Time To Cook

I come from an Italian-American family so food has always been an important part of my life and a major topic of conversation. My mom cooked most nights growing up and we always ate dinner together unless one of us had some kind of after school activity that ran late. We would often get together with extended family for Sunday dinners. Now that I have a family of my own I cook dinner every night (yes, every night), usually making enough for all of us to have the leftovers for lunch the next day. I know a lot of people shy away from cooking dinner because it seems like a lot of work. It takes a little more effort than ordering takeout or heating up processed food, but you can actually make a meal in the same amount of time it would take to grab take out or have it delivered.

Likewise, some processed foods take almost as long to cook as a real home cooked meal. I will give you an example. I don't understand jarred tomato sauce. Chalk it up to my Italian heritage, but it has a distinctive taste that overpowers everything and just makes me think, "this came from a jar." It baffles me more because I can make a quick marinara sauce in the time it takes to boil water and cook the pasta (which you still need to do even if you use jarred sauce). Chop an onion and some garlic, sauté them until soft, then add tomatoes (fresh or canned), season with salt, pepper, and fresh basil if you have it and you are done. The result costs less, tastes better, and is healthier than the processed alternative. And it takes the same amount of time as heating the jarred sauce and cooking the pasta. You can also find time while the sauce and pasta cook to make a salad, or add some kind of green vegetable to the sauce. You can chop some spinach and add it to the sauce at the end, or if you have a little more time you can sauté a vegetable like zucchini after you add the garlic and onions but before you add the tomatoes. 

Some might point out that dried pasta and canned tomatoes are industrial products and we won't always be able to just pick them up at the store. Yes, as the industrial food system breaks down they might become unavailable or prohibitively expensive. At the moment they remain a healthy and cheap option and if someone knows how to cook with them now they can adapt in the future. For instance, you can still use fresh tomatoes when in season. The rest of the year you can make a sauce with tomatoes that have been preserved in some way, either jarred or dried during the growing season. The tomatoes might come from your own garden, a local farm, or small grocery store looking to fill a gap left by the collapse of the industrial food system. Using dried tomatoes will require some tweaking of the recipe, but the principle remains the same. 

You can make fresh pasta to go along with the sauce pretty easily. It certainly takes more work than just boiling dried pasta, but it tastes better in most dishes. You can make your own dried pasta as well. This requires about the same initial effort as making fresh pasta, but you also need the right space to dry it over a few days. The plus side is that you then have something you can store for a while and cook up as quickly as store bought dried pasta. Someone could probably make a good small business in the coming years making dried pasta and selling it locally. In any case, people from many different cultures have eaten noodles for centuries. They made them long before modern food processing and they will probably continue to do so once those methods become untenable. To think that pasta will survive the collapse fills me a bit of joy and hope.

I give this just as an example. I plan to keep coming back to the question of sourcing ingredients from outside of the the industrial food system. The topic fascinates me and gives me a lot of, pardon the phrase, food for thought. For now I would like to give a great resource for people who want to eat a good meal, but don't want it to take too long.

First, a quick word on the kinds of things I like to cook. This will help you understand my recommendation. While I sometimes like to tackle a challenging dish, I generally favor meals that don't take too much prep work to cook. Cooking even a "quick" meal can be tricky enough when I have to keep on an eye on my 19 month old son. I prefer cooking nutritious main dishes that can feed a few people. Specifically, I try to make sure that a meal has a carbohydrate, a green vegetable, and usually some kind of protein. I also don't like waste, so I try to stay away from recipes that require me to buy expensive ingredients that will go bad before I get a chance to use the rest of them in another dish.

With all this in mind, my favorite cookbook at the moment is Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Fast: A Better Way to Cook Great Food. It has over 2,000 recipes from all different kinds of cuisines. Most of the recipes are main dishes and many of them take about a half hour to cook. Some take as little as 15 minutes. A few take 45 minutes or an hour to cook, but still only need fairly simple prep. In addition to the recipes it has tips for cooking more quickly and it provides some basic instruction that the novice chef will find very useful. I have only had this book for a few months, but I have made more recipes from it than any cookbook I own. Bittman also put a lot of thought into giving the recipes a user friendly layout. Every dish I have made from this book is good, some of them are great or excellent. If I could recommend one book to someone that wants to start cooking, but does not think they have the time, this would be it.

Next week I will talk more about the benefits of cooking.

Stay At Home Economics 101

Not long after I started working on the first post for Stay At Homestead Dad I came across a blog that did a great job illustrating the value of work done in the home. The post had gone viral and has appeared all over social media as well as in a few more traditional outlets, so you have likely read Fathers, you can’t afford a Stay-At-Home Mom. When I saw the title it made me upset, because I had planned to make the opposite argument here; that having a parent stay at home can make a lot of financial sense. Then I read the post and realized the author had actually made the same argument I wanted to make, but had simply titled the post poorly.

