On September 21st, 2008, Sarah (Gaertner) Cook asked:

Why do you make yogurt homemade? Is it healthier? More cost-effective? Taste Better? Seems like there are other things that you do homemade that are commonly purchased items. Isn’t it difficult to homemake so many food items when you have 5 kids? Just wondering.

Kit
What a fantastic group of questions! Though I admit that the way you phrased them made me laugh, then I started thinking, the answer here is more deserves its own post. (I even asked Heidi to chime in, and she did — what a sport!)

So, yeah. Why the heck do we do so much homemade stuff? I’m glad you asked.

First, it’s fun. Heidi and I both enjoy cooking. It’s one of the ways we unwind. It’s good, honest work, cooking food. It fulfills a universal need for sustenance and comfort. It’s also one of those small ways I can serve my family.

In most ventures, you can break down the major components to the sides of a triangle, and you can pick any two. In the case of food, I break it down like this:

To answer your above question, it is less expensive in the long run to do it yourself. I’ll go back to the yogurt example. A gallon of milk costs $3.00. I can use a third of that for my yogurt. I make it exactly like we enjoy it, and I don’t have any excessive packaging to throw away or recycle. Just a little aluminum foil. So less cost to my checkbook, less cost to the planet.

I may be biased or perhaps blinded by my own effort, but I think that food you make yourself tastes better for a variety of reasons. It’s not being seasoned by a bunch of people in lab coats and hard hats, for one thing. Discrete control over spices and whatnot means I can make something that will appeal to the family every time. There’s also something very satisfying about taking a pinch of kosher salt from my salt dish and letting it sprinkle from between my fingers. Homemade definitely tastes better.

I said “pick any two”, but honestly, homemade food isn’t all that time-consuming. For all the stuff we do to make the yogurt, for instance, there’s about 20 minutes of actual labor spread out over about six hours. And I don’t have to pack up all five kids to hit the store when we run out of bread. Hey, how about greek tonight? Cool, I’ll whip up a batch of pita bread. And so on.

In our attempt to live more consciously, with less impact on the globe, we have cut out almost all convenience food from our lives, and we’re living more healthily for the choice. Our garbage output is so much less than it was a few years ago, we can go a whole two weeks before we have to take the trash to the curb, if we want. I know we can do better, but we’re getting there. In the case of the yogurt, we use glass jars. None of those little plastic containers for us.

I love being able to pronounce every ingredient in my food. I know our milk is antibiotic free. I know the yogurt has only four ingredients. While I love playing with kitchen chemistry, I sleep a little better knowing a chemist didn’t create our food.

Since we’ve been making an earnest effort to go more homemade, it’s quickly become easier, and faster in some cases, than doing store bought. The kids fight over turns to be involved with food prep — home cooking has become part of our family identity. When our kids are older, they’re going to know that they come from a family that cooks. I love that feeling.

It’s a rewarding lifestyle, even if the kids think that scratch pancakes for breakfast on a regular basis is normal.

Thanks for asking! I enjoyed the chance to answer.

Heidi
The stuff we make homemade is generally (a) healthier than the store bought option (b) less expensive (c) yummier. Plus (d) Kit and I both really enjoy cooking/baking, it’s fun and (e) it’s educational. We want the kids to be very confident in the kitchen when they leave home so the more we expose them to now, the more comfortable I think they’ll be when it comes to experimenting on their own.

As for doing this stuff with kids - we almost always have two adults home, which makes it infinitely easier to do anything of course. And we get the kids involved in both making foods and cleaning up - even Emy can unload the dishwasher. When it’s something the kids can’t help with, the older ones are an enormous help in entertaining the younger ones so we can send them off to play for a few minutes while we’re chopping veggies or pouring out boiling water or whatever.

Time-wise, it’s actually just as fast (or faster) for us to do most homemade versions. It takes 20 minutes of labor to get 4 loaves of wheat bread ready (not counting rise time, of course.) I can’t hit the store that fast for a loaf of bread. I don’t make yogurt so Kit can address that one. It takes me about 5 minutes to get a double batch of banana bread in the oven. Jam is fast to jar. Mixing microwave oatmeal packets in bulk is easy and has none of the additives. We do a LOT of stuff in advance and in bulk (freezer breakfast and dinners, huge batches of baked goods or soup, etc.)

Pretty much any food that we eat a lot (several times a week) we try to make homemade, if it’s feasible. We’ve not figured out a good tortilla yet, we have the press but not great luck making tortillas.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 at 8:26 pm and is filed under Family, Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.