Category Archives: Cooking

We’ll beat the socks off Butcher ___.

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Jerica here, with some geek confessions for you. I love math. Did you know I almost went for a degree in mathematics? I wanted to be a code buster or something, I guess. Now I spend my days trying to crack the code on taking care of a whole farm, a very ambitious hubby, and five cute little crazy people.

All that to say… I really like running numbers for things. Looking at it from this way and that. You should see my Christmas lists—they’re on a spreadsheet organized by year and recipient, haha!

I know. So nerdy. I’ve been this way all my life.

Now that I’m a momma and house-chef-extraordinaire (but not according to my kids, who would remind you every time you mention “momma’s cooking” about that ONE incident with the stale banana chips hidden away in some oatmeal…), I love running numbers on cost of food. It’s fun to predict how much we will eat and then to actually look at it afterward, and hypothesize about any unusual influences.

Like yesterday—I made tacos with homemade corn tortillas. I wanted a double-batch so I could skip cooking later this week (it’s a doozy with Tyler and Shreveport deliveries coming up!).  But I had served a not-so-kid-friendly lunch of beef tips with mushrooms and gravy on rice. I thought it was delicious, but they sat and poked around in their bowls for a looong time. Whatev.

Anyway, they were HUNGRY at dinner. And they happen to LOVE tacos (who doesn’t?). So all the small ones pigged out. And maybe the big ones, too. It WAS pretty yummy, after all. 😉

I often see cute little blogs about healthy lunches, and in the photos they show these pretty little stainless steel divided trays with 3 raspberries, 5 almonds, some slices of avocado, and a few bites of steak. “Here’s lunch!”

Eh?

Call me a farmer, but … isn’t that the appetizer? I mean, at mealtimes, even lunches, we’re looking for gravy. Starch. Butter. MEAT.

We have farmer appetites for sure. So I’m pretty sure we eat more-than-your-average-bear.

All that to say, one would expect our cost of eating to be quite a bit higher than “regular” people, I think. But even if we don’t eat “extra,” numbers don’t lie. I’m totally convinced that no matter how you look at it, if you ship in meat or eat at a restaurant for even just a few meals a week, your cost for food is way higher than what you can get from a friendly local pasture-farmer.

So last night’s cost analysis, ready?

  • Half tub of organic grass-fed sour cream: $2.30
  • Five ounces of grass-fed cheddar cheese: $1.75
  • Half jar of organic salsa: $1.35
  • 2/3 lb organic masa flour: $1.04
  • 1.5 lb Ground Beef Short Loin: $18
  • 1 head local cauliflower: $3

Total meal cost: $27.44

On Monday nights, it’s our tradition to have the grandparents over, so our total headcount was 4 grown-ups and 5 kiddos who each eat probably almost as much as a grown-up. Again, numbers. It’s all in how you look at it. So if you consider the kids to eat half as much as an adult, that’s a total of 6.5 servings, or $4.22 per person. But I think they really eat more than that. Let’s say between the 5 of them, they eat the equivalent of 3 farmer-adult’s servings. So that’s 7 servings. $3.92 per person. But we farmers probably eat more than your average adult, too, at least compared to the internet people showing all their cute-and-healthy dinners, so let’s say we count everyone as an adult: 9 servings. That’s $3.04 per person. Total. Done. Ready to eat.

With top-notch ingredients. Grass-fed. Organic. Non-GMO.

Now I realize when you add it all up that sounds like a lot. “$27.44 per meal???”

But I bet you’d be surprised if you sat down and calculated your own “store-bought” meal cost at how high it is. And you have to realize, we were HUNGRY. It was dinner time. Dinner was late (a little)! And lunch was very light. So we could have got away with less, probably. We just love tacos, haha. And there were 9 of us!

(Which, by the way, I have a secret strategy for stretching food, which I did NOT employ last night—set half of it aside and DON’T serve it at the table. There’s a psychological element to how-much-food-is-on-the-table versus how-much-food-is-consumed. If you leave it in the kitchen, there’s a good chance you won’t even need it, and can make it do for another entire meal.)

