Food for (Good) Thoughts

The days when we were stranded at the cabin, we ended up not eating very well. Add into the mix too little exercise and too much time to think, I landed in a bit of a funk. Just days after our escape, we had a wonderful visit to the Eastern Market. Imagining life near the market, where we’d get fresh food every day, I realized how poorly we had been eating, especially at the cabin. I resolved, yet again, to get us back on track.

First step: get organized. Getting organized to eat better meant a full cleaning out of the cabinets and the fridge. (Stay tuned for that post.) This weekend, I finally could see the back of the cabinets and the back of the fridge. Knowing what I have on hand is amazing!

The second step in this process was to cancel the meal planning service that I’ve been using off and on for the past year. (I wrote about it here.) While I enjoyed not having to plan and write grocery lists, I was finding that we were eating too much processed food, having too many half-empty cans and boxes and bottles around and getting bored of meals filled with meat substitutes. I like some tofu or fake chicken on occasion, but the menus relied far to heavily on these instead of fresh vegetables.

Now I can look at the fridge, know what is going to go bad first and plan a meal around that, using what I can of what I have on hand, supplementing with fresh ingredients. Last night was homemade pizza! It really took not much time at all, just a bit of preparation so the dough could rise. And the girls love helping make dinner from (sorta) scratch.

Last night’s meal saved us no money over going out or eating a frozen pizza — I had to restock parmigiano reggiano , olive oil and some mozarella and flour, but it was so much fun and so much better for us. Little by little we’ll improve it. We’ll move from 100% all-purpose flour to a more whole grain crust, etc. But for now, I know we are on a much better track than we were, and I hope that we will all starting feeling better because of it.