What Would Grandma Eat?
Now is your chance to get in on the fun of creating all kinds of ways to challenge me to live like Grandma! I need you to respond to the pictures posted below by telling me what you think Grandma would have eaten or how she would have done things differently. Pick one or two - you do not have to respond to all of them. Your observations about these pictures will help me determine what my future Grandma Challenges will be. You may have to go back a few generations before you find the “green” parts of your history. Keep digging and keep the stories coming! Your input will help make this journey a success! Tip: Comment on the food itself as well as how it is packaged and served.
Picture A Lately I have been eating Kashi Cinnamon Harvest cereal with a banana and milk for breakfast. I really like scrambled eggs with veggies. My kids often eat oatmeal with banana and frozen blueberries, bread with butter and jelly, and milk with chocolate Ovaltine mixed in.
Picture B We drink a lot of water, coffee and milk from a local farm with chocolate Ovaltine for the kids.
Picture C We really enjoy coffee from a local company called Evo.
Picture D On a good day, I like to eat a salad for lunch. I recently made a salad with romaine lettuce, spinach, carrots, red pepper, green onions, cheese, and crushed hemp seeds with olive oil and balsamic vinegar on top.
Picture E The kids often eat wheat tortillas or tortilla chips with homemade re-fried black beans, cheese and salsa with grapes on the side for lunch. We also eat this for dinner 2-3 times a week.
Picture F I recently made a lentil dish with curry, coconut milk, chicken stock, minced shallots, various spices, organic spinach (was in the plastic container) and cilantro served in a whole wheat tortilla with a salad on the side for dinner. We also enjoy eating “homemade” pizza with toppings thrown on a store bought crust.
Picture G Here are some pictures of miscellaneous food items: A turkey club sandwich and water from a local coffee shop, coffee and treats from a local bakery, what’s left of a pizza dinner from a place my kids love, and ice cream (we love it in any form - from the store, an ice cream shop, or the ice cream truck)!
What Would Grandma Eat? I look forward to reading your comments! Stay tuned tomorrow for your responses from today and for the next question: How Would Grandma Bathe? Things could get smelly!
Hi April! I am so the last person in the world right now to offer a challenge with any sort credibility. But I don’t think that has stopped me in the past.
What might it be like to make your own ice cream? Could it become a fun family event and tradition? What sort of creativity could be unleashed in the household? And would something that is so easy and convenient to buy as ice cream become special - and maybe even sacred? What if the planning put into making ice cream (and food in general) can help remind us of God’s provision - especially if the incredients used to produce the flavors are seasonal? Lauren Winner has some things to say about such things in her book “Mudhouse Sabbath”. Grace and peace to you.
Bonus points for Breyers. I love reading their ingredients: cream, sugar, vanilla. Sweet.
For the rest, I think the hardest part for someone who likes salad for lunch, which I do, is to think about what’s in season locally. We haven’t had to pay attention to the season for at least 20 years. Maybe you don’t even have a good local source, like a farmers market, but trying to eat seasonally enforces more variety than we’re used to. Just like you look forward to the change of seasons in the weather, you can anticipate tomatoes in late summer, apples in the fall, etc. And anticipation makes everything better.
Well, you’re already doing a good amount by making things from scratch. That cuts down a ton on packaging (think about how many servings you get from a bag of dried pinto beans vs. how many cans you’d need to match that same amount).
Something Grandma would do is eat locally grown foods. This really makes for a hard winter season though. How many turnip dishes can one person eat???
I applaud you for using a local dairy for your milk. We do this too and I love the fact that our milk comes in GLASS containers instead of plastic. We just rinse and return the bottles to be used over and over again. Now that’s certainly something Grandma would do; especially since Grandpa was a milk delivery man in my case.
So really the trick to be more like Grandma is local, local, local and make as much from scratch as possible.
FWIW, making your own pizza dough isn’t hard at all. I used a recipe similar to this: http://www.recipezaar.com/117941 (heck, it may be the exact one actually, I’m just too lazy to check my printouts) and it’s not too sweet and the kids will be thrilled to help.
My Grandma Stewart would make large batches of Granola. She lived in Haiti and had many of the ingredients easily accesible. Dion has taken over the granola making role in our house!
It seems to me that buying in bulk = less packaging (in theory). And preparing double batches of meals would save clean up (H2O) & cooking (gas/elec) time. Plus you could use those bulk groceries and have dinner in the freezer. And I’m sure Aunt Deb knows all the bulk cooking quantities.
I agree with the others that local is better. We have great fresh street markets here, but the killer is the packaging! Everyone wants to give me every fruit and veggie in a plastic bag. I get those “crazy foreigner” looks when I request putting in it directly in my totebag. One step forward for the environment, 3 steps backwards for foreign relations.
Natasha
PS Where’d you find local milk in the city? I’m imagining cows wandering the streets of GR. hee hee
April,
I just baked muffins this morning for the first time in about a year (I’ve been buying my muffins for a whopping 2 dollars a piece at a local bakery). Anyway, I almost didn’t bake them because I didn’t have any of those little paper cup thingys. Then I realized that neither my grandma nor my mother ever used those paper cups. They just baked the muffins right in the muffin trays. Voila!
So this morning I baked yummy muffins sans paper cup thingys and they turned out great (albeit using a little more elbow grease to clean the trays afterwards!)
Hi April,
I do not like making extra trips to the grocery store so I do tend to buy in bulk & cook more than one meal at a time. Here are a couple ways that I save time in the kitchen and hopefully energy too. When we make a “freshly cooked” meal such as chicken on the grill or in the oven and potatoes & a vegetable, I make enough extra chicken and sides for one left over meal (such as chicken with pasta and vegetables with pesto sauce to eat with in the next day or two) and one freezer meal (such as a layered chicken, vegetable dish topped with potatoes & cheese. It takes alot less energy to reheat food than to cook fully each meal. The first meal takes more time ande prep, but the next two are quick & easy. I do this with taco dinner too. The extra beans & rice I make into a casserole dish for a meal to eat with taco chips with in the next two days, and for a freezer meal, I put meat and any leftovers like rice, salsa, guacamole, corn & beans rolled into burritos & freeze them in a glass dish. Many of the meals that I make can creatively be made into a casserole dish for leftovers. I hope the extra energy involed in freezing these meals is less than the energy used in gas to frequent the grocery store that is 10 miles away.
I am so fortunate to have had two Grandmas and my own mother and aunts who cooked so many things from scratch and canned everything that they possibly could especially tomatoes. They all had husbands who grew their gardens to supply the fresh vegetables. For every berry season my mom and my siblings and I picked berries for the freezer & to make jam.
I have not made canning a priority, but I do utilize my leftovers like they did. My grandmas & Mom used every drop of food that was left over in another meal untill it was gone. Such as breakfast poatoes, chicken salad, hash, scrambled eggs cooked with leftover vegetables, breads with potatoes and vegetables in them. About once per week we would have a breakfast meal for dinner to use up leftovers. When I look through their old cook books, I find many recipes of these types of dinners that you do not find in todays betty crocker.
I must be one of the few in my generation who had a milk man deliver milk to our back door. When all the neighbors stoped this service because they could buy it at the grocery store, my mom kept her service going until our milk man knocked on our door and said the buisness is closing. I remember boycotting the store bought milk in my home at about age 9.
Thanks April for this inspiring website!!
Bernadette