Sustainable Kitchen Project
{Originally posted on Kelby Carr}
When I decided to work at home most days, a major MAJOR factor was having more time to make good food for my family. I wanted to use more fresh ingredients, and make more things from scratch. Oh, in my mind, I would be the uber foodie mom, baking and creating and freezing and canning and doing various fun food things. I should totally have a sustainable kitchen.
In my kitchen, I have gadgets for making yogurt, juice, pasta, even sausage. I have a bread maker missing just one piece. Besides that, I have the knowledge (or the ability to Google and find out) to make any number of things from scratch. I have plenty of land to grow my own stuff, and I live in Asheville, NC where it is super easy to find cool locally grown produce.
Yet, my gadgets and cookbooks are gathering dust. I still hit the Super-Walmart so I can super consume. I spend $200-plus at least once a week on groceries. And I do still, sometimes (although definitely less and less often as I am at home more), give my children processed, packaged crap. OK, I said it. I may be a foodie mom, but I am a real mom. I am buying things in extra packaging for extra money and being totally non-green when I could just make and store things at home. Criticize away, if you must.
I blame life and having lots of work and having three kids and all of that. But when my twins were babies, I was working full-time and making homemade baby food and pumping milk for them to have at daycare. It wasn’t easy, and I was pretty much psychotically exhausted. But it should be even easier now, much easier. So I clearly CAN do it.
So I’ve decided I will create this public Sustainable Kitchen Project as a way to motivate myself, to keep myself honest, to connect with other moms who want a more self-sustaining kitchen, and to track my progress. I’ve already started in a few ways, and I’ll post about these very soon. For example, we are starting an organic vegetable garden. Here is a lettuce seedling I’ve started:
And I made orange juice this week:
Here are just some of the things I want to do as part of my Sustainable Kitchen Project. Hey, are there some I am not thinking to list? Let me know…
- Grow herbs, vegetables and fruit
- Make juices, teas and sodas
- Make yogurt
- Make pasta
- Bake breads
- Start a compost
- Buy more local produce and products
- Learn to preserve items when they are local and fresh with freezing, canning, etc.
- Make jams and other condiments
- Make butter
- Make beer and wine
- Make cheese (can that be done at home? that would be coool!)
I know I’m forgetting some. I’ll also keep track of the grocery bill, and any other side effects and impacts of the project.
Wish me luck with my self-sustaining kitchen!
Editors Pick by Catnip at Catnip and Coffee. You may know her as Type-A Mom, or as Foodie Mama, or by Kelby Carr, but no matter which name she’s using she completely rocks! I was inspired to set my own goals for a sustainable kitchen after I read this post. Thanks Kelby, for that little push! Don’t forget you can subscribe to her feed and chat with her on twitter!
Editor
catnip
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October 23rd, 2008
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Category:
Author-Kelby Carr, Channel- Homemaking, Cooking, Editor- Catnip, Featured 1, Food Philosophy, Green Living, Homemaking, Thursday 1, food, gardening
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This is a daily challenge at our house. But, its amazing how small steps really do begin to make a difference. Good luck with your self-sustaining kitchen. I just joined Foodie Mama and will follow your success there!
It’s amazing how scarcity breeds possibility. I have wanted a sustainable kitchen for ages, but like you, still found myself buying packaged, processed crap. Now I find myself in Turkey where there is much, much less processed crap to be had. What there is tends to be full of meat (my family is pescatarian) so we can’t eat it. And so, virtually everything we cook is from scratch. And we cook every meal. It feels great, but I still have a long way to go. I look forward to following your adventure!
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Great idea! I’d like to do more of this, but to be honest, I don’t know where to start. I did a container garden this year (Texas clay makes it impossible to grow lovely things), and would like to learn more about it (for example, I only got about 3 strawberries out of the deal, tomatoes for a couple of months, and peppers that attracted insects like the damned draw locusts). I’ve canned in the past (only my homemade spaghetti sauce and applesauce), and would love to do more jams (although I don’t think I could grow enough fruit to make it completely from scratch), and generally figure out a system to make more and freeze more so I’m not turning to the frozen pizza (although organic!) at the end of the day.
nice post, thanks for sharing!
What a great project idea! I often worry about what we are ingesting when I buy packaged food and have been making a real effort to eat what we grow as well. I can’t even begin to grow it all but it’s a start!
When you’re thinking of becoming less dependent on outside sources for your food, don’t forget that your appliances also use energy. I recently started using a thermal cooking pot and love it. You can’t cook everything in it but it does make great soup, stew, etc. Basically, it’s a pot that you boil your meal in and then you insert the inner pot into a sealed insulated outer shell that retains the heat all day. It’s like a slow cooker without using electriciy. Very handy, incredibly portable, and low energy usage!