Farmer's Markets

I am starting to feel the boredom and budget strain of trying to cook with fresh veggies in the winter.  I just returned from a trip to Costco and the freshest thing I bought was romaine lettuce and raspberries from who-knows-where - probably Mexico.  I bought beef jerky, dried mangoes, dried coconut, and cashews.  Tasty snacks, but not the veggies that we've been eating for most of our meals.  I've got more shopping to do and Whole Foods has beautiful produce, but I miss the stall shopping.  Our local farmer's markets start up around May, so long to wait.  I wish we could do a CSA, but it's really not cost effective since we are eating so selectively that I would worry about wasting too much of the produce.  I miss supporting a farm on the front end - buying into a share of the farm and weathering the corp success or failure with them.

So, farmer's markets it is!!  I've got a nice one really close, and a couple others nearby (some bigger, some with better music, more flavors of honey).  It's one of my favorite things about spring/summer and we have just a few more months to wait.  In the meantime, I'll keep recipe hunting to prepare for the fresh veg explosion that is coming our way.

food memories - nutritious associations

Food creates huge bonds and memories for me.  Tim and I go to hockey games frequently and when we started going we would often get nachos (nothing tastes quite like stadium nachos).  We've adjusted our budget and adjusted our diets and now the sight of that neon-orange glue that they call cheese makes me feel a little queasy.  My tummy is thankful that we don't often have stadium nachos.  But there is still a part of me that craves them between every first and second period of a hockey game.  It's a firm association - just a memory built around the sense of taste.

Watch - now that I'm blogging about it, I'll probably end up buying nachos this Friday.  Just great! :-p

But there are other food memories too.  Good food memories.  Right now I am getting ready to go and meet a friend's new baby.  It's making me think back the almost seven months to when my little one was born and I'm remember the sights and smells and sounds of the hospital experience.  I'm reliving the taste too, which is why for breakfast I'm having lime jello and beef broth.  Gross, right?  I had a c-section for Little Miss's delivery, and I ate a TON of jello while anxiously waiting for labor to start.  And the first food I was able to have as I was recovering post-surgery was beef broth.  I had also been on a low-sodium diet for most of my pregnancy, so I think that snap of salt and the warm liquid was exactly what I needed.  So now, anytime I am feeling nostalgic about Sophie's birth, I have some beef broth.

All of this to say - food memories can be good - they don't have to be indulgences.  I'm looking to build a family diet where we eat healthy, fresh, flavorful food around important events in our life, or repeated events, so that we come to crave those foods.  I've started making a chicken caesar wrap for dinner and bringing it with us to eat in the parking lot before a hockey game.  I want our birthday parties and holidays to have fresh fruits and veggies as part of the memory - and maybe just a few cookies or desserts.  I think that special food for special times makes sense, but if it's always junk food then that is what we will crave when we look to create those special feelings.  It's something that I want to continue to improve for us as much as possible.

simple meals

As much as I'm enjoying the hunt for new recipes - and I'm pleased with the success we've had at finding new meals that we like - I'm starting to miss the very simple three-part meals that we typically eat.  The classic is "meat, starch, veg" but we've adapted it recently to be "meat, veg, _____" with the third item being more veg, more meat, or some sort of protein booster like cottage cheese, or beans, or eggs.

This morning I'm going through my meal planner and creating single ingredient meals, like "green beans" or "cottage cheese" so that I can easily create a meal by dragging and dropping my three items.  I think next week I'll do chicken, steamed broccoli, and pinto beans - maybe add a little string cheese in there.  The advantage to adding it in the meal planner is that I can drag'n'drop onto my chosen day, but also, it auto-populates the ingredients into my shopping list.  For my pinto beans I will need beans, red pepper flakes, garlic salt, and onion.

Sometimes the simpler the meal, the more we savor the individual ingredients.  I know it makes prep easier and cheaper.  I also find simple meals easier to adapt to our schedule, since I can often pre-prep meals and then we're ready to go within a few minutes if I know Tim isn't sure when he'll wrap work up that evening, or if I have an errand to run right before dinner.

a starting point

I've always managed our household menu planning and grocery shopping.  There were plenty of years when we were both working and one or the other of us was in grad school and "menu planning" literally was picking a restaurant and then trying to bribe, beg, or otherwise persuade the other spouse to be the one to call in and pick up the order.  I don't miss those years.  I was surprised though, at how difficult it was for me to get any kind of good planning, shopping, prep, cleanup rhythm going.  I quickly got frustrated with how much food I would buy and then end up wasting because I didn't have a plan.  I got tired of trying to think of something new and exciting to have (I went through a whole month where all I could ever think of was soup - just the word "soup.")  Overall, the whole task just seems really boring and I didn't want to put work into it.

Just when I started to feel like I could set a budget, and make waffles, potatoes and meat, rice and stir-fry for dinner every night and at least we would get by, we made some changes in habits as a family and we decided to cut back on carbs.  We have a carb-filled - no, a carb-stuffed, diet in this country - and Tim and I started to see signs that we should rethink that track.  We are now looking for less overall carbs, and trying to pull in the complex, veggie and bean based, helpful building blocks kind of carbs, instead of the cheetos and white bread carbs, which were not helping our bodies towards their ideal performance capability.

It's been tough.  Very tough.  I have never looked into nutrition in depth before, and I still don't really have the patience to make a science out of it.  I'm at the stage now where I'm cutting out the obvious factors.  When I make stir-fry now, I rarely serve it over rice.  The bowl holds it just fine and we don't miss that filler.  Instead of having a chicken sausage on a stadium bun, we are just eating the grilled sausage with a fork and knife.  I'm surprised at how much I miss conventional munching formats (sandwiches are brilliant!!  It's been hard to give them up) but I'm also amazed at how much more flavor I get when things aren't drowning in bread.  Hamburger patty with feta and pickles and maybe some mustard has way more taste going on without the onion roll and I am enjoying the chance to explore those flavors.

We are by no means perfect at this - or even committed to letting it run our lives.  At this point we are looking at our options and putting ourselves through some change to see how it feels.  As I write this, just a tiny portion of a ginormous Costco pumpkin pie is sitting in our fridge.  We've munched the rest of it.  Not perfect; not claiming to be perfect.  But working on it.

Food planning has helped.  I have a lot more energy and attention now to the foods around me.  I'm learning about heartier veggies (kale instead of corn) that help us to feel more full and satisfied and less likely to just keep munching.  This blog will help as I get the chance to think through things on paper (which is definitely how I learn best) and get some feedback from other people who are noticing the same things, or already have great recipes to share, or want to talk through ideas together.  I'm also looking forward to being able to look back at meals over the course of a year and see where we've changed, where we've stayed the same.  I think evidence of personal growth is one of the best motivators for a big project like this.

Oh, one more thing about the planning.  Baby Sophie is 6 months old and I am excited about the opportunity we have to raise her with a different level of food awareness than I had growing up.  I've had some food struggles (yep: addictions) that I would love to see her avoid if possible.  She'll find her own path (don't they always?) but I will do my best to set her on a good course.  Which may just include the occasional pumpkin pie.

Happy meal planning.