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Week 2 of the latest installment to the series Someone Else’s Shoes.  This experience is Money v. Time. On Monday, I posted our spending for April 30 to 06. Today I have a long post for the time part.

I tried to be detailed so you could see exactly what I did with my time but if you don’t care for the details, just look for the big bold red numbers in each section and the really big one at the near the very end to tally up for the week.

Monday, April 30

Busy early work morning. Joe took care of breakfast (fried eggs, scones made yesterday). This maybe took him 5 minutes.

Christopher helped me with dishes this morning. What should have taken 15 minutes took considerably longer. He had a great time!  I’m only counting the 15 minutes assuming not everyone has a 3 year old to help with the dishes.

19 minutes late morning to mix up pasta dough, strain broth plus do a few little things including warming the milk for the Mother Culture for my new Viili yogurt. I received this from Cultures for Health a few weeks ago and finally have enough milk to make it up. I’m excited about the idea of a truly raw yogurt.

About an hour later, the milk had cooled for the yogurt culture. It took me about a minute to stir in the starter and put it up to ‘do its thing’.

Around 5:00 I took 3 minutes and put the greens to soak.

6:26 to 6:52- Started the sauce, rolled out the pasta, cut and started cooking the greens, put the pasta water to warm and wash up the dishes.

7:30 to 7:42: Cooked the pasta and got everything dished up.

Kiki had evening dishes: 30 minutes

What we ate:

Breakfast: Fried eggs and scones

Lunch: Leftover sushi and pizza

Afternoon snack: Leftover Pizza

Dinner: Something like a beef stroganoff over kamut noodles with sauteed beet greens and swiss chard.

113 minutes or 1 hour and 53 minutes

Tuesday May 1

Today is Kiki’s 17th birthday!

I spent very little time in the kitchen on this day.  Other than a simple breakfast of eggs and toast, a simple lunch of leftovers and doing the dishes from the day nothing else was done. Nothing.  We had dinner out for Kiki’s birthday (we’ll have another celebration this weekend for people who couldn’t make it tonight).  Total kitchen time: 30 minutes

What we ate:

Breakfast: Fried eggs and toast

Lunch: Leftover pizza

Afternoon snack:  Apples and peanut butter

Dinner:  Out

30 minutes or half an hour 

Wednesday May 2

After my day off yesterday I did have a few things to do this day. Nothing big though.

My yogurt culture was finished. I put a lid on it and put in the fridge to stop the culturing process.  This maybe took a minute?

Breakfast was the usual eggs and toast made by Joe.  15 minutes. Heating up leftovers made for an easy 10 minute lunch. Doing the breakfast and lunch dishes took 15 minutes.  40 minutes

Mid afternoon– Yogurt making time! It was so easy to stir together milk and the yogurt mother to make my counter-top yogurt. I made 2 quarts. This took 7 minutes (would have been quicker but I kept stopping to read the instructions that came with the yogurt).

Dinner was something like a Salsbury Steak made out of round steak and a simple gravy. It took 18 minutes to pound and dredge the steaks, brown then cover with broth to simmer until dinner (about 3 hours simmer time).

About an hour before dinner (white) rice went in the cooker and a simple green salad was put together. 15 minutes.  I didn’t make a salad dressing since I planned on vinegar and oil.

After dinner dishes took Kiki 30 minutes.

What we ate:

Breakfast: Fried eggs and toast

Lunch: Leftovers from Monday night

Afternoon snack: Ginger snaps (made on Sunday) and milk

Dinner: Something like a Salsbury Steak, rice, green salad

111 minutes or 1 hour and 51 minutes

Thursday, May 3

My town day. Breakfast was peanut butter toast and milk.  5 minutes.

After returning from town. I checked on the yogurt that had been culturing since yesterday. It was ready! I put lids on that and put it in the fridge.  I had milk left from last week (1/2 gallon) and took that plus 1/2 gallon from the milk I’d picked up while in town and started it to warm for Middle Eastern Cheese. This is a cheese that I learned about last year in the GNOWFGLINS Cultured Dairy eCourse but had yet to make due to lack of milk.  15 minutes for yogurt and to warm milk.