So when you see certain mail-order meat companies advertising “as low as $5 per meal!” ask yourself, what does that even mean? Are they talking about per person, or for the entire meal? Well… again, run those numbers. If you’re planning on dividing 1/3 lb of meat across your entire family, it’s per meal. But if you’re more reasonable (and not starving), that’s the cost per person. Just for the meat. Then you gotta get all the other stuff that goes along with it.

Um…

That’s not a good deal at ALL.

Plus, some of those companies use meat of dubious origin—from as far away as Australia (in case you need a geography refresher, that’s about as far as you can get from here without leaving planet Earth). I’m not saying we should never import any food, but our meat? Do we really need to go there? Things like coffee beans and bananas CAN’T grow here. But we NEED grass-fed meats to be grown here for so many reasons. Land stewardship. To take back the safety and quality of our food system. To be able to go see where our food really comes from and understand what’s in it and how it’s grown. To help our children understand the food they eat so they can make good choices and someday teach their own children.

That’s why we appreciate your support in eating our stuff and telling your friends about us. I know we don’t ship to doorstep, but we do a lot of other cool stuff to make it convenient to work with us. It is our pleasure to serve such a wonderful and supportive community. Thanks for being a part of it, bite by bite!

The Forgotten Flap

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We changed butchers a while back, and just like moving to a new town, the habits and names for things vary from meat packer to meat packer. So from this new butcher, we got this new cut back from our grass-fed cows called Flap Steak.

Before we started farming, I was like any grocery-store shopper, and was only vaguely familiar with the various cuts of meat available. So it was a whole new world when we started raising our own cows for food. It was like learning a new language: Pike’s Peak, Loin Tip, Loin Strip, Flank, Filet, and… Flap!

When I stocked it for the first time, I had a couple of customers get really excited because they knew what it was already, and a few others that are willing to try just about anything. But to the rest like myself, it was just one of many choices that seemed to involve a learning curve, and so was reserved for a less busy day that never came.

And you know, at our house, we often use the “weird” stuff or things that get damaged and can’t be sold, and there seems to always be plenty of that. But sometimes you just want a good batch of fajitas for supper.

So I finally decided to try it myself.

I had intended to marinate it like fajita meat and either grill it or pan-sear it (because Matt’s the Griller at our house, and he doesn’t often have time to fire it up with all the evening chores that have to be done).

But I got busy that week, but the meat was already thawed and waiting in the fridge…

So I did the irreverent thing and put it in the crockpot.

You can’t do that with a fajita steak! You’re supposed to grill it!!

I know, I know. But it was either that or dinner at 9pm!

We wanted fajitas but never did get around to making that marinade, so in went the fajita spices—chopped bell pepper and onion, minced garlic, and plenty of cumin and salt. I hoped it wouldn’t turn to mush. I do like a good, bitey fajita!

It was perfect! So perfect, in fact, that we ate it all before anyone thought to snap a picture.

My untrained culinary review? Flap Steak offers an ideal balance of tenderness and texture, and is robust enough to stand up to slow-cooking. It has amazing flavor, and the best part was we got our fajitas with so very little effort on my part. Because you all know we stay busy here at the farm!

Anyway, I just wanted to share that with you in case you’re feeling adventurous but still want a very easy meal. Try Flap Steak on our next round of deliveries to East Texas and Shreveport!

And for just such an occasion, I’ve created a fun new category for our online ordering system showcasing the newest items we’ve added to our repertoire. Look for lots more as the summer progresses. I have a surprise for you coming very soon!

The Right Knife

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The Right Knife

There’s nothing more challenging than cooking in someone else’s kitchen! You don’t know where anything is, and you often lack specialized cooking equipment that you’ve come to love and depend on. But the worst, once you’ve experienced cooking with good knives, is cooking with bad knives!

Do you have bad knives?

I house-sat for about a week many years ago, and the memory of that experience that stands out most prominently in my mind, is how very dull and flimsy the knives were! I don’t even know what I was trying to cook, but it was miserable!

And today it occurs to me… what if that’s you? What if you don’t even know how fun cooking can be because you have to fight with knives so poor that you can’t tell which end is the sharp one! I hope that’s not you, but in case it is, don’t run out and buy a $600 set of knives. I’ll share my own bare-bones favorites and you can begin building your collection one great knife at a time.

