Homegrown diet update

We have now completed just over a month of our homegrown diet experiment. All is going well. We have eaten a TON of green beans (which I can't ever get tired of) and zucchini and squash (which I tire of very quickly). Our potatoes have proven to be a wonderful staple crop, although I don't know if we'll have many left for the winter at this rate. We have cheated a couple of times on a few items. As I mentioned earlier, the chickens went on a brief egg laying hiatus shortly after we began our experiment, so we've added the occasional bowl of oatmeal in order to avoid having to eat squash and zucchini for breakfast (unless it is zucchini pancakes, which is just delicious!). I would like to say that our food bill was virtually nonexistent, but no such luck. For one thing, flour and olive oil - two of our allowed, imported ingredients - ain't cheap, and we're going through a lot of both. Secondly, we've been doing SO much canning lately that all of the canning supplies - jars, lids, honey for jam, etc. - have added up quickly. Of course, the jars are a long term investment, if you can manage to hang on to them. I'm hoping the real food budget payoffs will be this winter when we start digging into all those canned goods.

We have managed to add some wild foods to the diet as well. Joe's cousin found a large crop of sulfur shelf mushrooms (chicken-of-the-woods!) that have been feeding us well for several meals. Joe has also produced several delicious experiments with milkweed pods (turns out they taste like green beans). And of course, there's always the berries.

Speaking of food, and green beans, it's time to go cook up some for dinner.