Keto-foraging at a rural grocery store

Being keto in a rural area has its difficulties. Low-carb specialty products don't really appear at the rural grocery store--- not enough demand.

Gary's Quality Foods of Stephenson, MI is a cut above. In season they have a little produce from local farms. They were known for their meat department, though now the exciting meats are at the related Gary's market in Wallace, MI.

Gary's in Stephenson is now the sole grocery in town. Their rival went out of business years ago. But now two dollar stores have opened in town, both with a lot of processed food, crappy carbage, and other not-really-food junk.

Gary's only has a small fresh veggie section, but it does carry fresh veggies (and fruit, which is a matter of indifference to me.) It doesn't have the more exotic ingredients, but it does have the basics. Even some KETO basics. And sometimes they surprise me--- they regularly carry fresh ginger root, for example.

Cauliflower, that keto mainstay, is not always a given in their fresh produce department. Last fall I know they had some from the local Jandt's Farm, which was a real prize. I always prefer to buy locally-grown veggies when I can.

The goal of this foraging expedition was, first of all, cauliflower. I wanted to make up some cauli-rice (cauliflower rice, steamed riced cauliflower) in bulk and freeze most of it, so I could just pull out some and heat for easy meals.

My luck was in. They did have some Dole cauliflower--- since the local cauliflower isn't ripe yet. As you can see in the picture, they also had broccoli and brussel sprouts, neither of which were on my purchasing plan for the day.

My next stop was in the meat department. There is a recipe for West African stew that I was itching to try. I found it in my recipe book More-With-Less cookbook by Doris Janzen Longacre--- a Mennonite cookbook with an emphasis on economy, and saving the world through a more vegetarian diet. It was written by a large number of contributors, though, most of whom added meat to their recipes.

What the recipe called for was beef, but since it called for 2 pounds of it and I'm not made of money, I decided to buy a pack of pork steaks and cut them up for stew meat. The bone, of course, got frozen in the 'pork bones' bag for future bone broth cooking. (You CAN make bone broth from pork!)

The recipe calls for tomato paste also. I could have used real tomato paste--- perhaps using a little less than called for--- and I imagine the carb count would still be acceptable. But I have on hand some Walden Farms calorie-free ketchup, which is also carb free. I bought this at Gary's market also, though I'm not sure they still carry it, it's an older bottle. I used 1/2 cup of it in the recipe to partially replace the tomato paste.

My foraging expedition was a success. My freezer has a batch of packs of cauli-rice, and my Crock-Pot®️ is busy cooking the West African stew. Future blog posts will include more about how I make cauli-rice, my stop at a local farm stand for zucchini, and eventually my own version of the stew recipe, once I refine it.

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This is the recipe book I've mentioned. It's one of only two regular-diet, carb-filled cookbooks I turn to all the time. Mostly to find recipes to tweak. It's really worth owning in spite of the lower-meat-consumption emphasis.