grannyjsmith – where did you find the bulk cotton sheets? I need some 🙂
Cinnamon Grammy – The more I get into One Circle, the more I realize I need to learn. I do need to emphasize, however, that it is about efficiency in *growing* food, not *buying* food. I tried a little experiment today, wanting to see if buying the things in the sample diets they give are actually more economical to buy. So I found non-sale prices per pound and ounce at a Chicago area Walmart for potatoes, onions, turnips, turnip greens, sunflower seeds, parsnips and garlic (the components of the least optimal diet example), as well as the cup of full fat yogurt that I would want to add in exchange for a potato or two, and it came out to between $4.50 and $5.00 per day. Not bad, but I think I could beat it in price and get the same nutrition with some other foods, if I were buying and not growing.
Then I started thinking about various traditional diets of “aboriginal” peoples and how what they grew and how they grew it probably matched a lot of the criteria of the One Circle diets. For instance, the corn, beans, squash and sunflower seeds plus wild berries and greens of many of the agricultural groups among Native Americans in North America. I wonder if that particular diet, or the one used by the Tarahumara in Copper Canyon, supplemented with small game or livestock, might outperform the diets in the One Circle book. But I won’t know until I do the math. It’s all about a balance between multiple factors – RDAs of various nutrients, calories, production per square foot in the garden, the gardener’s skill, etc.
Hoping all this ruminating will result in an improvement in the garden, the grocery budget, and our health.
So I finally made one of the vegan cheeses today. It’s “OK”. I really love real artisan cheese. This is not cheese. It is a cheese-like food. I made the “Chevre” using blanched almond flour as the base. The instructions say you can also use other nut flours or even cooked white beans as the base. Nothing is going to replace real dairy, but this is passable as a substitute, and it does taste good. Even with using blanched almond flour, which is rather pricey, and a kit, which also has a price, it costs far less than the real thing. It is certainly not providing something indistinguishable from real cheese, however, and the nutritional profile is also different.
So thumbs up as a passable substitute if you’re allergic to dairy, and possibly as a nice prep.