After the milk cooled I had a few more steps to get my cheese going.  Alot of making cheese is waiting. I’d say my hands on time for this day to make this cheese was a total of 12 minutes.

A few hours before dinner I cut and browned the meat then put it to stewing plus made a green salad and kefir dressing. 20 minutes.

Close to dinner time rice was warmed and pineapple cut up. 10 minutes.

After dinner dishes took 30 minutes.  Joe wanted oatmeal for breakfast, 2 minutes to put oats on to soak.

What we ate:

Breakfast: Peanut butter toast and milk

Lunch: Leftovers from last night

Afternoon snack: Yogurt

Dinner: Italian stewed venison over rice (topped with clabber cheese) with green salad and kefir dressing.

Dessert: That yummy homemade raw yogurt with fresh pineapple

94 minutes or 1 hour and 34 minutes

Friday, May 4

Breakfast of soaked oatmeal only took a few minutes to cook. While it was cooking I took a little cream off of some of the milk. I like cream on  my oatmeal.  7 minutes

After my rather lax week in the kitchen, I have several things to do today. I should have made kombucha a few days ago. The current brew is rather tart at this time. Oops. I’m glad that the kombucha drinkers here like it on the tart side!

Started water kefir soda and a fresh kombucha brew- 22 minutes.

Lunch was more oatmeal. 🙂  There was some left for breakfast so we topped it with yogurt. 5 minutes to warm oatmeal.

Afternoon snack was a fried egg topped with fermented relish. So good! 3 minutes or so to cook the egg. Remember those muffins and brownies I made last week and stashed half in the freezer? Those came out to eat this weekend.

15 minutes to do up the dishes.

Kiki and Lulu cooked dinner this night. Something like this ghoulash but made with venison cut in small chunks. Joe brought bakery bread home to go with it.  And ice cream for dessert… Dinner took the girls about 40 minutes.

After dinner dishes took Lulu about 35 minutes. I worked on  my Middle Eastern Cheese which took about 12 minutes.

What we ate:

Breakfast: Oatmeal

Lunch: Oatmeal and yogurt

Afternoon snack: fried egg and relish

Dinner: ghoulash (the girls forgot to make a side so we just pulled out a few fermented veggies)

Dessert: ice cream

139 minutes or 2 hours and 19 minutes

 

Saturday

Breakfast was late and super easy. Rice cereal which takes about 5 minutes to make.

Lunch was very light and also very quick, kefir parfaits. Maybe 5 minutes to put these together.

Late afternoon all the dishes were done up by Lulu (20 minutes) and I took 7 minutes to work on my Middle Eastern Cheese.

Dinner was out for Kiki’s family birthday dinner.

Breakfast: Rice Cereal

Lunch: Kefir Parfait

Dinner: out

37 minutes

 

Sunday

17 minutes to feed sourdough starter up and make sourdough french toast for breakfast.

32 minutes at noon time to make lunch and flavor and bottle the water kefir (I didn’t start a new batch just put the grains in the fridge to rest in sugar water).

1 hour and 12 minutes to make a loaf of grain free bread (trying a new one this week), mix up a batch of no-knead sourdough (from the GNOWFGLINS eCourse), make a batch of mayonnaise and cook dinner.

7 minutes before bed to take care of my Middle Eastern Cheese.

 

Breakfast: Sourdough French toast

Lunch: Venison steak fingers, green salad

Afternoon snack: Muffin or brownie

Dinner: Egg scramble and sourdough pancakes

128 minutes or 2 hours and 8 minutes

Total for the week: 652 minutes or 10 hours and 52 minutesmuch less this week with the birthday dinners.

Over two weeks the daily average is about 1 hour and 45 minutes. 

Final Thoughts

This week really isn’t indicative of an ‘average’ week. We went out twice for dinner which doesn’t usually happen.  I’ll be interested to see what the daily average for the entire experience ends up being.

Be sure to check out last week’s Time post. Many of the Final Thoughts I listed then, carry over to this week.

I have a big question for you.  Does seeing how much time I spend in our real food kitchen encourage you, depress you or something else? Is this helpful to you in any way? Leave a comment and tell me what you are thinking.  

 

 

Photos:  Happy Birthday, remaining photos from my own camera

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