This post is part of my series, “Kickin’ It Old Skool: Why and How We Are Old-Fashioned” or KIOS for short.  If you’re new to the series, please read my disclaimer before continuing on.  I’m keeping a table of contents to this series here so you can see what I’ve already written about and what more there is to come.

When we started on this food journey several years ago, another question we asked ourselves was, “Can we make this ourselves?”  If the answer was “yes”, then we decided we wanted to move towards actually making it ourselves rather than buying it at the grocery store.

Right away, we started making strawberry jam for Nik and orange marmalade for me.  That was easy!  Then we moved on to making pickles, canning peaches, and canning other stuff too (like pickled green beans).  I made yogurt for awhile but stopped because it just seemed like too much trouble.

About a year and a half ago, I decided that I wanted to start making our own bread.  Since then, we haven’t bought any sandwich bread.  Hooray!  I also started baking our own bagels.  Additionally, I bake muffins and cookies that we use as snack food (in substitution for crackers, granola bars, etc that we might have bought instead).

We also decided that we didn’t want to buy cold cereal any more.  So I started making granola and steel cut oatmeal to eat for breakfast instead.

We started cooking our own beans and freezing them in meal-sized portions, rather than buying canned beans.  It’s remarkably easy, way cheaper than buying them in cans (even when buying organic dried beans), and you don’t have to worry about BPA contamination!

Nik took a cooking class a couple years ago and learned how to make homemade pasta.  We still eat probably 95% store-bought pasta but we aspire to eat more homemade pasta – it’s amazingly better and delicious!

So what’s left? Well, we know how to make pita and tortillas.  We just haven’t gotten a system going for making enough at a time to make it worth our while.  We want to try making cheese (especially mozzarella and feta).  I need to be consistent about making yogurt. I know I can make our own mayonnaise and mustard, I just haven’t done it yet.   I want to perfect a couple different cracker recipes.  If we made all those things too, we would have almost eliminated the processed food that we buy from the grocery store.

And that would be awesome!

Side note:  Yes, making all of this takes time.  If I wasn’t a stay-at-home mom with Ellie, I wouldn’t have nearly enough time to be able to do all of this.  When I was working full time, I did some but couldn’t do nearly as much.  Bread in particular was difficult because of the long rising times.   Now that I’m staying at home with Ellie though, I find that I enjoy having these things to do.  It helps give us a rhythm and purpose to our days and week.