Introduction:
Hello farm family! Thank you for following our farm to fork series. Our family is thrilled to have this opportunity to eat from the farm this month! In making the decision to eat this way we realized that some things would have to be purchased. So as mentioned in our Newsletter, we did have a shopping trip before the month started to ensure we had staples on hand.
Although we grow some staples like onions and potatoes. Those items are seasonal. Then you have items like rice, that we can never grow.
As a small urban farm growing grains is also out of the question and sadly, the one thing we forgot to purchase was bread. Not to worry, though because we do have some bread in the freezer. Although we aren’t sure if it will last the whole month, we will just wait and see. The good news is that I can bake bread and we have plenty of flour.
You will find that there will be some days that will have extra items like snacks. Plus we have a teenager, so he would try to live off cereal and ramen if he could!
Drinks for the month consist of water, coffee, tea, fruit and vegetable juice, nutritional supplements, and Mountain Dew for Brandon.
Some of the biggest blessings we had this year were our animals and a half cow, that was ready right on time. We don’t raise cattle, but we are so happy that we know people who do! All meats are farmed with a few exceptions which will be noted.
This series will document the meals the we had each day. Day one was mentioned in our Newsletter, but it will also be listed below. We’ve been trying to take as many photos as possible, but I have to admit that my name is Rachel and I’m super OCD about the photos so some things you may have to take our word on.
Day One
We were so pumped and hit the ground running on the first day, I have a tendency to overthink and over analyze things, but thankfully Brandon reined me in as I was literally going to plan out every single meal for each of the 31 days of the month. He was like “Rachel, you’re doing too much. We have enough food where we can just decide what we want to eat that day.” He was right!
My “green” personality lives by calendars and schedules, so I needed his “red” to help me out. Of course I still woke up at 5 am and started cooking and meal prepping for the day…..
What we had on day one is below.
Breakfast: Beef bacon and eggs scrambled with green tomatoes, onions, and peppers. (Beef bacon was purchased)
Lunch: Garden salad
Dinner: Baked pork chops, the same garden salad from lunch, along with rosemary and onion rice with broccoli.
Day Two
The second day was Brandon’s day to cook. He and I alternate dinner nights as part of our normal family schedule. When the children were home, they also had one dinner night per week as well. We have always been those parents who believed in teaching them how to be self sufficient and so cooking was a big part of it. Even today, our youngest, Josh will cook sometimes, but he is more of a baker. He sometimes surprises me while I’m working with donuts, cookies, etc, ❤️
Our second day meals are listed below.
Breakfast: Chicken sausage, garden salad, and cereal (not shown)
Lunch: Same as breakfast except no cereal this time.
Dinner: Sirloin and cubed steak topped with onions, peppers, and mushrooms. Served with rosemary onion rice.
Snacks: The guys had Oreos and I had homemade trial mix.
Day Three
This day I had I had an appointment early in the morning and so I wasn’t able to eat breakfast before going out. Thankfully, I had my celery juice and Brandon heated me up dinner from the previous night before I had to rush for work.
Breakfast: Cubed steak with rosemary onion rice or cereal (not shown)
Lunch: Garden Salad with sun-dried tomatoes, cucumbers, mushrooms, and topped with feta cheese or ramen (not shown)
Dinner: Pork ribs with our special barbecue sauce and coleslaw. This was the first time we’ve cooked or eaten pork ribs in 20 plus years! Man these were SO good!
There you have it our first 3 days in the books! Thank you for following our farm to fork series and we’ll see you back here in a few days to see what days 4-6 brought us.