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Making the Most of Granny’s Free Meal Plan

by Granny Filed Under: Affording Real Food

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 plan.

In general, I’m not a big fan of meal plans. I have friends who have made business’s out of creating them, making software so you can create your own, or providing somewhat flexible plans for people eating real food. I think all this is a sizable improvement of traditional static plans. Still, meal plans, even when you customize your’s completely, are very rigid by design. The rigidity is the very structure that is meant to discipline you into buying food, cooking and eating in a way that is fully defined in advance. I’ve lived 50 years on this earth and I can tell you I’ve not known a soul who really actually eats in this disciplined pre-planned way. At least not for very long.

Meal plans are a lot like diet plans. Same structure, same discipline in shopping and eating, all planned out well in advance. No one can stick to this for very long.

If I feel this way then why did I write a meal plan?

Funny you should ask ;-). I do think meal plans have their place in the transitioning from one kind of diet to another. They are a kind of training wheels for the beginner.

With that in mind, I’d like to make a few points on the use of the meal plan.

It’s a Guide not a Rulebook

The meal plan is a very simple old-timey restaurant style menu. Everyone in the house has their choice for breakfast or lunch, more or less, though some breakfast items you might want to make for all. Generally, old fashioned restaurants served just one thing for dinner and guests ate just that. This menu is no different.

But you can mix those dinners up and serve on different days, or take one out and serve an old favorite if you’d like. Just keep in mind you’ll need to adjust the grocery list too.

As you see, the meal plan is a simple guide, not to be rigidly followed. If you like the structure and feel you’re benefitting then absolutely stick with it! You can repeat this menu as often as you like. But if it’s starting to chafe, well, that means you are outgrowing it and that’s a good thing 🙂 .

Developing a Sense of Proportion in Your Grocery Spending

The main thing the meal plan is designed to do is give you a sense of proportion in your food budget. The grocery list has three columns of prices, one labeled “Okay”, one for “Good”, and one for “Best”. These roughly match up with the quality ranking I use in my Wholesome Ingredients posts. While all ingredients aren’t covered here, I hope to cover everything on the meal plan with these guides in the very near future.

So, how to use these three columns to balance your food budget?

Basically, if you have the grocery budget for “Okay” then probably you can’t afford too much from the “Best” column right now. For example, if you have the “Okay” budget and buy pastured chicken at $21.00 each you will have to cut down on quality for something else, perhaps even below “Okay”. If that’s all you have to spend then maybe you should pass on the pastured chicken so you won’t have to lower quality below what is acceptable for something else.

This is really the 80/20 plan broken down into real world terms. 80/20 isn’t just about eating restaurant food sometimes, or eating something you know you should stay far from just every now and then, while eating well most of the time. Nope, it’s also about balancing quality. So maybe you have a “Good” budget but feel very strongly about having high quality raw local milk. If that’s the case you may need to lower your standards just a bit for something else. Possibly, you may need to lower even below “Okay” for a small number of items to get that raw milk. That’s the 80/20 rule in action.

I hope you find the grocery chart in the meal plan helpful in thinking thru what you must have at the highest quality, and what you feel you can compromise on.

Using “The Granny Plan” to Expand on the Meal Plan

In “The Granny Plan” one of the steps is about developing a pantry of food so that you are ready to make most anything at anytime. Granny would have had such a pantry along with a very rough plan for meals that she kept in her head mostly. She could vary it easily as situations demanded, like maybe an extra guest or two or ten 😉 . Or if something might go bad if it wasn’t cooked soon, she would bump her plans to make it closer. So, while there was a plan of sorts, it was pretty loosey-goosey.

Newcomers to real foods are inundated with tons of choices, so much so that I think many succumb to decision fatigue and give up of real food for the time being. I know I surely felt overwhelmed at the beginning by some many things I could learn to deciding about the quality of ingredients at the store. What could I afford? What worked into my budget?

If you’re following the meal plan here then many of these very early choices are made for you. None of these recipes require special skills like fermenting or keeping a starter for sourdough or anything tricky to learn at all. And none of the foods are unfamiliar to the average family. At first you should be about the business of learning good quality from bad and what that means to your budget. Next, learning very basic kitchen skills. The fun but tricky stuff can wait!