I must mention that I’m no chef, and a lot of my knowledge is accidental or gathered the hard way, but if my advice, amateur as it is, helps you get back in the kitchen making healthier food for your family, I have succeeded!

You don’t need all the knives.

I could probably narrow it down to 4 knives if I really had to, but my favorites are these 7, and each for a very specific reason.

I thought it might be useful for me to tell you about each one, starting at the left:

The Paring Knife

This little beauty is nice because it has a short, agile blade great for efficiently carving out the seeds and hulls of fruit or bruised veggies. My favorite feature of this particular knife is the ergonomic handle. It’s got a nice fat part that sits in your palm, then a narrower part that helps you keep a great grip on the knife. And it’s all one piece of stainless steel and will never deteriorate in the dishwasher!

The Multipurpose Knife

This black-handled knife would probably also fall under Paring Knife category, and although it doesn’t have the fancy contoured handle, I love it because the blade is long and not too thick, so that cutting things like cheese and apples is easy. But the size of the knife is still small enough to be very easy to handle when doing more intricate cutting. Be careful when shopping for knives that the wedge of the knife isn’t too thick that cutting becomes a chore. This one has a nice thin blade that is still very stiff.

How Steep is Your Wedge?

I thought I’d share this cute little illustration to make this point a little clearer. If you and your friend are headed someplace fun together, steep ramps are going to much more difficult to go up than shallow ramps. The knife is really a wedge tool, and the shallower the wedge, the easier the work is to do (though if you’re going somewhere, it will take longer, but that’s a discussion for another place…). Like my drawing? 🙂

 

The same principle is true in a knife. It’s a lot more work for you to force a steep-wedged knife through a hunk of cheese or squash or whatever than to use a very thin knife. However, the thinner the blade, the less rigid/stiff/strong it will be, and so cutting very hard things like raw pumpkin can be dangerous with a very thin blade because the blade can warp or even permanently bend and cause injury to you or your pumpkin! Choose wedge thickness carefully!

Edited to add: I just ran this by my physics-expert hubby (who was actually my tutor in college… I’m more of a “chemical” engineer, you know!). He said my example is just a little too oversimplified. The work done by the knife really has more to do with the normal force and the modulus of elasticity of the food, such as cheese, as well as friction…. LOL I know. He’s perfect. All you other perfect physics engineers out there just overlook my explanations to the laymen like myself out there. 🙂 😛

The (Sharp) Serrated Knife

I only have a couple of Cutco knives, and the one I like best is this serrated knife. It’s wonderful for difficult-to-start things like tomatoes and other very soft fruits (yes, tomatoes are technically a fruit!). I also like to use it for things that have tough outsides, like onions and pineapple. I don’t care for serrated knives much in general, but this one gets well-used because the edges hold their sharpness very well. It’s no good to buy a cheap serrated knife that you can never sharpen. You also want to look for serrated knives that have balanced serrations. Not like this steak knife which is asymmetrical and will actually tend to cut on a curve:

The Professional Boning Knife

This is one of my very most favorite knives, but (pretty much) all I use it for is slicing raw meat. If you’d like to get into quartering chickens or cubing steaks/roasts for stews and fajitas, etc, this is the kind of knife you need.

But you also need a good knife steel, the big fat thing over at the far right, which is used to realign the tiny metal molecules at the edge of the blade, causing it to keep the sharpest cutting edge possible. Raw meat, and especially skin and gristle, are very difficult to cut through with a less-than-sharp knife, and you end up sawing and ripping more than actually cutting, which is hard work and results in ugly workmanship and frustration. I use the steel to refresh my blade every time I prepare to cut. It’s well worth the investment, but DO NOT use it on a serrated knife!

The Bread Knife

If you are into homemade bread at all, you need a great bread knife. Again, a poor-quality knife results in ripping instead of cutting, and a short-bladed knife won’t be able to reach all the way through a large loaf of bread, leaving you to have to cut from two ends, which will likely lead to goofy-looking slices. A very sharp knife with good even serrations is a joy to the baker. Since homemade bread (hopefully) doesn’t have all those nasty dough conditioning chemicals that store-bought bread does, it will be more crumbly and less tough than commercial bread, and you’ll need a knife that lends itself to not destroying the bread’s delicate texture. I like a serrated bread knife because it starts into the hard crust more easily than a smooth-sided blade.

