 nights out of the week we pre-plan a little sumthin sumthin and make enough to share with the house of 6-going-on-8 individuals. Some dinner highlights might include:

• Wild Local Mushroom and Nettle Soup a.k.a. Forager’s Soup
• Lamb (local farm) and Asparagus Stew (for Easter)
• Homemade Gourmet Pizzas (last week’s variety featured three kinds: Sausage/Mushroom/Pepper w/ Asiago+Chedder, Elk Meat Fajita Pizza, Goat Cheese/Pear/White Garlic Sauce pizza)
• Thai Coconut Chicken Curry Soup w/ rosemary bread
• Sprouted Lentil and Potato Stew
• … along with popular sides like soaked black beans and rice, salads, so on. As you can tell, we do stew/soup/one-pot-meals often

Desserts around here aren’t always as unique, and waaaaay to often come in the form of gooey warm cookies from the Immaculate Baking Company, who we have single-handedly helped through the tough economy with the obscene frequency of our purchases. Mmmm… Otherwise, we have managed to whip out things like: Black Bean Brownies (Lacey’s staple brownies), Coconut Oil Brownies (Vivian’s staple brownies), a few batches of Carrot Souffle, strawberries and fresh cream on homemade shortbread, Chocolate Beet Torte, Cocoa Short Bread cookies, so on.

There’s been a bit of bread making with more on the way, by Lacey, and I took my turn at some Herbed Apple Chedder scones this week too.

Drinks around here include lots and lots of: homemade Kombucha tea, homemade Kefir, raw local milk, red wine, beer, coffee (Sleepy Monk), tea (…tea …and more tea), and occasionally a glass of water.

SO, are you hungry yet? If not, maybe these pictures will help you:

Now, let’s talk about HOW we can eat like “traditional nutrition” divas without exploding the bank accounts. It’s a lesson we are learning along the way, but includes a few resourceful avenues.

Produce: We get 95% of our produce from Organics to You, an organic delivery service that collects the majority of its produce from local farms, brings to your doorstep, and takes the check you leave under the mat. Wa-la. We began ordering a “Value Bin” every week, at $60 a bin, and taking turns as families to pay for every other week. We found that we had MORE than enough and couldn’t use it all up, so we switched to every other week delivery of the bins, costing us only $120 a month ($60 per household) and we are just super resourceful about storage and use. Ripe fruits are often cut up and frozen for kefir shakes, veggies are chopped and stored in a container in the fridge and thrown into eggs, soups, salads, pizzas, etc by the handful. Should we run out of something, like we need an extra onion or more apples and bananas, then we get what’s on sale at New Seasons or People’s Co-op throughout the week. This has been a proven system thus far and provided us with tons of fresh organic, mostly local produce all month. And when we get our veggie beds running, we plan to cut back to the smaller bin, saving us even more.

Meat: meat is only purchased through local sources if possible, and on sale or at the farmer’s market (or directly from the farm). We don’t use meats in every meal and often spread it out into several dishes, even cooking down bones for stock, etc. Meat is purchased by the person cooking it, rather than an even split, so it is based more on what our household pocket books would like to spare at the time.

Milk: we go through a few gallons of milk a week, 95% of which is brewed for kefir. Our milk is farm-direct from Kookoolan Farms, is raw and whole and the tastiest damn milk you’ll ever drink. I am lactose-intolerant, but the raw has been extremely gentle to my system and the kefir has done me wonders. I’m a big fan. Eventually, we hope to make butter and cheeses from our milk as well.

The rest of it: As we are finally settling into a food routine, we are weaning ourselves more and more from the notorious grocery store trip, where things just sort of jump into your cart, be they sticky buns, beer, or kiwis. The best step towards reworking this habit is FINALLY HERE!!! We got our FIRST bulk order in from Azure Standard this morning! Woo hoo! Each family set aside grocery money to purchase regular staples in bulk quantity. We got nearly 500 pounds worth of food this way, including: raw local honey, organic peanut butter, organic quinoa/lentils/rolled oats/ beans, organic chicken/rabbit feed, nutritional yeast, organic unrefined coconut oil, organic whole wheat flour, sea salt, organic cocoa powder, baking soda, turbinado sugar, so on. If your familiar with items like this, you know that this is NOT cheap in the grocery store. We got everything for an average of $1.50 per pound. That’s right. Insane savings, likely around $300 dollars over the next few months. We are storing these large quantities in the basement in food grade buckets we purchased used on Craigslist for $2 a piece and cleaned out in the sunshine just today.
Here are some pics for proof!

In all, the families hope to survive the summer with a food budget roughly $75-100 less than we were spending in single household dwellings by sharing costs and meals and purchasing bulk. May the good Lord bless us with an abundance of veggies in the backyard at harvest time!

I guess that’s the story, the beginning of it anyway…

Posted in Frugality, Nutrition, Photos, The Beginnings