Eat Scrumptious

I am tracking my family's efforts to reduce and eliminate packaged, processed foods beginning today for a whole year. Beginning today!

Over the weekend, I devoured Cheap Eating: How to Feed Your Family Well and Spend Less by Pat Edwards. This book was published in 1993 and written by what must be the world's best home ec teacher. (Wait - quick check of Pat Edwards bio indicates she is a reporter with a life-long interest in Home Economics who also served as the house mother for troubled boys).

Of course, having just lost my job my twin goals are eating better and spending less. Cheap Eating startled me; turns out, in 1993 Pat Edwards knew all about the things that Michael Pollan wrote about (in much greater detail) in 2007. Must be that journalist-with-an-interest approach.

Number 8 on Pat Edwards' Ten Commandments for Cheap Eating reads: Avoid convenience foods. Look at the labels - they're largely chemicals that nobody can pronounce, understand or digest...If you are willing to spend an extra ten minutes in the kitchen, you can generally prepare a better tasting, more nutritious meal at less than half the price.

Couldn't be better news, if you ask me.

Cheap Eating is also full of tips on recycling (as a means of saving money and the earth) and organic gardening (as a means of saving money and your health).

She opens Chapter 2 with the key to successful Cheap Eating: To eat cheap, you have to think cheap, and planning has always been a foundation for saving money.

She suggests the following steps:
- prepare your weekly menu
- list absolutely every ingredient necessary for the weekly menu
- go through your cabinets, pantry, refrigerator, and freezer crossing off everything you already have (thoroughness at this point can help to avoid extra trips to the store)
- add non-food items like toilet paper and laundry detergent
(And then, once you have compared the regular prices at three different stores, you are ready to shop.)

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This morning, we had oatmeal from our super-budget-friendly 42 ounce cylinder of Quaker Oats. Cheap and healthful stuff there (though, technically, this must be a processed food, yes?). For lunch, we are having leftover veggie soup I made in my Vita Mix yesterday (thrown together recipe below). Dinner will be today's big adventure.

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Veggie soup:
I gathered up the various veggies I had in my fridge (onion, celery, carrots, red pepper, yellow pepper, green pepper and broccoli), some garlic, a can of dark red kidney beans and 2 cans of diced tomatoes. I chopped and sauteed onion, carrot and celery. I put these things in the Vita-Mix - onion, celery, can of tomatoes - with juice - garlic, a 1/2 cup of kidney beans and a little bit of water and blended until smooth, then added the blend to the sauteing vegetables. I chopped and added all the bell peppers, added the rest of the kidney beans, and some Mrs Dash seasoning. I let it cook until all the veggies were tender. It was crazy good - kid and hubby approved. Also I added a little Sriracha chili sauce to my bowl, which punched up the flavor even more.

Controversial it may be, but the feds were sure on to something when they sought unfettered access to (suspicious) citizens' library book-borrowing records. No doubt the most rookie detective could see a pattern in the books I selected last night.

Cheap Eating: How to Feed Your Family Well and Spend Less by Pat Edwards and Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping by Judith Levine. Of course, I am hoping to be gainfully employed before a whole year goes by and I am not all that big a shopper anyway. But, it's supposed to be very funny and I could use a laugh and some impulse purchase resistance tips.

I also got Cooking the Whole Foods Way by Christina Pirello and Polish Heritage Cookery by Robert & Maria Strybel; looking to maximize my Vita-Mix use and learn a thing or two from the 800+ page book about what the Polish food culture is (was).

My great-grandmother was Rosalia Dembinski. She was born in Germany, so my grandmother (her daughter) insists Rosie was German. But back then Germany saw borders less as a boundary and more as a dare. Plus, I am pretty sure Rosie is the source of the Polish phrases gramma has been keeping us in line with all these years.

And my hubby's mother's family is all Polish, so these facts (coupled with the easy - and free - access to this incredibly well-researched book on Polish heritage cookery) made me decide to investigate this food culture first.

I also picked up a tip book on having a successful blog (meaning, you know, someone else actually knows about it).

Just yesterday I posted about how one of the challenges I face in cutting easy, fast and packaged foods out of my family's diet is that I work full time and often travel. And then this very morning, I joined the ranks of the nation's unemployed.

So now a new challenge: eating Real Food without increasing our food budget (and maybe even decreasing our food budget?). I know - Rule of Thumb #5 is Pay More, Eat Less. Well, maybe by focusing on the 'eat less' part, I can still buy higher quality food and break even.

Interesting how meal planning is the answer to both a super busy schedule and a reduced family income.

(So glad I got my Vita-Mix before my pink slip!)

I have a few things working in my favor as I embark on this Real Food journey.

I have ready access to fresh fruits and vegetables year 'round. And for at least four months each year there are Farmer's Markets just a short bike ride from my house. My family can go weeks without eating meat and not really notice, so increasing vegetable eating will primarily mean reducing our pasta consumption. Seems easier than swapping out meat as the star of dinner.

