Really good food costs either time or money

There's no doubt about it, really good food (organic, freshly cooked, scratch-baked) will cost substantially, either in our time or our money. We could feed ourselves on junky cheap stuff. I could open packets of ramen, or blue box mac and cheese, night after night. But I want better. I want delicious, fresh-tasting vegetables and fruit. I want well-seasoned, but not overly salty meals and snacks. I want cheese, not cheez. But the good food I want comes with a cost.

To feed my family well, I choose to spend more time than money in making that happen.

• I choose to bake and cook almost exclusively from scratch
• I choose to hunt down bargains

• I choose to work with less-convenient packaging

• I choose to keep a garden and orchard
• I choose to preserve whatever I can each summer and fall
• I choose to forage wild foods when possible

• I choose to repackage institutional-size containers into more home-kitchen friendly sizes when I come home from the wholesaler
• I choose to shop at multiple stores

And so, I choose to spend a lot of time procuring and preparing food each day.

When you see my grocery totals for each month, they're made possible by the hours of work I put in each day. Your choices may be different. You may be in the position to spend more money and less time in meal management for your household. Or you may be choosing a blend of time invested and money spent.

This came up with me, personally, after church a couple of weeks ago. A gentleman friend of ours asked me what I do. I replied that I'm a homemaker. He countered with, "yes, but what DO you do?" (Emphasis on the first DO.) I could just be insulted and saunter off to my own corner. But instead, I chose to "educate" him on how some of us manage meals for our families, through labor in place of dollars. As I delved into the details of baking all of our bread, keeping a garden and orchard, canning and freezing for winter meals, and cooking almost everything from scratch each day, he began to have a look of incredulity in his eyes. I didn't even go into how and where I grocery shop. This was such a novel idea to him, that a modern-day homemaker might do many of the things that his grandmother had done.

I think our family DOES eat very well, almost every single day. Because we enjoy really good food. That is a priority for us. And I've found the way to make that happen, with an investment of my time, in place of our money.

Gotta go. I've got to get that golden brown, with fruit bubbling up over the edges, cobbler out of the oven!