Real Food

[dancerjodi]

Devina read this http://www.amazon.com/Real-Food-What-Eat-Why/dp/1596911441 a long time ago and suggested it to her LJ friends, and after poking at reviews I added it to my Amazon wish list (which I then consulted when spending some Barnes and Noble gift cards).

I'm through the intro and the dairy section and am on to meat and I'm really enjoying it. I think the author is good at mixing humor and experience with research and is making a convincing argument for focusing on eating real foods. The question though is how to balance that with costs and convenience.

We've talked with some friends that do the raw milk thing and I have some friends doing the organic/free range/grass fed meat thing. I've done the veggie CSA thing a couple of times in different ways and we've hit the local farmer's market though not as much as I'd like to. Does anyone in the Boston area have a service, farm, store or wherever that you absolutely love and want to suggest? Any tips on this kind of transition? There are only two of us so moving to a milk or meat or eggs or veggie share means that we will have to do more home cooking and less eating at restaurants (not wanting things to spoil and making the most of $ spent on food). In concept these are great ideas, but there are always those days/weeks/months that you just don't feel like dealing with it, you know?

Comments

[dethany.livejournal.com]

I've been wanting to get that book for a while now - it is pretty much exactly how we eat (to my mother's chagrin of course.) We're both at ideal or close to underweight now and eat whatever the hell we want, my folks are overweight and eat fake diet crap all the time. Nyah nyah! I *really* think it has something to do with your body just not knowing wtf to do with that processed garbage and it literally sticks to you. Blech! I feel SO much better eating real foods. This was the same book reviewed extensively in the Times about a year ago, right?

The one drawback definitely is convenience, but in keeping my own hours and not being chained to a desk/lack of cooking resources, it has been much easier. We've got a great butcher locally and compared to processed/packaged meats, if anything, it is more cost effective to buy the real stuff.

[julishka.livejournal.com]

my grandma used to sometimes boil her milk and freeze it. not sure if you actually need to boil it first, but for her there was a reason for doing so, i just don't remember what it was.

[lsl.livejournal.com]

We bought a large upright freezer. We got a lot of fruit and veggies over the summer and fall when they were in season. We had a farm share and bought stuff at the farmer's market. We did a lot of pick your own at local places to reduce cost and have fun with the kids. We processed the excess in various ways: drying, canning, freezing. We made lots of tomato sauce and froze it in quart sized ziplock bags, for example. It's a lot of food processing work, but we did it in big batches on weekends mostly and now we have a lot of food, both ingredients and in various states of prepared. It has been working out pretty well so far this winter. We'll need to adjust amounts of things and will probably add a little more variety next year. We're working on it a little at a time. We also bought a side of beef (half of a cow), grass fed, organic, free range, grass finished blah blah blah. That's really why we got the freezer. It was reasonably economical when buying a large quantity. If you are interested in getting local organic beef, one of Avon's coworkers has about 900lbs in her freezer (from her own cows) that she is trying to sell (not where we got ours, but we will next year if we can). No need to buy an entire half of a cow, but the price is better the more you buy. We are also trying out a winter farm share this year based in Belmont.

[dancer.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the info!

Where is the farm in Belmont? Do they have a website?