Smoothies are quickly becoming my best friend. I have always been a big fan of smoothies and am only now learning of all the great things, other than fruit, that you can throw into them and the girls love them! I don't think they have ever turned me down when I have offered them a smoothie. We started throwing spinach into smoothies a while ago, the first time I didn't I wasn't thinking and threw it into an orange julius. The resulting flavor was fine but the color was a nasty pukish gray and no one wanted to touch it. So a good rule of thumb is if you are throwing green stuff in your smoothie and you don't want you smoothie to be green or pukish gray, throw in fruit that is dark colored like red or purple (mixed berries like blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries work really well and you can buy them in big bags at Sam's, Costco, or Winco). Flax meal is another super easy thing to throw in, avocados make smoothies nice and creamy (but remember the green rule) and we discovered something else surprising...broccoli. My friend told me that she knew someone that put frozen broccoli in their smoothies, my thought: gross. When I think broccoli I think of a bit more overpowering flavor and not really one that you want to chug down in the morning. I decided to give it a try though and just put in a little bit and SURPRISE... you couldn't taste it. The next time we tried a bit more and... the same result. We've even tried broccoli and spinach and it was still good. I don't know if fresh broccoli would have the same result as frozen, we haven't tried it, I most definitely would not try cooked broccoli.
We had a complete dinner fail the other night. Ryan was going to be gone till late and as often happens when Ryan is not going to be home for dinner I didn't feel like spending a lot of time making something that I was pretty sure the girls wouldn't eat. So we ate cereal and I justified it with a smoothie that had broccoli and spinach in it. Yay for smoothies!
Monday, October 22, 2012
Farmer's Market
So we tried out our local farmers market a couple weeks ago and it was awesome! I've been meaning to check it out for months but we always had something else going on. There were lots of produce vendors and even vendors selling meat, eggs, and bread. The prices were even pretty comparable to the grocery store and some times cheaper, which I was a little surprised at. Another cool thing is that they operate all year round, yay for California! I think I may go every Saturday.
Sunday, October 21, 2012
Goals for Food
I think an important step of changing the way we eat for the better is to document my specific goals for our family. So here goes:
1. Get all of us to eat healthier: In talking with Ryan we all have specific eating needs, I just need to figure out the best way to meet all of them.
3. Eat more of a variety of vegetables. I did a little spread sheet once of all the recipes we typically make and then divided the ingredients into categories like: pasta or rice, produce, dairy, canned goods, etc. I discovered that basically the only vegetables we eat on a regular basis are: potatoes, green beans, carrots, celery, onions, lettuce, spinach, and occasionally other more "exotic" things like asparagus.
4. Stay in my grocery budget. Basically I am not very good at this. We have some wiggle room in our budget that we can increase it a little bit if necessary but I need to decide, given our other food goals, what the best amount is for our family and then stick with it.
5. Grow a fair amount of produce we eat in our own garden. Ryan and I both grew up in families with large gardens and mothers that canned what they grew. I am so grateful for this skill that our families past down to us and have big plans of turning our small weed patch into something much more productive and useful.
6. Waste less food. I feel like whenever we get a lot of fresh produce inevitably a bunch of it ends up going bad and getting thrown away because I don't use it fast enough, I can't figure out what to make with it, or I just forget about it. This may also be a menu organizing problem. If I organize our menu in such a way that when I buy, for instance, something like spinach I include meals with spinach several times so that I use it all up before it goes bad.
7. Improve my cooking skills, learn what ingredients go well together, get better at making meals out of what we have. Whenever I have something I don't know what to do with I always just jump on to allrecipes.com and see what I can find. Not that doing that is a bad thing, but I would love to have a better knowledge of fruits, vegetables, and especially fresh herbs so that I knew what goes well together and the best way to prepare it without always having to dig up a recipe. I rarely ever buy fresh herbs and have never grown them because I just don't know what I would do with a large quantity of them.
8. Food storage. We have essentially no food storage and very little in terms of emergency preparedness. I really want to get organized and have 72 hour kits, a week or so of water for everyone, and at least a three month supply of food that we are rotating through. I have always thought of food storage as canning jars and mostly #10 cans full of wheat and rice, things that you store in case of natural disaster. But really it is more for everyday emergencies like running out of grocery money (always happens), or a pay check or reimbursement is delayed, unexpected expenses, being temporarily out of work, city water line gets clogged or backed up (this actually happened once in Provo and we couldn't use the water for a good part of the day). We even got a letter from our water company recommending we have at least a 3 day supply of water for everyone in our family.
So this gives me lots to work towards but there is no time to start like the present.
1. Get all of us to eat healthier: In talking with Ryan we all have specific eating needs, I just need to figure out the best way to meet all of them.
