A Year of Food

This picture is from Life Magazine in 1951 and is an example of what the average blue collar family ate in one year. The amounts are based on Department of Agriculture statistics. The man in the picture worked for the Du Pont plant in Cleveland for $1.96 per hour. His family spent $25 per week on food.

This is the annual grocery list:

• Evaporated milk, 56 cans
• Cheese, 20 lb
• Butter, 56 lb
• Margarine, 21 lb
• Milk, 698 qts
• Peaches, 3 bu
• Grapes, 2 boxes
• Eggs, 131 doz
• Apples, 2 crates
• Oranges, 2 crates
• Cantaloupes, 1 crate
• Lemons, 1 crate
• Watermelons, 2
• Plums, 1 box
• Bananas, 1 stalk
• Peaches, 20 cans
• Cherries, 11 cans
• Frozen corn, 2 cases
• Frozen orange juice, 48 cans
• Shortening, 72 lb
• Flour, 450 lb
• Dried fruit, 8 pkg
• Sugar, 350 lb
• Pears, 15 cans
• Bread, 180 loaves
• Tomatoes, 15 baskets
• Potatoes, 690 lb
• Beans, 3 baskets
• Radishes, 1 basket
• Squash, 1 basket
• Cucumbers, 1 basket
• Beets, 3 baskets
• Ice cream, 8 ½ gal
• Lettuce, 2 crates
• Cauliflower, 1 crate
• Cabbage, 1 crate
• Carrots, 1 crate
• Celery, 1 crate
• Peas, 1 bu
• Onions, 1 sack
• Orange juice,11 cans
• Spinach, 22 cans
• Sauerkraut, 12 cans
• Cereal, 48 pkg
• Coffee, 39 lb
• Tea, 12 lb
• Ham, 144 lb
• Pork loins, 132 lb
• Saddle lamb, 15 lb
• Saddle veal, 30 lb
• Carp, 25 lb
• Salmon, 20 lb
• Chickens, 31
• Turkeys, 2
• Beef, 300 lb

This two and a half tons of food is such a clear example of hour our food choices have changed over the past sixty years. I first saw this photo in Bill Bryson's memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, a comical reflection of his childhood in the 1950s. He features this picture on the first two pages of the book and refers to it as an example of how plentiful and happy most Americans were during the 1950s. From there, I researched the photograph further and found the actual list, particularly the amount of fresh produce and basic supplies and materials, fascinating. I would be interested to catalog and document the groceries we purchase for a year. I'm not sure if I would be as proud to share that list all of the time. It certainly would not include three baskets of beets, 15 pounds of saddle lamb, or 72 pounds of shortening. I still love the idea of going back to basics.

Ben has started to move into the next box of hand me downs (size 12 months), and I'm so excited about all of the new cute things he has to wear. Josh picked out this outfit for church this morning. It was a pretty big hit, but I can't believe how old he looks.

Food Rules

Michael Pollan's latest book, Food Rules, is a very quik read, and refueled my interest in nutritional anthropology and making better choices about my food. Michael Pollan wrote The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, both of which I recommend for everyone to read. He also contributed a great deal to Food Inc., one of the best food documentaries I've seen. For those of you smirking at the idea of comparing that to all the food documentaries I've seen, I would recommend the following: Supersize Me, Food Fight, King Corn, Fast Food Nation, and The Future of Food. I know this may seem so far out there, but I honestly believe that our food choices, how, where and what we eat, can be one of the biggest shifts that Americans can make in order to solve obesity, the health care and welfare crisis, and even the increasing problems children are having in school (ADHD, behavior problems, anxiety, and poor social and emotional coping skills, etc.)

Back to the book at hand, Pollan outlines very basic rules to follow that would accomplish all of these changes. But I will be the first to admit that food choice habits are so hard to break. Some of my favorite rules are:
#2 - Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
#7 - Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third grader could not pronounce.
#13 - Eat only foods that will eventually rot.
#22 - Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.
#46 - Stop eating before you're full.
This continues on through 64 rules, each with a short explanation. This short book is a good compliment to his two longer texts which have the same general theme with much, much greater detail. I feel so strongly about this issue and I truly believe that changing what we eat can change our nation.

