What is going on here:

Elton John's "If there's a God in Heaven" seems very appropriate to me today. Some of the verses:

If there's a God in heaven
What's he waiting for
If He can't hear the children
Then he must see the war
But it seems to me
That he leads his lambs
To the slaughter house
And not the promised land
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I'm making lunch right now: onions, eggplant, mushrooms and zucchini sauteed in olive oil. This will go with steamed rice. It's pretty much the sort of thing I've been eating for the past ten years, but I didn't realize just how expensive it was: onions, .79 #, and the one I used was close to a pound, eggplant, $1.50 (I got it on sale, lucky me), the zucchini was free at the thrift store, otherwise...I don't know, ay least .69 a # and probably more...mushrooms, I got on sale also, a dollars worth. The olive oil is about $24 for close to a gallon, and it lasts a long time. I don't know about the rice, I buy it in bulk.

Three years ago, I would have skipped the eggplant and mushrooms and added some cheddar cheese on the top. Here's what it would have cost:

Onions- I grew all the onions
Zucchini and other summer squash- I grew these as well
garlic- I could be liberal with it because we grew that, too.
rice or pasta, bought in bulk, a dollar a pound or less
olive oil- roughly the same
cheese- for this dish (enough to feed the whole family) I would probably have used .25# of cheese at $2 or $3 #.

Of course, I left out the eggplant and mushrooms, but these items were hard to get. My partner disliked buying them excpet for special meals, and after all, we had more than enough summer squash, so much that it was being fed to the goats. Right now, it wouldn't save me any money to use more squash unless I could get more of it for free from the thrift store.

Other meals commonly eaten then:

Cream of spinach soup: with homegrown onions, garlic, milk, and spinach. Only the flour and butter for the white sauce base had to be purchased. Sometimes we used stinging nettles instead and that was even better. I believe I also used lamb's quarter's (a wild green) on at least one occasion.

Stir fried vegetables over rice (most of the veggies homegrown, the rice boughten).

Vegetable soup: same thing, except that there were usually dried beans and a can of tomato paste.

Pesto sauce with pasta- homegrown basil and parsley, boughten olive oil and parmesan cheese and pasta (oh well, one has to splurge soemeimes!!!)

Borscht: homegrown beets, onions, garlic, potatoes, and dill. Bought the sour cream and minimal amounts of cider vinegar and honey used.

There were bizarre dishes for breakfast that are hard for me to describe...soemtimes they were also lunch or dinner. Basically, you fry up an onion, add some leftover pasta or rice, summer squash if you have it, and the stir in some scrambled eggs and let those cook, and top it off with cheese. A little chopped up kielbasa can be added. It was good as long as the eggs were fully cooked (we grew the eggs too, or bought farm eggs). After I gave birth to my fourth son, I wanted eggs nearly all the time, and so I wanted this particular dish almost 3x a day!!! I must have been anemic from the blood loss....

Popeye pancakes: like a cross between a pancake and an omelet baked in the oven- homegrown fruit (raspberries or apples), milk, and eggs. The butter and flour were purchased.

Now, making most of this stuff wouldn't save me a lot of money. I'd have to buy the eggs, milk, veggies, and fruit. I've started buying my food in bulk again, and that does save money.
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I guess what I'm thinking is, I didn't value my work there very much. Even though I grew most of those veggies as well as the milk, and was a prominent figure in picking the fruit or finding free fruit elsewhere to pick, AND I did a lot of the cooking (which was sometimes time/labor intensive), along with birthing, nursing (which saved on formula and medical bills) and caring for five children (no daycare), I still felt like a lazy slouch.

Again, I could blame this on him, but one has to be responsible for one's own state of worth, happiness, and well being. And frankly, I didn't relaize how much all that was worth, how much money I was saving, until I actually had to go out and buy it all- *ouch*!