Eating better, a little bit at a time

I realized that a good chunk of my Facebook posts are about food.  Food I cook, food I buy, and more often, food that my husband cooks, because he's a lot more organized than I am.  I've always liked cooking, but I have trouble finding the time to do it.  If I could live in a cooking show, where the ingredients just show up on the counter, peeled & chopped, and the dirty dishes just magically disappear, I'd cook a lot more. 


When I had more money I bought a lot of premade foods - take out, mixes, and frozen.  After my first son was born, I ate nothing but hot pocket sandwiches, granola bars, and other things I could eat with one hand.  Then my second son was born, just as my first was entering the preschool picky-eating phase - for years our home menu was dominated by macaroni & cheese, more granola bars, and melted cheese sandwiches.  We're vegetarians, but the kids wouldn't eat vegetables. Kid #2 wouldn't eat fruit either.  With both of us working full time, there were more boxed foods, more frozen pizzas, more snacks to eat in the car, more seasoning mixes that we could pour over rice and pasta.


Then a few things changed: 1) We couldn't afford to keep buying the premade stuff 2) We read Michael Pollan's book In Defense of Food.  Now, I hate reading blogs that are all "I eat nothing but natural/organic/pesticide free/raw/vegan/low carb/low fat etc etc etc and it changed my life and I'd never ever go back".  Pollan's book didn't turn my life around, but it got me thinking about the chemicals I'm putting into my family's bodies, and the amount of food garbage we're generating.


So... we're trying to eat more real food - cooking from scratch, buying organic when it's cheap enough, and gardening.  It's nowhere near 100% -child #2 still doesn't eat fruit or vegetables (more about him later), and there is no way on earth I'm going to swear off Little Debbie Swiss Rolls or Diet Coke.  But each little step makes a difference - I do what I can, which is better (and cheaper) than not doing anything at all.  So that's what this blog is about - a vegetarian family trying to be more vegan, trying to be more organic, trying to be more "from scratch", and enjoying food.  Sometimes doing it well, sometimes not so much.  Because that's how life and food is.