What We Eat Without A Grocery Store
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You never really appreciate something until you have to live without it. Right now I really appreciate green food. I haven’t purchased a fresh vegetable for seven weeks and it’s definitely starting to show.
The carrots are gone. The celery is gone. The turnips are gone. The cabbage is gone. The frozen broccoli is gone. The fresh fruit is gone. The frozen berries are gone. The parsnips are gone. The cheese is gone. The chocolate is gone. The bacon is gone.
Going into this project I made a list of how many of each vegetable we would need to store to get us through. These would come either from our garden or the farmer’s market. The problem is space. I stored maybe half of what I knew we needed because we simply didn’t have the space in our crisper drawer or root cellar. I suppose it is to be expected when you rent and can only dig so many holes.
What remains are potatoes, dehydrated vegetables of all sorts, a few gallons of fermented vegetables, about two dozen squash, frozen and dried herbs, plenty of sprouts, some frozen green beans, a bit of meat, and whatever we can salvage from the hoop house. Plus our raw milk and eggs from the farmer and a host of pantry ingredients like beans, grains, herbs, spices, and coconut oil.
So what are we eating?
I tend to eat differently than the rest of our family because of dietary restrictions. So while everyone else eats porridge for breakfast I might cook up a couple of eggs. Or at dinner I might eat just some squash and sauerkraut and pass on potatoes or beans because I have to stay away from too much starch.
Dinners look like this:
- Cod scampi, roasted squash with butter, sauerkraut.
- Chicken liver pate + grain-free bread, dehydrated vegetable soup.
- Chicken curry + sprouted brown rice + sauerkraut.
- Spaghetti Squash + Dehydrated Vegetable- Canned Tomato- Beef sauce + sauerkraut.
- Beef Stew + Grain-free biscuits + salad of beets, sprouts, onions, and blue cheese.
- Potato-Onion soup with sauerkraut
- Tuna salad with onions and fermented pickles, baked potatoes
- Italian meatball soup with greens, roasted squash with butter + Sauerkraut
- Crock pot pinto beans with fermented salsa + raw cream, Grain-free "cornbread"
- Black bean Soup served with raw cream and fermented salsa + Roasted Squash with butter
Recipes in bold can be found in the cookbook.
Last night we really wanted taco salad so I layered sprouts, fermented salsa, and some chicken in bowls and served it with baked potatoes with butter for the men.
Breakfasts look like this:
- Winter boost smoothies
- Cracked Oat Porridge
- Fried Eggs + Potatoes + Raw Milk
- Pancakes: Oatmeal, Buckwheat, or Coconut Flour + butter and honey
Lunch is usually leftovers or something quick like baked potatoes with butter and salsa + raw milk.
Because all of our vegetables are fermented or dehydrated, food preparation is really easy right now. I can make a minestrone soup in five minutes by throwing dried vegetables, home-canned tomatoes, and leftover chicken into the crock pot. After eight hours on high you would never know the vegetables were dehydrated.
Learning
To be honest, I miss fresh vegetables and the possibility of eating out. We don’t really do the latter very often because it doesn’t jive with the concept of home-based food production. Every now and then, though, it is such a treat to have someone else cook and clean up after you and know that at least real butter was used in the process.
More than ever we are looking forward to spring and the new growing season. The greens, radishes, spring onions, and more greens will be incredibly precious to us. Before they were just there, and we ate a little bit of them because that’s all there was in spring. But this year I think we will grow and eat all we can get because we know what it’s like to live without them. And I think that is about the only thing that can really bring gratitude and perspective to every meal.
What are you eating during these dark days?
Very impressive. One day I think we’ll be eating only things we grow, can, or store but at the moment, we’re still working on the smaller steps. This year I plan to grow and can all our tomatoes and green chilies, as well as grow all our garlic and dried beans.
We do eat mostly seasonally but since we’re in zone 8, we don’t have a deep-winter-frozen-ground situation where nothing is growing. Right now we’re buying cabbage, turnips, onions, and beets from a local farm and picking mustard, kale, carrots, radishes, and cilantro from the garden. Our chickens have all but stopped producing (a combination of age and winter) but I expect production to pick up by March if not sooner (and we have a new round of chickens who should lay their first eggs in March). Since I’m not even remotely interested in store bought eggs I’m desperately missing my 4 eggs scrambled for breakfast every morning. And I miss quiche. And deviled eggs. I really really like eggs.
We live in California so we have fresh vegis-Want me to send you a box priority shipping? The farmers market was closed due to rain and the holidays and I was so happy to get back there on Sunday.
