Btw, how do you make flour from scratch? (Impressive!). I made bread for awhile, but never flour...
My mother used to do this when I was young and we were dirt poor (my father supported a family of four on a Ph.D. stipend). She would buy chicken feed and grind it into flour with an attachment on her mixer.
You can buy whole grains that are for human consumption once you're not quite so poor too! It's fun, provided you have a mill or attachment (there are manual and electric ones) and it's even quite sensible as, unlike flour, the grains keep practically forever so you can buy in bulk; we get 8kg buckets.
This is also the ONLY way that you can purchase some non-wheat, non-Poaceae 'grains' (really pseudo-grains) which can be used as substitutes which are not likely to be heavily contaminated with nuts, soy, sesame seeds and wheat-relatives.
Some of them go rancid so quickly, though, that meant grinding only what you need in the recipe-- 1/2 c. 1 c. A coffee mill is ideal. But laborious. Teff tastes exactly like dirt, by the way. (Just so everyone knows. It's expensive dirt, though.)
Okay-- let's just add, here, that too much time on my hands wasn't the sole stressor in my life at that point. My rule is that we never-- ever-- talk about the pumpkin tapioca... er... "pancakes" (really, "pan-fried jello" is a closer but still fairly generous euphemism) episode when DD was two. I cried because that was all that I could come up with to safely feed my child for dinner, and believe me, I wouldn't have eaten them if every one had come with a twenty dollar bill.
Add in a few trips to the emergency room every time I got anything "wrong" (and sometimes when I didn't, at least as far as I could sleuth using every available means and countless hours for weeks afterwards) and it's pretty clear why this was a recipe for MAJOR mental health problems of a perfectionism/OCD nature. Everything about this lifestyle encourages anxiety disorders.
One of the "rules" about living this way is that you check packaged food THREE TIMES; before purchase, as you put it in the pantry, and every time you use it. Yes, rules about the proper number of times to
read something. LOL. Oh, and you should count to TEN slowly when you inject epinephrine. And carry more than one dose. And mix lot numbers in those doses. And track peak-flow numbers daily. Keep a food diary. Make notes on recipe modifications so that you know what works and what doesn't (all of my cookbooks have to have wide margins-- I look for it). And check the expiry dates on prescription medications in emergency bag weekly. Nothing from outside the house goes onto the kitchen table or counters. Wash your hands every time you come through an outside door.
I didn't actually have OCD, I don't think, but I sure looked pathological, and it was the first time I'd really felt the pull of how easy it would be to just give in to it and become some frenzied scurrying, endlessly-checking terrified creature making up rules about what I needed to do so that the universe wouldn't punish me or my family anymore. I was definitely stressed out and it showed.
I'm happy to say that I've (mostly) recovered, even though I still do most of those things above-- I just don't do them with the sort of awed FERVOR that I used to, and I don't compulsive clean to burn nervous energy. My spouse is less happy with my recovery, however. The house often looks like bomb filled with paper, food preparation, textbooks, laundry, and whatever my DD is into these days (right now it's jewelry findings and tools and beads) has gone off somewhere inside. I mean, no-- we're not hoarders or anything. But this is what homeschooling tends to result in. LOL.
Anyway. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.
