/ck/ - Food & Cooking

I now eat food exclusively cooked at home. I also have a large garden every year and raise chickens for meat and eggs. I have on hand, about 700-800 jars (1/4 pint, 1/2 pint, pint, quart, and half gallon) of home grown and home cooked meals year round as well as about 150lbs of potatoes and carrots, and several bushels of apples (2,000lbs of produce grown on my property this year).

When I buy food, I think about large quantities and things I don't grow, trade, or hunt.

The last time I went to the grocery store to buy food (2 weeks ago) I was buying both food and seeds. This was in the form of beans/peas mostly. I bought stuff like whole wheat flour, spices/herbs I don't grow, dry beans/peas (navy, kidney, red, pink, black, white, blackeye pea, large lima, small lima, etc), pecans, walnuts, nut mix in the shell, etc. I trade some of my produce and home canned products to get local raw milk for cheese making, yogurt making, and butter making. I also trade for deer meat.

I can whip up a batch of stew large enough for about 80 meals that only costs about $10-$20 in groceries if I bought it all. All the kitchen equipment I use has paid for itself many times over in savings before I became a farmer.

Take this image for instance. Only 3 items I grew or traded for (beef, potatoes, and squash), the rest was store bought. It made 5.5 gallons of vegetable soup. That's 88, eight ounce servings for about $15 of the most expensive varieties of produce the local store sells. Had I bought everything, you'd add about $8 more ($23 or $0.26 per serving). I paid $0.17 per serving after savings.

>>4961634
I'd like to mostly cook all my meals and I'm willing to spend on things like pic related, seeing as it looks healthy and cheap.

>>4908385
Also, I made this soup a few weeks ago (Oct 6th). 22 quarts of spicy vegetable soup containing a good bit of my own vegetables from my garden.