When I was a child I was afraid of trying new food. we ate the same things frequently and we didn’t try a lot of new things. I loved taco night, but to me tacos were unseasoned ground beef, in a crispy corn taco shell from a box, served with shredded cheese, lettuce and ketchup. which now that I think about it, it sounds like a cheese burger in a taco shell.
My parents didn’t really do anything interesting with food. I don’t blame them, I understand it. I fell into the same trap - we used to be so busy that we just put food on the table. we didn’t take the time to really think about what we were doing. like my parents, it was just something that we had to make and provide while we were working full time, but not something that we enjoyed doing and really gave too much thought. it was easy and convenient versus healthy, tasty and good for your family. it used to be hard to think about how to feed our family healthily.
Everything I do with food today I taught myself.
and we certainly do things differently than we did in the house I grew up in.
in no particular order of importance, this is how we food:
education.
we’ve spent some time on education. we’ve tried a lot of things. now we don’t diet. or follow a strict diet. we are not paleo. we've read a lot of things, and have taken in a lot of information over time. we spent some time following Jamie Oliver and really listening to his message about whole foods. We had a Naturopath in our lives for a few years and really listened to her teachings about how foods affect your body and your health. We put our whole family on an elimination diet, hoping to clear up some issues and clean up everyone’s GI tracts. We learned so much by doing this.
we are simply whole foods with things that we allow or not allow. We try to stay away from foods that are inflammatory, like gluten, sugars, dairy, etc.
preparing our own food.
we do quite a bit of batch prep work. we spend usually an hour every week putting together a lot of things like raw vegetables and fruits for snacking, pack cheese and meats into grab and snack container sizes/portions, olives, fruit parfaits, tortilla roll ups, anything else like that. grab and go.
doing this makes it easy for everyone to make decisions. if the vegetables were in the fridge, and it needed to be washed, cut and prepped in order to be eaten, no one would eat them because of all of the work involved. by doing all of that work ahead of time, it makes it really easy for us to grab healthy food and snacks.
this helps with healthy on the weekends, after school, with packing lunches, packing food for on the go and traveling.
included in the batch preparation time we usually try to grill up extra meats that can be added to salads for lunch and other items. this helps when someone doesn’t want eggs, doesn’t like the meal we are having for dinner and we need something to have quick on a super busy night.
meal planning.
we always meal plan. each week before we grocery shop, we plan out what we will make for meals and what we need for school lunches, and since we make the same breakfasts almost every day we know what we need for this. planning everything out like this really cuts down on waste and the money we spend on food. we literally only buy what we need. no “well, maybe we might do this”. if for some reason we don’t make a meal because our schedule changed, we shuffle it into the next week’s rotation.
grocery shopping.
we go grocery shopping every week. this, along with the meal planning, has literally cut our spending in half. I just buy what we need for that week. when we shopped once a month or twice a month, we had huge shopping bills, and we bought for what we thought we could or might make, and what we might need for lunches or snacks. now I know exactly what we need. we hardly ever have to throw away food, we deplete the food sources wholly and hardly anything gets wasted.
Along with this, but not necessarily about food, but totally related - I don’t allow plastic bags to come into my home. so when I am grocery shopping I use those little hand baskets inside a larger cart to hold all of my produce. and then I put it into my fabric bags at the checkout.
I always go through the self check out, (except at Costco where they don’t allow it). so that I can put my items on the belt in the order that I want them in.
because I always bag my own groceries. and I bag all of my groceries according to category. all of the like items get bagged together like organized little solders, in as few a bags as possible. all of the meat goes together. all of the vegetables go together. this makes it so easy for me when I get home.
bulk groceries.
we will buy only certain things in bulk. larger containers and bags of fruits and vegetables are big for us. we buy 2 giant bags of celery hearts every week, a giant bag of peppers, several large containers of berries and grapes, a big bag of avocados, etc.
We never buy meat in bulk. we don’t like the texture or taste of frozen meat.
organics.
we buy mostly organic foods. all of our meat is organic and local when we can. we buy mostly organic fruits and vegetables. I always buy organic apples, pears and other fruits that we eat the skins of. I am less concerned with the avocados, lemons and limes and other random things.
food storage.
we don’t have extra food storage or a freezer. We didn’t want to eat frozen foods, and we didn’t want to buy any more than we were going to eat each week, so we got rid of our chest freezer. it was a mind trick. if we don't have the space to store it, we don't buy it. so we literally have no where to store extra food.
we have an extra fridge in our basement and it usually only has eggs since we buy 4-6 dozen every week and that is a lot to store in our main fridge.
our main fridge is very organized. all of the fruit is in the fruit drawer, open and stacked, easy to grab. the lettuces and green leafy things are in one drawer, all of the other vegetables are in another. the meats are all stacked together on one shelf. the left overs and container items are all in square containers all stacked up according to their type, easy to see, easy to grab and serve.
