clean eating

I've had a few friends recently bring my attention to the way I/we eat.  My friend Hannah probably started it with her successful switch to the Paleo diet. It got me to researching such things.  After a lot of reading, I realized a few important things. 

1) Paleo isn't really for me - not so much because I absolutely couldn't do without grains and dairy and legumes etc (although, yeah, that *would* be really hard) but because I just don't feel the need to eliminate them from my diet or my kid's diets.  We really like green beans around here, and milk, and oatmeal.  And I'm cool with that.  However, it did bring my attention to how much other stuff I was buying. 

2) I do want to eat better.  We, as a family, tend to go through cycles with food.  We go from pretty healthy to super healthy to having weeks of convenience eating.  Winter is the hardest with a more limited selection of produce and fruits and less energy to deal with it all.  Spring and Summer, by contrast, are just teaming with freshness - so I figure now is the perfect time to start making a few changes. 

3) Clean eating.  This is the term that I was missing from my vocabulary, but was trying to pinpoint.  The first thing you'll read is that clean eating means something different for everyone.  For me - it means eating foods that fresh, whole, and have no ingredients that I don't know to pronounce.  I'm making 2 big exceptions here.  The first is that I'm not buying "clean" bread and tortillas yet - I'm buying relatively healthy ones still - but bread is too hard for me to add to my clean list right now and I need to start manageable.  The second exception is that I'm not gonig to throw out all my "bad" food. I paid for that frozen lasagna in my freezer - so we're going to eat it.  The change is that I'll stop buying them in the future.  I suspect it'll take a few months to really weed out all the old stuff - but that's ok.  Slow and steady.  

Love a newly stocked pantry. 

 Still got some not-so-great foods in there, but I bet it's 75% clean food. 

So, I will fully admit that this is me nesting.  It feels like it.  I don't have a strong desire right now to clean out my closets and scrub my baseboards with a toothbrush (yet - that phase may still come) but this clean eating idea is exciting and is giving me a satisfaction about providing for my little ones.  I have this week off of work for April vacation, so I have more time than usual to cook and plan and I'm feeling very optimistic about maintaining this.  It all just feels good.  The word that keeps coming to mind is "empowering"

No more sugary insta-oats.  I'm making them homemade from now on. 

The other part of this that I find exciting is that this is providing me so many opportunities to teach Abby about food - more than we've done in a while.  It would make me so happy and so proud if she grew up with a very healthy sense about food.  She loves helping me cook, and this plan requires a bit more planning and prepping and cooking - so we've been doing more of that together.  It's been nice.  

omelet muffins - prep.

 omelet muffins - done. 

I froze a bunch of these - 1 min in the microwave and it's a quick breakfast option.

And finally - even though I'm purposely taking things slow - I've found that cutting out processed foods and things with weird ingredients has been really pretty easy.  Most of our dinners haven't changed too much.  My grocery list wasn't severely altered.  I've still been able to coupon - which is key for us.

So, it's going well.  I like doing it.  I think it'll become easier and easier.  Thanks to Hannah and Bobbi especially for getting this ball rolling.  

ruby red through and through.

I won the BJ's strawberry lottery this week with a perfectly ripe bunch