Food Roots Thursday

embarking on something new here...
my pal, S over at Nourishing Days has started Foots Roots Thursday where food/gardening bloggers are encouraged to write about the roots of their food. Or rather, where you food has come from.

Being that it's May and things are just beginning to sprout in our gardens again, we don't have anything fresh to eat from our plots except for chives and dandelion greens!
Eating Local Last Year, What a Blessing
Being self-employed, my financial life is typically made up of feast or famine periods. It's all good and we get through both just fine with money savvy and lots of faith that it will all work out. Last year was a feast year, albeit, unintentionally. While I have always kept a good-sized garden, I never took on growing all that I could until last year. We took the Eat Local Challenge, although it ended prematurely when I was completely sick with first trimester nausea in February and desperately craved Cheerios and Lay's Potato Chips. :) We made it 8 months.
We learned a lot in those 8 months. We canned a ton of food and also invested in a 1/4 cow, 1/2 a pig, 1/2 a lamb and our typical 25 chickens, plus our year-round eggs. It worked out great. The freezer was full of meat and a ton of vegetables and frozen fruit.
In March, I had to go full-on grocery shopping for the first time since May of last year. I spent $150 and nearly cried walking out of the store. I used to spend that much nearly every week before we started the uber growing. Not long after that, I finally did our taxes. Since both my husband and I have radically changing paychecks (me because of my self-employed status and he because he works within the auto industry-ack), I never can depend on an average amount coming in from week to week. I was shocked to see that he had actually made $20K less than he usually does and I made a little more than I did last year. If someone had told me at the beginning of last year that we would have such a huge income flux, I would've had months of anxiety and probably would have rushed out and found 3 part time jobs. Instead, I was blissfully unaware. I can only contribute this to growing as much of our own food as possible. Outside of our mortgage, our biggest source of money going out would typically be food.

The only thing I didn't like last year was the sudden increase in the amount of meat our family was eating. I had been a vegetarian for 7 years. Our daughter didn't have meat until she was nearly 6 years old. I started off slowly with eating meat again. We would have the occasional chicken, or sometimes turkey sausage. Last spring we jumped into having a deep freezer full of animal, which we ended up using nearly every day. So strange and also something I didn't feel totally comfortable with.

This spring, as our freezer empties day to day, we've decided to return to more of our former vegetarian ways. Both for health and financial reasons. There will be no 1/4 cow this spring. There will be chickens to be processed at the end of summer once again.

It appears we're looking at a 3 month lay-off for my husband this summer and this new baby will be due in early October. I'm still fine to work and plan on doing so until the first contractions set in. :)Am I worried? Not so much. I am thankful that last year we learned how to do so much to change our eating and shopping habits to save a lot of money. Last year's Eat Local Challenge proved to be a hidden blessing for this year and years to come.

So what are we eating today?
Potato, lentil, onion, carrot, collards soup with bread from the River Street bakery. Only the carrots and onion are locally raised/bought, and the collards are from last fall's garden. Oh yeah, it's being cooked in turkey stock, from last Thanksgiving Day's turkey, which we raised ourselves. Not bad for early May in Michigan. Had pancakes this morning with flour from Westwind Milling Co. with homemade yogurt, last summer's frozen strawberries and local honey. If it's not grown in our backyard, then we try our best to get Michigan-grown. The closer to home, the better.