Green and growing.

I joined Pinterest which may or may not be to my detriment (depending on how much time I spend pinning and repinning things...ok, let's face it, this could get ugly...) so you can find me on there. I've been slowly going through my links and pinning things up that I find useful. One thing I found was the website of the Thrifty Mama which has a lot of good suggestions on living a natural life on a smaller budget.

That is definitely one thing we're struggling with right now. I really believe in the benefits of organic food and whole food and local food, but it is so hard to buy it without it costing an arm and a leg! One thing I've found is that good staple meals like beans, lentils and brown rice go a long way for making a lot of cheap but good for you meals. Also, spices are a huge part of it, in my opinion. Just adding spices makes boring brown lentil mash much more interesting. I cooked a lentil and veggie tostada meal recently and the spices really made it a lot better.

The other difficult thing is finding good proteins without overloading on milk, cheese and other dairy products, or eating too much meat. Don't get me wrong, I'm hardly an herbivore but I try to limit my meat consumption to two meat dishes (where the meat is an accompaniment, not the main course) or less for the family a week. But that means that I need to make sure we're upping our protein intake from plant sources, in particular making sure we get enough complete proteins which is difficult with a mostly vegetarian/vegan diet. Well, I suppose it isn't that difficult. Nuts and grains make a complete protein. So do grains and legumes, legumes and veggies, or veggies and nuts. So it isn't impossible or even really all that hard, but it's more difficult than, say, grilling a steak or drinking some milk.

Mostly I'm a traditionalist. If our ancestors didn't eat it in the 1700s, we probably shouldn't eat it now. GMOs, antibiotic and hormone treated everything, high fructose corn syrup, refined flour and refined sugar. It all inundates our culture to the point where we just don't even see it. It can be hard to break away. By far the most difficult thing is buying organic, which (sad to say) is the lowest on my priority list. My first priority is to buy healthy foods, and if I can find organic so much the better, but if now I'll buy conventional. Luckily we're involved in the Heron Pond CSA this year as well as growing a garden for the fourth year, which will help with our veggie sources. I'm also hoping to make use of the various farmer's markets that are around to buy the staples like maple syrup and honey. Hopefully Jon will have some hunting success and we can get our meat from that. I've also ordered a book on Amazon about foraging in New England which will help supplement our food intake. There is a lot of good foraging that we already take advantage of. My blackberry and blueberry jams last year were entirely foraged stock, the blackberries from the road next to our property and the blueberries from Kennebunk Plains. I plan to get even more blueberries this year because the blueberry jam was quite popular. Our rhubarb patch is prolific as always and I will be looking for more sources of good rhubarb recipes so I can use it as it grows. I might also start selling it along with our extra eggs.