Rules to live by

Before I start in on any recipes, I want to say a little about our family's general guidelines for how we eat. We certainly don't always follow this. My husband, Sean, and I have a weakness for ice cream (and brownies, and cookies...) and those wonderfully delicious crunchy kettle chips...barbeque flavor. Yum. But overall, we try to stick to these "rules."


Eat at home.

For budget reasons, as well as health reasons, we avoid restaurants (especially fast food). They always give you enough to feed two or even three people, and it's packed with way too much sodium, sugar, fat and calories.

Early in our dating and marriage life, restaurants were our weakness. But since being forced to back off from them for money reasons, we now only go when traveling, or on the occasion when we don't have anything prepared to cook, dinner was ruined or we're stressed out and/or tired and we say screw it, let's go out to eat. But that's not very often.

Eat as few highly processed foods as possible. 

In this country, it's nearly impossible to cut ALL processed foods out of your diet, even with home-cooking. Besides fresh fruits and vegetables, pretty much everything has some level of being "processed" simply because it's produced and/or handled in such large quantities.

But I'm talking about things that are boxed up with a list of 25 ingredients in them: some natural, some genetically made/modified, some you don't even know what they are, and packed with too much salt, sugar and preservatives. You know what I'm talking about.

Can we just make it ourselves?

There are some things you just don't need to buy. Like chicken broth. Buy a rotisserie chicken from the store, have chicken salad sandwiches, put some chicken in your home-made soup, and then boil the bones in a bunch of water for a half hour...then freeze it for later. It's not that hard, people.

We also make our own popcorn, granola, oil & vinegar salad dressing, pizza crust, red pasta sauce, soup, sweet tea, sunbutter, pickles, frosting (on the rare occasion we need it), and who knows what else. The point is, if we can, we try to do it ourselves. You know what's in it, when it was made, and it will probably taste better.

Try to buy local.

During the warmer months, we buy all (except bananas) of our produce from the farmer's market. We have actually gotten to know pretty well the lady we usually go to. We know where her farm is and that she's pesticide free. And she'll often throw in an extra something-or-another for free for us.

We are also trying to vamp up our own garden. We've done a few things so far, but this Spring we're really going to step it up. And that, my friend, is local.

Avoid the white.

We cut out white bread, white rice, white pasta, and white flour. We go for the 100% whole wheat (well, brown rice...not whole wheat rice :)

Water. Milk. Sometimes Sweet Tea.

Oh, and sometimes beer, too.

That's all we drink. And as I said before, we make our own tea...a huge pot of water on the stove...sugar and a few tea bags. No store-bought tea jugs for us.

On average, I'd say I have 1 to 3 sodas a month. And usually that's when we're at a restaurant. Here's a link to a story on what one soda does to your body.

Our meals at home.

Breakfast is either our home-made granola or oatmeal cooked on the stove. One morning meal per weekend we like to have a little brunch of eggs, pancakes and either grits or bacon.

Lunch is usually leftover dinners. If nothing's available, then some scrambled eggs or a sandwich or something.

Dinner is almost always home cooked - with the rare exception of the store bought pizza or jarred pasta sauce.

Snacks are fresh fruit, cottage cheese, yogurt, whole wheat crackers, nuts (except for Noah who has a nut allergy), raisins, or other dried fruit. We try to avoid all pre-packaged snacks for the kids.

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Wow, I think that covers it. I had more to say on that than I thought. But it comes down to eating real food and avoiding the over-processed stuff. Cook for yourself. And for your family.