Shannon's Tips: How Not to Throw Away 1/3 of Your Food Like Most People

I read the other day that in America the average household throws away about 1/3 of the groceries it brings home! And that in 2024 a family of 4 is spending between $1000-$1500 a month on groceries, it’s like throwing away about $300-$500 a month! It’s also been found that larger households and lower income households tend to waste much less than a third of their food and being a going-on-mother-of-9 (did you guys know that yet???) I might have a few tips on how to cut this amount of waste down. And just think what you could do with all those savings, like sign up for a subscription box of the best meat IN THE WORLD!

Tip #1: Keep your meat frozen

Freezers are great for extending the time you have to use your food. Getting your meat in vacuum sealed packages mean you can leave them until you’re ready to use them and even quickly defrost them last minute in some water.

Tip #2: Utilize Frozen Fruits and Vegetables More Often

Consider more frozen fruits and vegetables for the same reason. Fresh produce is highly perishable and one of the most commonly thrown away items. Frozen veggies are less expensive than fresh too! We recently used our vacuum sealer machine to seal up several big bags of trimmed green beans for the freezer for wintertime. But using freezer bags will get the job done fine with perhaps less time before they start getting freezer burned. If you find you aren’t using some fresh produce like you intended, quickly eat it or get it into the freezer and save it for later.

Tip #3: Smart storage for fresh produce

That being said, there’s nothing like a fresh peach in August or strawberries in June or a cold, crunchy salad in the summer. Keep buying or growing fresh produce but be extremely realistic and conservative about how much you will use and if you will eat it before it spoils. Keeping produce like berries in mason jars in the fridge after rinsing with vinegar keeps them fresh much longer. You can even put whole peaches in half gallon mason jars! Root veggies like potatoes, onions and garlic like to be kept in a cool, dark, dry place like far away from your stove.

Tip #4: creatively using leftovers

Along with fresh produce, leftovers are one of the top thrown away items. Either right after the meal or after a week or two languishing in the fridge. Our family struggles with this as there’s often random things left on plates by small children that are sometimes in a questionable state. Or we cooked 2 too many fried eggs for breakfast. Or we didn’t use the too small for the whole family amount of mashed potatoes in the fridge and it got pushed to the back and forgotten. We take heart that we have chickens and pigs who enjoy these but it is STILL wasting money. I use up meat and veggies in scrambles in the morning and use up potatoes in various ways for breakfast too. The only veggie I get push back about being in eggs is brussel sprouts but if I slice them small they don’t mind. I make soup often and it is very forgiving of having random things added. Spaghetti meat sauce in a broth-y, tomato-y soup, mashed potatoes really just disappear, random meat can be added and of course any veggies, noodles, beans, rice or other whole grains.

tip #5: planned leftovers

My other advice in this area is to plan to make enough of foods that are easy to have as leftovers and then they are planned-overs! Soups and stews are great for this. In Italy they don’t call them leftovers, they just say they are having more of something! So even if you want new things every night, suffering through a leftovers night (or a “more” night) will save you money, be less wasteful, and is more economical than buying many different ingredients.

tip #6: Saving questionable food

My favorite example of this is from when my mom joined the Peace Corps in her early 20s and went to Senegal. The village she lived in often had a butchered animal (like a goat) hanging out in the open in the over 100 degree sun for days and clearly going bad by our standards. This did not phase them in the least, when it came time to prepare dinner they would cut pieces off the carcass and thoroughly cook it over the fire. My mom was like “SURELY I AM GOING TO DIE FROM THIS!”. But she ate it along with everyone else and although it tasted terrible, she never got sick from it because the fire killed the germs. So if we have something just for our family that we found had a spot of mold (not smelling bad) we will scoop that part off and boil it really well. And a mold spot on cheese or a little start of mold on bread can just be cut off. An apple with a soft spot can have that part cut off too.

Tip #7: I would say plan ahead but I don’t

I love going to a friend’s house and seeing that they have one of those meal chalkboards with everything written out for the week and then I pick which night we’re coming for dinner by it, haha kidding! I have never been great at planning ahead but after practicing cooking for a long time I can throw things together with whatever I have on hand at the moment. So I tend to keep a well stocked pantry and freezer that I can make some of our go-to meals with and then I look around at what I have that needs to be used and make things with that. Like at the moment I have a bunch of cucumber and zucchini and will be planning some things around those. So if you like having a meal plan for the week or month and that works for you I think that can be really helpful knowing what to buy. I think I can only get away with doing it this way because we spend a lot of time at home and cook all 3 meals from scratch. A family with a busier life than ours or less cooking experience would do well with a meal plan to reduce waste.

