Eat Food Update

This is officially day 7 (last day!) of the Eat Food Challenge. I think that overall, it was not a great success. I had 3 main problems:
1. I ate out a lot this week and am not sure how the food was made. I tried to choose the most "real" option, but I can't be sure.
2. Kid food -- total disaster. It turns out that I have very little control over what my kids eat when they are out of the house.
3. Camping -- we went camping this weekend and I packed very quickly on Friday. I had to pack things that would not take too long to cook on our camp stove and that the kids would eat. I also needed lots of snacks for hikes. I brought plenty of fruit, dried fruit, nuts, stuff for sandwiches... no problem so far. I made hot chocolate mix instead of buying it. BUT... I also got hot dogs, marshmallows, peanut butter and jelly crackers and cheerio snack mix. I was in a big hurry at the store. The hot dogs and marshmallows -- I know they're bad. No excuse there. I've actually tried the "natural" marshmallows sold at Whole Foods and they just seem totally weird tasting to me, not to mention exorbitantly expensive.

PB&J crackers -- all I really wanted was a quick trail snack. My kids love these, but they are bad bad bad. They are wrapped in cellophane, and then all the packages are wrapped again. They are full of weird ingredients, and I noticed that they're not actually PB&J but PB&J "flavored". That's strange. How hard can it be to put PB & J in a cracker? Apparently too hard. Here's the worst: Each serving (6 cracker sandwiches) has 3.5 grams of trans fat. I had no idea. That's the last time I'm buying those crackers.

Cheerio Snack Mix -- in my speed I thought this would be a pretty healthy choice. It has cheerios, chex, pretzels, crackers, etc. I did not get the cheddar flavor b/c I thought it would be too overpowering. THEN I looked at the ingredients. There were many strange ingredients that grandma would not have recognized. And they were very salty. Not very good trail food, considering that we were running low on water by the end of our hike.

So, overall, I am a failure at eating real food. I guess. I tried, but maybe I could have tried harder. What kind of nut buys hot dogs in the middle of an Eat Food Challenge? But just constantly thinking about it made me learn some new things:

1. To eat real food, some planning is necessary.
2. It is better to just make simple snacks rather than buy them. It saves packaging, time, and a lot of weird ingredients. Example:

• don't buy stupid PB&J crackers -- make crackers with PB&J (this is really obvious, especially since I brought PB&J with me on the camping trip!)
• don't buy snack mix -- make "Ensalada de Cereal" (Cereal Salad) or GORP. My kids like Cereal Salad (that's what we call it) -- we just mix up all the last bits of different cereals. Instead of the cheerio snack mix, I could have mixed up some cheerios, some dried fruit, some pretzels, whatever.
  

3. "Healthy" grocery stores can have surprising ingredient lists. Every dessert I looked at in Central Market (a la-di-da version of our regular HEB) had partially hydrogenated oil in the ingredients. Gross.

4. I researched High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) to see what was so bad about it. It sounds pretty bad and has been linked to obesity. The body processes fructose differently than glucose, and it can lead to obesity and insulin resistance (according to some peer-reviewed studies, but not all). I also learned that High Fructose just means that it is higher than regular corn syrup -- not necessarily that it's super high. It's actually only 5% higher than regular table sugar. Hmmm.... One theory about the link to obesity is that HFCS is so cheap that it has led to increased portion sizes.

Also, there is such a thing as organic HFCS. AND, that companies are labeling products with HFCS as "natural" because it's made from corn. Even thought it's been chemically altered. That doesn't sound very natural to me. So watch the labels! Organic does not necessarily mean HFCS-free.

I'll continue watching the info about HFCS, because I'm curious to see just how bad it really is. In the meantime, I try to avoid it as much as possible, which can be really difficult because it seems to be in everything. For example, do you know what the second ingredient in my daughter's chocolate milk at school is? That's right...HFCS.

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.

Real Food Day 2 and Coffee

I know everybody wants to see exactly what I eat every day, but I'm going to hold off. Today, I'm going to focus on a previously super artificial food that is really easy to make "real" -- coffee.

I love coffee. 'Nuf said. Burbanmom decided to give up coffee, but then changed her mind. I don't blame her. Yes, it's addictive. Yes, I'm addicted. But I'm okay with that.

So.... how was I messing this up?
Back in the days, I was drinking regular coffee (not free trade, not organic) that I got at the supermarket, not recycling the can I got it in, or buying coffee in a disposable cup from the nearest coffee shop.

No more! Now, I buy organic/free trade coffee, reuse the bag it comes in, and if I buy coffee outside of the house (which is an enormous waste of money, but necessary), I bring my own cup. Starbucks and WF will give a discount for BYOC. I think it's 25 cents at WF, which is pretty darn good.

