What sacrifices do you make to be able to eat our meat? While at the Farmer’s market Friday a lady picked out a couple of packages of Boneless Chicken Breasts and I tallied the total for her. She was taken back and asked the price per pound, at $8.99/lb it wasn’t cheap. I’m with her….I too would have probably said, thanks but no thank you. At least not for right now. Our ‘season’ of life is the we have ‘two-almost-teenagers-who-do-nothing-but-eat‘ stage and we just couldn’t afford Filet Mignon and Boneless Breasts!
Instead, whole chicken would be purchased and savored. Someday….I could afford the boneless breasts without boning out the chicken myself. In what way do you sacrifice money, time or other foods or items so you can feed your family well?
I make sure I use all of the animal including bones, organs, and unfamiliar cuts of meat. This means I get more bang for the buck. So, I guess it’s more of an adjustment than a sacrifice. I look at what some would consider useless and think, “What can I do with that?” Example: My dogs have been enjoying cow’s tongue this week. This saves me money on about 3 days of dog food.
Exactly! We also consider eating well ( not just meat!) to be an investment towards our long term health!
Sacrifices…..hmmm.
I honestly don’t think of any of the times of ‘eating cheaply but well’ that I’ve ever lived through (and there were many, and years of those times!) as involving any sacrifice.
When my kids were born, we lived in a cabin in the woods of the Yukon, with pretty much no income other than the ‘family allowance’ check the Canadian government pays to all mothers – $16/mth per child – or the occasional job at the inn down the highway, washing walls and getting cabins ready for the season. We had salmon, moose and the occasional caribou; we snared rabbits and bought potatoes, carrots, onions, flour, oatmeal, powdered milk, brown rice and honey. It never felt like we were ‘depriving ourselves’ in any way. Well, there was the time I had, lucky me, two eggs and wanted to make a birthday cake for my boy’s second birthday, and his father decided to juggle them…..
Then the cabin burned down – and we had to move to town (Whitehorse). The father found work in a lumberyard, and I went to vocational school to study carpentry, became an apprentice and joined the union. But food has always been my passion, so I bought a dilapidated house, renovated it with my new-learned skills, and opened a restaurant. I think the only reason the restaurant survived was because of the tremendous value of ‘using leftovers/using all’ skills I had acquired living in the bush. And those skills didn’t come from nowhere: I was born in postwar Germany and, in my mother’s words, ‘there was nothing to eat’. So from infancy I was used to people foraging for greens, dandelions, nettles and such, drying fruit, pickling surplus harvests, canning and preserving. A favorite dish to this day is stale, dry bread broken into a bowl, sprinkled with sugar or jam and with warm milk poured over. (A few years ago I was working in a bakery owned by a man from Yugoslavia, who was telling me about that same dish as a childhood favorite…..)
With another family, we shared a pig every fall, and always had dozen of cans of sausages stored in the cellar. Every scrap of usable pig went into those sausages!
And now, as I’m approaching retirement, these early lessons are an inseparable part of how I approach food. I’m still obsessed with food, and constantly amazed and delighted by the peasant cuisines of the world that use such basic ingredients to make the most delicious meals. And I chuckle at the irony that has elevated many of these foods to the more expensive or at least trendy ones in American restaurants (cuts such as skirt steak, hog jowls, chicken wings, monkfish and sardines; bread puddings, fish cakes, fried-rice variations, potato patties and pierogies, an endless list.)
Never a sacrifice: but then throughout the years, there’s always been SOMETHING to put on the table, and we’ve been blessed in that.
I actually quite enjoy the art of balancing good food with affordable prices. I buy meat from local farms, which tends to cost more, but is so much better (and I want to support local farms!) – but I buy the cheaper cuts and try to stretch a portion of meat to last for two meals by adding more veggies and less meat to recipes. That’s a bit easier for me because there are two of us rather than a big family! Like Kandice above, I love eating the organ meats as well. They are delicious!