The Food on the Farm Goes 'Round and 'Round

Frugal Farm-living Tip #1.

Don’t waste food. 

Food management is crucial.  Maybe I should say feed management.  Because this applies as much to the animals as to the people.  Really, on the farm, the food just keeps going ‘round and ‘round.  The kitchen veggie scraps that I don’t freeze for later use go to feed the compost which feeds the soil which, in turn, feeds us and our livestock.  (This is as good an excuse for avoiding overprocessed food as any.  My friend Elli says "A healthy, well-fed compost pile comes from a healthy, well-fed family."  And she is right.)
Any scraps that I give directly to the livestock eventually feed us as well, either in eggs or meat. 

I have two containers on my kitchen island at all times.  One for scraps for the chickens – stuff I know they will eat (Yes, they are particular) or that is higher in protein, especially during the winter when their scratching yields very few juicy morsels.  And one for vegetable matter to be composted or aged for a couple of days and fed to the worms. 

As for the edible leftovers, I have posted here before about freezing veggie and meat scraps for broth.

And in almost all of my cooking I find my self asking “What must I use first?”  Last night we had shepherd’s pie made from 3 leftover baked potatoes, a lone beet, ½ a bowl of sweet corn on stalk of celery, two carrots  and a breakfast sausage patty.  It doesn’t sound like much but we all had seconds.  Yum!

If I have ¼ cup of taco meat left, it will go into chili that week.  Same for spaghetti sauce or any tomato based product really.  Ditto for leftover corn or peppers, etc. 

A surplus of eggs and a tiny bit of bacon (*Kim!) with ½ an onion makes a skillet meal.

A half portion of leftover steak pretty much always ends up in my homemade vegetable beef soup.

Tonight I am making navy bean soup using the ham bone from the Christmas ham. 

(Never underestimate a good ham bone.   I have gone home from a church potluck with two or three.  Even the guys at Tim’s office will occasionally send one home for me.)

Are you getting the picture?

Though it is often, accurately, used to describe me personally, I think that the word frugal is maybe somewhat of a misnomer in this case.  The goal, when it comes to food, is not to exist on as little as possible, but to allow as little as possible to escape our little farm.

If any scrap of food leaves this property as the garbage truck rolls away from my house on Wednesday morning, we have lost an asset, and I have fallen down on the job.

*Kim is my very special bacon-frugal friend.