The Chef’s Knife

These last two knives are both technically chef’s knives, but as you can see, are shaped a bit different and have different beneficial characteristics. I like the stouter, silver-handled knife for these two reasons: it has the ergonomic handle, and the stouter blade gives me more leverage when chopping through hard vegetables like raw sweet potatoes. It’s also very broad and makes mincing nuts or onions easy work since they can’t “jump” over my blade as I’m working through a pile of food.

The black-handled knife has a longer, narrower blade that gives a bit more control for precision cutting and room to work. The long blade is handy for chopping things lengthwise like carrots, or really large things like cabbage. Both have “dimples” (I’m sure there’s some correct technical knife term, but I don’t know what it is) along the blade to help keep the food from sticking to the side of the blade as you slice through it.

Which is the BEST knife?

So there is Jerica’s simplified version of choosing good knives for the home cook. If I had to pick just one knife to take to a desert island… with an otherwise fully-equipped kitchen of course, haha… I would probably choose the multipurpose paring knife and sharpening steel. It’s my favorite knife because of the blade size, and I can do just about anything with it in a pinch. Hope you enjoyed this article! If you’d like notice of more stuff like this, please sign up for our newsletter! Happy cooking!

The Perfect Breakfast Food

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The Perfect Breakfast Food

What’s the perfect breakfast food, according to your farmers?

Is it a smoothie full of hidden organ meats, freeze-dried berries from Mt. Everest, and a dozen types of organic greens? (My crunchy self is giggling over this one!)

Is it a powdered mix that serves itself up all hot and caffeinated as a one-pot wonder?

Is it the sweetly encrusted donut that is the only thing you can face at that hour of the morning before your coffee has kicked in? Hey, some breakfast is better than none, right?

Is it a 16-course gourmet meal complete with locally-grown edible superfood flowers, homemade bread with freshly-churned butter, biscuits, pancakes, a tall glass of fresh raw milk, and a plate full of farm-raised eggs, bacon, sausage, and ham?

Well… My husband would probably nod his head vigorously to this last option, and I’ll give you a hint that it’s the closest thing to what I envision as the perfect breakfast food for the fast-paced family on the go. But not the whole 9-yards. Just that last little 3-letter word.

Ham.

But not just any ham.

Real, smoked, pasture-raised, chemical-free, deliciously natural ham. Just sweet and salty enough to be nice and hammy but not overwhelming in any particular direction, and of course plenty smoky. The best part is that it’s sliced thin enough to thaw quickly and cook even more quickly with little effort (choices include ½” or ¾” thick).

Just warm your skillet, maybe toss a tablespoon of butter or lard on unless you’re using cast iron, and lay the ham steak gently down. Warm over medium heat until steaming, then flip and repeat, a few minutes per side. Voila! Done. Breakfast. The perfect breakfast.

What’s so perfect about pasture-raised ham?

Well, it’s sweet enough to face in the wee morning hours. Lightly salted so you don’t have to guess on seasoning. Nice and smoky. And our favorite feature: Ready to heat and eat.

And even if that’s all you eat for breakfast, you’re probably going to have one happy tummy all the way to lunch, not to mention you hardly had to do anything to prepare breakfast, and there might be enough left over for tomorrow or to carry with you for lunch! But you can get fancy, too, and cook some eggs or biscuits or hashbrowns or whatever you like, and have a delicious country-style farmer breakfast. Toss the bone into a freezer bag and save it to add to your stockpot next time you make broth to get even more value from this humble but lovely little cut.

So why am I telling you about ham steak when you’re busy stuffing Christmas stockings and trying to keep the baby from climbing the tree (at least that’s what happening at our house…)?