Luke and I were visiting my parents for our 16th anniversary and we went for a bike ride around the island and out to a cute breakfast place! The basket is covering it but I’ve got a baby bump that should be ready the beginning of February!

Blueberry picking experts

Blueberry eating expert

Sunflower that bloomed for my birthday!

Blustery Bovine’s Best (sometimes beef) Breakfast Sausage Recipe

Sorry for kind of dropping off the face of the earth for a while there, I’m still here haha! Mothering many is the greatest and often fills up my days. All is well here, we have had the most mild winter here in Wisconsin and it already feels like spring! The grass has started to green up a bit this last week and it appears we might already be out of mud season. Here’s Luke and Audrey feeding hay to the cows today, she’s driving for him while he uses a pitchfork to spread it out for them.

And Clare Bear’s first birthday! Can you believe her?! She is everyone’s favorite and never wants for anything. Sometimes her siblings make a “bear”icade to try to contain her and keep her with them. “Clare don’t leeeeave meeeee!!!!”

I wanted to share the breakfast sausage recipe that we like to use with you and I’m sure that those of you signed up for the subscription have noticed that we have the ground pork plain at the moment. A lot of you have food allergies or are control freaks (raises hand) so this way we can do it ourselves. Pro tip, you can do this with ground beef too or a combination of beef and pork. Hopefully we will have more lamb this year, it’s delish with ground lamb! Here’s a picture of it made into a patty with ground beef, my family loves it!

DIY Seasoned Breakfast Sausage

Ingredients

  • 1 lb ground pork or beef or combination

  • 1 tsp garlic powder

  • 1 tsp onion powder

  • 1 tsp salt

  • 1/2 tsp black pepper

  • 1/2 tsp sage

  • 1/2 tsp thyme

  • 1/2 tsp crushed red pepper

  • 1/2 tsp fennel seeds

Directions

Combine all in a bowl and mix with your hands until all incorporated. Did you know that the fat in pork and beef are very moisturizing and good for your skin? Now your hands are soft and beautiful, you’re welcome.

Heat a skillet over medium heat and cook as patties until browned or cook it crumbled and make a scramble. The patties make great breakfast sandwiches too!

Baby Clare, Spring on the Farm, and Our "Chaos Garden"

It’s certainly unanimous around here, baby Clare is the CUTEST baby! I’ve been slow sharing, she’s already 4 months now! I had a checkup on the day she was born and the midwife said I looked very ready to go into labor, so much so that she was going to call me at 4pm and check on me before leaving the birth center for her nephew’s hockey game. She called me at 4pm and, being the people pleaser I am, assured her she could go to the game and I had only had a few contractions that day and please don’t miss it for me. She paused for a while and said, “Shannon…….for some reason I just feel like I shouldn’t trust you. I’m going to stay here tonight.” SO rude haha! Then my friend brought us some dinner for which I was eternally grateful for in my very-pregnant-4 days-til-due-date state. I ate the salad without any problem and got a few bites into the mac and cheese and had a HUGE contraction. I told Luke we should PROBABLY wait for another one before we decide to call the midwife and head to the birth center. Luke and the children stopped eating and all silently stared at me with the intensity reserved for a bomb about to explode. Another contraction quickly came and Luke called the midwife and I breathlessly gave instructions to the children. Which only made everyone’s eyes bigger, the breathlessness, not the instructions. Which I’m sure were very boring and I can’t actually remember. Luke and Hannah and I got in the car and drove a little faster than we should.

Luckily the birth center is only 8 mintues away (but who’s counting?). When we arrived I resolved to just keep moving, just put one foot in front of the other, to get into the birth center, up the stairs and into my room despite Luke’s very sweet offer to carry me. The midwife was getting everything organized and filling the birth tub while I sat on the bed. She checked me and the baby and all was well and I was nearly completely dilated. I pushed with my next contraction and afterwards she told me the tub was ready and I could get in if I wanted to. I was at the point where I don’t think I could have walked over there and I knew I needed to stay put. With two more contractions baby Clare was born into Luke’s arms pink and crying and after only a 40 minute labor! I’ve always told people that movies are so unrealistic in how they portray labor as so fast and rushing to the hospital at the first contraction, but this one was about like the movies! Clare Juliana was exactly 9 lbs and had a full head of dark hair! I had the sweetest, most gentle birth assistant take care of me afterwards in a way that only someone with about twice as much life experience as me could give. We were able to go home just 4 hours later to sleep in our own bed! My favorite part was when we got home Luke got Clare and Hannah and the bag into the house and told me to wait in the car and he would come back to help me because of the snow on the ground. I had a moment of quiet to admire the stars and thank God. Luke hurried back out and walked me in slowly with his arms around me and he exclaimed that she is just the sweetest baby and we both laughed and teared up a bit. Katie was still awake and Audrey quickly woke up and came downstairs and we all passed her around and basked in her cuteness while Luke loaded up the woodstove. They reluctantly left our new bundle and got snug under their down comforters for our first night together as a family of 10.

