Cooking from scratch. Cooking From RAW Ingredients!

Recently I was involved in a bit of a Facebook kerfluffle about cooking from scratch. The gist of the discussion was whether or not it was part of a homemaker's job to cook for the family. My personal take on this is that there's not much that comes in a box or package that passes muster for nutritious living in our family's book, so cooking from scratch is more or less a necessity if my family is going to eat in a way that I feel is healthy. I understand that the time constraints that many families face make cooking a very difficult time trade-off to fit in on a regular basis, especially if both parents are working full time. But if one parent is home, and their job is as the "Home-Maker" then in my book, cooking is part and parcel of the deal.

As you can imagine, the notion that a homemaker should cook for the family caused a bit of a brouhaha in this day and age of "Don't put me in a box and tell me what I should do" feminism. In reaction to the June Cleaverism of the 1950s, we have swung so far in the other direction that no woman wants to be told that she should be in the kitchen (and far be it for me to tell anyone what they should be doing). But to me, it's not really an issue of feminism or not. My husband is often the at-home parent and when he is, he cooks. End of story.

In the midst of all of the hubbub (anyone notice that there are so many great synonyms for a Blogging Brouhaha?), was this simply astonishing quote:

"i think that we don't all understand cook from scratch the same way - for the ones who supposedly cook from scratch at every meal every day, you wouldn't be on facebook if you understood "from scratch" the way some others do. My sister in law cooks "from scratch" every meal and she is never out of the kitchen, unless it's to go buy some raw ingredients - RAW ingredients"

Which I think is worth addressing in depth. There are several parts to this myth that bear some serious discussion. The first is that cooking from scratch, or using "RAW ingredients" is some sort of terrifying bugaboo that modern homemakers just can't face. To debunk this, I'm here to tell you that I started out as a lousy homemaker. I was going to be the career gal: you know the one who has it all and comes home from her mentally stimulating and fulfilling job to kiss her lovely well-scrubbed kiddos hello and sit down to a family meal together. Except that I really couldn't make that one work. Kid #1 more or less demanded that I set the career path aside and become a full-time mother (which of course meant that I needed to start homemaking as well). Not having been much of a cook to start with, I had to learn from scratch to cook from scratch. Which is all to say that if I can do it, anyone can.

Myth number two is that it takes some insanely inordinate amount of time to buy and cook with RAW ingredients (I'm going to just keep capitalizing that one because the effect is so epic, as teen son would say). So much time in fact that you would never be out of the kitchen unless you're leaving to go buy those RAW ingredients. Now on account of my children's food allergies, I'm required to cook from scratch even more than the average homemaker. I can't simply go buy a bag of Bisquick and whip up some pancakes, nor can I buy the already made and pre-frozen waffley thingies. I have to start with some RAW goat's milk, RAW eggs, and add in the flour etc. until a pancake batter appears. To confront this sisyphean task, I simply bought a copy of Betty Crocker's cookbook and I go to the store once or twice a week. If I'm feeling especially organized, I whip up a triple batch of the pancake batter in the evening after dinner and store it in a handy lidded container in the fridge so we can pour a few spoonfuls on a hot griddle whenever POOF we want a pancake to appear. Time to make pancake batter from scratch: About 15 minutes.

Again, I'll make the point that I utterly and totally started out as the suckiest cook ever (my hubby can attest to this), not unlike Julia Child. So if I can do it (even if I have never risen to the level of a souffle-maker but have just mastered the basic pancake), anyone can. Heck, cowboys on the trail of a cattle drive managed to make flapjacks from scratch, and they were certainly no gourmet chefs, so I'm fairly confident that most folks can master it.

Myth number three: If you buy into the enforced slavery of the cooking-from-scratch mentality, you won't even have the time to update your Facebook account.

So here's a typical menu and time breakdown:

Breakfast: Omelette with sausage, onions, zucchini, and mushrooms: 15 minutes
Lunch: BigAss Salad with chicken breast, dried cranberries, pecans, and goat cheese: 35 minutes including cooking the chicken breasts and making the dressing
Dinner: Turkey with Portofino sauce over steamed cauliflower (I'm eating Paleo right now and not doing any breads or pastas): 45 minutes

Shopping: Two one-hour Costco trips a month amortized on a daily basis = 4 minutes per day
Three Weekly trips to the grocery store by foot = 2.5 hours = 22 minutes per day
One weekly trip to get our raw goat's milk = one hour = 8 minutes per day
Caring for chickens (where we get our eggs) = one hour = 8 minutes per day

Total Shopping time: 42 minutes per day
Total Cooking time: 1:35

Total Kitchen Slavery Time: 2:17

As you can see, I don't spend anywhere near my entire day cooking and shopping, and I even have time once in a while to update my Facebook status and get in these crazy discussions! Also, three of our grocery shopping trips double as dog-walking time, so they really should get some time deducted for that, and most people don't have to go out of their way to buy raw goat's milk or raise chickens for eggs. I'd say for most folks it could be 1.5 hours or less to cook from scratch with RAW ingredients, including shopping time.

Robin's Cooking From SCRATCH with RAW Ingredients Time Saving Tips:

- When you can, prepare ingredients for more than one meal at a time. If you're chopping onions, peppers, zucchini, etc., chop two or three instead of just one. Store the others in tight-lid glass containers in the fridge. Now when you want to whip up a salad or a stir-fry, it's quick and easy.