Because I have been pondering a renewed vision for helping folks get healthy by getting back in the kitchen, eating the right things, instead of feeling overwhelmed by daily decisions, the last of which ends up being what’s for breakfast/lunch/dinner. Maybe you just need a few good, but brainless, decisions to help you along your way. Enter pasture-raised ham for breakfast. Sure, doll it up with some scrambled eggs and fresh fruit if you like and are able. But the point is, even if all you eat for breakfast is a chunk of SGR ham, at least you are eating something filling and real. Ham steaks also make a pretty convenient quick-dinner idea, whether you do breakfast for dinner or chop it up for soup or eat it on a sandwich. It even goes great as a centerpiece meat alongside mashed potatoes or rice!

Ham is a cut we produce a lot of because, well, the rear-end of a piggy is pretty large! We finally found a smokehouse that will do an all-natural cure for us, so we are excited to officially introduce this delicious and convenient cut of pork! Check out all our delicious and clean smoked products here.

Time-Saving Kitchen Tips You Can Do Today

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If you’re into real ingredients, you probably spend a lot of time cooking and have accumulated your own set of kitchen tips. When we started working through the healing process for Matt’s autoimmune disease (ulcerative colitis), we had to make everything from scratch to avoid the ickies like preservatives, GMOs, vegetable oils, trans fats, artificial flavors and colors, etc. A bonus feature of cooking at home is that you get to enhance the nutrient content of the foods you’re making by using more nourishing ingredients. For example, if you’re making rice or gravy or bread, use homemade broth instead of water. Use mineral-rich real sea salt instead of white salt to boost trace mineral intake. Use unrefined sugars and less of them for homemade desserts that have an extra healthy boost. You get the idea…

Scratch-cooking takes time! Yet for his health, and mine, and our family’s, it’s worth it. But as an engineer, I am always thinking about ways to speed things up and save myself time. If you’ve never read the book “Cheaper By The Dozen,” we highly recommend it for a fun family read. It gives a glimpse into the mind of an engineer-type—we’re always microanalyzing our movements to eliminate “unnecessary motion.” Looking up the same information over and over again would definitely qualify as unnecessary motion! I have compiled a handful of simple but effective kitchen tips to help you save time cooking that nourishing, real food, so you can spend more time enjoying your good health.

Kitchen Tips to Help You Save Time

Here are just a couple of simple kitchen tips that you can implement in the kitchen today, most of them completely free! 

Have a handful of favorite recipes?

I have a handful of recipes that I find myself using at least a couple of times a month. I’m an index-user in the cookbook, and looking up the same recipe over and over again wastes time. Write the page numbers of  your favorites in the front cover of your cookbook! Or you could flag the pages with page protectors. Easy!

Always having to look up weight/volume conversions?

I don’t know about you, but I find it extremely inconvenient that a half cup of butter is the same as a quarter stick of butter. Or is it the other way around? Stop second-guessing yourself on conversions and stop wasting time looking the same information up on your phone over and over again! Instead, print yourself off a handy kitchen conversion chart and tape it inside the cabinet door above your favorite workspace! It’s not a bad idea to leave room for your own added notes. I have written on mine things like how much a cup of flour weighs, and what amount of salt to use when making a salt brine for fermented foods. I don’t have to stop to look those things up with my sticky fingers in the middle of my kitchen frenzies!

I have created just such a chart for you. With love from your favorite farmers! 🙂

Click here to download this free printable Kitchen Conversion Chart!

Forget to zero the scale?

On that same kitchen “cheat sheet,” write down the weights of your common mixing dishes. That way if you’re in the middle of creating something delicious and realize that it’s too late to weigh the dish, if you have the weight already recorded someplace, just do a little math to adjust your measurements! A calculator in the kitchen can be a help, too!

Want to reduce dishes when measuring?

Grab yourself a simple digital kitchen scale! You can usually find them for $10-$15. Even if you don’t do much baking, weighing ingredients is so much simpler and reduces the number of dishes to wash, especially if you’re using things like home-rendered lard. It’s one of my most-used kitchen tools!

I hope these tips save you some time and make your real-food-cooking more efficient. Thanks for supporting real food farmers like us! 

What are your kitchen tips?

Cook-at-Home Challenge: Count the Cost

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Does food matter?

Matt and I had a health crisis circa 2005-2006 that forced us to analyze everything we were doing so we could find answers to why his intestines were trying to kill him. And they were. Standing 6-foot-5-inches tall, and weighing less than 120 pounds, doctors said there was nothing left to do but to surgically remove his entire large intestine. They said food didn’t matter, that this disease (ulcerative colitis) was hereditary and couldn’t have been prevented, and that surgery and drugs were the only way to stop it. 

