Eating Well

Another thing I can do now that Miss F can occupy herself for small amounts of time is cook from scratch.  I had found 100 Days of Real Food  quite a while back.  I was all gung ho, ready to ditch processed food.  I signed up for the 10 day pledge, and failed by day 2.  I hadn't really gotten *B* on board, and Felicity was still a wee one.

Miss F has been eating solids since Christmas, when she turned 6 months.  I make all of her baby food myself.  *B* noted on a couple of occasions that she ate better than we did:  all organic, fresh foods in gourmet combos like parsnips and pears.

 

When Miss F cracked the caning in her high chair, we had her feed herself on the floor.  

She has a new high chair now.  I believe this was avocado.

With the parsnips, *B* was particularly annoyed since it's his favorite side dish and I pureed the entire huge batch that I made. So we stopped buying food from our local big box grocery store and went back to the organic market instead.

On March 1st, I gave up artificial sweetener.  It was on a whim, really.  It was (and is) a bit hard since I loved iced tea with sweet 'n' low, and always had diet soda with foods like pizza or burgers.  It's been over a month, and I no longer pause when ordering a drink.  I get water, and it's just fine.

Somewhere in all of that, *B* and I rediscovered the real food pledge.  We started to cut out our sugar and substitute small amounts of maple syrup and honey instead.  I'm not a big maple syrup fan.  When I first read that Lisa put maple syrup in her coffee, I was just a little grossed out.   But that's exactly how I drink mine now!  I'm trying to cut back on that, so I'm down to 1 tsp of maple syrup in a whole cup of coffee.  My goal is to get to just coffee with milk.

One night, we just had a moment.  Miss F was in bed, and we decided it was now or never.  We pulled 3 bags full of processed food out of our pantries.  One bag of cookies even had TBHQ in it!  We emptied most condiments out of our refrigerator.

The only condiment we didn't remove is Worcestershire sauce.  Yes, it has more than 5 ingredients.  But do you know how hard it is to make that stuff???  We tossed the Heinz stuff and kept a bottle that we had gotten from our organic shop.

Since that day, we've made a concerted effort to eat much more real food and to really scrutinize what it is we put in our bodies.  Doing that, for us, means making a lot more foods from scratch.