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 to start sometimes.

When we decide that we want more real food in our families lives there are so very many things we could do, so many options to start with. So we read lots of blogs hoping a plan on how to proceed will become clear. We end up diving in somewhere, adding things to do regularly and we make a little headway. Then comes the tricky part … enthused by our success we add a bunch of routines and then life happens. The baby is sick, or we have to work overtime, or our budget is tight. At this point our progress stalls and we slip back into old habits. I’m describing myself here. Maybe you too.

What we need is a plan …

A step by step way to mastering the basics of real food cooking. A way to ensure the new habits stick and we’re able to stay with it. That’s what “The Granny Plan” is all about!

A plan that can take us from day one through to becoming competent basic real food cooks. A plan modeled on something that really works. In this series we’ll go step by step from beginning baby steps through to managing more and more complex tasks. Each week’s post will have a new step to introduce and an assignment for the week. You can work along with us or read the whole thing and get started when you’re ready … it’s really up to you.

The Granny Plan is for you if you want to:

Develop habits that making real food cooking second nature for you. No thought, you just do it!
Save money on your food bill by buying food ahead of when you need it.
Get a good rhythm going for the pre-preparation of ingredients needed for real food dishes. Things like mayonnaise or lacto-fermented salsa … stuff like that. So you don’t run out at the worst times.
Reduce food waste in your household.
Find the time to learn all those exciting new recipes you’re stashing away on Pinterest for the long awaited day when you have spare time .
Reduce the amount of time you spend shopping for food. Real food shopping can be fun, but it can take up a lot of time.
Would like to contribute your expertise in designing a systematic plan to help real food novices get up and running quickly.

With Structure Overwhelm Turns into Confidence

With a structure for practicing habits the sense of overwhelm becomes a feeling of building confidence. The Granny Plan works by building one small habit upon another. It’s not that this plan is the only way, but that it is one way that you can work on in the company with other wannabe Grannies here at Granny’s Vital Vittles. This plan owes a debt of gratitude to FlyLady and The Sidetracked Home Executives writings, Don Aslett’s and many other time management books I’ve read over the years. I’m kinda an aficionado of time management books. I love them and trying new systems. Mostly because I have so much trouble keeping things straight without a good system in place.

Planning and establishing good routines is something we all struggle with to one degree or another. Real food cookery is particulary hard I think, due to there being so little support from friends and family. It’s really hard to figure these things out alone! And I think I’ve had a unusually difficult time learning this stuff myself. FlyLady tells the story about how she worked out her FlyLady method … it was really self-help since she was finding it extremely difficult to keep her own house clean. My story is a lot like that. Incorporating new habits has always been really hard for me so I’ve made a study of it. This method helped me figure out how to have real food more consistently in my own home and I hope it’ll help you too. In fact stepping through it all will be a refresher for me … recent events here have unraveled some of my more recently acquired habits and a little practice along with everyone else will do me good too … you can send me a question if you’re having any difficulties. I’ll include a little troubleshooting section with each step with any questions. It’ll be completely anonymous. Sharing your questions will help everyone.

How The Granny Plan Can Help You

Join us in working through each step in the plan, no matter how silly or small you think it is. Just practice each new habit each week for one week before adding another. Make a commitment to not jump ahead. That’s super important! We need time to learn new habits and to move them into auto-pilot mode. If it seems we’re moving ahead before you’ve got the habit well established just stick with that habit till you’ve got it down. Then move ahead to the next weeks habit. There is no ahead and there is no behind in this plan. You are where you are and that is that . Feel free to comment below each step if you like, but if you’d rather not that’s okay too.

I am making three assumptions about our Wanna-Be Granny working the plan. Those assumptions are:

That she has read many of the articles on this site and other real food sites and has made a clear decision to incorporate as much real food into her families diet as her time and budget will allow.
I assume she completely unaccustomed to cooking regularly. If that doesn’t apply to you, you may want to jump in to the steps at the spot that feels right for you. This is the one exception to the rule on not jumping ahead.
That she has a kitchen available with basic tools and a food budget .

If this series is well received I hope to release The Granny Plan as a book in the early summer months. Think of this series as a mini version of the book, and as a group experiment. I’m pretty excited about the possibilities and hope to release this material in multiple formats to reach the most real food beginners we can.

The Granny Plan is unavailable as an eBook at the present time but feel free to read the summarized version on this site.

[ The Granny Plan was originally inspired by a weekly series I wrote back in 2013. I thought I’d share some of the original for new readers … just click thru the links to get a little taste of the book from the linked post excerpts. ]