We didn’t believe it.

I hope none of you has gone through what we went through. A health crisis of epic proportions is enough to change anyone’s mind about what they put into their bodies. For us, it changed everything, from the way we eat, to the way we live and even the way we raise our children. We became farmers because we were so convinced that really-pasture-raised meats are critical to good health. 

And I am happy to report that Matt still has all his guts and hasn’t taken any medications since the summer of 2010. Praise God!

So here we are, now competing with our tiny little farm against the ever-growing and utterly convenient prepared foods industry, from fast-casual to heat-and-eat to mail-order meals delivered to your door. We can’t make it that convenient, but I can try to put some tools into your hand that will help you on your back-to-health journey. Because food does matter… and I know what you’re up against: the time, the knowledge, and the cost. There are many hurdles, but you can do this, and you may be surprised how little time it takes and how little money it costs you!

The True Cost

A lot of folks look at the cost of our meats per pound and think, “That is SO expensive!” 

And it is. 

I won’t pretend it’s not. But really–how much meat can a person eat? With quality ingredients, one tends to eat less and feel more satisfied. And of course we all know the “it’s an investment in your health” banter, and that is true, but it’s hard to reconcile that statement with having to pay a higher grocery bill. 

I want to show you what you would spend if you participate in our Cook-at-Home Challenge this month. By sticking with really basic ingredients instead of ready-made foods, and choosing homemade meals that are so simple it’s silly, you can spend less than $3.89 per serving. What fast food joint can feed you for that? And unless you have a farmer-size appetite, you probably will be able to get even more meals out of the same dish so that your final “cost per serving” is quite a bit lower! 

As part of our Cook-at-Home Challenge, I have included a complete shopping list so you will be equipped to cook everything in the package without having to take an emergency trip to the store (even more cost savings!). If you buy everything on that list at the high end of price, here’s what you’d spend:
 

Chances are you’ll find quality ingredients for less than what I estimated here, and it’s very likely you have most of what you need in your pantry already!

If you’re eating commercially-prepared meals more than a couple of times a week, please consider joining us this month for the Cook-at-Home Challenge. The Challenge will equip you with easy recipes, a meal planning strategy, a shopping list, and a ready-to-go meat meats package so you can get started right away feeding your family high quality, homemade meals. 

Bonus: Broth!

If you follow my Challenge instructions closely, you should even have enough bones and veggies left at the end to make a batch of homemade broth without spending any extra money (besides the electricity to run the crockpot)! Broth nourishes the intestines and the joints and has been found to reduce joint pain if consumed regularly. You can drink it like tea or substitute it for water in things like rice, oatmeal, and even bread! (I know… you’re probably not making bread from scratch yet, right–but we’ll win you over and teach you how eventually, I hope!)

So now it’s your turn. Check out the Cook-at-Home Challenge here, just in time for our Longview and Marshall deliveries this week. You can also schedule a time to pick up at the ranch in Jefferson during checkout. 

Why is meal-planning so hard?

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Why is meal-planning so hard?

Meal planning… The bane of many a mother’s existence. We ask ourselves, “Do they really need to eat AGAIN today?”

Let me just start by saying that I do not have this all figured out. I mentioned early on in this email series that Matt chuckles when I tell him my latest meal planning strategy because chances are, I will scrap it after a day or two. I’ve tried complicated, I’ve tried highly regimented, I’ve tried super-seasonal, all with moderate success. I keep coming back to the need to have some basic, core recipes available so that if all else fails, THAT’S what’s for dinner.

How many of you have purchased specialty ingredients, only to have them spoil before you get around to using them?

How many of you end up looking at the clock at 5 P.M., and wonder to yourself, “What should I make for dinner tonight?”

And even if you’ve conquered planning ahead, there remains that age-old question… what should you make for dinner, day in and day out?

Why is meal planning so hard??