In related news, we just placed our seed order with Baker Creek Seeds and we have some big plans for the garden this year!



Ben is up to seven teeth, and he can stand on his own for a few seconds. He hasn't tried to take any steps yet, but he will walk all over the house on his own while pushing his train. Thanks to Tiffany for the cute monkey tags shirt!

Make Your Own Baby Food

Ben has only really played around with food and we haven't been feeding him every day, but he absolutely loves it. For several weeks he has been grabbing spoons, cups, and any other dishes or food he can get his hands on. We used our good friend Darby's yellow squash to make Ben's first baby food. I cut it in half, scooped out the seeds with a spoon, then placed it on a cookie sheet with about 1/4 inch of water. I baked it for about an hour at 400 degrees and it was total mush by the time that hour was up. I probably could have taken it out sooner, but it was so easy to scoop out into the food processer once it cooled. While pureeing it I added enough breastmilk to make it very runny, then I poured the mix into ice cube trays and froze.

I did the same process with green beans a week later, except I used the steamer to cook them. I put wax paper (left over from my cereal boxes - thanks Alma :) over the ice cube trays to prevent freezer burn, and then I poped them all out the next day and dumped them in a big tub that used to hold animal crackers. We have plenty of room in our deep freeze, and now we have about 40 baby food ice cubes.

We got the green beans from a friend that sells at the farmer's market. I'm determined (for now at least) to only feed Ben locally grown, fresh vegetables. We haven't really grown anything that's baby food friendly just yet, so I'm relying on our farmer's market for now. I even bought some of those purple beans, (like green beans) and steamed some of those for Ben's baby food. They taste just like green beans and even turn green when cooked, but they looked neat.

Ben absolutely loves green beans and bananas. He's fine with the squash and avacado, and he hated the peaches. I think they were too tart. I might thaw one squash cube with a green bean cube and mix them in order to use up the squash. I mixed some squished banana with the peaches and that went better too. So much food ends up all over him and the chair (and the floor), but at least he's enjoying himself.

Food Inc.

I'm not a huge movie buff, but I love a good documentary, and last night Josh and I went to the Moxie and saw Food Inc. This movie features three of my favorite authors, Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, and Joel Salatin, speaking about the problems of our current food supply. Here are some fascinating tidbits I took away from the film: Almost all of our food supply comes from five major corporations and almost all of our food supply contains corn and / or soy. Diversity and choice are hard to find in a local grocery store, even though it appears otherwise. The film refers to this as "the veil" between the public and where our food actually comes from.

The argument that "I ate fast food as a kid and have continued over the past 27 years and I'm fine," no longer applies. Food has changed so much in that amount of time. Factory produced food is less safe than it was 30 years ago because the FDA has become so intertwined with the mass food production industry that there are far fewer safety inspections. Modern methods of meat processing allow for massive amounts of bacteria to enter our food. Consider how many food contamination recalls we see each year.

The most heart wrenching part of the movie involved a mother discussing the death of her two year old son after eating a fast food hamburger that contained e-coli bacteria. After seeing that, it will be so hard for me to give Ben a fast food hamburger, most of which contain beef from at least a thousand cows.

So what are we to do? The film suggests shopping locally, visiting farmers markets, growing your own garden, and shopping wisely. In buying food, we are voting for what the companies will create more of. If we buy food that does not contain hormones, or if we buy organically produced items, then stores will begin carrying more of those items. As the film stated, "We vote three times a day." The website, Eat Well Everywhere, asks you to enter your zip code and they will list sustainable and healthy sources of food where you live.

We are still working on making better food choices. The Ozark farmer's market on the square has been a great resource for fresh, local food. We are also considering buying hogs and calves next year in order to produce our own meat, in addition to the chickens. Josh has even more ambitious plans for our garden next year, and this film strengthened our goals of sustainable farming even more.

Drying Herbs

I am fascinated in methods of preserving our harvest, and my newest attempt is drying. I am drying wildflowers (as they are hanging all around our house), and I was recently given a dehydrator. My first dehydrating project is basil and parsley.

