3 days and counting.

Today's plan is to stock up on the necessities.  After having scoured the bread recipe books, I have an idea of something of the things I'll be needing to bake a variety of bread. I'll be starting at the bulk food store and working out from there.

It made me start to wonder.  How will this affect the amount of trash we create?  Convenience foods are typically wrapped in boxes and plastics and jars and bottles.  All large items.  While we can recycle most of them, it's still a lot.  Raw ingredients can be bought in bulk, come in big bags (like flour and sugar) or don't really come wrapped at all (fruits, veggies and the like).  We'll still have milk jugs I suppose, but my guess is that it changes the amount of garbage we drop out at the curb.

Call me terrible, but I've never been particularly worried about garbage, but since this is a complex experiment, I might as well take note of any and all changes, for better or worse.

I'm starting to panic less, for now.   Looking back at the kinds of food we ate, overall, we ate a lot of food made from scratch.  Much of what wasn't was mostly made from scratch, just using bakery bread, or salad dressings, or things like that.  Realistically I could spend the entire year making essentially the same things, bread, meat, veggies, potatoes, soups and some baked goodies.  We would survive, but it would defeat the purpose of my experiement.  Ideally I'd like to eat in a similar fashion to how we currently do.  We eat plenty of meats and veggies, but we also enjoy cereal, sandwiches, pastas and sauces, tacos, pizza, casseroles, and the like.  Thats where the tricky stuff comes in.  I'll need to make my own cereals, sandwich fillings, salsa, noodles, tortilla shells, etc.

Knowing that this can be as simple or complicated as I'd like it to be (simple being just eating the same thing over and over again), makes me feel a little calmer. 

My overall plan is to fill the freezer with my own "convenience foods", things I can pull out at a moments notice and have a good meal.  Chili, soups (beet borscht being at the top of that list, YUM!), lasagnes.  I typically do that kind of thing anyway, but I guess it'll take a bit longer if I have to actually make my own lasagne noodles. 

I'm sure I'll panic again, but for now, I'm doing OK.