3. Eat more of a variety of vegetables. I did a little spread sheet once of all the recipes we typically make and then divided the ingredients into categories like: pasta or rice, produce, dairy, canned goods, etc. I discovered that basically the only vegetables we eat on a regular basis are: potatoes, green beans, carrots, celery, onions, lettuce, spinach, and occasionally other more "exotic" things like asparagus.
4. Stay in my grocery budget. Basically I am not very good at this. We have some wiggle room in our budget that we can increase it a little bit if necessary but I need to decide, given our other food goals, what the best amount is for our family and then stick with it.
5. Grow a fair amount of produce we eat in our own garden. Ryan and I both grew up in families with large gardens and mothers that canned what they grew. I am so grateful for this skill that our families past down to us and have big plans of turning our small weed patch into something much more productive and useful.
6. Waste less food. I feel like whenever we get a lot of fresh produce inevitably a bunch of it ends up going bad and getting thrown away because I don't use it fast enough, I can't figure out what to make with it, or I just forget about it. This may also be a menu organizing problem. If I organize our menu in such a way that when I buy, for instance, something like spinach I include meals with spinach several times so that I use it all up before it goes bad.
7. Improve my cooking skills, learn what ingredients go well together, get better at making meals out of what we have. Whenever I have something I don't know what to do with I always just jump on to allrecipes.com and see what I can find. Not that doing that is a bad thing, but I would love to have a better knowledge of fruits, vegetables, and especially fresh herbs so that I knew what goes well together and the best way to prepare it without always having to dig up a recipe. I rarely ever buy fresh herbs and have never grown them because I just don't know what I would do with a large quantity of them.
8. Food storage. We have essentially no food storage and very little in terms of emergency preparedness. I really want to get organized and have 72 hour kits, a week or so of water for everyone, and at least a three month supply of food that we are rotating through. I have always thought of food storage as canning jars and mostly #10 cans full of wheat and rice, things that you store in case of natural disaster. But really it is more for everyday emergencies like running out of grocery money (always happens), or a pay check or reimbursement is delayed, unexpected expenses, being temporarily out of work, city water line gets clogged or backed up (this actually happened once in Provo and we couldn't use the water for a good part of the day). We even got a letter from our water company recommending we have at least a 3 day supply of water for everyone in our family.
So this gives me lots to work towards but there is no time to start like the present.
Thursday, October 18, 2012
What's for Lunch?
I ask myself this question everyday as it nears noon and my answer?.... usually I have no idea. Lunch is my worst meal of the day as far as what to make. A lot of the time I can think of things for me and Ryan to eat but those things are necessarily things that the girls will eat, like a salad. Everyone is beyond sick of peanut butter sandwiches, in fact the last time I made them for lunch L. through an all out crying fit. It is not uncommon for her to refuse to eat something but it usually doesn't turn into a crying and screaming extravaganza. I even made an organized lunch chart/menu that I could follow to try and generate some ideas other than sandwiches. It went something like this each day we would have something different: soup, pasta, salad, sandwiches, and then we could have leftovers a couple times during the week. I think the idea itself is good but I am struggling with kid friendly ideas for each of those categories.
We did have a fair amount of success with one idea about a month ago: Tea Party. The credit for the idea goes to Fancy Nancy. We fixed up some herbal tea in the morning (our favorite is the Celestial Fruit Sampler) and I added a little sugar so the girls will actually drink it, then we refrigerated it till lunch. Then we make a bunch of finger foods like: banana or some other kind of bread, cut up veggies, sandwich roll ups - a slice of bread rolled flat with a rolling pin, then spread filling like peanut butter, honey, or jam, then roll it up and cut it in half (or more pieces, think cinnamon rolls) and put a tooth pick in each piece. The girls loved this, I even let them use their play dishes so they each had a tea cup and little plate. We also invited friends over for the tea party once and that was fun.
Other than that though I am in need of lunch ideas. Anybody have any favorites?
We did have a fair amount of success with one idea about a month ago: Tea Party. The credit for the idea goes to Fancy Nancy. We fixed up some herbal tea in the morning (our favorite is the Celestial Fruit Sampler) and I added a little sugar so the girls will actually drink it, then we refrigerated it till lunch. Then we make a bunch of finger foods like: banana or some other kind of bread, cut up veggies, sandwich roll ups - a slice of bread rolled flat with a rolling pin, then spread filling like peanut butter, honey, or jam, then roll it up and cut it in half (or more pieces, think cinnamon rolls) and put a tooth pick in each piece. The girls loved this, I even let them use their play dishes so they each had a tea cup and little plate. We also invited friends over for the tea party once and that was fun.
Other than that though I am in need of lunch ideas. Anybody have any favorites?
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