- If you have a batch of time available, mix up batters ahead of time as well. Making a double or triple batch of pancake, waffle, or muffin batter to have available in the fridge makes quick work of nutritious breakfasts. The kids like to bake teeny muffins in a cute little pan I got that fits in our toaster oven. It's almost like those fun "easy bake ovens" that you can buy for kids except that it works really well and the food is nutritious. Having batter on hand for them to make themselves a breakfast muffin also saves money from the endless boxed-cereal grocery bills.

- Plan meals from menus (I'm just now getting the hang of this one!) and shop from a grocery list made from those menus. Then you're guaranteed to have the ingredients on hand to cook what you want when you want to. If you don't have to do last-minute trips to the store, you save on gas, time, and frustration.

The Environmental Impact of Feminism

On a discussion board I frequent, there is currently a largely civilized debate about the value of what used to be called "women's work". Since nowadays, either partner can choose to be a stay at home spouse, that phrase has gone by the wayside. But the reality of the situation is that this work, that of the "homemaker" is largely devalued by society. Some people have put forth that a person with no children, or children old enough to be in school have no business even staying at home, and that such people are not paying their own way in life.

This has been going around and around in my brain all day, and even though it doesn't really apply to me (homeschooling/unschooling is more than a full-time job!), it got me thinking of not just the economic value of such work (replacing everything I do would probably cost a fortune, even if one could find someone with the diverse skills of chicken midwifery, robotics coach, and violin tutor, LOL), but of the environmental value and impact of this work.

Now before I say another word, I want to make it absolutely clear that I am in no way advocating for some return to the June Cleaverism of yesteryear. I don't think a societally enforced imprisonment of women in the household with an apron and a copy of Betty Crocker is the answer. And I fully understand that for many families in this era of haves and have-nots, having both parents work is a financial necessity (and that of course is a whole 'nother topic, on the Walmartization of the workforce where so many people are not paid a living wage). But I do think it's imperative that we look at the true value of this work, and the repercussions that abound when homemaking is farmed out to the likes of McDonalds, Eggo Waffles, and Swiffer.

I was shifting some stuff around in the freezer today, and looking at the neat packages of frozen blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, and cherries that fill half of the shelves. They stand next to the meat I picked up from the butcher (a local 1/3 pasture-raised organic beef), and the baggies of pancakes and waffles that I make up ahead of time so the kids can have healthy easy breakfast on days when we have little time. This is one small microcosm of the environmental value of a homemaker.

If I hadn't taken the kids to the berry patches and roadside fields and fruit stands this summer to get local organic foods to fill our freezer, we'd be buying more fruits trucked to a plant, packaged, and trucked to our local supermarket. If my husband or I didn't have the time to find and build a relationship with the local people who supply our raw milk and organic meat, pick it up when needed, and then thaw and prepare nutritious meals for the family, we'd be driving through a McDonald's like so many Americans on the go. I did that once last year, when we were on vacation and I was completely staggered by the sheer amount of waste products generated by one fast-food meal. And that doesn't count all the trucking and non-sustainable agriculture that went into producing that meal. Likewise, if I wasn't cooking nutritious sprouted whole-grain wafffles and pancakes with our own organic eggs and raw milk, I might be opening a pack of Eggos for the kids before we rushed out the door to get to our respective jobs and school. I won't bother typing in the ingredient list, but suffice it to say that they barely resemble food and I can't even imagine the environmental impact (let alone the healthcare and economic impact) of so many of the nation's food choices being such pre-packaged dreck.

Of course, we shouldn't ignore transportation. Although I'd like to think that most two-income families go merrily carpooling out the door, this isn't the case for most in America. Our old neighbors were a prime example - both parents and the teenage child left the house in three separate cars each morning, bound for three separate places, all less than five miles from each other. But their hectic schedules were too overwhelming to coordinate, so three cars it was. And for two-working parent families, it might be completely necessary for either parent to have to drive kids to after-school activities or daycare.

There are many more incidental environmental impacts. As the hours spent on the job by members of the workforce creep up steadily, less and less time is available for simple household tasks. Thus something like the time it takes to wring out and clean a mop becomes so stupendously valuable that products like Swiffer hit the marketplace with a bang. It seems there is nothing out there that can't be made disposable. Diapers have been around for a long time, but now you can simply throw your baby's bibs away without having to take the time to wash them. Facial washcloths - who knew that they made them disposable? After all, taking the time to throw in four or five more washcloths to your laundry could be the straw that broke the overworked camel's back. And not only fast-food meals are served on disposable dinnerware. People are sometimes so time-crunched that paper plates and plastic forks are used for regular family dinners to save time on washing dishes.

All of these seemingly disparate things don't cause us to blink our eyes when taken one at a time. These things you might look at separately and say "what's the big deal, if someone wants to use a Swiffer instead of cleaning a mop?" but when you take them together, when you take them on a national scale, it's clear that the environmental impact of the absence of homemakers in so many families becomes huge. And there's no easy answer or quick turnaround (though the rising prices of fuel in a post-peak economy may turn around the Swiffers, multiple cars, fast food and such all on its own). As such things no longer seem "cheap and easy", the work of a homemaker becoms much more apparently valuable in a monetary sense.

So what can be done to jump-start this change? For one thing, think about the homemakers you know and make sure that when you talk to them you do not disparage their role, even inadvertantly. They are valuable, not just to their families, but to our society and to the earth itself. They play perhaps the most important job on the planet. If you hear someone else act dismissively to someone with a homemaking role, bring the issue to discussion. It's often a very quiet discrimination against people who are "just" housewives or homemakers or "just a stay-at-home mom". It seems that official job titles working out of the home carry so much more prestige and importance, and anything we can do to reverse this trend will be better for our communities, our society, and our environment.