More-with-Less Cooking

A while ago at a used book sale I saw a cookbook that looked familiar; sure enough it was a copy of one of the staple cookbooks which a dear friend and mentor had on her shelf. I bought it for about $2 and forgot about it.

I found it again at it is a perfect guide for the food project we are setting out on. The book was published in 1976 so some of the statistics are wrong now, however, how to make sure you are eating whole proteins with legumes and grains hasn't changed, nor has the fact that meat costs a whole lot more per gram a protein as the vegetarianism options.

The book is More-with-Less Cookbook by Doris Janzen Longacre and is filled with good old fashion Mennonite cooking sense. Now I am not Mennonite myself but every Mennonite I have met has had an appreciation of good food, and usually lots of it.

So here we go, aiming for a less meat and lower cost meal but more filling and satisfying!

First meal attempt:
Six-Layer Dish
I was craving a casserole type bake anyway.

Layer in order given in a 2qt. greased casserole, seasoning each layer with salt and pepper:
2 medium potatoes, sliced
2 medium carrots, sliced
1/3 c. uncooked rice
2 small onions, sliced
1 lb ground beef
1 qt. canned tomatoes
Sprinkle ove;
1 Tbsp brown sugar
Bake at 300 for 2 1/2 - 3 hours
Options:
Just before ground beef add 1 c. cooked kidney beans, drained.
Substitutes browned book sausage for ground beef.

I'm adding the beans, substituting chicken and omitting the onion, mostly because of what we have available in our pantry. It's not normally what I would make, but nothing we wouldn't normally eat, and it does look more filling than what I would normally make. I am looking forward to it.

Hopefully it cooks down, or the 2 qt. pan might not have been big enough...

A Quest to Eat for Less

So we're looking ahead at our third month in Saskatoon. It's not as glamorous as we hoped but we are making ends meet, barely. Eventually my husband will get more hours at his job but it means lots of work first and probably two more years of school before he's at sustainable full time. That seems to be the difficulty of breaking into the counselling business.

There are three major things that we're working on at the moment; two are for our personal lives, one is for work.

For work, both of us are working together at setting up a group pre-marital counselling seminar. It is going to be ten three hour sessions, likely once a week for four to ten couples. This is something that after talking to pastors from various local churches seems to be a need. So we're putting our schooling to work at getting this together. Eventually, my husbands boss would like to offer this through his work too, but since he is not working at a Christian counselling center we will have to modify it to be less Christian. Now, I don't know how that will change it, other than some wording, because I feel that all sound marriages are based in Biblical principles whither or not the couple believe in the One who created those principles. We will just have to work it out.

For ourselves we are going to do to things: We realize how much stress we have been under with the move and are going to take some time for ourselves just to study Scripture together. We're using a book to guide us, it is one that I have read before but am looking forward to reading again. The Good and Beautiful God: Falling in Love with the God Jesus Knows by James Bryan Smith. We also have the second book in that series, The Good and Beautiful Life: Putting on the Character of Christ. I am looking forward to working through these and memorizing Scripture with my husband.

Second, we are looking to eat better, really to eat for less. Both in the sense of eating for less money as well as for less junk and calories. Both of us, when we are stressed start to eat more food, and less of it healthy. So we are sitting down and actually planning out healthy meals, instead of just cooking whatever we can find. This means eating less meat, it is often the most expensive thing we eat, and making sure that we are getting full proteins and lots of vitamins and minerals from what we are eating. Lentils and beans are becoming our friends, they are cheep, chalked full of goodness and I still get to feel full after eating.

God is good, all the time. The work will be worth it when it all comes down to it.  I know that even though we feel like we are coasting at the moment, God has a plan for us. Sometimes I worry but I know that we can lean on God and do the best with what He gives us. Moment to moment. All the time, God is good.