Feb 20 2012

Go get something to eat. Stop eating all the food!

Like most families we are really good at burning through the grocery budget. My husband is a master at making a budget work so that is usually okay. I’ve told him that should be his job, giving families their budget plan for the year. He is THAT good. He can take a piddly amount of money and make it work for the month and still let you have $20 of fun money left. When you don’t make much that is a big deal.

When Husband was in the Army, I quit work to stay home with our first baby. At the time I didn’t have a budget. We were on WIC to help out and with just us it was easier to spend less on food. Then we had another baby and WIC increased to help so we didn’t budget. I’m so thankful for programs like WIC. We’ve come across some of my husband’s old pay stubs from the Army and I’m not sure how we made it on one income. Actually, we did leave the military with a hefty load of credit card debt so I guess I know how we made it.

5 years ago he was in college full time and working at a bookstore full time. We had 4-5 people in our household then so there was a good bit of eating being done. My weekly grocery budget then was $100. I hit it most of the time. Our food choices were different and it was really easy to coupon clip to a lower grocery bill. Then college was over and everything started changing.

Husband got a job with the government as a scientist so he made decent money. We bought our first house (at the height of the housing boom-oops) and life continued to be good. Then I found out about raw dairy and all the other food choices trickled in over the next few years. My grocery budget slowly crept up along the way.

Now, my grocery budget is $300 per week. $1200 per month. That is insane. I am not feeding my family anything that you can’t buy at any grocery store (except for the raw dairy depending on where you live). The quality of our food has changed and I rarely can find a coupon I can clip. One of the grocery stores here will sometimes have a coupon for a couple dollars off produce. I shop at the farmer’s market for produce and get eggs from a friend. Our meat source occasionally has specials on the grassfed meat we buy. I buy bulk nuts and nut butters (when I can). I get local honey from a health store by the pound. I make 95% of our food from scratch. I shop multiple stores to make sure I get the best price. We eat out at max twice a month. I menu plan and shop to a list. I feel like given the dietary changes and choices we’ve made that I’m doing pretty good. My grocery bill is still beaten to a whimpering pulp every week.

The only thing I don’t make from scratch are the corn tortilla chips my husband likes and the occasional packages of gluten free pasta. Where is the money going?

Let’s see a rundown of what I buy (not weekly, a random total so you can see it isn’t anything exotic or expensive):

Fruit (apples, bananas, grapes, pears, oranges, berries, peaches, pineapple, frozen fruit for smoothies, dried fruit).
Vegetables (sweet potatoes, potatoes, garlic, onions, mushrooms, peppers, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, spinach, lettuce, tomatoes, celery, zucchini, squashes, peas).
Nuts & seeds (almonds, pecans, walnuts, sunflower seeds, pistachios)
Wild caught fish, Grassfed, organic meat & eggs (ground beef, roast, whole chickens, pork chops, bacon, pork sausage)
Deli meat and cheese (ham off the bone, muenster, colby jack, havarti)
Raw dairy (milk, sour cream, kefir, yogurt, cream, butter)
Occasional helpers and treats (corn tortilla chips, gf pasta, organic popcorn kernels)
Spices
Pet food
Household supplies, from soap to toilet paper
Baking flours and powders (often in bulk from a local farm group or costco)
Odds and ends (flax, honey, olive oil, virgin coconut oil, pickles, olives etc.)

There is no extra fluff in there. Is there? Feel free to point it out if I’m missing something here. I don’t buy boxes of crackers and cereal or prepackaged or processed foods. I don’t buy fruit snacks and candy or junk filler for lunches or between meals. I rarely buy extra treats like ice cream (even then I will only buy it $3.00 or less and it has to be Breyer’s with a short ingredient list. I’m no fun to grocery shop with). I only stray from my list if there is a great deal on something that can wait until we use it (nut butters for example) or if I have no food so kids are starving when we shop. Even then that means they pick out a Greek yogurt or something good-ish but cheap.

I try to keep lots of eggs on hand since it is an easy food when people are hungry and you can do so much with them. Aren’t they pretty, fresh from a washing?

For some reason I thought that taking sugar (except local honey and maple syrup) and all grains out of our diets would level everyone out and people wouldn’t eat all the time. I actually thought our food budget would go down. Instead, it almost feels like we, the kids especially, eat more now, at least more often. Perhaps because without grains and sugar we feel different when we are done eating. We don’t have that heavy sit back wishing it was polite to unbutton your pants type full. We now have a satisfied feeling instead of the full feeling we think signifies we are done. In fact I think we are satisfied sooner eating the way we do now so we walk away only to return later looking for more food.