So in “The Granny Plan” continue to work on building up a pantry, babystep by babystep. Use the meal plan as a kind of pit stop on the way to your destination of mastery of Granny skills. Make it your first goal to have on hand everything on the grocery list and make all the meals listed there, in so far as your family likes them. Use “The Granny Plan” to babystep your way to this early goal. Easy-Peasy 🙂 .

Get Your Copy of Granny’s Kickstarter Meal Plan Now

Is Your Kitchen Ready to Cook?

by Granny Filed Under: Routines

Coming into the holiday season we are all spending at least a little more time in the kitchen. I’m spending a lot more time in the kitchen this week and I’ll bet you are too :-). I thought I’d take a few minutes today to check in with everyone with a reminder of the importance of keeping your kitchen ready to cook.

A clean kitchen is the heart of your home. It makes all the difference to how easy or hard it is to cook for your family. So developing good efficient routines to keep it clean is of the upmost importance! So let’s review the basics, shall we?

Declutter Your Kitchen

You’ll probably want to save this one till after the holidays though you could make a few inroads here despite the busyness of the season. The simplest thing to do to start with is clear your counters of all but the most commonly used items. You could stash the extra stuff in an adjacent room just until you figure out a more permanent spot for it. Clear counters make cooking so much easier! I could make some improvements here myself. Counter clutter seems to have a life of it’s own so it’s worthwhile to consider the usefulness of the items you find there pretty regularly. A couple of minutes here and there while waiting on something on the stove is all it takes. Make this one of your 15-minute tasks on The Granny Plan, even though it probably won’t take even that much time to do.

Clean As You Go

Make sure you are keeping up with the clean as you go step of The Granny Plan during this hectic season! If you’re doing a lot of cooking like I am this week it’s so easy to just let the kitchen go for a little bit. But every time you do you’ll need to spend that time plus a bit more because cleaning after the cooking is done takes longer than cleaning as you go. Things need to soak, you end up with sticky messes, the kitchen gets cluttered with things that are in some stage of the cleaning process, and before you know it the kitchen is too messy to cook without some serious effort!

So the next time you feel super tired and all you want to do is sit down, think of the extra work you’re creating for yourself and stick it out and finish up the cleanup.

Keep Your Pantry Stocked and Ready

During the holidays there are lots of panicked runs to buy forgotten items if my local grocery is any indication. You can avoid a lot of this by simply keeping a stocked pantry. Sure, there are things you’ll need for the holidays that you really don’t buy the rest of the year. This is pretty minimal though, and you’re less likely to overlook them if your pantry is already stocked with all the staples. Maybe a little late for Thanksgiving this year but keep in mind as you shop between now and Christmas.

How are Your Holiday Preparations Going?

Share with us in the comments below … We’d love to hear from you!

The Pantry Principle – How to maintain your pantry – Part 5

by Granny Filed Under: Affording Real Food, Routines

Now that your pantry is building momentum it’s important to keep it rolling in the right direction. Mainly I’m thinking of problems with:

  • Things going bad before they are used.
  • Running low on things you thought you had a lot of.

So let’s consider each problem individually.

[Read more…]

The Pantry Principle – How to get the ball rolling within your budget – Part 4

by Granny Filed Under: Affording Real Food, Routines

To get started with The Pantry Principle Project I’d suggest picking something from the list that you currently buy that is stored at room temperature. For instance, you could start with dried beans. You already buy a cup or two from the bulk bins at the food store. Try buying a couple of pounds and storing it in an airtight container. To expand on this, buy a few more containers and repeat with a different kind of bean. Next you could add rice to the mix. And a few extra cans of tomato in the cart. This should help you save some out of the weekly grocery budget. During this time cook out of your pantry. You probably already have a number of things in there that are not on your raw ingredient list, maybe not on your real food list, but your family is familiar with them. You can help get them used to the change by serving the old standbys mixed with new items made from your new pantry.