Ok OKAY! I will refrain from adding 300 more! We have been busy with springtime on the farm, Luke rented a no-til drill to re-seed the pasture the cows were in over the winter and to touch up a few areas that didn’t grow in as thick as he wanted. We then conceived the idea that we should use it to make what we have named “The Chaos Garden”. We dumped all our garden seeds together that might do well out in the field without attention (pumpkins, cantaloupe, watermelon, zucchini, beans and peas) and used the drill to seed them in about 1/8 acre in a purposely overgrazed area of the pasture. It took 15 minutes, the hardest part was opening all the packages, haha! No tilling, no weeding, no planning, let’s see what God does with it!

And here’s some baby animals and our smiling faces!

The chicks are at the ugly adolescent stage, sorry about that!

We’re Being Promoted by a Nutritionist!

Health Benefits of Pasture-Raised Meat

Our farm’s meat is now being promoted by a local nutritionist! I *knew* I felt better when I started eating our own meat almost exclusively, but she has helped us with learning the WHY behind it. We know that raising animals on pasture is healthy for the animals, the earth, and for the people who care for them but here’s why eating pasture raised meats is significantly healthier for YOU too!

Extra Omega-3s

Meat from grass-fed animals contains two-four times more omega-3 fatty acids (good fats) than conventionally raised meats. Omega-3s play a vital role in every cell and system in your body and people who have ample omega-3s in their diet are less likely to have high blood pressure and are remarkably 50 percent less likely to suffer a heart attack.

In animal studies, omega-3s have slowed the growth of a wide array of cancers and kept them from spreading.

Omega-3s come from the chloroplasts of green leaves and algae (which is why seafood is also high in omega-3s) and when cattle are removed from fresh grass and put in a feed lot to consume grain, their omega-3 levels drop every day they are away from their natural environment.

Chickens and pigs raised conventionally indoors do not eat any greens and are therefore nearly completely devoid of omega-3s.

Considering a majority of Americans are deficient in omega-3s, and 20 percent have blood levels so low that no omega-3s can even be detected, switching to pasture raised meats is an easy way to boost our overall health.

CLA Bonus

Meat and dairy from grass-fed ruminants are the richest known source of another type of good fat called "conjugated linoleic acid" or CLA. When animals are kept on only pasture, their meat and dairy products contain 3-5 times more CLA than products raised on conventional diets. Much research is currently underway and CLA may be one of the most potent defenses against cancer.

Vitamin E

Meat from pasture raised animals is also four times higher in vitamin E than feedlot cattle. Vitamin E is linked with a lower risk of heart disease and cancer and even has anti-aging properties. A majority of Americans are found to be deficient in Vitamin E.

Weight Loss

Switching to leaner pasture-raised meats can help you lose weight too! A 6 ounce steak finished on grass can have 100 calories less than a 6 ounce steak from a feedlot cow. If you eat a typical amount of beef (66.5 lb/year) switching to pasture-raised beef will save you 17,733 calories a year without requiring any willpower or change in eating habits. If everything else in your diet remained the same, you'd lose about 6 pounds a year! Many grass-fed producers (including the Blustery Bovine) make sure their animals have ample amounts of fat and marbling for flavor and only send them to processing in the summer and fall, but even this meat still contains less fat than beef raised on grain.

Here’s the 6 month belly and it’s even bigger now at 7 months! Luke got a really nice doe this hunting season on our own property and taught the kids how to process a larger animal (they had only done poultry before). We are enjoying the coming cold and shorter days that are giving us more rest and family time all hanging out around the fireplace.

The Grazing and Haying That Makes Your Beef

Luke has been working hard farming and making great videos for you and I have been working hard growing baby number 8 and I just haven’t gotten the videos on here for you!

So you get 2 at once today!

