Homemade Food for 30 Days | Personal Challenge
Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 10:19AM 
Homemade Pasta Recipes by Leite's Culinaria
I will admit that Gray and I are total nerds, and what is fun to us is "exhaustive" to others :cough: Charlotte :cough:.
Enter our personal challenge.
I wish I had some profound realization, or touching story. I don't. We just love making our own stuff. So let me lay out our plan for you.
Whole Wheat Goldfish Crackers by Smitten Kitchen (She hasn't posted forever. Is anyone else getting worried?)
- For 30 days all of our meals and snacks (it is always 30 days) will be homemade from scratch.
- So, this means, if we are having beans, no canned beans. If we are having pasta, no store bought dried pasta. Sandwiches? We are making our own bread. No boxed broth or canned soup, okay, okay - you get it.
- Because of Wes, and because well, I don't know how to make it work, we will be buying dairy, eggs, meat and flour.
- We are not de-toxing here folks. The plan is to keep eating the same foods we do now. We are not dieting, nor are we going Paleo. We are just wanting to make more of our own foods from scratch, but love us some goldfish crackers.
- This is a big one for us - no eating out. Plain and simple....except maybe one cheat day. MAYBE. Gray says yes. I say no. It would be for my birthday. I will be at a conference over my birthday anyways, so I think it will be an easy thing to pass on.
Pumpkin Spice Latte Recipe by The Motherload
That is that! The concept is pretty dang easy. The downside? No beer - we don't have any brewing, no wine and I will really, really, really, miss In-N-Out grilled cheese sandwiches with grilled onions and chopped chilies. Oh, and did I mention I have this huge thing for soda? That is easily fixed though - because we can make our own. HELL YES.
The good news? I think it will be really interesting. While we both work, Gray can, and most importantly will be in the kitchen and I have mornings to do prep work. I really don't expect there to be a huge change from how we eat now, except it will require us to be a bit less lazy (putting beans in the crock pot in the A.M. instead of popping open a can), but, we will see!
Ginger Salad Dressing Recipe by Life's Ambrosia
What we don't know what to do about though is family functions. Do we stick to our guns and eat ahead of time, or do we say to heck with it?
Thoughts?
We also need a start date. Monday? Maybe?
Oh! Also, this means I will be teaching Charlotte how to make chicken soup from scratch, and she will teach me how to parallel park....maybe. The thought makes me nervous.
Reader Comments (5)
Charlotte kind of lost interest in my teaching her how to roast a chicken when I slid my hand between the skin and meat to put in rosemary, onions, and lemon. Skip the whole wheat goldfish and instead go buy yourself some nuts, then spice them with tamari, cumin, etc. Try epicurious for great easy recipes. Sounds fun...you CAN do it!
OOOo Your roast chicken sounds fantastic - I guess at least maybe she can be okay with plopping the meat out of the package into a pot and not touching it - well, at least that is my saving grace!
The innards of a chicken really get me.
Those nuts sounds like a great snack - sadly, Wes doesn't do well with nuts, so the goldfish (or, well some kind of cracker) will be in our lives for sure.
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM. Homemade pumpkin spice latte! Yes, yes, yes! Thanks for sharing that link to the recipe. Hot diggity!
And of course I think it's super cool that you guys are going homemade-everything for a month. My hubby wouldn't know what to do without his potato chips; the only junk food he really eats. And I think a whole month without buying any convenience food would be the ultimate ginormous challenge (for me, at least!)... sometimes it's hard to come up with lunches for work every day without a little help from a box of crackers or granola bar. And making all that myself would require so much foresight and effort. Hahaha-- it just occurred to me that this would likely fall under what Finchfound has educated me as being a "first world problem." (hangs head in shame)
Ooo you gonna make your own yoghurt too? This is the way we lived when we were on the farm a couple years ago. Pizza with homemade crust, homemade tomato sauce from our own tomatoes and homemade mozzarella cheese!!!! It was so so yum!
Homemade Mozzarella seems like it is really easy to make, and yogurt does too, so I think we are going to give it a try!
We just started some homemade vanilla extract.
If anyone is interested, how to make homemade yogurt: http://honestfare.com/making-yogurt/