the news gave a daily allergy forecast, which was new to me.  i had days and days where i couldn’t function, my head was so stuffy and congested, my eyes were constantly watering as though i had spent the morning watching “The Notebook” over and over and over.  i hate taking medicine, but i took Benadryl like it was my daily vitamin, and still, nothing helped.

when we moved to Des Moines, i was curious as to how my allergies would be affected, and at first all was great.  it was still cold here in April (it even snowed 2 days after we arrived, which was our first snowfall of the year!) so everything was great until the trees started to bloom and drop pollen all over my car.  i had a few pretty bad days, and since then i’ve been fine.

now the flowers have bloomed, the grass is high, everything SHOULD be making me feel horrible, but I don’t.  I realized this week, that I noticed a change when we started purchasing local honey!

Dustin has always told me that we should buy local honey to help with our allergies, but it’s so expensive!  Especially when you can get a little bottle of that honey bear honey for about a dollar.  plus, i don’t really like honey, so it really wasn’t a priority to me.

But one day in early May, I found a bottle of local honey in a grocery store, and it was really inexpensive.  I thought I would give it a shot, mostly for Dustin and the kids, but one day Julian and I had made homemade biscuits, and I tried a little honey and i was hooked!  It tasted SO great, and I started *needing* it almost every day.  I found a new favorite breakfast, and I really think that making a small amount of local honey a part of my (almost) daily diet, is really what has helped with my allergies.  And in the end, local honey is WAY cheaper than Benadryl, so I’m happy

my favorite, no-cook breakfast:

1-2 pieces of toasted Ezekiel sprouted grain bread OR whole wheat bread  (the Ezekiel bread is fairly expensive, but with the rising costs of flour, it is only about $1 more than our usual whole wheat bread from the store)

1 Tbsp. of natural peanut butter (see note at bottom)

1/2 -1 tsp. local honey

raspberries (if i don’t have raspberries, i usually have apples or strawberries instead)

walnuts

a note about natural peanut butter:

there are a lot of natural peanut butter’s on the market now.  you can find peanut butter made from peanuts only (and even mix your own peanuts into butter at stores like Whole Foods), some contain salt, a few contain “natural sugars”, some contain palm oil.

here is an informative/funny article about natural peanut butter that explains why your good peanut butter has a lot of oil formed on top.   if you’ve ever bought Smucker’s natural peanut butter, which is one of the easiest natural pb’s to find on grocery store shelves, you opened the lid to find about 2 Tbsp. of oil just sitting on top.

the first time my mom saw this, she promptly poured the oil into the trash can!  (i was tempted to do the same)   of course, by the time you get to the middle of the jar, the peanut butter is too dried out to spread onto the sidewalk, much less a delicate piece of bread!

after several years of buying this stuff and trying to mix it up with a butter knife, i had an “aha!” moment.  i got my hand mixer, with one blade only, and inserted it deeply into the jar, blending on low, speeding up to medium, and then back to low until it is very smooth and evenly distributed.   this method allows us to use the entire jar, with no dry pb 

so if you’ve given up on natural peanut butter, maybe try one more time.  you might grow to love it!  (but don’t love it TOO much, it is still a high calorie food, and one of my worst weaknesses.  if given the chance, I DEFINITELY would have invented the Reese’s cup)

disclaimer: if you have very bad allergies, be careful experimenting with local honey.  this article gives some good advice for using local honey to help with allergies.

So step one, you have to throw out the oreos, dorito’s, and other naughty foods that you’ve accumulated since your last menstrual cycle.  well, maybe you don’t want the food to go to WASTE, so you eat most of them, throw the final handful of chip crumbs in the trash and then feel quite pleased at your first effort to rid your home of junk food.

Step two, you head to the grocery store.  Head held high, you walk briskly past the candy aisle with nary a glance, straight to the produce section and begin to fill your cart with only healthy items.  You feel so much healthier, just LOOKING at this cart full of colorful, healthy food, that you don’t stop at the standard lettuce and tomatoes.  Maybe this time you’ll actually LIKE the taste of radishes, so you grab a bunch of those.  Or this colorful, prickly looking fruit.  It looks SO cool, so grab 3 of those and add them to your beautiful stash.

You get home with all of your healthy food, stash it all away in your produce bins, but of course it overflows out of them because you are just so darn healthy, you shut the door and forget about that food for now. But come dinner time, you open the fridge and find:

there is nothing to eat.

nothing quick anyways.

You wistfully think back to how triumphantly you strolled past those frozen pizzas, the “healthy” ones even, sure you would never need them because from now on you are making all of your pizzas from scratch.  If only you had a frozen pizza, dinner would be ready in a few minutes, but no.  You stare into your fridge, at it’s mound of healthy, yet inconvenient, food, and throw a couple of yogurts at the kids while you figure out what to do with some of this stuff, finally deciding to beg your sweet husband to pick up some Chinese food.  your diet will have to start tomorrow.

2 weeks later, you find yourself tossing bag after bag of rotten produce (when did you think those prickly things would be a good idea?) into the trash.

Now while I don’t actually believe that a shopping cart of produce will make you a better person, I do believe that a cart of healthy foods that are actually CONSUMED, will improve our diets.  But how do you use it up before it goes bad?  How do you make it as easy to prepare as, say, a box of mac n cheese?

The answer is so simple: prepare all of your veggies and fruits before you are actually ready to use them.