My guess is that we get stuck in a rut and just need some fresh ideas. But when we run out of fresh ideas and creative energy, we just need some core recipes that will pull us through so we can feed our families. But it is critical to consider the amount of time we can devote to actually making dinner amidst our other activities and responsibilities. Dinner won’t just happen, so we have to be realistic about the complexity of meals we can fit into our day. Looking ahead just a little will make a world of difference for your dinnertime.

So here’s the basic strategy:

  1. Allow yourself breathing room to enjoy creative recipes when you are inclined to do so. A meal plan shouldn’t stop you from having fun if you’ve come up with an interesting idea, or from improvising if a neighbor gives you a whole mess o’ summer squash! Think of your meal plan as your framework for the days when you don’t have room in your head to decide anything else. 
  2. Allow yourself the freedom to set aside favorite family traditions. In our house, it’s homemade pizza night every other week. We missed pizza, so I figured out how to fit it into our crazy lives at least a couple times a month. I can do that. And I’m always working to take greater joy in it. Maybe for you it’s Taco Tuesday or something like that. That’s a meal plan. That’s great. Keep doing it. Work at making your ingredients better and better each time, and learning to enjoy the task of nourishing your family.
  3. For your regular-ol’ busy don’t-want-to-think-about-dinner days, try this: stick with reliable, simple recipes that get the job (of feeding your family) done. On your busiest days, use your slow-cooker. On the days when you’ll have a little more time to be in the kitchen, try the Kitchen Days recipes. But keep it simple. The Cook-at-Home Challenge is a great place to start. 

I’ve set up this Cook-at-Home Challenge to mesh with your busy schedule–half of the meals are one-step, all-in-one slow-cooker type meals. The other half require minimal prep and very little hands-on time, but for these, you do have to be available for the hour preceding dinner so you can pop things into the oven, stir your cheese sauce, etc. It’s a way to get you in more control of what you’re feeding your family by constructing your meals from real, basic ingredients, instead of commercially-prepared, heat-and-eat type meals, but it will not require a degree in culinary arts, nor an afternoon slaving over a hot stove.

Let me encourage you to make homemade dinner a priority at least two nights a week for the next four weeks. Can you do that? It’s less than 10% of the meals you will eat in that time period, assuming you eat 3 meals a day. Let’s get this 10% right and begin building the foundation for truly healthful eating. Don’t beat yourself up if it’s not always perfect. Just keeping refining it.

Many of you have asked for copies of the recipes because you’ve recently stocked up and don’t need more meat, or perhaps some of you are farther away and can’t materially participate, but want to learn some new things alongside the rest of us in the Ark-La-Tex. You are most welcome to use the recipes, but I urge you to choose really-pasture-raised meats, as these will yield the most delicious and healthful results. Conventional chicken simply will not taste as good without a lot of doctoring, plus there are many disadvantages to eating only conventionally-raised meats. If you want to know more about why that is, check out our blog series on Why Pasture Raised Meats? 
 

Finally: The Recipes

Here are the printable recipes, planning strategy, and shopping list. Tomorrow I hope to send the cost analysis of the meals and ingredients to show you the true cost of eating well. But first, “I have to finish my chores!” (Name that movie!)

So now it’s time for action. I’ve given you the recipes and the shopping list and a planning strategy to suit your schedule. Join us this month for the Cook-at-Home Challenge.

Orders for Tyler delivery are due today, so don’t miss out! Hope to see you there!

Cook-at-Home Challenge: What’s for dinner?

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I will meal-plan for you this month!

Hopefully you got to read a bit about our upcoming Cook-at-Home Challenge introduced in our last newsletter. I know there are so many of our readers that have said, “I want to eat more healthily, I just don’t feel that I have the time to devote to cooking, and even if I did, I don’t know WHAT to cook!”

I can totally relate. Sometimes I ask my family, “What do you want for dinner?” And when they don’t respond with answers like “pizza” or “fried chicken,” then they say, “Whatever,” or “I don’t know.” 

I don’t know anybody who got full on I Don’t Know. Sometimes what I really want is someone to just tell me what to make, and I’ll make it! (Well… except for things like fried chicken and pizza, ha!) 

