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The other by-product of making butter: buttermilk.

Butter.

Whipping cream to make butter.  Recipe: whip cream until it’s butter.

Making chicken stock from the remnants of a rotisserie chicken.  See: http://www.chickenfeeds.ca/2009/08/chicken-soup/

Blueberry soda.  Okay, so the soda water wasn’t technically made from scratch, but we’re looking into a seltzer bottle.  From Alton Brown’s Blueberry Soda recipe.

One area that we had to make a small exception for in this experiment was cheese.  Realistically, unless we planned our meals 6 months to a year in advance, making cheese to order is fairly difficult to do, and eliminating it from recipes is nothing short of sacrelige.  For quick cheeses like cream cheese, quark and mozzarella, we’ll still be making these from scratch, though our first endeavour was a failure.  Sadly, we will have to do without Cheez Whiz in its entirety.

The other area that we’ve identified is “going out.”  Since I run my own business, a fair amount of work gets done over lunch at restaurants.  While neither of us want to rid ourselves of a social life, or put meetings on hold for an experiment, we’ve decided that any restaurants we go to have to make most of their food from scratch.  That means no store-bought condiments, breads, etc.

We’re past day 3 of this little experiment, and I wanted to share a few challenges that we’ve had.

1. Dishes.  TOO MANY DISHES.
2. We’ve been unsuccessful in having dinner before 7:00 so far.
3. Drinks are fairly time-consuming to make if you want variety beyond water, milk and juice.
4. The oven or stove is on all the time, and it’s 35 degrees out.
5. Order of operations.  You can’t make risotto before you make stock before you roast a chicken, etc.

Other than that, and the fact that we have literally been in the kitchen for no less than 5 hours apiece this evening, things are going well.  Oddly, we haven’t wanted for much, with the odd exception for diet cola - we just went ahead and made it, and where it couldn’t be easily made at home, we, for the most part, counted it out.

Let’s see how the remaining 27 days goes.

Soda bread made from buttermilk made from making butter

A few weeks ago, I read an article by Michael Pollan that disturbed me.  It was a few thousand words, but the gist of it was that cooking at home was on the endangered list.  We’ve become so accustomed to mixing dried spaghetti and a jar of sauce together and calling it “cooking” that my generation’s culinary abilities were near zero.

I looked around at my own kitchen, and realized how much I rely on food that is processed in some way.  We’re not exactly the Velveeta type, but even cream cheese or ketchup or store-bought bread has unnecessary ingredients in it.

Near the end of the article was the quote, from a food industry market researcher, that spurred this challenge.

“Easy. You want Americans to eat less? I have the diet for you. It’s short, and it’s simple. Here’s my diet plan: Cook it yourself. That’s it. Eat anything you want — just as long as you’re willing to cook it yourself.”

So, that’s what we’re doing.  Over the next month, Cara and I have decided to eat only what we make, with a few exceptions for social interactions that occur at restaurants.  It’s not a diet, it’s not ideological - it’s about getting back in touch with the things we eat by making them from scratch.

We’ve gone through our cupboards and set aside anything that’s not a single ingredient, and will work through the month cooking, baking and shopping our way through this experiment.