But won’t this deplete the veggies of their precious vitamins?

Well, yes.  Proper storage is essential to prevent oxidation that occurs when fruit and vegetables are cut up.

However, what good is owning veggies that don’t get eaten at all?  Is limp broccoli and moldy peaches that end up in the compost heap a better alternative to veggies that have been prepared earlier in the week?

While I don’t usually have time after a shopping trip to tend to the weekly dinner prep, I have plenty of time in the evening and it feels so good to have a weeks worth of food washed, chopped and stored away ready for use.

Here’s what we have this week:

Carrots and broccoli, peeled and chopped for a stir-fry

Strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries, washed, patted dry and stored separately for snacks, desserts and breakfasts

Watermelon, chopped in the fridge (frozen watermelon treats in the freezer)

potatoes, peeled and sliced and soaked in water (to prevent browning) for french fries and mashed potatoes

asparagus (on sale this week, so i stocked up) washed and shopped for dinner, while the remainder was blanched and frozen for upcoming months when asparagus won’t be so affordable.

(i covered the asparagus, and i soaked it in a bit of water too.  i wasn’t sure how to properly store it, but we ate it tonight and it was wonderful, so i’ll probably do that in the future)

if you like salads, you can prep everything that you like in your salads and save them in individual containers for a nice grab n go lunch (don’t add the dressing until you’re ready to eat).

you can prep veggies for stir-frys, casseroles, salads, fruit for fruit salads, desserts or just simple snacking.  the possibilities are great, and I’ll share one example of how this can be a great time saver.

This week, I got very very sick.  It came on so suddenly, I started to heat a pan for dinner and shortly after, I was doubled over in pain.

I told Dustin that I needed to lie down for a minute, and that minute turned into about an hour.

Normally had this happened during dinner time, Dustin would have had to call in a pizza, or make due with PB&J’s.  But since I had chopped up all the food ahead of time, I was able to tell him, “The potatoes are already cut up for fries, the asparagus is clean and chopped, just saute it in the pan with a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper , the Boca burgers are in the freezer, no mustard on Julian’s”.

Dinner took no longer than normal, a somewhat healthy meal was served, and as a bonus, I didn’t have to cook it!

you can’t really tell in this picture, but there are a few other items that we make ahead and keep in the fridge during the week, including tomato sauce for pasta and pizzas, black beans or pinto beans for soups, tacos, burritoes, etc., and brown rice for stir-frys, taco/burritoes, or rice pudding, Dustin’s specialty.

What can you do today to make dinner time easier on yourself tomorrow?

here’s a great tip for watermelon, honeydew melon, cantaloupe, pretty much any melon.

so during the summer when melon is REALLY cheap, or if you’ve got leftover watermelon from your 4th of July picnic and don’t want to throw it out, try this.  i bet you (and your kids) will love it.

take a melon baller.  i don’t have one, so i used a little teaspoon sized measuring spoon.

my make-shift melon baller

scoop several balls of melon, and place them on a cookie sheet or plate or cutting board, and freeze.  (this step is important, because if you freeze the melon balls in a large clump, they’ll stay that way, and be more of a melon “mass” than a melon “ball”.

(i’m having serious issues with some of the odd words that i am having to use to describe this process.)

after frozen, place in big ziploc bags or freezable containers and now you have these little frozen treats that make great healthy snacks, year round.

frozen watermelon balls

i haven’t tried it  yet, but I want to try mixing up some frozen watermelon in the blender or food processor to see if it comes out a little sorbet-ish.  i’ll keep you posted if it works

the first post is always overwhelming. i’ve been blogging for well over 3 years now, but starting a new blog is so daunting. there’s so much to say, but i’m just going to start with this one tiny bite. (that is how you eat an elephant, afterall. one bite at a time. but please don’t eat the elephants, it’s just an expression).

through this blog, i hope to record small snippets of our family’s food life, share inspirational links to articles, photos, podcasts, recipes and books that pertain to good eating and good living. i also found my personal blog starting to become more of a food blog. i know that a lot of my readers may not be as interested to see what i ate for dinner, (who wouldn’t find that tantalizing? ), so i felt like a new blog dedicated to food was the way to go!

a little about me: i am a full time mama to 3 wild monkey children and wife to a very hard working man, who looks a bit like Woody from Toy Story. which is totally hot, right?

i spend my days doing mommy and wifely things in our new home in Iowa, while squeezing in all the time that I can for photography, reading, blogging, cooking and baking. in the past few months, i’ve become very interested in Vegetarian cooking, which is so foreign to this meat & potatoes girl, but i love it.

although, i would never presume to call myself a Vegetarian at this point. i am still working out my feelings on this subject, but i just wanted to give you a heads up, since most of my food talk will not involve meat. and while i do enjoy reading about healthy living and cooking, i am not at all claiming to be an expert in this area. i have a STRONG affinity for all things sweet and carb centered, i miss bacon terribly, i love to bake, i dread exercise, i forget to take my vitamins, i am frustratingly overweight, and i have been known to make a lovely healthy meal for my children while sneaking bites of Pillsbury cookie dough from the refrigerator. (it has been almost a year since i’ve done that though, so maybe that is a part of my naughty youth)

but i’m all about doing SOMETHING, rather than nothing, in the hopes that all of those little somethings will add up to a surprisingly large something. again, it’s all about small bites here.

so, i’ll put this out there, and future posts are bound to come more easily, i hope.

welcome, welcome!