

Wherein Granny Finds a Fork in the Road
- Hi Y'all! So glad to be back here on Granny's Vital Vittles! So much has been going on in my life that writing had to go on the back burner for a long, long while. But now I'm ready to fire that burner up again and start producing some fresh and tasty content for all my wannabe Granny friends 🙂 . I imagine you might be curious about what's been happening, and what led to such a long blogger vacation. Well, I'll tell you. A Fork in the Road When I started this blog, and for the 3 years it was very active I was working full time as a contract software developer, with a 10hr+ a week commute on top of it. So I was working, driving, cooking, writing, and promoting my work ... in other words I was working ALL the time. I wanted to work full time on Granny's Vital Vittles, but knew I was a long way from making that happen. I was a part of a real food blogger network of several hundred food blogs and was seeing some real progress toward being able to make blogging my job when that network blew up with… READ MOREMost Recent Posts

A Day in the Life of a Busy Kitchen
I have a confession to make … my kitchen in normally, everyday, mostly in a state of disarray of one kind or another. Stuff on the counters, stuff in the sink, floor needs sweeping or mopping, or the dishwasher to be loaded or unloaded. Sound familiar? If you cook at all I’m sure you can […]

Making the Most of Granny’s Free Meal Plan
Last week I released my first meal plan as a free download for anyone signing up for my mailing list. The meal plan has a page devoted to getting started with the plan but that is necessarily brief, so I wanted to share a few more thoughts with everyone on how best to work the […]

Three Spice Snickerdoodles
This funny sounding cookie is believed to have originated in New England in the 1800’s. So not only did your grandma likely eat these cookies, but your great-great-great grandma may have had them too! Supposedly the older recipes used cream of tartar and to make the cookies rise, while the newer recipes just use baking […]

Two Meat Crockpot Chili
This set-it-and-forget-it crockpot meal is sure to please the guys in particular this fall. But then who doesn’t enjoy a hot steaming bowl of comforting chili on a cool night! In a nutshell all you do here is brown the meat on the stove, add the remaining ingredients and pour into your slow cooker. Then […]
Saving Money Cooking from Scratch

3 Dangerous Ways to Save Money on Food
Here at Granny’s Vital Vittles I talk a lot about how to save money on real food. It concerns me greatly that there are many people in this world that have trouble getting real food to eat due to money issues. I’d love to see a world where everyone gets real food to eat! Now, in […]

The Pantry Principle – What you’ll need to get started – Part 2
Last week we talked about how to save lots of time cooking for your family by starting and maintaining a pantry. If you haven’t ever approached shopping in this way before you’ll certainly be wondering where to start. A few things are obviously missing from your household setup, most likely.

Real Food at Walmart – A Quick Tour
Two weeks ago in my post Real Food at Walmart – Can it be done I posed the question: What if you had to buy all your food at Walmart? Pretend you didn’t have access to any local food or health food stores at all … how close could you get to a 100% “Real Food” diet […]

Real Food Economics 101: Eating on $6.25 a Day
I’ve had a few questions come up about the details of what we were eating to get by on $6.25 a day. A few seemed skeptical that this figure is correct. I thought that today, we could go over it in some detail. Now, mind you, I’m mining my memory to recall the details of what our meals were like, since the figure is based on the previous years food expenses. I am quite sure the figure is correct though. I keep very careful records :-).
Straight Talk

Real Food Economics 101: Real Food vs Average Food Budgets
The general perception is the real food is really, really expensive! Far out of range for the average person to have more than occasionally. They don’t call Whole Foods Whole Paycheck for nothing ;-). Well, maybe Whole Foods as a grocery store is really expensive, but does it follow that real food eating is much more expensive? To answer that question we need to know just how much do people spend on food on average on both an average diet and a real food diet.

Whey – Miss Muffet’s Favorite!
When you were a kid, did you ever wonder what Miss Muffet was eating? Little Miss MuffetSat on a tuffet,Eating her curds and whey;Along came a spider,Who sat down beside herAnd frightened Miss Muffet away. I know I did … sure didn’t sound like anything I had ever heard of. So I did a little […]

Which Potato Do You Buy?
Let’s talk potatoes shall we? The lowly dietary staple that everyone and his brother runs down as the unhealthiest thing ever. So simple, so ordinary we use it to describe lazy people ( couch potatoes ) or plain eaters ( meat and potato kinda-guy ). That potato. Let’s just say straight out of the gate […]

Real Food at Walmart – The Nature of Compromise
This series has been quite the whirlwind ride for me … I’ve learned a lot from my exploration of Walmart’s grocery shelves and from sharing my findings with all of you. Mostly I’ve confirmed what I had expected from my first post, that real food shopping at Walmart would involve a lot of compromise. Those […]

Why Choose Beef Tallow?
Before entering into the world of real food you most likely never heard the words beef tallow before. Lard yes, beef tallow no. That is unless you’re: Really interested in history. Went to cooking school. Getting on in years ;-). So I thought we’d talk a little about beef tallow, what it is and how to […]

Getting Started with The Granny Plan
I want to invite you to join me in a learning experience. It’s called “The Granny Plan”. It’s an experience designed to lead to shining good health, joyful healthy kids, delicious healthy abundant food, and gentle days at home with family. We all want a life like this, but it’s hard to know where […]
Wholesome Ingredients

What You Should Know About Beans
Over the past few weeks I’ve been talking a lot about how to save money on your real food bill. There can hardly be a better place to start when considering ways to fit real food nutrition into your budget than the humble bean. Inexpensive Nourishing Food Legumes have been a staple of the diet of […]

Local Honey is the Best Honey
We, all of us have a sweet tooth, don’t we? Nature has fitted us with a strong drive to find the sweet in our food. In nature, sweet flavors are a bit rare and hard to come by. But in our foodscape sweet taste is abundant and cheap. Not only the inexpensive granular sugar which […]

Choosing Flour – Are Whole Grain Flours Traditional?
When we think of Grandma in the kitchen cookin’ up something good, that something good probably involves flour. Yet, people know very little about flour. How it’s made, how long it keeps or how to care for it. There are many shades of difference for the sake of flavor or cooking characteristics but for today’s […]

Feel Bad About Eating White Rice?
I’m here to tell ‘ya that you can feel good about eating white rice again! I’ve never cared much for brown rice and I bet you feel much the same. I’ve had maybe one or two good plates of brown rice in a lifetime. Most brown rice in the US is rancid long before it gets to you. That’s why it generally tastes rather bitter not nutty as it should if it were fresh.