The piece certainly deserves a read. But I will sum it up by telling you that it consists of a working father calculating how much he would need to spend to get all the services that his stay-at-home wife provides. He certainly highballs his calculations in some areas. For instance, he probably should have calculated the cost of getting take-out instead of the cost of a personal chef. But overall I think he makes an important point:  it costs a lot more to buy a good or service than to do something yourself.

My wife and I made a similar calculation when we decided I would stay-at-home and take care of our son. I don't have the exact numbers anymore and I would not disclose the details of my finances anyway, but we reached a similar conclusion. When we added up all the goods and services we would need to purchase if I had a job, it amounted to a good deal more than the paycheck I would bring home working as a public librarian. It simply did not make sense for me to work outside the home.

The cost of child care alone is huge and would eat up the majority of my pay check. Then comes the extra money we would need to spend on transportation. If we still lived in Brooklyn this would simply amount to the cost of a monthly metro-card. But the public transportation in Poughkeepsie is not great. We currently get by with one car, but if I worked we might need a second car with all the expenses that come along with it (monthly payment, insurance, gas, maintenance). I cook dinner every night (yes, every night), but if I worked outside the house I would probably take at least one night off a week and get takeout. Cooking your own meals is generally a lot cheaper (more on this in a future post). All these things already amount to a good deal more than what I would get from a paycheck. If you add in the savings from growing food in my garden the quantifiable benefits rise even higher. And this only takes into account things you can put a dollar sign on. It does not count things you can't really quantify, like the extra attention my son gets from me that he would not get in day care, or the fact that I cook meals much more delicious and nutritious than anything we would buy at a take-out place, to name just two examples.

I realize this goes against current conventional wisdom. It seems like in most families today both parents work. I won't argue that every couple should make the same choice we did. If both partners have very high salaries and/or a strong sense of job satisfaction then it probably makes sense to keep both jobs. Still, there is a reason why having one partner stay at home used to be the norm. So it makes sense for more families to crunch the numbers and start asking themselves if one partner should stay at home. If more people thought like this they might realize that their second paycheck goes towards buying things they would not need, or could produce at home if one partner stayed at home.

I know that in today's economy not everyone becomes a stay-at-home parent by choice. Many people have lost their job and can't find another one despite their best efforts. So they end up taking care of the kids and the house by default. If you find yourself in this situation, instead of letting it get you down I suggest that you embrace it. Remember that you can contribute a lot to your family's bottom line without having a job.

As the economy shifts away from sectors that usually employ men and towards jobs traditionally held by women, more men find themselves out of work with their wives the sole bread winner. Some men have a hard time handling this psychologically, especially those who consider taking care of the home and kids women's work. At the same time our culture has sold many women on the idea that empowerment means holding down a job with a paycheck, so I think that some women also find the idea of staying at home unappealing.

Like any working arrangement being a stay-at-home parent has pros and cons. Of all the jobs I have had it is the most demanding, but it is also the most fulfilling. The work can be tedious at times, but I don't have a boss making me do pointless busy work because he has me on the clock and wants to get his money worth for the hours he is paying me. If something needs to get done, I do it out of necessity, not because someone tells me. This makes work less like work. When I'm not doing chores I get to spend most of my day playing with an amazingly cute and bright child.  During his nap I sometimes get some house work done, but I usually take that time to do some exercise, read a book, or write this blog. I'm somewhat of an introvert and a homebody, so the job suits me and this should certainly factor into anyone's decision to stay home. Spending so much time with a small child can feel isolating even for an introvert like me. So I try to get out and socialize with other adults regularly. Overall though I really like the job and can say that I do it very well.

Whatever your gender, you should not let cultural expectations stop you from following a path that might work for your family.  Staying at home certainly requires a change of perspective, but with the right attitude it can be very fulfilling work. I plan to talk about the psychological and cultural barriers to making this change down the road. For now I suggest crunching the numbers and asking yourself if it would make sense for you or your partner to stay home. Really think about all the things you would not need if one of you could spend their time doing things at home. It might surprise you. Even if you don't ultimately decide to have one partner stay home, this exercise should help show the real value of domestic labor and might give you some ideas of ways you can maximize your home economy even if both you and your partner work.

Next week we get cooking.

What To Expect When You Are Collapsing

I don't know exactly what the future will look like. But I do know that the world will look very different by the time my son grows up. Like most parents I spend a lot of time trying to make informed choices about raising my child. But I think I have different concerns from the average American and if you have found your way to this blog you probably do too (welcome). My worries don't revolve around the latest article about kids and their social media and their electronic dance music, or whatever story has old men shaking their fists at children these days. Though I certainly have my own thoughts on teaching kids healthy media habits and I don't let my toddler anywhere near a television.