To harvest basil, cut no more than 1/3 of the plant at any one time, and cut from the top to encourage a bushier plant or from the sides to encourage a taller, more narrow plant. I harvested a small bowl's worth, washed the leaves and separated them from their stems. I then placed them on a few racks of the dehydrator (with no overlapping leaves) and plugged it in. I left the basil in for about 12 hours. I left the leaves whole to preserve as much of the flavor as I could. When it's time to cook I (or Josh) will use the mortar and pestle and grind up the leaves to release the oils and make the basil easier to cook with. After all of that work, it didn't make very much. I'm hoping to harvest about once a week in order to have enough basil to last through most of the winter.

To harvest parsley, cut the stems about one inch above the ground. The best time to harvest is when the plant is about to flower. Mine aren't close to that point, but they are very overcrowded and needed to be thinned, so I figured I'd try it now and see how it worked. I clipped here and there and had quite a bit more than I had of the basil. I dehydrated this separately in order to not mix flavors. After the parsley dried, I held the stem in one hand and ran my fingers across with the other to separate the small leaves from the stems. I should have no time filling this jar in the next few weeks.

After dehydrating herbs, be sure to check the jars periodically for moisture. If any condensation forms inside the jar, take everything out and put back in the dehydrator for another 6+ hours and dry out the jar to prevent mold or mildew.

Seeing the apothecary at the Bakersville was so neat. I can't wait until I also have rows of dried herbs and spices to use all year.

Black Raspberry Season!

For the past couple of weeks, we have been harvesting black raspberries. On some past blog entries, I said we were harvesting blackberries. We weren't. Blackberries are pulled off of stems and are larger than raspberries. Raspberries leave a white thing behind on the plant, and they have a hollowed out top because of it. The blackberries are just now coming in and we're gathering a handful or so each day. For the past 2 1/2 weeks we have been harvesting 1-2 pints of black raspberries each day, and they are delicious!

We have put raspberries in every salad, made raspberry soda, raspberry gelato for dessert, raspberry thumbprint cookies and raspberry jam. I tried canning for the first time! I didn't take step-by-step pictures because I just followed the directions inside the Sure-Gel package. It turned out great and I've made a second batch since then. I added a picture (above) of some of the jars (the ones that haven't grown legs and found new homes already) on the old fashioned kitchen we got from my mother-in-law's store, the Ozark Mercantile.

I'm still trying to convince Josh to write a guest blog entry about the raspberry soda. I bought Josh a water carbonator for father's day and we're going to try sarsaparilla next. Raspberry gelato is simply raspberries, sugar and cream.

I enjoy canning and am considering all kinds of new recipes. Corn cob jelly and walnut praline syrup are the next two on my list. Our garden hasn't taken off quite as well as I had hoped, so I'm going to start frequenting the farmer's market to buy in season vegetables for canning and freezing.

I recently purchased Super Baby Food and, although we aren't starting solids for a while, I plan on making and freezing some baby food (in ice cube trays) so we can feed Ben lots of healthy local vegetables when he starts eating.

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Ben is really starting to enjoy toys. He has been practicing moving his pacifier from his left hand to his right and back, and then back in his mouth (but always sideways or some weird way where it doesn't fit right). He's cooing and ah-gooing, enjoying his swimming pool (lots of kicking), and sleeping in his crib for at least the first half of every night.

Chicken Walnut Blackberry Salad

We harvested our first full bowl of lettuce today (we started very late). For dinner we ate a delicious salad with fresh leaf lettuce, basil, chicken, walnuts, feta, and blackberries for dinner. It was awesome. I love fresh food, and this was the first meal I've ever picked on my own. How rewarding! I planned on taking some pictures, but we finished the salad before I got the chance.

Elsewhere on the farm we have a major Japanese beetle problem. They have nearly destroyed most of our fruit trees. Josh did some research about natural repellents and concocted a solution that consists of Tabasco sauce, and dead Japanese beetles. He shook the existing beetles off and sprayed the solution on the trees. We will see how well this works.


Josh assembled my birthday present from his parents - a lawn swing and I love it! The ducks and chickens are growing, potato plants are taking off in the old tires near the raised beds, and the parsley and basil are ready for picking as we need it.


