Alex's latest lego creation, a star battle cruiser.
Our Dias de las muertes bulletin board complete with paper marigolds.
Honey, why is the toilet in the tub? David loves to rearrange the furniture whenever the rest of us are out for the day, but this is riduculous! Seriously, David was busy plumping, patching, painting, and flooring. Now about that toilet...
Today was rainy, cloudy, and sunny. Ah, Autumn in the great Northwest. We decided to leave Ari to her studying and David to his fix-its. The little folks and I ran lots of errands. We took some favorite picture book copies to be laminated and found a keyboard for Anni on sale for $9! We went searching for long sleeved t-shirts for Anni, and she found a few to her liking. Then we went grocery shopping for a few pantry staples.
Now that summer is over, it's getting harder and harder to get find all our foods within the mile limits. We are finding much more difficult to find fruits within the 100 mile limit. Luckily, we froze and preserved lots over the summer, and we do get some from further afield via the CSA box. Now what to do with that persimmon???
We are finding that our monthly exceptions have stayed pretty consistent, usually an oil of some type (peanut for Nov.), a citrus fruit (mandarins), and hot chocolate. Our individual weekly exceptions can vary widely. Alex had to have ramen today. Anni wanted peanut butter. Ari (of course) needed coffee. David is currently craving a burger, and I had to have a veggie sushi roll with wasabi.
Responding to a question: Are you still buying organic given the current economy?
The answer is a matter of availability, health/cost ratio, and quality. Overall we do buy organic if at all possible. With the end of the seasonal farmers' markets, it's a bit trickier finding all the organic goodies. We are lucky enough to have a couple of great organic supermarket chains in the area which I hit often, and now even some of the 'regular' supermarkets have an organic section. We do buy less organic food due to cost, but since it's more nutritionally dense, we figure we come out even. Occasionally, we will buy some of the safer non-organics if the organic item is looking particularly poor that week.
Meat is an especially tricky issue, the organic free range or pasture fed meat is extremely expensive. So, we eat veggie at least four times a week now. At first there was much grumbling within the tribe, but now they've adjusted and don't usually ask about the missing meat. And when we do spring for the meat, it's usually part of a casserole, stew, etc with a whole bunch of veggies and grains.
Dinner tonight was tostadas with tiny crab cakes (Whole Paycheck) on a bed of cilantro-cabbage (CSA) slaw, with tomatoes (garden), green onion (CSA), and radish (CSA), and topped with jalapeno (organic from regular supermarket) cream. We served this up with roasted pumpking seeds (garden), black beans (organic from regular supermarket), corn (CSA), and a platter of fruit (mandarins ((monthly exception)), kiwi ((CSA)), and pomegranate seeds ((CSA))). The kids were so thrilled about the miniscule amount of crab that they didn't even realized they'd just eaten eleven servings from the fruit/veggie group.
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