Instead, I have in mind the very volatile ecological, economic, cultural, and political landscape we live in today. Peak oil, climate change, income inequality, high unemployment, legislative gridlock, crumbling infrastructure, and a shaky-legged American empire all present problems we will have to face whether we like it or not. The fact that we have avoided these problems for so long and many people still refuse to even acknowledge their existence will make them even tougher to handle. I used to wonder whether technology could solve our problems (many of which it created itself), or if industrial civilization would slowly fall apart. The older I get the more it seems like the latter. I have noticed how the Futurama predictions of the past never happened and many of the current technological promises I read these days seem cut from the same cloth as the dreams of yesteryear that never came true. I find it unlikely, for example, that we will build literal and figurative pipe dreams like the hyperloop, when we can't even maintain our roads and bridges.

I realize the lifestyle of the average middle class American can only exist because of an abundance of cheap energy made possible by fossil fuels. As these resources become more scarce this lifestyle and much of the world I have grown up with will start to slowly disappear. Anyone paying close attention can see that this has already started to happen. Identifying a problem is one matter, responding to it effectively is another. So in the face of all these problems I found myself asking the old question:  what is to be done? 

As I started to grapple with this question I found a great blog that has helped guide me through making important changes in my life. Many people familiar with peak oil and other problems of our age might already read The Archdruid Report written by John Michael Greer. His work has offered not only a connection to others who can see the cracks in industrial civilization, but also useful ways of coping that I have adapted for my own circumstances. I have applied many of his lessons to my own life and I feel that my experience can help others even further. I still have more changes I want to make, but I feel far enough along that I can offer something to people making a similar transition.

So what kind of changes did I make and why do I think other people would benefit from reading about them? Did I start a farm? No, though we did move from an apartment in Brooklyn to a house in Poughkeepsie with enough room for a decent sized garden. I made a much less dramatic change. I decided to be a stay-at-home dad and start focusing on things I can make and do at home. That might not seem like a big deal, but I guess that is the point. It is something within most people's reach. The home economy can produce a lot of things we have become accustomed to buying. Making or doing things yourself lets you have them for a fraction of the price it would cost you to buy them and the results often beat the pants off what you could purchase. 

Unlike picking up and moving to a farm (not a feasible option for many people for a variety of reasons) you can start doing and making things at home today. Sure it might take a while to realize the full potential of what you can produce at home, but that's fine. You can ease your way into the process one step at a time and soon you will look back to find you have accumulated a number of useful skills and resources. It takes some time to learn some of these skills, but not as much as you might think and once you learn how to bake your own bread, for example, you won't want to pay more more for a store bought loaf that doesn't taste as good. Frankly, our society often sells us the erroneous notion that we can make big changes in an instant. We can make the decision to change rather quickly (though even that process can happen gradually), but putting an idea into action takes some time. Look at this positively, you don't need to change all at once. You can ease your way into it, though the sooner you start the better. Or as John Michael Greer says, "collapse now and avoid the rush."

So what kind of help will you find in this blog? I will certainly share some of my favorite recipes and instructions for useful DIY projects. But those things will serve as an aside to a weekly blog that outlines broader strategies for getting the most out of the home economy and parenting in an age of diminishing fossil fuels. I plan to give concrete advice, but I also hope to inspire you to find solutions that work best for your situation. Posts will often deal with John Michael Greer's useful acronym L.E.S.S. (Less Energy Stimulation and Stuff). When relevant I will suggest books on that week's topic. You certainly don't need to be a parent or a stay-at-home partner of any kind to get something from this blog, but I will often advocate for having one partner stay at home as I find this an option that more people should consider no matter what their gender. I think it makes a lot of economic sense for most people and the next post will deal with this in more depth.

I have not collapsed as far as I would like. Some of my skills are more advanced than others and I still have a lot more projects I want to pursue. I hope this will make the blog more accessible to someone trying to break free of the mainstream. Likewise, my son is only 19 months old, so I can't say I have seen it all as a parent. But, for whatever the proud declarations of a father are worth, I feel like I have done a good job thus far and often get compliments on his intelligence which I attribute to keeping him away from screens, getting him in nature, letting him explore, and trying to foster communication by talking, reading, singing, and listening to him as much as possible.

I hope to bring a unique and useful perspective on these topics. I used to work as a public librarian in one of the rougher neighborhoods in Brooklyn. So I feel I can offer a combination of grit, commonsense, and a knack for evaluating available information and communicating it to people of diverse backgrounds. I also bring an earnest desire to make important changes and a desire to share what I have learned. It should make for an interesting journey and an interesting blog. Thank you for reading.

Suggested Reading:

Green Wizardry by John Michael Greer

This book gives a lot of great information on gardening, cooking, preserving food, passive solar technology, and thinking in whole systems (very useful for waking up from the slumber our culture lulled many folks into). Each chapter includes useful exercises and suggested reading on that chapter's topic. It also introduces the reader to the concept of L.E.S.S. which I plan to discuss in an upcoming post.