Ben is still on his antibiotics for the next week or so. His next appointment is a week from this coming Monday, and the infection is looking a little better each day. It's still a little red and puffy and some of the stitches have started falling out. He has been nursing very, very frequently and not sleeping as long lately.

Square Foot Gardening

After researching and studying numerous types of gardening, and debating raised beds versus planting in the ground, companion planting, and so on, we decided to try square foot gardening. The idea is that you build a raised bed and section it into 12 inch squares. You then plant different vegetables in the squares and rotate them as you harvest.

We started with an old fence my dad salvaged for us. Josh pried it apart and recycled it into a 6' x 6' box. It's a little bigger than I would prefer, but it was easy and quick to assemble because that's how long the boards were. We filled the bed by a modified Lasagna Gardening method. Lasagna gardening is no digging, no tilling. (I don't have pictures of the first few steps because I was on baby duty.)

1. Build the raised bed box on the ground in a sunny spot. I would recommend only 4 feet across, not 6.
2. Lay wet newspaper down thickly on the ground. I would go at least 5 pages thick to reduce weeds. It's easier to wet with a hose after the newspaper is down
3. Put several inches of compost on top of the newspaper. We found some great aged horse manure through craigslist.
4. Fill in a good section of the box with dirt. We used 14 40lb bags of topsoil from Lowe's for this one, and we're going to use dirt from the old garden plot for the next one.
5. Snake a soaker hose through the dirt. It took 25 ft of soaker hose for this box. It was cheaper to buy a 50 foot soaker hose, cut it and crimp on an extra nozzle then to buy 2 25' hoses.
6. Add a few more inches of compost.

7. Hammer nails every 12 inches around the edge and run string across to mark your 12" squares. I used nylon string I had left over from a science project at school.

8. Map out your garden and plant your plants. See below for our plan.
9. Place mulch around the plants and water. We needed only 1 large bag of mulch for this bed.


Essentially, lasagna gardening is layering newspaper, compost, dirt, compost, mulch. Some directions involve more layers and many involve peat moss. Here is a great explanation of why we NEVER use peat moss. To summarize, it does nothing good for your garden over time, as it decomposes too quickly and squeezes the air out of the soil. More importantly, the mining of peat moss destroys bog and wetland habitats.

We just barely dipped into the concept of companion planting. The author of Square Foot Gardening says he doesn't really think companion planting makes that big of a difference. However, telling people to plant lots of different types of vegetables in one garden essentially is companion planting. We made sure to place carrots next to tomatoes, onions near carrots and a few other pairings we read would work well. We also included marigolds at each corner to aid in pest repulsion. The underlying concept of companion planting is that (most of the time) plants do better when a variety of types are planted near one another.

Here our garden layout:

3 MA 4 LL 4 LL 1 HL 1 HL 3 MA

4 CE 8 SS 8 SS 4 SP 4 SP 1 OK

4 CO 1TO 1TO 1TO 1TO 1 OK

8 BE 1TO 1TO 1TO 1TO 1 OK

8 BE 12 CA 4 PA 4 SN 4 SN 1 OK

3 MA 12 ON 1 RP 1 RP 1 BA 3 MA

MA = Marigolds
LL = Leaf Lettuce
HL = Head Lettuce
CE = Celery
SS = Sugar Snap Peas
SP = Spinach
OK = Okra
BE = Beans
TO = Tomatoes (4 Better Boy, 4 Celebrity)
CA = Carrots
PA = Parsley
SN = Snow Peas
ON = Onions
RP = Red Peppers
BA = Basil

As far as plant spacing and what to put where, we put the tomatoes in the middle so they wouldn't cast a strong shadow on one end of the garden. The bed is also in a very sunny spot. This is the conversion for seed packet spacing to how many per square you can plant:
12 in. = 1 per square
6 in. = 4 per square
4 in = 9 per square
3 in = 16 / square
From there, I used graph paper and counted how many starts we had and kind of made it up as I went. Some of the starts were very small and weak, and I'm not sure if they will take.

