Wordless Wednesday: Our Foodie Summer

Our summer has been full of food milestones:

We were asked to take part in a sweet corn taste test. The corn is a genetically-modified hybrid developed by Seminis to protect the crop from insects. It was fabulous! I'm all for reducing pesticide use if possible. 

My first homemade banana nut muffins. It was a great use of too-brown bananas.

I hate throwing away food! While the bananas were obviously not local, I used a packet of Weinsenberger Mills Biscuit Mix instead of Bisquick (which my Betty Crocker cookbook called for). Weisenberger Mills is located in Midway, Kentucky and purchases grain from many of my farmers!

We put out our first official garden. I prepared the spot with my trusty garden claw and some of my horse manure. Then we just stuck in some seeds. We planted tomatoes, cucumbers, scallop squash, carrots, and beans. The beans emerged first, followed closely by the squash and cucumbers. The cucumber beetles have really enjoyed our garden, but they seem to be gone now. Keeping the weeds out is also daily work.

This mysterious plant cropped up about two feet behind the garden in the hard clay. We are still unsure what it is. Someone suggested it may be a gourd. We will see. It's getting bigger by the day.

Our first harvest. Not enough to feed a family of four, but I did cut up the squash and add it to some spaghetti sauce. I am about ready to harvest a few cucumbers.

The wild blackberries are thick at our house. There are about 50 or more bushes on our property. I loaded the kids up with Deep Woods Off and bowls and off we went. I am amazed they have grown so well without human intervention. It has been very dry here this spring and summer, but I guess we had just enough rain.

The first of many blackberry cobblers. It was so delicious. I'm also thinking about trying my hand at blackberry preserves. For breakfast the other morning, I added them on top of a whole wheat tortilla and peanut butter. Roll it up and you've got a great on-the-go meal.

I lost all of my original laying hens to coyotes and hawks.I purchased two new hens and they did not take to the coop. We have yet to catch them, but I recently found where they were laying their eggs... in my hayloft. They are half the size of what I was getting before. I sure do miss my girls. If I try chickens again, I will have to put up a fence. So much for free-range chickens. 

Do you have any good summer food stories? 

Share them here or on Twitter - use #summerfoodfun and tag me - @foodmommy. 

Fury, Frustration, Failure and School Lunches

While it may not have been the most horrifying thing for a parent to experience, yesterday’s family food drama was this food mommy’s worst nightmare.

I get a note from my child’s school that her meal account balance is negative, and I wonder “what the heck? I just put $50 in about a month ago.” The good thing about the new internet-based system is that I can check what my child has been purchasing. The bad thing is that I discovered where all the money went: cookies and extra entrées. I was livid. I had really been perplexed as to why the healthier choices I had been giving my child, along with regular doses of exercise, had not produced any results. Guess I can’t blame Nana on this one.

The fury came first, and it was directed at the school: Why didn’t the cashier think it was inappropriate for an 8-year-old little girl to be buying so much food. I know they want to sell the cookies, but extra pieces of pizza, corn dogs, and hamburgers? (I know, you may be wondering, “what happened to taking lunch to school every day?” I’ll get to that later.) I can’t believe they even offer that. I don’t remember being able to buy extras when I was in school, even in high school. We were given a dollar every day, and what they provided for that dollar was all we got. I never thought that there was not enough food.

So, now I have a problem with the meal account system. Our society as a whole definitely has a problem with self-control – with food and spending – and this system obviously doesn’t do us a bit of good to control either. Fortunately, I was able to have a conversation with the cafeteria manager and they put a note in the system that my daughter is not allowed to purchase anything other than the $2 meal. However, they won’t be getting more money from me for a long time.

Next came the frustration: Why can’t I make my child understand how much food is necessary to sustain us, and that too much food is a bad thing? We have this conversation over and over, and I hate that I have to talk about food and health so much to my child. I just want her to make good choices so she does not have to worry about her health her entire life. It is not fun! I regularly allow my kids treats, but under the assumption that they are making good choices most of the time. This has obviously not been the case.

Finally comes the feeling of failure: I have failed my child because I let a busy life get in the way of better habits. For the first couple months of school, I was making her lunch every day (except one – check out “The Great Chocolate Milk Compromise”). Then she was accepted into the school choir which meant getting to school earlier a couple days of the week. So one day, became two, and then three. And finally she was lucky to get one lunch from home a week. I didn’t feel bad at the time because they changed the menu, and it looked pretty decent. I just had no idea that they let the kids buy as much as they want. I also stopped asking her what she was eating at school, and just assumed everything was peachy. I had a few hours of self-loathing, but finally came to realization that we just need to start anew.

Miss E now has no choice but to take her lunch to school every day. She also has to do extra chores to work off all the extra money spent on her school food extras, and no spending any nights away from home for a while. I might also be doing some hardcore research on the number of calories a young person should be getting, and show her what that looks like in terms of volume. The sheriff just got a little bit meaner.