The baby should be arriving the end of January and I’m looking forward to it being a quiet time of year where I can just hang out by the fireplace with our new bundle and recover.

The growing bump for your enjoyment:

Our four wheeler was broken for a while and we jokingly called the extra work his CrossFit routine, haha!

But in all seriousness, the work he has been doing this last year has been great for him. He’s had to take his belt in 2 notches and has gotten stronger!

We are 2/3 of the way stocked up on hay for the winter!!!

It has been a huge blessing that Luke was able to find all the equipment we needed and keep it running.

There has definitely been broken down days and once Luke exclaimed,

“Can I just go ONE day without having any equipment break on me?!”

But being a “professional shade tree mechanic” he has it all working at the moment and has learned to navigate a lot of the quirks of our 35-80 year old haying equipment.

But I am SO grateful it is looking like we will be able to make all the hay we need this year.

Which is really good because with the droughts and high gas prices this year the hay prices are more than we would be able to afford for as many cows as we have.

But don’t worry cows, we’re stocking up grass for you!

{Recipe} Refreshing Ginger Switchel + Baby Chick and Rented Farm Videos

Many people haven’t heard of switchel (aka haymakers punch) but it has been made since the 1700s and serves as a healthier version of Gatorade. Even Ma Ingalls (from the Little House books) knew that drinking plain water could make someone sick when they had been working very hard and sweating so she prepared them a “sweetened ginger drink”.

Molasses used to commonly be used to sweeten the drink (and contains the most minerals) but maple syrup and honey have gained in popularity too. We have tried it all the ways and our favorite is a little honey AND maple syrup. And in case you needed some good news in the world, you should know that it has been a record breaking year for maple syrup in Wisconsin! It’s just flowing down all the roads, we have to use canoes to get around! Haha!

The drink also contains some raw apple cider vinegar which gives a pleasant pucker and numerous health benefits. We love it cut with carbonated water and ice cubes (such opulence!) but using plain water is fine too. We make a half gallon at a time and keep it in a big mason jar in the fridge and fix it with about 1/3 switchel concentrate and 2/3 fizzy water. It’s nice to be able to adjust the amounts as necessary, like if the kids want a treat I might just give them a splash in their cup with lots of fizzy water but if Luke comes in with his shirt all drenched I might not dilute it much at all. We all enjoy this drink but especially Luke (who tends to be the hardest worker in the family) feels much more revived from switchel than things he used to drink (like when he worked for the university and would drive to the gas station on summer afternoons for a coke).

You can also add this to iced tea or add lemon or add fruit to it (but then it’s called a shrub). But there’s no rules about amounts, you can make it the way that tastes best to you. I love spice so I like it extra gingery! Don’t fret about measuring the amounts just right it, will be great with more or less!

Ingredients

  • 3-5 inch piece fresh ginger (peeled, chopped into 1/2” rounds)

  • 6 cups water

  • 1/2 cup raw apple cider vinegar (like Braggs brand)

  • 4 tbsp honey

  • 4 tbsp maple syrup

  • Carbonated water and ice cubes to finish (optional)

Method

  1. Bring your peeled and chopped ginger to a boil in the water.

  2. When it begins to boil turn off heat and let sit until cool. The longer you let it sit, the stronger your ginger infusion will be. We usually let it sit a few hours. You can let it sit up to 4 days on the counter in a closed jar.

  3. Dissolve honey and syrup in a little hot water in a half gallon jar or a pitcher.

  4. Add your apple cider vinegar to the jar.

  5. Add ginger concentrate to the jar.

  6. Give switchel a shake before serving.

  7. To serve, we make it with about 1/3 switchel concentrate and 2/3 carbonated water and ice cubes. Stay cool and enjoy!

Here’s a few springtime videos we have made recently! Luke shows you the farm we are renting and talks about the plans for it. Then Katie shows you how we take care of day old chicks. And finally a little botany/biology lesson on what proper grazing does to the grass and soil and what the goals of it are.

A worker man in need of a glass of switchel!

{Video} Luke Shows You How His New Toy Works

After many failed auctions with a tight budget and specific equipment needs we finally have all of the haying equipment we need! Luke shows you how our new haybine works…

And for your enjoyment, some slippery water critters (and frogs and fish too, haha!):

Our friends thinned their patch and gave plants to us so Luke and the kids planted 21 raspberry bushes for me for Mother’s Day!

And this is going to be our future farm store! Hopefully late summer/early fall? We will keep you updated on it!