Currently, my meal “planning” revolves around the seasonal local produce from our weekly CSA box (we live it San Diego so the CSA operates all year!) and the freezer full of co-op buy bison, beef, pork, and my hunter-sister’s venison (even some bear!).

My husband and I love good food and crave variety, so I use a lot of herbs and spices from many ethnic cuisines to keep the CSA harvest from getting boring (beets again?). I can easily make a basic cabbage and pork shoulder into something Mexican, German, Polish, Asian with a switch of the supporting seasonings – you get the idea.

It’s also so great to get kids started on this way of eating and living while they are ripe for learning and forming their food preferences (which are much harder to change once they are, um, engrained . So many people rationalize the unhealthy foods they feed their kids, thinking they are “stealing childhood” if their kids’ diets don’t conform to the “machine cuisine culture”. Too often parents fail to appreciate they might actually be stealing their kids’ future health as adults when they give in to the popular notions of kiddy cuisine.

I have marveled at the transition that I have made. I can actually see light shining through my metal shelves in my refigerator. And I am eating fantastic meals, even better than before.

I also started some herbs in my garden, actually quite a few different kinds, that I use for my cooking. It used to be that I’d use only a small bit of a clamshell of herbs and then they’d go rotten. Now, I don’t spend the money and have ready access to fresh herbs, better than storebought. It’s great!

We have three kids, er, make that three major-amounts-of-food-eating machines. When I tell people how much I spend on groceries a month, they think we’re batty. We don’t drive a great car, but it’s good enough. We’re currently renting while my hubby finishes his schooling. Our pad is pretty small for 5 people. Still, it has always been our main objective to give our kids the best foundation possible and good food is integral to that.

In order to get that good food, we rely on our relationships with our farmers and our good hunting skills We get our vegetables from a local, organic CSA. Our eggs come from one farmer, our raw goat milk (to make yoghurt and kefir) from another. We buy grass fed bison from friends and ‘beyond organic’ chicken from another farmer. When our deep freezers are full, I feel like all is well.

I keep it pretty simple at meat time, but I still get rave reviews every time we sit down. I’m sure it’s just the quality of the food. Good good needs little in way of extra flavorings and spices. For supper yesterday we ate braised, grass-fed beef ribs cooked with two heads of cabbage I just quartered and threw in the pot and a whack of onions that went in too. I cooked it all for about 7 hours in some bone broth I had made. We topped it with ghee and slurped up every last morsel. Who needs carbs?! That’s comfort food at its best!!

Oh, one last thing (sorry for going on): kids raised on good food will always appreciate it. My oldest teenager is a competitive athlete (a very good one, if I may say so). That girl is lean and powerful. I see her at competitions with her friends surrounding her, asking what they should eat. She’s become the ‘go-to’ girl for nutrition advice from her teammates. It’s quite funny to see their expressions when she tells them to “ditch the dried cereal” (a staple in these pre-competition circles, sad, I know) and “eat grass-fed meat and lots of good fat”!! Ahhhh… a girl after my own heart

I’m SO glad things are simpler, tastier, and far healthier now. We basically try to keep our freezer stocked with meat, and for my weekly meal planning, I just choose a meat for each day of the week, and decide on a veggie to go with it. I don’t usually choose a recipe until I’m about to start cooking, but having a plan helps me decide what produce to pick up at the grocery store without having waste, and reminds me what to start thawing each evening for the next night’s dinner.

Thanks for posting your experience with this – maybe a few more people will see it, think “Sounds good to me!” and switch to eating real food!

I’m constantly blown away looking at the food stocks and waste in other peoples homes now. Especially when they complain that “there’s no food.” Well, I guess they’re technically correct… No food, only food products.

I recently went 3½ weeks without emptying my own kitchen garbage (the only can in the house) because there’s so little waste these days. It had to taken it out… it stunk. Haha