I’m good with how we are eating. Although, this last week was a bit of a slack week with more gluten free grains than I’d like. My oldest said tonight that we ate too many grains this week and she didn’t like how she felt. She said she feels very blah and her belly hurts when she eats grains even thought they are gluten free. Maybe the trick to having a smaller budget is to eat things that make you feel crappy so you don’t feel like eating more. I don’t think I can make my budget smaller again. My brain is just going to have to get used to more food, more good food, more often. I hope Husband’s magic budget can handle that.

Feb 13 2012

Bouncing off the walls in a rainbow haze.

Just so you know, I’m going to go completely overboard with links in this post. It is a topic that really makes me mad so I tend to get diarrhea of the mouth..or keyboard…or whatever it would be in blogland. I’ll try to pair it up with words where appropriate but if I can’t find a place I’ll place it randomly because I can. My favorite excuse.

I never thought I’d make it out of ages 2-4 with my youngest. She was equal parts adorable squishy awesome and pull my hair out make me crazy. Not in the normal way that toddlers make you want to pull out your hair. I’ve babysat a lot and was also a nanny for a few years. Something just wasn’t right with my kid. I was concerned she could have a hearing problem because it seemed like she did not hear me. Not that she wasn’t trying. I told my husband it was like she had cotton in her ears. That made for a very long day. She’d go to bed and it would take SO long for her to go to sleep if she was alone. Out of desperation I’d finally just go lay with her to help keep her still and quiet but of course that just had her depending on me to fall asleep. Even laying with her wasn’t easy. She couldn’t stop moving and talking and touching the walls or just being awake. You are two years old and have been running all day long with no nap. You should be tired!! I know I was.

She stopped napping around 1 1/2 years old. By then she was on a full food diet and was taking in who knows how many different colors. Nap time was as painful as regular bedtime with the added bonus of my other two girls needing my attention. We homeschool so there was nobody else out there watching my kids for me. I would finally get her to sleep after time was sucked away and find out it was close to her nap needing to be done in order for her to be able to make a reasonable bedtime. I finally just gave up. We quit naps and moved her bedtime to 7pm. Over time awful bedtime just became the new normal. I talked to my daughter at one point about bedtime. She said that she just felt buzzy inside. She said she just felt like she couldn’t be still. How annoying for my sweet baby.

I don’t really remember when I first heard about food dyes changing kid behavior. I do know I didn’t act immediately. I guess I was holding on to me being wrong and that she was just an active, slightly difficult child. This didn’t make sense and I’m really glad I finally saw that and did something.

When we started reading labels for food colors my whole world slipped. They were in everything! To give you an idea of what the dyes are in (and the state of our diet at the time-ha!) these were some standouts.

Marshmallows. WHITE marshmallows have blue food dye. After going to 4 stores we finally found that walmart’s store brand didn’t have any artificial colors so I could still spend $1 instead of the $4.50 for the gourmet types. I just wanted to make rice krispies treats and have some s’mores at a campfire.
You know those soft and fluffy pop open cans of crescent rolls in the refrigerated section? <sigh> We loved those.
Ice cream. A friend brought us ice cream from a local place and it was so fun and delicious. It was bright blue and had pop rocks in it too! When we get ice cream as a treat now, we have a few flavors by Breyer’s we buy since there is a small amount of ingredients and none are dyes.
Box blueberry muffin mix. I am a baking nut but wasn’t always as concerned about homemade only so I used to buy these occasionally. They were super fast (although not much faster than homemade) and everyone gobbled them up. Too bad there were no blueberries in them.
You do know maraschino cherries aren’t really that red, right?
Any kind of kid fun flavored, colorful yogurt that any kind of tv character is promoting.
Toothpaste. ADA approved? Ha!
Jello and pudding. Turns out pistachio pudding isn’t bright green naturally. Who knew? Actually, turns out homemade pistachio pudding is SO much better tasting so I am no longer sad about this.
Pop tart? Breakfast bar? So much for starting the day out right.
I’m just going to lump candy, gummies, fruit strips and pretty much any bright, unnaturally colored food you see right here.
Condiments, jams, jellies and dill relish.
Breads, buns, cereals, soups, boxed meals.
I read today that they spray oranges to make them more orange. The fruit. The fruit named orange. What? (See? When you shop for oranges, you’re looking for a bright, deeply colored orange. You don’t want a yellowish orange, because that tells you it’s not ripe; if it’s not ripe, it hasn’t developed all its medicine. (That’s one reason why so much of the produce available in grocery stores lacks real nutrition these days — it’s all picked before it has a chance to ripen on the plant.)
Growers know about this color preference, so some of them — in Florida for example — hijack that instinctual process by dipping some of their oranges in a cancer-causing red dye that makes the peel look more orange. The FDA has banned that dye from use in foods, because it is a carcinogen, but they say it’s okay to dip an orange in it, because people don’t eat the peel.)
Medicine! Grape, berry, bubblegum, the sticky sweet syrups are all colored to match their flavor. Good luck finding dye-free at 11:30pm as your kid is burning up at home. For the most part we’ve switched to natural medicines so this isn’t as much of a problem as it used to be.

