Working Towards Self-Sufficiency: 10 Food Items I No Longer Buy

Are you trying to make more of your meals from scratch? Maybe you’re interested in producing your own food and eating more seasonally?

Here on the smallholding, eating freshly prepared food, made with seasonal home-grown ingredients is the main objective! Home-grown, freshly cooked food tastes so much better, it creates very little waste and there are zero food-miles. And we know that there are no pesticides or nasty chemicals lurking in our meals.

So, here are 10 food items that I no longer buy from the supermarket, but make at home instead.

Ready Meals

When cooking from scratch with home grown ingredients is the goal, it really goes without saying that ready meals are off the menu! This includes pre-prepared meals in microwave trays, ready-to-cook sauces in jars, filled pastas, soups, frozen pizzas and anything else of this ilk.

These foods are certainly a convenient option. However, they are expensive, almost invariably ultra-processed, and often high in sugar and salt. They also generate a lot of single-use plastic waste and the ingredients are not easily traceable.

Homemade alternatives, cooked with fresh and wholesome ingredients, taste better and are far more nourishing and filling.

Bread

I have been baking my own sourdough bread for a few years now. I hate to blow my own trumpet, but there really is no comparison to shop-bought bread.

The beauty of sourdough is that you only need three ingredients for a basic bread: flour, water and salt. Nothing else. No processed foods. No hidden additives or preservatives.

We’ve not been brave enough to try growing our own wheat just yet, but it is on my list of things to try in the next few years!

Pastries and treats

I also bake any pastries or sweet treats that we enjoy at home. The benefits are two-fold. Primarily, this is another way to keep ultra-processed foods out of our diet. But a significant secondary benefit is that we only have these when I have the time and energy to make them, which is not very often! With sweets, chocolates and all kinds of treats being so cheap and readily available, we have found this to be an effective way of limiting our consumption.

Tinned tomatoes and passata

Our tomato harvest has been very reliable year after year. We set aside a week towards the end of September, when our cooking tomatoes ripen.

Each day of Tomato Week starts by harvesting all the tomatoes that are ripe and ready, usually about a wheelbarrow full per day! Then we spend the morning washing, chopping and pressing the tomatoes to remove the skins and seeds. The resulting enormous pan of tomato juice spends all afternoon reducing down on the stove top, before we can it in the evening. Last year we canned a whopping 60 litres of passata!

Root Vegetables

Potatoes, carrots, parsnips and swede are among our staple home-grown veggies.

Every year we grow a good crop of early, second early and main crop potatoes. The polytunnel enables us to grow and harvest the early potatoes by mid-May. These keep us going until the main crop is ready in early autumn. We store and eat the main crop potatoes throughout the winter and into the following spring.

The carrots, parsnips and swede have not stored so well in previous years, so we chop and freeze a large proportion of our harvest of these vegetables to keep us stocked up for the year.

Squash

We really enjoy squash! Again, the polytunnel has been such a game-changer, especially for our courgette crop. We dedicate a whole bed in the polytunnel to courgettes in early spring. And by the time summer rolls around, we have more courgettes than we know what to do with!

Our butternut squash and pumpkins get a good head start in the polytunnel, before they are moved outside at the height of summer. This has been a reliable way to ensure a good harvest! These thicker-skinned squashes store remarkably well through the winter, for deliciously warming soups and stews!

Onions, Leeks and Garlic

Our allium crops have also been very reliable, year after year.

We grow approximately 400 onions in our main autumn crop each year. Once they are harvested, we lay them out to dry in the polytunnel. I then plait them into strings and hang them in our food store. These keep us going until our over-wintered onions are ready the following summer.

Similarly, we grow approximately 100 bulbs of garlic every year. These are harvested, dried and plaited in the same way. These keep all year until the next crop is ready to harvest.

We also grow a whole bed of leeks each year, and usually get a yield of about 100. These keep very well in the ground, so we just pull them up as we need them through the autumn. When the first frost is forecast, I pull up any remaining leeks to chop and freeze them.

Milk and Dairy Alternatives

I have been waging war on ultra-processed foods (UPFs) for some time. The overwhelming evidence is that they are detrimental to health for numerous reasons. I also really dislike the excessive amount of single-use packaging that comes along with them.

Over the years, I have tried making various plant-based milk alternatives by hand. However, the process is labour-intensive and inefficient, so time and again I reverted to purchasing commercial soya and oat milks.

But this year, we have invested in a plant milk maker and this has proved to be a real game changer! I make a fresh batch of milk every day, using only soaked soya beans and water. We use this in hot drinks, cereal, porridge and home-made yoghurt.

I also make cashew-based cream cheese and cashew cream as alternatives to their dairy counterparts.

Pickles, Chutneys and Fermented Foods

Pickling in an excellent way to manage and preserve surplus produce from the garden. I regularly make pickled onions and beetroot. Next year, I would like to branch out to dill pickles and perhaps also a sandwich pickle similar to Branston’s.

We really enjoy chutneys, especially red onion chutney. This year, the cooler and wetter summer resulted in a lot of green tomatoes at the end of the season. So, naturally, I made several litres of green tomato chutney. It is absolutely delicious!

Fermented foods are packed full of probiotics and beneficial microorganisms that support your gut health, and by extension your general health. This year, I have made sauerkraut for the first time as we had a bumper crop of red cabbages. It has been a firm family favourite as a side to almost every hot meal. I will definitely be making it again next year!

Jams and Preserves

We are very lucky to have bramble hedges around our field, as well as several well-established apple trees. One of my main goals each autumn is to produce enough bramble jam to see us through the year!

I would like to grow more soft fruits to expand our jam-making capabilities. Strawberries, raspberries and blackcurrants would be ideal.

Are there any foods that you prefer to make or grow yourself, rather than buying them commercially? Leave me a comment – I would love to read about it!