We would like to build and plant several more beds, but with Ben's surgery Tuesday we at least wanted to get one going beforehand. We still have 172 plant starts and hundreds of seeds.

We have enough of everything to make another bed identical to this one, and then we would like a couple that have melons and other vining plants. We also need to decide how and where we're going to do corn and if we're going to do potatoes.

Between using recycled lumber and starting almost everything from seeds, we have only spent about $150 so far on our vegetable garden projects and we've got everything to do between 4 and 6 beds total. We do not planning on buying topsoil for the rest of them, but we just wanted to get this one done today, without having to borrow the tractor again from Tim. We will hopefully build the rest of the boxes soon and get everything in the ground and going within the next couple of weeks.

A toad friend watched as we planted.


Ben spends a lot of time sucking on his hands and fingers these days. I'm thrilled he's figured out some kind of self-soothing and our car rides have been a little easier when the paci falls out.

Chicken Salad Salad

I made one of my favorite things for dinner tonight - chicken salad salad. Every time I make chicken salad it's different, based on what produce we have around. Tonight I added celery, onions, carrots (just a few), apples, walnuts, relish, sour cream, light mayo, salt, pepper, Cavender's Greek Seasoning, and of course, chicken. Yum. I'm going to experiment with freezing it because I made a boatload. I kept the apples out of the part I'm going to try to freeze. I'll try to post how the freezing turns out when I decide to have it again.


Wal-Mart in Ozark restocked with some healthier choices recently. Veggie Chips are back for $3.99, and Cascadian Farms Organic cereal is back too. Click here to print a $1.00 off any Cascadian Farms product, making the cereal only $2.18/box. There are a bunch of other good coupons on that website I used today at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart also has red, orange and yellow bell peppers on sale for $1 each (they're normally three times that or more).


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Ben's moving on into his 3-6 month clothes. He can still fit into some of the 0-3 stuff, but I filled the first box today with clothes he's grown out of. He's two months old today and it's amazing how quickly its gone by.

pantry organization

As I continue my spring cleaning / organization kick, I decided to tackle the pantry today.

Before:


I measured my shelves and found a good deal on baskets at Big Lots to get me started. I printed the labels on card stock and used packing tape over them to stick them to the baskets (the same label system I use in my classroom.) We buy a lot of the same things, so it was easy to sort everything into categories:
breakfast, snacks, pasta/bread, baking, desserts, drinks, crackers / taco shells, soups, beans, corn, broth, jello, candy, sauces and paper products.

After:


We still need to organize the spices, fridge, and freezer, but I now have a very clear picture of what I still need to look for in stocking up, and what we have plenty of. I'm still looking for deals on beef broth, tomato paste, tomato sauce, tomato soup and canned tomatoes. I hope our tomato plants do well because we go through those products so quickly.

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Ben barely cat-napped a few times today and I managed to work on the pantry while carrying him in my baby sling. By the time Josh came home from Jefferson City I was pretty exhausted and cranky, but I'm so glad he could come home today and help me out.

Josh ended up giving him a bottle because I pumped immediately before Ben wanted to nurse again.

extreme couponing

So I took couponing to the next level this week and added Wal-Mart. Because I had several coupons to use before they expired at the end of this month, it turned out to be quite a large shopping trip, but the rest of this month will most likely be pretty small. Again, I only bought things that we could stockpile in our pantry or cabinets or freeze, and only things we would ordinarily buy at some point.

I was originally going to itemize everything like I've done before, but that seemed a bit too daunting.

CVS



Walgreens



Wal-Mart (The old lady in line behind me was so excited to see how much I saved with my coupons. She kept saying how proud she was of me.)



Overall, my out of pocket was $157.83 and the original price of all of this was $284.41, so with sales and coupons I saved $126.58 or 45% of the original price! That's not bad considering how many "staple" items I was able to buy. I didn't buy a single item I didn't have a coupon for except for Ben's security blanket. I even had a coupon for my socks ($1 off any No Nonsense brand item, and I found the socks on clearance so they were only $2 for the pack!)

Here's the best of my purchases, and feel free to ask if you want to know how much anything else was or where the coupons were from.