All of the prepped foods (bags and containers) are all stacked into 2 pull out draw organizers or stacked together for easy grabbing.
green vegetables.
we’re obsessed with green vegetables. because of all our education we understand that we must include this in some way everyday. so we make a green vegetable every evening for dinner. if we don’t have a big meal that has a steamed vegetable with it, then we make a green leafy salad.
hot breakfasts.
we make a hot breakfast everyday. and they eat it everyday, together, in our kitchen, at the counter.
starting out their day with food in their bodies helps their brains operate better through the whole day. we don’t allow cereals, breads, etc unless on special occasions where we have a big brunch or something special.
we make eggs every single day. it’s basically a short order cook type situation. what kind of eggs do you want? cheese? mushrooms, asparagus and feta? jalapeños?
if for some reason we don’t have eggs, we usually serve some of the leftovers, like meats and vegetables.
we want our family to have some substantial and protein based versus something that is sugar or turns to sugar/insulin that will wear off before too long and make them not have enough power to operate their bodies in the busy day ahead.
simplicity.
we don’t really complicate things. we like to simply steam or roast our fresh vegetables. we don’t really make any complicated side dish recipes. we roast the potatoes. we steam the broccoli. we don’t cover it with cheese or anything else. salt and pepper.
we simple roast, pan fry, or grill our meats. we don’t do a lot of marinating, or sauces or anything else.
going back to the top and the stories of my parents and how I grew up, I didn't understand that food could be this simple. I saw them struggle to make the few types of meals in our rotation, they weren't very exciting and I didn't really like home cooked food as a result. (sorry Mom and Dad, I love you, but I didn't really love the swiss steak or the pork chops).
taking things down to the basic simplicity in preparing them we make it easy to enjoy. and by that I mean enjoy the entire process, from the buying, the making and even the consuming.
and we are teaching our children that eating healthy really isn't that hard at all.
recipes.
we don’t really follow a lot of recipes. if we do, they are fairly simple and easy to follow. we enjoy a more basic recipe, with easy, basic food and their natural flavors.
we love the basic Food Revolution of Jamie Oliver. easy meat roasts, basic things.
and I really love Gimmiesomeoven’s recipes.
we also have some paleo and whole foods recipe books and sources that we like. we’d like to keep things gluten and grain free, lower in nightshades and dairy.
junk foods.
we make allowances for junk. not everyday preferably. but we do allow junk on occasion. if we don’t create an environment for us all to have healthy relationships with food, we will eventually find trouble. the more that we forbid things the worse the desire to have the junk gets. we’d rather there be a healthy relationship where everyone knows that there is space for junk too.
decisions and choices.
we give our a kids a say in decisions/choices. we ask them to chose meals and other items they wish to eat. they have some control over what we are eating, making decisions for the whole family. it also helps them understand what it takes to provide the meals, involving them in the process of picking what we need to purchase and then prepare.
New things.
we make an effort to try new things. as new things are introduced and pushed into the market, or things come into season that we do not usually eat, we give them a shot. as we did the elimination diet we tried several types of meats that we had never tried before. we prepared foods that we had never tried before. some of those things make it into our normal rotation and become part of our everyday, some items come and go and some items are never tried again. but at least we introduced ourselves to new tastes.
making from scratch.
we’ve made it our goal to always try to make our own foods from scratch. our own taco seasoning for ground beef, our own mexican rice, refried beans, our own sauerkraut, pickled peppers and other vegetables. we make our own stock, our own broth.
we try to eat out a lot less, and learning to make our own foods from scratch has really helped with this. my obsession with tacos has helped this… we’ve been making our own fish tacos, our own carnitas, fajitas and more.
Grow our own foods.
we’ve started to grow our own vegetables. our garden is only in it’s second year but already we are finding that growing our own food is not only cost saving, healthy, but also incredibly rewarding.