Actually, this is not totally true, because I haven't bought any coffee in about a year. All my coffee has come to me, free. I can not reveal my sources, but it has been left over, so I guess I'm sort of a freegan! (It's not from the trash, though.)

Creamer
I hate that powdered creamer, but I do love half and half. I used to use fat-free half and half. Then, I decided that I only use a little bit, so why not use the real deal? I switched to regular half and half and finally figured out what it is -- on the fat free package, there are about a million mysterious ingredients. But half and half is half cream, half milk. That makes sense.

If you don't want to buy half and half, you can make it, and then make butter with the extra cream. This could be a fun experiment to try with the kids. Another option is just to use whole milk -- still pretty creamy (since I'm used to skim) and less expensive.

Sweetener
C drinks his coffee black. I wish I could, but I like it a little sweet. I was using Splenda. But after 2 days of sugar, I'm going back. Sugar is good, and not too caloric (again... I don't use that much). This is a strange change considering that I used to make fun of people for using artificial sweeteners, and then I became one of those people. (I blame Weight Watchers. I had great success, but started eating a lot of artificial stuff.)

Day 2 Review
I thought that I could rely on WF for my pastry fix. (I know, I have a serious problem). Did you know that many of their pastries contain seaweed products (I can't remember exactly what they called it on the ingredients...). It really cut down on my choices.

Pretty good day today.
Questionable food: tortilla
Triumph: made my own baguettes! And did not destroy the kitchen in the process. I used the dough cycle on the bread machine, then took the dough out, shaped it into baguettes (actually, into canes) and baked them in the oven. They were awesome. We had spaghetti for dinner (made my own sauce...no Ragu supplement) and, of course, chard.

I wonder what will be in the CSA box tomorrow. Chard? It's almost like Christmas.

Eating Food -- Day 1

Right off, we had a problem on the first day of the "Eat Food Challenge". C bought chocolate donuts with sprinkles for the kids. Boo! That's okay though. It's the first day, and it's a little hard to get into the habit. Here is a rundown of what I ate today (what C ate is pretty close; the kids had the same except for school lunch, a popsicle each, and the very last of the graham crackers):

Breakfast:
oatmeal with raisins & milk, coffee
Lunch:
beans & rice, chard
chocolate
homemade bread with organic strawberry jam
Snack:
banana
Dinner:
baked tofu
couscous curry
salad with homemade balsamic dressing
more chard!

It was a lot of veggies, but it actually wasn't too hard. I came home to a chocolate donut sitting in the middle of the table, but since I had some happy chocolate in the cupboard, it was easy to resist.

I ate a ton of food today (as you can see), and discovered that baked tofu is the GREATEST -- it totally eliminates the problem of tofu squishiness that has previously turned me off. C and I polished off the tofu in just a few minutes (the kids had a taste & then opted out). I just marinated it in a sauce I made & then baked it at 400 for 30 minutes. It did seem like a lot of oven use for not very much food, however.

What was a problem? Salad dressing. I have a favorite balsamic vinagrette that I use, but it is full of weird ingredients. So I made my own. I just mixed up some balsamic vinegar, some olive oil, a little salt & some grapefruit juice. It was delish. I also got excited about DIY salad stuff and made croutons from some weird bread I made the other day. They were a hit.

But.... dinner caused a kitchen explosion. I used a ton of bowls, pans, and the chopping board was like a veggie explosion.

The homemade bread may seem like over-achieving, but it's really easy. I feel like a cheater because I use a bread machine. It takes maybe 2 minutes to put the ingredients in and then 3 hours and 10 minutes later -- awesome bread! We started making bread because we were inspired by some friends of ours. We couldn't believe them when they told us that they don't buy bread at the store. Now... neither do we! The breadmaker has been totally worth it even if only to make pizza. The pizza that we make at home is better (not to mention healthier) than most delivery pizza and is very economical to make. What's also nice is that we almost always have the ingredients -- bread stuff, some sort of tomato sauce, cheese, and random veggies.

What's funny is that a lot of the things that seem way out there to me (like making all my own bread) are pretty normal for a lot of other bloggers. It just shows that you can be an example to others--maybe even somebody that you don't know. After a while, what seems weird starts to seem normal, and hopefully the world gets a little greener.

That's a lot of chard
Yep. Sure is a lot of chard. We still have some more to eat. And artichokes (all 7 of them)... and more lettuce... and cabbage. Tomorrow is going to be another veggie heavy day because we have another CSA box on Wednesday. I'm still up in the air about continuing CSA after this trial month.

How much does CSA run in your area? Do you think it's worth it? How much more are you willing to pay for local food?

Kids
I think this challenge is pretty hard with kids, unless you love to cook. We are out of snacks now, except for pretzels. So, it's either fruit or toast or .... fruit. The morning is tough too -- the kids are addicted to Honey Nut Cheerios. We'll see how tomorrow goes.