Looking at my list now, knowing how most of the foods make our bodies react makes it seem like I was trying to poison my kids. A few years back I was doing what I could with the budget I had. I felt so thinly stretched trying to get into a homeschool groove, stay on top of the mess we create by being home most of the day and try not to lose my mind with my littlest. By the time I removed dyes from our diets we had been drinking organic milk and eating organic eggs and chicken. I know I felt like I was doing great. I was. I just needed to do better.

We had not had any food dyes (yes, I’m going to keep throwing links in) in our bodies (other than soaps, I wasn’t there yet) for over a week when we went to visit my in laws. I had my two oldest and my husband had the 4 yr old. He was running to Target and they met us at their house. While there the 6 & 8 yr old were calmly coloring spread out on the floor. Then Husband and youngest arrived in full chaotic splendor. She was bouncing through the door. At first it didn’t click what was going on. My mother in law commented that she was full of energy. With narrowed eyes I asked Husband what he fed her. “She didn’t eat anything. She only had a raspberry icee at Target.” The words left his mouth and he said “Oh, it was blue.” It was easy NOT to be mad because it was our first solid evidence that we were on the right track.

For awhile after that two most common phrases in our family were, “Did she have food coloring?” or “What did she eat?”. About 90% of the time when it was asked we’d find out that she had eaten something with artificial colors in it. One time we went to a birthday party and they had cupcakes. She had a cupcake with the tiniest amount of sprinkles, I even wiped as many off as I could in the time I had to pass it to her. As she was all hyped up that night I thought “Thanks for the reminder!”. That is what every incidence became, a reminder.

My older girls didn’t have as much of a reaction to the artificial colors. I did notice they were able to hold their focus better. School has become much easier to keep people on task. Reading food labels is natural to us all now. One day in the candy aisle an elderly woman complimented us on reading labels. How great it was of me to get them in the habit. At the time I smiled and gave her a kind response. As we left, I realized that this big thing we were doing, in her eyes, was just life for us.

Things are so different now with the removal of this one set of ingredients. I didn’t remove just one color because it is worse. We removed them all for everyone. If I’m not willing to feed it to my babies then I don’t want it in me either. I can now expect a decent amount of listening. I can expect that she will not freak out and tantrum on the floor. She can put her laundry away and clean her entire room without being asked and told and hand held and walked through the entire thing so I might as well just have done it myself. She will ask to do more schoolwork than any of my kids. Her attention span isn’t limited to tv zoning out. When I feel like she has cotton in her ears she’ll tell me she isn’t listening. That isn’t ideal but at least she is honest and not just incapable of hearing us.

I can expect that she will be sleeping soon or is able to remain quiet waiting for sleep to come. I swear, bedtime has been the greatest gift from this. My husband once said he’d rather eat dirty cat litter than do bedtime. I only ever called him on that once or twice when I was at the end of my rope. She doesn’t always go to bed and not ever get back up or call us. Most of the time she will go in and lay quietly until she can settle herself down to sleep. I keep them all fully involved when it comes to pretty much anything that concerns them. She knew she’d have to do the work to get used to falling asleep alone. Bedtime has ruined so many of our days. I would spend all day long thinking we should have more babies because they are so awesome! So much fun! Then bedtime came. I was ready to never deal with kids again. Until I woke up and then I would start it all over again. I hated feeling that I didn’t like my kid and the last thing she would hear from me would be an angry, frustrated or defeated voice.

Now, while bedtime isn’t perfect (she is still a 6 yr old!) it is so much better. I find that I actually hold onto how bedtime was more than they do. I’d become SO used to bedtime being a major struggle that it is hard for me to let bedtime flow. I’m working on it. Until I get it right I’m so happy to be able to send my baby off to sleep with a kind voice and kisses all over her adorable face.

Feb 11 2012

Digging out of the overwhelming.

How do you handle it when you are handed a giant project with lots of little pieces you have to figure out what to do with? Half of the time, I jump in head first and kick butt. Half of the time, I freeze. I just stand and stare at it until the wheels in my brain turn long enough to decide where to start. Unfortunately, that usually takes awhile so I just go read a book. Good solution, huh?

