Week Eight Meals

Did everyone have a merry Christmas? Did you have some yummy treats this week? Here's what we ate:

Sunday, December 22:
Breakfast - unless otherwise noted, breakfast is eggs fried in butter
Lunch - unless otherwise noted, lunch is leftovers
Supper - steak stir-fry

Monday, December 23:
Breakfast - bacon and eggs
Supper - steak and beet greens
Dessert - cookies and ice cream

Tuesday, December 24:
Supper - pork roast and sauerkraut, cheesy baked potatoes
Dessert - ice cream

Wednesday, December 25, Christmas:
Supper - smoked ham, cauliflower, edible pod peas
Dessert - ice cream, chocolate and cookies

Thursday, December 26:
Supper - sirloin tip roast, cheesy baked potatoes

Friday, December 27:
Supper - sirloin tip roast leftovers, edible pod peas

Saturday, December 28:
Supper - zucchini "lasagna"

Where it came from:
Beef - Homer
Beet greens - Soldotna
Butter - homemade
Carrots - Palmer
Cauliflower - Soldotna
Cheese - home made
Dairy - home grown and Kasilof
Edible pod peas - Soldotna
Eggs - home grown
Pork - Funny River
Strawberries - home grown
Tomatoes - Anchorage
Zucchini - Soldotna

Christmas was this week! I love Christmas. James got to spend the night on Christmas Eve and spend the whole of Christmas day with us. Our holiday meal was entirely Alaskan, but not dessert. The cookies were homemade but with white flour and white sugar.

On Christmas day, I made fresh butter with some cow cream I had saved in the freezer from Peninsula Dairy, the place we used to get raw milk between the time when we ran out of frozen goat milk and the time when our goats freshen in the spring. While making the butter and seeing the buttermilk in the jar, I thought about how, if we weren't on this special eating plan, I would make some buttermilk biscuits while the buttermilk was fresh. Suddenly it made perfect sense to me how yesteryear's farm families were able to get so much food made. There's a logic to it that isn't very common knowledge in these modern times when we buy most of our foods at a store. When we are using our cream separator to get cream for butter, for instance, there is skim milk left that can be used to make monterrey jack cheese. The whey from the cheese can be used to lacto-ferment vegetables, or to make bread. Going back to the cream, it can be used for cheese or used to make butter, which gives you buttermilk, which is good for baking. The processes for milk, cream, cheese, whey, butter, veggie preservation and baked goods don't have to be independent activities, they can go smoothly hand-in-hand to give you greater variety of food in a streamlined method of food preparation that I plan to implement more often next year.

As we near the end of our Alaska Food Experiment, we are starting to run low on vegetables. We knew that the veggies would be the limiting factor in how long the Experiment lasted, and it looks like we'll be able to go for the projected two months but not much longer, if any.

As I write this, it is Saturday night. Sunday is James' birthday, and we are taking the day off of the Experiment to take him to dinner and a movie. Happy birthday, James!