2. Scratch Cooking and Scritch Cooking

I cook from scratch most of the time. I don't have a lot of processed foods--my pantry and freezer are mostly full of ingredients. I have things like canned green beans and frozen vegetables--but not a bunch of frozen microwave meals and stuff like that. Got frugal one year, oh, when Sophia was a baby, and never looked back.

We belong to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). Ours is a combined CSA--several local farms and bakers and so forth gather together, so we don't simply get beets all August long like the first CSA I belonged to. The Amish farmer makes the pickled beets and egg noodles and honey and peaches. My favorite pork farmer provides, well, pork. Little local farms have heirloom and hybrid tomatoes and cucumbers and all the produce that will grow in Missouri and Illinois. Dried beans and locally made tortillas and eggs and teensy little Japanese turnips and butternut squash and whole chickens and on and on. You can trade non-perishables (like the applesauce we never eat) for whatever they have on hand. You can buy extra. You learn how to cook just about anything.

That's what I mean by scritch cooking--cooking what you have even if you wouldn't have chosen it for yourself. Early spring brings greens. Lots of greens. And there are more, tougher, greens later in the summer into the fall. I NEVER ate greens before the CSA. Why would I? Bleah. But no. Olive oil and lemon juice. Or bacon and onion. Or baked in the oven with parmesan cheese. Mmm.

Beets no longer frighten me. Turnips, bok choy, pumpkin, ground lamb, salsa verde, whatever. I pack the fridge with our $50 share and it spreads through the week. No, that's not all I buy for my family to eat. I go to the local supermarket every other week or so--our weekly food bill is probably close to $120 for a family of 5 (well, Leo doesn't eat much...). Less in the summer, more in the winter. It helps, of course, that besides the bit of meat from the CSA, we have a deer in the freezer and some fish from my father-in-law and that's just about it meat-wise unless we get a hankering for something more interesting (rarely, to be honest).

Last night I made a pretty simple dinner of chicken in marsala based sauce with capellini (oh, there is the every-so-often trip to the Italian grocer, I AM SO SPOILED). For dessert, though, I made something that was definitely scritch: peach pumpkin cobbler.

I had a vacuum-sealed package of frozen peaches. I had a jar of peach butter that I was eying suspiciously. I'm not a peach fan. And I had way too much frozen pumpkin. So I dumped these three ingredients into a 9x13 pan and sprinkled it with lots of pumpkin pie spice and some turbinado sugar. Topped it with my mother-in-law's biscuit cobbler recipe and stuck it in the oven.

The girls wouldn't touch it. And I didn't care. I never make them eat dessert. Truly. And I sat down with a little mug of it, topped with just a few tablespoons of vanilla ice cream (because I was, frankly, apprehensive)....and ate the whole thing. It was like a pumpkin pie with a hint of summer and the salt in the biscuit top made it just lovely. Ah.

There was a time when I never would have done something so obnoxious as that. But I'm glad that time is over.