When we first took gluten out of our diet I was frozen in motion. I made all the meals but I just didn’t know where to start, so I didn’t. I took ALL grains out except for gluten free oats. Those were still good enough for breakfast. At least one meal was easy! I won’t tell you how long it took before everyone was tired of oatmeal and I make a fab oatmeal. Then I bought some Pamela’s pancake mix. I can do this! But with 5 people it gets expensive. I can’t do this! For dinner I just didn’t make anything with grains. I would make meat, a vegetable and then a sweet or white potato or squash to heavy things up. I think that is what feels like it is missing when wheat first leaves the diet. That heavy feeling we get when we load up on pasta or bread. I figured if I fed heavier sitting foods nobody would notice pasta was missing. That didn’t really work for long.

Life (along w/ my awesome husband and his job) had granted me the beautiful gift of a trip to England to see my best friend. I went feeling great. I took my enzymes with me just in case but didn’t know that I’d use them much. Ha. A week before I left I told my husband that I could finally stand to look in the mirror. My face was no longer puffy and I felt like I could finally see myself. I packed 2 containers of nuts and raisins for the flight there and home. I brought along a few other gluten free treats and I thought I was set. I did fine at first. The morning after I got there was rough but the enzymes helped me out. We hadn’t been THAT long without wheat so my reaction wasn’t as bad as it is now. My week went by fast and before I knew it I was home and browsing pictures. My face was puffy in every picture but one. The only picture with MY face (the not puffy one) was the day I got there and hadn’t had any wheat. My motivation was building.

We went through a couple gluten free breads (flavorless and cardboard are words that come to mind) before my brain finally caught up and I started to take back control of my kitchen. My first thought was that I didn’t want to put a new nothing (rice) in place of the old nothing (wheat). I figured I’d just end up with more flavorless cardboard. One day I went to our grocery store and bought one of each of the flours in their gluten free aisle. Sorry, bank account! I figured that arming myself with the necessary materials I’d be able to handle whatever recipe I found. What I needed was a bread or pasta or both that were more than just some rice blends. Pasta looked pretty pointless. Time to find a bread recipe. That led me on a windy road of recipe hunting. Too dense, too thin, too bland, too much work, too not bready-what a pain! I did find one eventually that we all loved and wasn’t just a bunch of rice. I finally had a fingertip hold on what I felt was safety.

I had 10 or so books checked out from the library and bought this and this. I jumped in head first at this point. What I’d come to realize is that I didn’t have to match all our old meals. My husband is a huge pasta fan so I guess I thought I needed to keep all the pasta coming. That was wrong and so expensive. The pasta I did keep on hand was Tinkyada and Peacock. At first I’d just randomly buy 6-8 packages of pasta. I was blowing through my grocery budget without a second thought. I’m certain my husband was super happy about this. I found a place locally I could buy flours in bulk. I also found asian groceries were a great source for gluten free items. Tapioca flour and sweet rice were especially cheap there. Plus, I found interesting vegetables and random rice based snacks as well as candy without food coloring. It was like my birthday!

Backwards as I usually am, I finally started menu planning. Actually, first we opened a separate checking account just for household shopping, mainly groceries. Apparently, I was not so great at not using all the money for food and food was not as important to my husband as it was to me. I think that is because he has to actually go to a place full of people and work equipment and you know, make the money. Then I just go spend it all? No fair! Okay, so now I have a checking account. I officially have my big girl pants on. Menu plan is done and shopping list made. I still spend almost all of my grocery budget every week. It’s no puny amount to me either but 5 people and 6 pets eat a LOT of food.

But, I did it. Baby steps and we are here. I have officially changed our entire food world around when I thought it would take forever and I’d die of frustration. I didn’t just change it I fixed it. I took what was broken and instead of taking it to eh, ok, I took it to oh mmm..yummy. Other than the bread I did the same thing recently when I took out grains. I kept the bread recipe since I’m just not perfect and sometimes I am just tired and want what I want. So I keep the few gluten free items we love knowing that the rest of the plan is in place. I have only shopped once without menu planning and it messed me up for two solid weeks. No more!

If you find yourself in the middle of a major overhaul here are some things that helped me. Our family sat down and we listed all the foods we liked and all the meals we liked. With this I could figure out what needed new, gf recipes or just some tweaking to fit with our new diet. I went through my new gf cookbooks and made a list for each book the recipes I wanted to make. I kept all these food lists in a notebook for quick reference for days when menu planning was kicking my butt. That is basically every other week. Make sure when you write up your menu plan you list breakfast, lunch and dinner. When I first started I figured I’d just wing it for breakfast and lunch since I’m good at that. I was left scrambling for those meals. So much for winging it.

Hopefully this will help. If it doesn’t, should I ever lose my memory I have a good place to find my own way back to my kitchen. Happy recipe tweaking!