Free - Diet Dr. Pepper (go here to get your free coupon, can be used anywhere)
Mentos Gum - $0.28 / pack ($1.00 off coupon from All You Magazine - March)
Halls Cough Drops - $0.18 (after $1.00 off coupon from the newspaper ads, I think)
Grands Biscuits - $0.50 (on sale at Wal-Mart for $1, then coupons from newspaper ads)
Glade Oil Warmers - $0 (I had two buy one get one free coupons and the check-out guy said I could use them both, so they were both free. I'm not sure if he was supposed to do that, though.)
Reynolds Foil $0 (Walgreens has an in-store add, plus the add from the paper makes it free)

The rest were various combinations resulting in the following:
4 4-packs of toilet paper for $2 each
6 things of deodorant for $0.99 - $1.24 each
4 large bottles of shampoo for $1.49 - $2.24 each
4 packages of Pillsbury fridge cookies for $1.83 each
6 boxes of Quaker granola bars for $1.50 each

I bought a KC Star at Price Cutter and it was definitely worth it. I believe they have twice the coupons of the Springfield News-Leader, especially for food. Some were duplicates, but then I just bought twice as many of that item if it was a good deal. I've also started taking a Sharpie and writing how much I paid for an item on the item. I think this will help me remember how much I spent the first time, so I can aim for that price when replacing it. We are lucky to have plenty of storage cabinets above our washer and dryer and a nice pantry, or this could get out of hand. I would still like to install some additional shelves in the laundry room, but I'm not going to have another coupon trip this large for a while.

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Mom noticed I didn't put any pictures of Ben up today. We visited great-grandma Hebbert today, but I'm going to write about that tomorrow with pictures, so here's Ben and daddy on the couch.

off dairy

I've been off dairy for quite a while now, and it's killing me. When we began having problems with Ben's stomach, the doctor suggested I cut out dairy to see if it has any affect on him. However, we started the reflux medicine at about the same time. So we don't know which is really helping him.

Before, I would eat dairy all day. I always had milk and cereal for breakfast, a sandwich with cheese for lunch, and cheese sticks or yogurt as snacks during the day. Then, most often dinner would involve at least some form of dairy.

To satisfy my craving for ice cream, I bought generic fat-free cool whip (entirely chemicals, I recognize) and put them between two of Josh's home-made chocolate chip cookies from yesterday and I made myself a fake ice cream sandwich. I made several of these, wrapped them in foil and froze them overnight.

delicious



Granted, I'm still eating some dairy in baked goods, but I'm really restricting my intake. I'll start slowly reintroducing dairy on Thursday and I'm going to have to restrain myself from eating an entire gallon of ice cream.

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Ben's been loosing some of his hair, but he's grown quite the mullet in the back.

frugal dinner - vegetable chicken stir fry

In order to trick Josh into eating more vegetables, I volunteered to cook vegetable chicken stir fry for dinner tonight.

Recently, GO Magazine posted an article titled A Cheapskate's Grocery Guide GO visited six Springfield grocery stores and priced a list of items to compare. The majority of the time Wal-Mart had the best prices, with Dillons having sales that were occasionally cheaper. Dillons had the highest prices on occasion too. Price Cutter was surprisingly high compared to the other choices.

Heeding their advice, I bought my stir fry ingredients at Wal-Mart. Eggs were down to $1.25/dozen (cheaper than the GO article), and brown eggs were $1.54. Frozen stir fry vegetables were $1.83, Tyson boneless, skinless chicken tenders were $4.96 for 1 1/2 lbs, and bean sprouts $1.77. Everything else we had in our pantry and cost very little per serving, but would make this recipe much more expensive to make if you had to buy everything.

