Eating well

In an effort to become healthier. I made some major changes to my eating habits in the past few months and unfortunately fortunately for my husband he ended up tagging along.

Although we’ve always tried to eat well, we are far from food purists in our home. I do cook a significant portion of our food from scratch, but we regularly consume ready-to-eat cereals, crackers, etc. I try to buy better quality food and even organic if I can reasonably justify it. Since there are only two of us, it is way easier to spend more on things because they don’t have to go nearly as far. I can buy a box of Special K chips for me and they last a long time. When the kids were home I must admit I cheated and bought boxes of those ready made meals {Hungry Man} because let’s face it sometimes it was just easier.

Buying better food and eating real food does have its disadvantages though. One of them is financial. Once you become accustomed to eating real food that isn’t laden with chemicals, it is almost impossible to go back to the other, cheaper stuff. I’d like to find more ways to cut corners on our food budget, but at what cost? The options become either continue spending more or completely eliminating the item from our pantry.

The other downside is that when you try to revisit those favourite foods from your childhood, you find they just aren’t what you remember. I recently had an old-time craving for Kraft Dinner.

It was something I enjoyed when I was younger. I made it and was honestly really looking forward to it since I hadn’t had it in years. I could not even finish it. The chemical taste of the “cheese” was terrible and the amount of salt - ugh!  I could not believe how terrible the dinner tasted to me and I ended up not finishing it and threw the rest of it out.

I never set out to become a food snob. I simply wanted to feed us better foods. But I find that the more we move in that direction, the harder it is to do anything but eat real foods. Plain yogurt blended with real frozen fruit? Yum. Pre-sweetened yogurt? Gag. Homemade brownies? Yum. Sugar-laden boxed brownie mixes? Gag. To be sure I can still find some mixes that work for me. But they are becoming fewer and farther between.

So I’m guessing the beloved Alphaghetti’s from my childhood are probably a no, too.

Blessings