If this sounds like your life… I have great news for you. I’m ready to be that person that says, “Hey, here’s what you should make for dinner.” (I’m the first-born child and only girl among my siblings, so I’ve got Bossy down! 😉 )

I want to make it easy for you to get healthy meals on the table. Not only healthy, but delicious. Not only healthy and delicious, but affordable. Not only healthy, delicious, and affordable, but EASY. 

Ready?

Here’s what’s on the menu:

  • Slow-Cooker Roast Chicken with Veggies
  • Homemade Chili
  • Slow-Cooker Beef Chuck Roast with Veggies
  • Oven-Roasted Drumsticks with Homemade Mac-n-Cheese & Steamed Veggies
  • Slow-Cooker Pulled Pork with Veggies
  • Deliciously Moist Meatloaf with Homemade Mashed Taters & Steamed Veggies
  • Slow-Cooker Roast Chicken with Veggies (again!)
  • Pan-fried Pork Chops with Homemade Mac-n-Cheese & Steamed Veggies

 

Pictured above is a super-simple dish of slow-cooker beef chuck roast with veggies. You can just toss it all in the crock-pot early in the day, and come home to a delicious home-cooked meal, hot and ready to serve.

I chose this collection of recipes for their simplicity, ability to fill the belly and please the palate, and frugal selection of ingredients. Even the least experienced cook should do well with the teaching-style recipes. No more powdered cheese mix. No more seasoning packets. No more cans of cream-of-chemical soup. 

 

You can do this. Let me get you started! Join us for the Cook-at-Home Challenge in February. We’ll be making our monthly delivery rounds in Tyler and Shreveport this week, and Marshall and Longview next week. I hope to see you there!

Will this get you back into the kitchen?

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We want to help you get back into the kitchen!

It’s been a CRAZY month so far! Matt took a brief trip to the American Pastured Poultry Producers Association meeting for larger scale producers (apparently we qualify! 😉 ). It was a great time of gaining insight on our production practices and thinking about our future in raising the best chicken (and eggs and turkey and pork and beef…) in the world! But somebody had to stay home and mind the farm… Guess who that somebody was!

 

 

 

This photo was taken during my “training tour” at the northernmost border of the paddock, a lowland section that Matt plans to turn into a runoff collecting pond someday. 

My care-taking responsibilities certainly weren’t fulfilled without help, though! Boaz helped with egg collection duties (because that really is a circus with four little kids in tow!), and the Grandparents (Bailey and Bobbi) helped watch kiddos while I trekked through a HUGE pig paddock to make sure the 170+ pastured porkers weren’t going to mutiny while Boss Man was away. When he got home, Matt said something to the effect of, “Well, everything is still in one piece!” Did he expect anything less??

All I can say is that I am grateful for my hard-working hubby and glad that he’s back to managing the outdoor half of the ranch.

Meanwhile… I’ve been working on some things of my own in the spare moments of quiet between homeschooling, packing eggs, and managing the farm sales. 

As I observe the food trends in our nation, particularly in the Ark-La-Tex, I gather that the plight of many families struggling to take control of their diet and their health is made more difficult in two ways:

  1. They lack the knowledge and skill to cook homemade meals.
  2. They lack the time/money/planning skills to obtain the needed ingredients.

Cook-at-Home Challenge

If that’s you, I want to issue a new challenge to you. I want to equip you to get back into the kitchen and to start the journey toward truly from-scratch meals with wholesome ingredients. And the best part is that these meals cost less than $4 per serving, and that’s being very generous with serving size and ingredient cost. It is likely the real-life cost is under $3 per serving, depending on prices for extra stuff and how much your family actually eats.

For the 4 weeks following our free February deliveries in Tyler, Longview, Marshall, and Shreveport, we want you to commit to making two homemade dinners per week (8 meals total). For partakers of the challenge, I’m going to supply a shopping list, a planning strategy, cost analysis, and recipes.

All you have to do is place an order with us for the pre-packaged Cook-at-Home Bundle, and run to your local grocery store to pick up any additional ingredients that you don’t have in your pantry (but you probably have most of what you need already!). 

My hope is to encourage and equip you to start 2017 by providing your family with delicious, nourishing, and affordable meals that you make in your very own kitchen.

Are you ready to get back into the kitchen?

Check out the bundle here, and if you’re ready, go ahead and order!