J
i’ve been thinking about you a lot this month… as an experiment, i gave myself half of what i usually do for groceries, just to see if i could do it. we’re halfway there and it’s going well and we’re learning a lot! your “experiment” is fascinating to me. i want to try and put more away this summer and fall so i can depend on that this next winter.
i love how varied your meals still are even though you’re not shopping and not using fresh veggies, etc. great job!
While I am impressed by your efforts, I have to say I honestly believe that the self-sustaining/grocery-store-free lifestyle is hard to accomplish without a farm. It takes serious work and storage space, more than a house. You would need an entire extra building, a real root cellar and not just a single fridge either. If you read early American colonial accounts, February and March were called the starving months. People actually starved. And died. I am grateful for a grocery store, despite the fact I would love to have an urban homestead and more self reliant.
Wow, so this post resonated strongly with me ! This week seemed to be the start of the dark part of the season for me. We still have a little bit frozen or canned, and we’re lucky enough to be getting fresh veggies through a Winter CSA, but the variety of fresh veg right now is pretty slim in the mid-Atlantic. Like you we have plenty of potatoes! We still have lots of carrots, and we’ve been lucky to get small amounts of lettuce. But I did break down this week and buy both mushrooms and a grapefruit, which is our first store produce purchase in a very long time.
I just want to say that the challenge you’ve given yourself has really inspired me to challenge myself as well- I have nowhere near enough stored from last summer to get by the rest of this winter without going to the store, but you have inspired me to live more reliant on my pantry and food stores and less reliant on the store for now, and to aspire to put up a lot more food next winter. Unlike a previous comment, I do think it is possible to live without a grocery store in just a house, with the right facilities and equipment. Our house is only 1400 square feet, but we have a decent sized unfinished basement/cellar that would hold an immense amount of preserved, fermented, and cold stored food. In the basement is also the largest chest freezer I have ever seen. Seriously, we got it with the house because you would have to take the entire staircase out to get the freezer out. I don’t believe you would need an entire building to house a family’s worth of food for a winter.
Could you tell me what winter based smoothies are?
I am afraid I am still buying things at the grocery store that you are not. My veg garden did not do well over the summer. I think the combination of poor soil and extreme summer heat. I had a hard time keeping the plants well watered. We are working on a compost and hoping to improve the soil enough for a better garden. I saved tomato and pepper seeds from last summer to try this summer. Every year I have high hopes for a terrific garden but it’s been hard. I bought a lot of vegetables at our farmers’ market last summer. It would be wonderful to save money and grow my own. We’ll see.
I too am so inspired by your challenge and love hearing the updates. One of my goals this year is to expand our garden and purchase a dehydrator. I doubt we will be where you are by next fall but I hope to be several steps closer. I would love if you posted some of your grain free bread recipes. We are not grain free but we are heading for a journey into the GAPS diet and I would love to try some proven recipes when we get to that point. Thanks so much for sharing!
what is your grain free “cornbread” recipe- we are off corn and I have not found a substitute for that yet?
I learn something new from you young kids everytime I open up one of your emails. After a lifetime of digestion problems I was properly diagnosed as a celiac. We made huge changes, joined a CSA, learned to ferment veggies, dried lots of veggies & fruit, etc. 6 years ago we learned about eating according to your blood type and that made another improvement in my health but we slowly got lazy about following it properly. After reading about so many of you making drastic changes, I got out all my books, retaught myself and we are now REALLY being careful about what is in our food. Both of us are feeling SOOOO much better. I have given many bags of grain products to our local kitchen for people needing help. You all inspire me to keep working at this and next summer I will dry more, store more, ferment more, freeze more. I thought I did a good job last summer, but realize now that I put up about 25% of our veggie & fruit needs. I will horde my freezer space differently next year. I cannot have a garden where we live, but our CSA is very generous & we are lucky to have a few farmer markets and natural food grocer who carrys only organic produce.
I’d say that I’m likely about 20-25% on grocery/health food store at this point. Bulk of food comes from farmers market. Still getting my balcony garden down so I can start to regularly source food from that as well.
eggs we have aplenty! The chickens finally decided it was warm enough to start laying about 8 eggs a day reliably. I need some new egg recipes for sure. I’m in the PNW, so we can nurse winter crops through fairly easily. I want to set up a hoop house this year, after I get started on the garden. And I’ve found out that our place on the river has an insulated room, previously used to hang meat. I think I’ll add some ventilation and turn it into a root cellar. I’m probably enjoying your experiment this winter more than you are 🙂
I am so proud of you, you are a survivor and you are dealing with the vegies shortages well. You are an inspiration! Just when I start feeling sorry for myself and how little I have in the pantry I see what you are doing with even less. God bless you & your family.
Randee