Take our food on the go.
we take our own food with us. when we go on the road, or travel, we take our own food, prepared fruits, vegetables, and other snack and easy items.
when traveling, we buy groceries. instead of finding a place to eat out for breakfast and lunch, we hit up the local grocery store and stock up on prepared vegetables, fruits, and the easy items. We usually carry a cooler with us and in it’s pockets are utensils and other items that we can use to cut things like avocados, etc.
eat together.
we try to eat as many meals together as possible. especially in the evenings, our dinner meal. we find that the most important relationship bonding happens when we are eating our evening meal together at the table. we catch up on our days, and talk all while enjoying the foods to feed our bodies and our souls.
there is something quite magically about what happens both in our relationships to each other, but also how we end up eating our foods. we linger, we savor, we talk, we laugh, we take our time and therefore we process our foods better, we eat less because it gets a chance to settle.
we present our dinner as a buffet.
as we’ve prepared our dinner foods, we set up a buffet serving line in our kitchen. we don’t set the table family style. in the buffet line all of the foods are presented in bowls and platters. each person serves themselves to their helpings and then sits at the table. because they have to get up from the table, where everyone watches you, and you have to leave the great conversation happening, there is less second helpings going on. if we had the bowls on the table, there would be a lot more extra helpings and more grabbing of random foods because it is right in front of us. we have some old habits of needing to finish all of the foods, and keeping it off the table helps to reduce the impulse to grab more food than you need.
left overs.
we try to make enough of certain things so that we can have left overs. we usually have at least one night where we are too busy to cook and prepare a hot meal for the evening, and having the left overs makes it easier for us to present a warm meal at the end of the day.
we use the left overs for lunches, sometimes for breakfast, and usually for at least one or two meals through the rest of the week.
things that we try to create more of would include grilled meats, roast meats, taco fillings, fajitas, brown rice and some steamed vegetables.
lunches.
weekday and school day lunches are pretty basic. we don’t allow bread sandwiches so our family has acquired other tastes for lunches. every lunch usually includes a salad. sometimes it’s a layered salad in a jar, but usually is a salad with a grilled meat on top. there are drawers filled with prepped and cut vegetables, fruits, meats and cheeses. everything is there and easy to grab.
we do have some dry goods like trail mix and some pirates booty types snacks, but no chips, no crackers or things like that.
weekend lunches are not that much different from the weekday/school lunches. we often will create a buffet in our kitchen that will sit there for the kids to cruise through. this will consist of a vegetable tray, fruit tray, a cheese and meats tray, and usually some guacamole and salsa, and sometimes a grilled meat. this is the same for our game time snacking.
desserts.
we don’t do a ton with desserts, but we certainly do love them. we used to be a huge ice cream house. now when we do buy ice cream we buy small pints, and one for each person. and that’s it. it’s yours and once you’ve finished it, you’ve got nothing else until the next time.
because I am trying to be dairy free, we have tried a lot more options with coconut ice-cream, almond milk ice cream and other types of frozen treats.
we will on occasion buy frozen fruit bars/pops, or other kinds of treats similar to that, where the kids can grab them from the freezer. they love these.
I will also throw together an easy chia seed pudding, made with coconut milk. this is a great creamy substitute to a regular pudding or dessert.
we used to try all of the gluten free flours and recipes for treats, trying to still make them permissible to us somehow if I made them with a gluten free flour and sugar substitutes. though we really tried this for a long time, we never could really get around a lot of this. we do still have a few recipes we do that are gluten free, but otherwise our baking and treats when we do them, are made with organic sugars, and organic flours, but not the more unusual flours and ingredients.
water bottles.
everyone carries around a water bottle. or at least they are assigned one. either metal or glass. having a water bottle that they like, and even don’t mind showing off a little certainly helps them keep it filled and wanting to drink from it.
the water was a huge mountain that we had to cross. our oldest hated water and refused to drink plain water for most of her life. it wasn’t until we put them all through the Elimination Diet that she made a huge change in her life (18 years old!) and now drinks more water in a day than the rest of us. It has literally turned her health around.
our dishes.
we use all white dish ware. we’ve eliminated all colored and patterned dish ware and all plastic plates,bowls serving items (this was usually kids dish ware).
having everything all uniform makes it easy, and allows the food to stand out. it’s presented in a great way, you see it, you know how much is on it, and what you are eating.
I don’t know how much we differ from other families. I know that when other teens come into our home they are surprised by our food, by our groceries. I know my kids’ lunches are not the same as their classmates.
at least once a month I have some one come up and talk to me at the grocery store and comment about my cart, my grocery shopping bags or my food. I usually have to explain that we eat organic, that we eat a lot of vegetables, that I have a family of 5, that I have a teenage son. I am shrugging. I don’t know what it is about my food and my grocery cart that looks different, but people love to talk to me about it. I don’t mind. Let me tell you about my food strategies…… :)