Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Food

We like to eat, don't you?  I don't like to spend a lot of money on food.  It's not that I don't have the money to spend; it's that I don't want to.  I'm not always successful though.  After all, I'd rather eat at In-n-Out than make hamburgers at home.  So once a month we will go out to eat at some cheap place. 

 

We have a garden.  We raise animals.  We enjoy this except for when the weather is really hot or really cold.  This means that we enjoy our outdoor activities about half the time.  This is fine for now because we don't have to take our garden or animal raising seriously at this time.  But we can switch to the serious mode in any instant.  The garden will be ready if we need to commit more than 30 minutes a day.

 

Our garden is big.  Others have seen my garden and comment about why in the world would I grow as much food as I do?  I can food from the garden.  I always have a year or two supply on hand plus what we get to eat fresh.  I also vary the garden each year.  A couple of years ago I grew about ½ acre of corn.  That is a lot of corn considering we weren't selling any of it.  We ate corn raw straight off the stalk.  We cooked corn for dinner.  I froze a bunch on the cob.  We picked bushels which I steamed then dried.  The kids took off the kernels.  We then stored the dried corn into buckets.  We had about 100 pounds of dried corn.   There was an awful lot left.  What did I do with the rest?  We gave plenty to the local homeless shelter.  The rest went to feed the animals.  They liked it. 

 

Our animal collection is pretty basic.  We can't have too many because we don't have a lot of land to support them.  I'll talk about our animals another day.  I've read some pretty ridiculous things on some survival sites about animals.  I don't want to raise chickens or rabbits in my garage.  I don't want to eat the squirrels that try to invade my garden (I said try…I'm a good shot).

 

We also have fruit and nut trees.  I can't think of a better gift to give someone than a fruit or nut tree.  This I will also talk about another day. The variety of fruits capable of growing in my neck of the woods is amazing.  I could eat a different type of fruit each day for a month without repeating.  More on this in the future as well.


4 comments:

  1. Don't you knwo that your body is like a car and all the parts need to be kept in good condition. You won't put bad gas or cheap oil in your car but you'll put fast food into your body? You should eat as much home grown food as possible. Look at the egg recall. A billion eggs are bad.

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  2. The eggs were contaminated by animal waste. It could happen to home grown food. It doesn't indicate that commercail food is bad. The various components in your in & out burger are no different then the same food you would buy at the supermarket. It's just food. Your body turns it all into it's basic components and uses it for fuel or to rebuild. It's just food!!!

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  3. Oh my! the last post is TOTALLY not true. The calf I grow and butcher at home, is cleaner and contains ONLY beef. No fillers, no meat glue, no additives, or preservatives, and isn't contaminated by the many hands it passes through. It isn't a mixture of a lot of unhealthy cows, fed corn and silage that the cow's body IS NOT designed for...it is the cow we loved and raised, fed clean, good grass, without pesticides or herbicides, and good hay and clean water. The toxins released into the animal by poor feed, is passed on to the human when it is consumed.

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  4. Tonight I had to go to a dinner meeting. It was held at a little restaurant close to home. It's an expensive place but the food is pretty much like home made. It's expensive though. Everyone was charged $16. That's enough money for several days worth of food for the grandkids and myself. We usually go out once a month or so and only when we travel. I just can't see leaving home to eat, or worse yet leaving home, picking up some slop and bringing it home!

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