1/2 lb. chicken, cut up and cooked ($1.65)
2 eggs scrambled ($0.26)
1/2 bag frozen stir fry vegetables ($0.92)
1/2 bag bean sprouts ($0.89)
1 cup rice cooked (we have a 20 lb. bag from Sam's, so 1 cup costs pennies)
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/2 onion chopped
1 tbs. sesame oil
1 tbs. rice vinegar
3 tbs. brown sugar
pinch cayenne pepper
vegetable oil
1 clove of garlic, minced
1 tbs. minced fresh ginger

I'm not very good at cooking or giving cooking directions, but you can get the idea.
I made the sauce first and let it simmer while I made the rest of the meal.
Sauce: brown sugar, soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame oil, cayenne pepper, ginger
Cook the chicken with the garlic then set it aside
Scramble the egg and set it aside
Heat oil with the onion and once it's cooked, add scrambled eggs and rice to make fried rice
Add the frozen vegetables, bean sprouts, chicken and sauce and cook until the vegetables are done.

Granted the onion, fresh ginger and 1/2 cup of soy sauce cost more than any of the un-priced items on the list, the whole meal easily cost less than $5.00. Basing my cooking on what we already had in our pantry, I only spent $3.72 out of pocket for dinner for two, and the ingredients I have left over can either go back in the pantry or be frozen, so nothing is wasted!

I also LOVE Red Diamond sweet tea and I could easily go through a gallon every other day, but I can't stand to spend that much money on tea. Yesterday I made a gallon pitcher of Lipton iced tea and added 1/2 cup of Splenda and it's not too bad. For the first gallon I used 5 tea bags and I think next time I'll try 8 and 3/4 cup of Splenda because the first gallon tastes a little watered down. Either way, making my own gallons of tea = huge savings compared to buying gallons of tea at the store.

For dessert Josh made chocolate chip cookies and we both ate an excellent meal for just a few dollars without feeling deprived.

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Dody sent me a picture of Ben yesterday at the park.



I called the pediatrician about Ben's persistant but fading eye goop. The nurse told me to massage his tear ducts in addition to giving him his eye drops three times per day and call if his eyes haven't cleared up by Monday. We will also be meeting with the surgeon on Monday to schedule Ben's surgery.

Ben watching me (sleeping while I) cook (a rare sight.)

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

I just finished reading In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. It's a fascinating book about our culture’s food choices. The first half of the book is a little dry, but builds the foundation for why our eating choices need to change. He focuses on nutrients, food myths, evils of the food and drug industries, and how food has become increasingly less "food-like" over time. In the second half of the book, he explains how we actually need to eat. His message is Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Eat food.
Pollan explains that "food" is whole foods such as fruits, vegetables, meats and other items that usually contain five or fewer ingredients. You must know what all of the ingredients are and nothing should be difficult to pronounce. He then proceeds to read the ingredients of Wonderbread and explains how far away from "bread" it actually is. Most store bought bread has so many unknown ingredients and high fructose corn syrup, that it's much more like fluffy sugar and much less like bread.

Not too much.
The author emphasizes that most products that advertise health claims should probably be avoided. Most reduced fat or fat free products are highly processed contain a great deal of synthetic products to make up for the fat loss. Pollan also reflects on the titles added to food such as free range, grass fed, and organic. Buying items from farmer's markets or locally is superior to any of these titles. Free range can mean that chickens were allowed to stand on a dirt plot for an hour or more a day. Grass fed can be applied to any cattle because they were almost all fed grass as calves. Instead, we should look for titles like "pasture raised" or "grass finished" to insure our food is the most nutritious.

Mostly plants.
Pollan is not strictly favoring or opposed to vegetarianism (read his previous book, The Omnivore's Dilemma.) However, he does favor a diet of one meat product per day and the rest fruits and vegetables. Even further than that, the plants should be mostly leaves and less seeds (flour, corn, grains and most of what we eat.) Eating in-season will also provide a more balanced diet and introduce us to foods we would not normally choose.

Some of his most profound statements from this book:

Avoid food that makes health claims.

Shake the hand of the hand that feeds you.
(In buying as much food as you can from farmers.)

Eat only food your great-grandmother would recognize as food.

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Ben is on night three of sleeping well. He sleeps from midnight to 10am waking at four and eight. That is definitely manageable for me and makes my life so much easier than the previous weeks.

Our Gumdrop pacifiers came in today too! the only kind Ben likes



Josh ordered them and didn't realize there were color choices, so we have fifteen pink ones, five orange and five blue. We're fine with that. It's still easier than driving back to the hospital for more.