Real Food Day 4 & Experimental Thursday!

Real Food
Certain things are easy with real food. Dinner. Putting real sugar in my coffee. Making bread. It hasn't required a whole lot of change.

Kid food has been a real bust. What do you do when the neighbors give your kids ice pops? Do you rip them out of their hands (Not real food!)? No way. On Tuesday I packed a lunch for my daughter, but she forgot to bring it to the cafeteria and got the school lunch instead. She did eat her packed stuff at snack time, though.

Breakfast cereal? I basically gave up. Today, however, I woke up late and my son missed the bus, so I decided since he would need to eat a serious breakfast at home, I would make scones for everybody.

One thing that the challenge has made me do this week is not to resort to convenience foods. The other night when I made spaghetti sauce, I didn't have quite enough tomatoes. So, we just ate a less saucy sauce. Today, I did not have the normal blueberries to make the scones, so I decided to get radical :) and chop up some frozen strawberries. They were delicious, in a sort of strawberry shortcake way.

Another problem area has been eating out. I'm just not sure how real the food is. Today I had breakfast at my favorite pancake place, but I know their pancakes come from a mix (they sell it in the front of the store), so I ordered something else. I opted for corn tortillas instead of flour, but I'm not really sure the corn tortillas were any more "pure". With any challenge like this, I figure that trying my best is the point -- stretching my comfort zone a little -- thinking a little more about what I do every day. Should I torture myself and my family or strive for a goal that is so difficult that it is unatainable? I don't think so. I just do the best I can.

Experimental Thursday!!!

My neighbor taught me about the wonders of sprouts, so today I decided to start my own sprouts. I bought 15 cents worth of mung beans in the bulk part of the grocery store, and that is supposed to make a whole jar of sprouts. I'm excited to see how it goes. Here's the process:
1. Soak beans (about 1/4 cup) over night.
2. Put the beans in a jar with holes in the lid. About 3 or 4 times a day, fill the jar with water and then put it upside down so the water drains out. This will rinse off the beans so they don't get funky, and give them some water to grow. Keep this jar in a dark place.
3. If you want thick sprouts, put a weight on them. My neighbor gave me a "pillow", which is a piece of nylon material with rocks sewn inside of it. She puts this on top of the sprouts and has a plastic container with holes in the bottom.

I like this experiment because already I've learned 2 things I never knew about sprouts:
1. They are white because they grow in the dark. If you want to "green" the sprouts, you expose them to the light at the end of the sprouting process.
2. The weight makes the sprouts fatter because they have to be strong and push up on it.

So hopefully in about 5 days (give or take), I'll have a jar of sprouts and I can try making some pad thai. For only 15 cents -- that's my kind of price.

Worms!
The worms arrived today. In a box labeled "live worms". I wonder what the mail carrier thought of that :)

We fixed up the farm and put the worms in. We took a video, but it's not fit for publication right now because it's WAYYY too long. My friend was visiting and she was pretty grossed out, but helped shred the paper. According to the instructions, the worms need 3 days with not too much food to get used to their home, and then we can really get in business.