Day 20 - Father's day, all organic cookery and shopping

Happy Father's day to all the great dads who make a difference! Especially my schatzi Tom, who is a wonderful and caring daddy to our daughter Amelie. To make a special day for him I decided to cook all day and give him a break from cooking. Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner with a bonus of organic chocolate chip cookies.

 Breakfast was organic scrambled egg sandwich. I am not a good cook and can never make eggs really good. I think organic food makes me a good cook. The eggs were fluffy and super good, I put hummus on the bread and decorated it with organic green onions.

For lunch Amelie requested a peanut butter sandwich with apples. I thought that I should try our new bulk wheat organic pancake/waffle mix. I still had organic chocolate chips left over from the cookies I gave up making. I mixed the pancake mix with organic milk and put some of the chocolate chips in it. Super easy fast lunch that satisfied the entire family. As Amelie requested I cut up some apples for all of us (organic apples) and put natural peanut butter we buy in bulk at Winco. Everyone enjoyed it and finished their plates with no complaining. (Who would refuse this lunch anyway??)

Dinner was a little bit more challenging. We had organic ground beef left, which was in the fridge for a while and needed immediate attention. I decided to make some Frikadellen (which is very similar to hamburger patties). Chopped up an onion, put in some organic oats, bread crumbs (non-organic), a little organic ketchup and mustard (non-organic) and mixed it together. I am always worried that the patties will fall apart and they generally do. Some say it requires eggs to keep it from falling apart and some state that eggs are not necessary. So, I did it without the eggs. I pressed them really really good together and handled them with care and no sudden moves in the pan. I fried them with olive oil, the only thing we use to prepare food in the pan. Well, they actually started falling apart but they made it all in one piece on to the plate.

We purchased only 1/2 lb of organic ground beef for about $3 and I got two patties for each of us and one for Amelie. In the past we purchased 1 lbs of non-organic ground beef, now we just have to buy a little less in order to keep the same price. I made two side dishes, organic Tabouli with fresh cucumbers and organic zucchini with organic garlic. Yum! Amelie generally does not eat zucchini and refused this time as well, but she at the patties and even asked from some Tabouli. For dessert and mainly as a reward for Amelie, I made us an organic vanilla yogurt with organic blueberries.The yogurt was purchased at Walmart - a big pot of organic vanilla yogurt. I crushed the blueberries in the yogurt, but Amelie ate everything except the "yucky stuff" a.k.a. organic blueberries...hahaha...

I noticed that I can cook a lot more and better from bulk. I really enjoy cooking, as long as I am not hungry. Once I am hungry I have to eat something little first in order to enjoy the process of cooking. Now that we have been shopping a lot more controlled and with purpose we established a little routine and are trying out a lot of organic bulk grains, pasta, flour and anything that looks appealing in the bulk section. I am desperately looking for glass jars or actually any containers with lids to put my bulk stuff in. If you have any let me know!! I already started three and am still working on some more. Here is the first look at my bulk pantry.

My bulk containers

I use chalk paint for them. Tape them off with masking tape and spray them. Once they are dry you can use chalk to label them. The benefit is that once you change your bulk you can change the label easily. 

First cookies that turned out!

My secret - cookie mix

 I made chocolate chip cookies for Tom.  Yes, I did! But I made them from a box! I am meeting with a friend this coming weekend, who is a great baker and she will teach me how to bake cookies. (organic whole wheat cookies) Until then I am o.k. with a cookie mix. I used a familiar one, which is Dr. Oetker, it is a German company that produces baking powder, cake mixes, yogurts, frozen pizza and pudding. The cookies were soo yummy. I added natural peanut butter to the second batch and Tom and I like those much better. The package was just about $3.00 - unbeatable price. It's hard to find good inexpensive cookies, organic so for now this is the solution.

Sunday is our day to plan for the upcoming week. And after we made plans and figured out lunches/dinners we went grocery shopping. First we went to Co-op and purchased just about what we purchased last week with $5.00 more than last time (mainly because I am trying organic shampoo and lotion from bulk). This time we did not go to Winco and decided to try Walmart. 

We purchased mainly organic items at Walmart. Winco & Walmart serve as an additonal store for things we either can't effort at Co-op, are overpriced or simply not available at Co-op. We spend about the same at Walmart as we spent last week at Winco. In summary we spent $5.00  more at each store this time, which equals $100.00 total for groceries for this week. I hope we can keep the bill down in the future and still continue saving money despite eating/buying organic food.

 WISDOM OF THE DAY

I would like to use an excerpt for today's Wisdom of the Day, from one of my favorite organic books "Anna Getty's Easy Green Organic - by Anna Getty" "In 2007 there were 21 major episodes in the USA involving beef products contaminated by E.coli, up from just 6 episodes in 2005. Several factors are thought to explain the dramatic increase: Perhaps a more virulent strain of the bacterium has emerged. Maybe the heat wave in the summer of 2007 increased the stress level of the cows. Or bacteria is getting into the distillers' grain which is fed to cows. Organic beef cattle are finished on pasture and grass-based forage instead of corn, which reduces stress on the animal and the frequency of E.coli"