My hubby just celebrated a birthday of significance, which has him on high-alert for health issues. He is in terrific shape, maintained by playing full-court basketball about 4 times each week. But he worries about what's going on that cannot be seen (and hesitates to have his worries confirmed by any medical probes). His concern allows me to offer him more healthful breakfast and dinner options without too much protest.

My daughter, who just turned 12, has been schooled about proper nutrition since fifth grade. Her 6th grade health class watched SuperSize me http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me. She has not requested fast food of any kind since (except for Wendy's - that darn commercial that says 'Way better than fast food. It's Wendy's!' I guess has her believing that it is not actually fast food). She is eager to eat whatever recipes she selects from a cook book. And she is pretty open to eating whatever you put in front of her. Unless, it includes beans. Or asparagus. Oh, or seafood. Not so much as a fishstick for this kid. One sneaky trick I have used over the years with her is to blend beans into whatever soup or sauce I am making. If she cannot actually see a bean, she never complains.

And, I just invested in a Vita Mix, which is so powerful, it can blend anything into oblivion. This machine has given my hubby and daughter a jump start on increasing fruit consumption (replacing sugary cereal consumption) with incredibly good smoothies in the morning. After I make all-fruit smoothies for them, I toss a bunch of greens in the Vita-Mix and make a green smoothie (though commonly it is purple due to the blueberries or blackberies winning the pigment battle) for myself.

Hubby and kid will not touch a smoothie that has spinach or romaine in it, no matter how much I say "Mmmmmmm....." when I am drinking mine.

The Vita-Mix gives me one additional extraordinary power, which should help guide us down the Real Food path. It grinds grain. So instead of having to use store-bought, bleached, refined, white, nutritionless flour, I can buy whole wheat berries and grind my own flour fresh at home before baking.

And in the biggest picture, we are fortunate that we are seeking to maintain the good health we know we are lucky to have. We are genetically blessed - neither my husband or I have heart disease, diabetes, alzheimer's or commonly inherited cancers in our families. No one is immune to any of these, of course, regardless of how pristine one's family tree. (And maybe we're at some extra risk because we're never really on the lookout for anything specific.) But having 96-year-old grandparents living independently sure does make one smug about her gene pool.

We also have the same challenges many others face. We both work full time and my job often requires travel on weekends. My daughter is involved in activites outside of school, too, which means our schedules are never the same day to day or week to week. Meal-planning and routine food shopping is going to help, I think.

So, my family is on board with this effort and I have access to everything I need to achieve it. It's gonna be easy, right?

Kind of like how Christians have the "11th Commandment" - Do Unto Others - that encompasses all of the previous ten, Michael Pollan has recently offered a one-size-fits-all rule for eating Real Food: 'Don't buy any food you've ever seen advertised - the real food is not being advertised - and that's all you really need to know."

"Summer summer fruit, it wouldn't be summer withouuuuuut 'em" "Got milk?" and "The Incredible Edible Egg" are ad jingles and slogans that have me wondering if fruit, milk and eggs are disqualified as real food because their respective suppliers' associations spent some portion of the members' annual dues to advance the industry through advertising. One the one hand, this is blatant advertisement. On the other, I know my great-great-grandmothers would recognize each as food.

This puzzle leads me back to Pollan's previous nine Rules of Thumb suggested in his article Unhappy meals http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html. I aim to follow these in my quest to eat (and to feed my family) Real Food. Paraphrased in parts, and directly copied in others, from the article:

1. Eat food. Or, don't eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.

2. Avoid products that come bearing health claims. Don't take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health. (The silence of the yams...I love that.)

3. Especially avoid food products with ingredients that are unfamiliar, unpronounceable, more than five in number or that contain high-fructose corn syrup.

4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible.

5. Pay more, eat less. Paying more for food well grown in good soils will contribute not only to your health (by reducing exposure to pesticides) but also the the health of other who may not be able to afford that sort of food: the people who grow it and the people downwind and downstream of the farms where it is grown.

6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Scientists may disagree on what it is that is so good for us about plants but they do agree that they're probably really good for you.

7. Eat more like the French. or the Japanese. Or the Italians. or the Greek. People who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are.

8. Cook. And if you can , plant a garden. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting process of providing for our sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be cheap and easy; that food is fuel and not communion.

9. Eat like and omnivore. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases.

These nine steps seem to me a reliable guide for reducing the processed/packaged foods we rely heavily on in our house. Some will be easier than others - I love to cook and have started a (limited) garden. On the other hand, if I were French, or Japanese or Italian or Greek or a member of any identifiable culture, I might know a tradition to turn to first. But it should be a fun experiment to pick some of the nationalities we are rumored to have in our history and research what my great-great-grandmothers might have served to their families.