[Read more…]

The Pantry Principle – What you’ll need as raw ingredients for real food recipes – Part 3

by Granny Filed Under: Affording Real Food, Routines

Shopping to replenish a real food pantry is different and really a whole lot simpler than recipe shopping. Begin by making a list of the raw food items you will need to make the recipes you make very regularly. The idea is that it only contains the most basic ingredients … not anything that you would make and then stock as an ingredient. Guaranteed it’ll be a short one! It should resemble your Great-Grandma’s shopping list at the general store. Below I’ve got mine. I think it will cover our Mrs Dull’s “Southern Cooking” recipe experiments too. [Read more…]

The Pantry Principle – What you’ll need to get started – Part 2

by Granny Filed Under: Affording Real Food, Routines

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.

Getting Started

Let’s say you are starting completely from scratch as I did many, many years ago. I had just a tiny apartment kitchen, a few pans scavenged from my Mom’s rejects, and some old tupperware. I had little to no extra money. My kitchen lacked pantry space, storage containers and freezer space. What to do, what to do? Start small with baby steps. Begin by adding inexpensive additions in small steps. For instance, storage containers. It’s pretty cheap to buy glass canning jars for kitchen storage. Walmart, hardware stores, and often your local grocery store has them at about $7 a case for quart jars. [Read more…]

A Good Enough Cook

by Granny Filed Under: Straight Talk

Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.
G. K. Chesterton

I wasn’t always a cook. Heck, many would argue that I’m not a cook now ;-). Still I cook pretty much everyday and have for about a decade now. So am I good candidate for the next cooking reality show? Hardly. Instead I find that I have become a “Good Enough Cook”. Like my mother, and her mother before her, and her mother before her. [Read more…]

The Pantry Principle – How to save gobs of time cooking for your family — Part 1

by Granny Filed Under: Affording Real Food, Routines

Ok, so you’ve decided to improve your diet. Maybe you’d like to lose weight, or as you’ve learned more about the source of your food you’ve decided to improve the quality of what you buy. Or maybe you, one of your children, or your husband is suffering from a chronic health problem and you’ve decided that it’s likely your diet is contributing. Whatever your motivation, there is always big questions about how to actually go about making a change, from a practical point of view. You have very little time as it is, and how are you going to add on the extra effort to:

  • Figure out what to buy
  • Figure out where to buy it affordably
  • Figure out how to make it so your family will eat it

I’m going to tell you my secret for saving time. I’ve been doing this since I first heard of the idea from The Complete Tightwad Gazette back in the mid-nineties. I was an original subscriber to Amy’s Dacyczyn’s ( a.k.a. The Frugal Zealot ) newsletter and eagerly awaited my issue in the mail with many hints and general principles for saving money. This one has to be my favorite. It not only saves money but it save gobs of time and allows you complete creativity in the kitchen. This tip will help you save lots of money at a supermarket, which is how I’ve been doing it for years, but it becomes vitally necessary if you are shopping locally for the most nutrient dense food you can get. Why? Because local food shows up in big bunches. It comes when the crop is ready to pick or when the cow is ready to be processed. You can buy in small quantities at a farmers market, for example, but this will be the more expensive way to go. It’s much more affordable to form relationships with the farmers in your area and arrange to buy when things are ready. Better for you, better for the farmer.

So what is the Pantry Principle?

Basically, you fill up your pantry and freezer with the most nutrient dense food you can get your hands on when it becomes available. All buying is then done with the idea of replenishing your pantry and not with particular meals in mind. By having a full pantry you don’t need to spend precious time planning meals ahead. You can use up any leftovers as they build up, saving money. You have the ability to walk into the kitchen and say “What should I make?” and be prepared to make most anything that you might usually make. This will save you time by:

  • Greatly reducing trips to store. This saves a lot more time than you might think at first.
  • Having lots of ingredients on hand makes it easy to make things in batches which you can then freeze for times when your schedule is crazy.

In this economy too, there are other benefits. In the event of job loss you have a pantry of food to rely on. Your grandparents would keep a supply of staples on hand to help protect the family from the unexpected.

In this series we’ll talk about:

  • Part 1 – How to save gobs of time cooking for your family.
  • Part 2 – What you’ll need to get started: your initial investment and where to find space.
  • Part 3 – What you’ll need for the raw ingredients for the recipes on this site.
  • Part 4 – How to get the ball rolling within the budget you have to work with.
  • Part 5 – How to maintain your pantry.

So, let’s get started!

“And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” – John 8:32

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