More Expensive by the 1/2 Dozen

A friend recently sent mail with the following link. It is a website that looks at the price of food and what families eat around the world for one week.

http://ruralentrepreneurs.com/blog/?p=325

What a great site! I’ve shared it with my children and have forwarded it too many other families.

This post and a previous one about foraging in the woods has me thinking a lot about food prices lately. We’ve always been watchful of our food bill (we spend about 150/week for a family of but as the kids get older, (especially the boys) they are requiring more food which calls into play my best creative powers.

One of the best things we did for our food bill was to go to a fund raiser at the High School, for 12 dollars per person (Marc and I only took the 2 oldest kids) we each picked out a bowl that a student had made in art class and were able to refill it as many times as we wanted from a selection of about 20 different soups. Now 48 dollars for a soup dinner for 4 people sounds a bit pricey but it turned all of us on to soup. The boys each had about 6 bowls of different types of soup.

It made us look and think about soup in a different way.

When we got home, I dusted off my trusty crock pot and started making weekly soups. I usually don’t buy much for the soups but prefer to use what’s on hand. This morning’s soup used up some cans of soup leftover from our bout with the flu, coconut milk, some hummus, half of the leftover roasted chicken, some of the week’s uneaten vegetables, and the rest of the coffee in the coffee pot.

Add some crusty bread and we’ll be having a very cost efficient dinner.

Because the food prices have gotten so outrageous, not much gets thrown out these days. A roast chicken gets us three meals (the first, a soup and a chicken pot pie type thing).

Left over vegetables are put in a container in the fridge waiting for the next soup batch. Potatoes are added to just about anything (in fact there is a joke in our house, when mom’s making meatloaf, you better not go in the kitchen because if its not nailed down – in it goes).

We have also been longtime foragers of the wild. As a child I devoured (pun intended) Euell Gibbons books and would spend the day in the woods eating what I could find. One of my sons is the same way and his goal this summer is to bring a bowl to the woods each day and prepare a salad for lunch. Not a bad goal.

We routinely eat Dandelion greens and sweet clover. We brew pine, birch and sometimes Willow tea (although I’ve taught him that willow tea is more of a medicine than a sipping tea). Right now, we have some maple sap dripping into a bucket. This summer, we are going to try cattail roasted root and flour. The kids pick wild berries by the bucket that we put into muffins and breads.

There is a ton of food out in the woods. You’d have to teach yourself (you can probably find some good local classes) and I’m not sure that you could replace your groceries with them but you can certainly augment with them.