Converting to Real Food

Whoever coined the phrase "lazy days of summer" must have had me in mind because I have not been putting much effort into getting fit this summer. At least not in the ways we typically think of when we hear the word fitness. I have been exercising better stewardship of my health and paying more attention to things I can do to improve our family's health overall. I just haven't spent an enormous amount of mental or physical energy on trying to lose weight.


Fitness Friday is open to our discretion this week, so I thought I would elaborate a bit more on one of the subjects I touched on in my last post about keeping costs down in the kitchen. While one of my primary motivations was certainly to eat well for less money, it quickly became apparent to me that there are many health benefits associated with taking the time to eat fresh foods, cooked from scratch. We are making a concerted effort in this house to forgo buying foods packaged in boxes, bottles and jars when it is possible and fairly easy to make it ourselves, free of the dyes and preservatives found in just about every food in your typical supermarket. My Fitness Friday contribution for this week is to link to and post a few recipes that our family really enjoys that are healthier, and cost less than their convenience food counterpart.



Dressings and Sauces:

Basic Pasta sauce (from the Joy of Cooking, and very very easy):

Heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil over medium heat. Add 1/3 cup fresh parsley, 1 medium chopped onion, 1 small carrot, peeled and finely chopped, and one celery stalk, finely chopped. Cook until tender, about 5 minutes. Then add:

2 cloves minced garlic, 1/2 cup basil leaves, chopped. Cook stirring for about 30 seconds. Add in:

2 and 1/2 pounds chopped, seeded ripe tomatoes, or: one 28 ounce can and one 14 ounce can whole tomatoes, with juice (I've done both. Either works well.) Salt and Pepper to taste.

Simmer uncovered until sauce is thickened, about 10 minutes. Toss into pasta of your choice. Oh yes, don't rinse pasta after cooking. The starch helps the sauce cling better to the noodles which is important because this sauce isn't as thick as your typical jarred pasta sauce.

Here is a link to a very good ranch dressing recipe. Tastes good, and is much fresher than what you'd buy in the store. You can also use homemade mayo to make it if you prefer that to store-bought mayonnaise.

As an aside, I highly recommend the newest edition Joy of Cooking to anyone who is a novice in the kitchen or interested in cooking from scratch. It is an exhaustive and detailed manual covering every subject and cooking technique you can think of and full of great recipes. Worth the investment. Of course, like most things learning to cook is mainly about hands on trial and error, but this is definitely one of the better cookbooks I've run across. A few more recipes we've enjoyed in recent months:


Breads and Crackers:


I have linked a couple of times already to Diane's burger bun recipe, which is easy and delicious. You really should try them. Krystal, organic food guru, posted back in the spring about the yucky stuff found even in the so-called healthy stuff on the grocery store shelves, such as the cookies and crackers. Which sent me on the lookout for an easy recipe for crackers, since we do love crackers in this house! My eldest and I ran across this one and decided to give it a try. They were quite good!


If you happen to have a bread machine, this is the best white bread recipe I have ever had for a bread machine. By the way, if you don't have dry milk powder, just use a cup of milk instead of the cup of water and the results are just as good. The same thing goes for Diane's recipe. I ran out of milk powder and an even substitution of milk for the water in both recipes works great. I haven't found a good bread machine wheat, but I have had a good hand recipe, from Julie that is quite tasty. Wonder how hard it would be to convert it to a bread machine recipe?

Breakfast Sausage:

To a pound of ground turkey add:

1 tsp. sage, 1 tsp. salt, 1/4 tsp. ginger, and 1/2 tsp. black pepper (or 1/4 tsp. red pepper if you like your sausage spicy). Mix and make patties, links, or whatever your prefer. Cook through.

Here is a recipe for beef sausage that is fairly close to the one my daughter and I came up with in the kitchen recently.

Those are just a few easy and tasty recipes that I have found as I work on converting our family from processed food to foods made from scratch. A few things I've discovered during this sometimes overwhelming conversion:

• While food from scratch tastes better than the fake stuff, it does take a little time for your taste buds to "cross over."After years of eating Tuna Helper from a box, for instance, I had to adjust to the lower sodium content in my own homemade version of the same dish. One of my daughters is convinced that among those ingredients we can't pronounce are chemicals hidden to keep us craving these products.


• While it may seem hard at first to cook from scratch, it really is just a matter of carving out more time to do it as well as shopping a bit more wisely. When I was growing up, almost every day I can remember my mom (who worked, by the way) calling home and saying to chop up an onion, some celery, and a bell pepper. I hated that and always thought there was no way that we needed to cut that stuff up for every dish she cooked. I am finding that the reason I was able to cook my first decade as a homemaker without cutting up many vegetables was because I was paying the food manufacturers to season the food for me with dried versions of the same veggies stuffed into boxes!


• Refocusing my food efforts on my family's overall health and not just on losing weight necessarily led me on the road to cooking from scratch. It is much more important to me that I keep Hydrogenated/Partially Hydrogenated Oils and MSG out of my kids than cutting a few calories by giving them a "low fat" cookie. Also, the idea that we're eating something "better" in terms of lower calories or even sugar just gives us license to eat more.

I don't have any weight loss to report, but I can report that we are losing trans fats, preservatives, and fillers from our family's diet. Eating foods as closely as possible to the way God created them will go along way towards our overall, long-term health and fitness.

Have a great weekend!