Nourishing Foods - Grocery Shopping

This is my last post for this series, showing what our current "Nourishing Foods" grocery shopping looks like. If you have any questions, I'd love to answer them as best I can!


(Just for kicks, I'll throw the prices in today as a bonus.)
Organic Romaine Lettuce - $2.99
Stonyfield Organic Yogurt - $3.99
Kroger Orange Juice - $3.49
(2) 1/2 gal. Local Milk - $2.99 ea.
Bananas - $1.50
3lb. Cara Cara Oranges - $3.99
King Arthur All Natural White Wheat Flour - $4.69
Kroger All Natural Peanut Butter - $1.89
(2) T-bone Steaks - $10.48
Private Selections Beef Roast - $10.39
Reg. Roast - $10.08
Chicken Breasts - $8.28
Pears - $1.96
Avocados - $2.00
Naturally Preferred Brown Eggs - $2.59
Pepsi & Dr. Pepper - $4.00 ea.

Total: $83.92

I didn't think my total was too bad considering all the meat I bought and for getting more "delicious toxins" for Daniel (aka his sodas). I saw the steaks marked down and thought they would make a birthday dinner extra special next month.

The Private Selections roast was also marked down from just under $18. Ever since watching Food, Inc. a second time I have been getting more and more leery of feeding Susannah generic meat. I have heard that Private Selections is a high quality brand (they have a high quality price tag, I know that much!), so I am hoping that they really are. Anyway, this roast will be specifically for Susannah, and Daniel and I will eat the other one (most of it will probably go towards his sandwich meat).

I was excited to see the bananas marked down, too :) Daniel likes Banana Pudding or Banana Cream Pie and I haven't made either of those for him in forever. I'll make one of those for him and the rest of the bananas I'll freeze to add to smoothies. They are nice bananas for being mark-downs!

To keep this post from getting too long, I'll do a "grocery shopping wrap up" post later, with what I've learned from these first few weeks of our journey.

Nourishing Foods - Grocery Shopping

Ah, the 3rd week of sharing my grocery shopping with you. Sally was right in her comment last week when she said shopping with a goal is a lot more expensive than shopping with a budget. Somehow I want to get "goal" and "budget" married to each other. I know that eating nourishing foods is going to require a bigger grocery budget, and that I don't have a printing press in my basement. (Ha, I wonder how many hits that line will get me!) So I think my best bet is moderation. Surprisingly, alot of the prices are very comparable for the better quality, if you compare with a leading name-brand. Anyway, enough rambling. Here's what I got this week:

Bottle of Red Wine (for cooking!)
Gal. Kroger brand orange juice
Gal. local milk
Oatmeal
8lbs. oranges
Qt. honey (I'm checking into a possible local source)
Popcorn (Maybe I'll try growing some this year!)
Cornstarch (Yeah, I know, a modified corn product!)
Frozen Peas and Veg. Blend
Spinach
Organic Lettuce
Sour Cream
Organic Carrots
Organic Mushrooms - markdown
(10) 1/3 less fat Cream Cheese
Dried Apricots
2 doz. Cage Free Brown Eggs
Organic Pumpkin Seeds
Kiwi
Onions
Mango
Organic Tomatoes
Avocados

$94.97

The wine and cream cheese ($10 in itself) aren't usual buys, and I had to up our milk because Susannah is drinking milk now :)

Nourishing Foods - What We Eat

As part of our Journey to Nourishing Foods, I wanted to share with you what we're eating. When I read others' blogs that have a specific eating lifestyle I'm always curious what their meals look like :) I kept a food journal so you could see the real deal. I didn't want to post a menu plan and then either feel pressured to stick to it, or feel guilty saying we were eating one thing when we were eating another.

Remember that this is a journey. It's not something I/we have perfected overnight. I'm still learning and making changes as I cook and bake. But we still eat normal food. At least I think we do! You can see for yourself and let me know ;)

Jan. 20:
Supper - Hamburger Pot Pie with White Whole Wheat Crust, Salad (Romaine, Spinach, Carrots, Mushrooms, Eggs, Tomatoes)
*****
Jan. 21:
Breakfast - Green Pepper & Mushroom Omelets with Toast
Lunch - Roast Beef Sandwich & Banana Nut Muffins (Daniel); Leftover Hamburger Pot Pie, Peaches & Cottage Cheese (Miriam)
Supper - Marinated, Grilled Pork Chops, Leftover Baked Macaroni, Leftover Broccoli & Green Beans (not mixed together!)
*****

Jan. 22 (Saturday, which usually means fend for yourself):
Breakfast - Egg Sandwich (Daniel); Banana Pancakes (Miriam)
Lunch - Banana Pancakes, Leftover Hamburger Pot Pie (Daniel); Egg Sandwich, Orange, Chips (Miriam)
Supper - Fried Rice
I'd made cookies so we enjoyed some of those throughout the day, too
*****

Jan. 23:
Breakfast - Egg Sandwiches
Lunch - Hotdogs (Daniel); Leftover Chicken Rice Soup (Miriam) We were going to share the hot-dogs and soup but he was more in the mood for hotdogs and I was more in the mood for soup!
Supper - White Whole Wheat Waffles, Scrambled Eggs, Turkey Sausage
*****

Jan 24:
Breakfast - Egg Sandwich (Daniel); food at MOPS (Miriam)
Lunch - Roast Beef Sandwich, Banana Nut Muffins (Daniel); Leftover Hamburger Pot Pie, Peaches & Cottage Cheese (Miriam)
Supper - Pork BBQ from freezer, Peas (very late supper)
*****

Jan. 25:
Breakfast - Egg Sandwich (Daniel); Leftover Waffles (Miriam)
Lunch - Roast Beef Sandwich, Pretzels, Cookies (Daniel); Lunch with Grandma at her Home (Miriam)
Supper - Wendys (Daniel - working late); "Beans" (Great Nothern Beans cooked with Hog Jowl) from MIL (Miriam)
*****

Jan. 26:
Breakfast - Leftover Waffles and Sausage
Lunch - KFC (Daniel - I was sure I was out of bread, lo and behold I found more that evening. *sigh*), Leftover Rice, Hotdog and Orange (Miriam - I was cleaning up leftovers! It was a weird meal.)
Supper - Beef, Cheese & Tomato Quesadillas on Homemade White Wheat Tortillas, Corn
*****

Jan. 27:
Breakfast - Egg Sandwich (Daniel); Leftover Banana Pancakes, Peaches & Cottage Cheese (Miriam)
Lunch - Roast Beef Sandwich, Pretzels (Daniel); Leftover Quesadillas (Miriam)
Supper - Arbys (Daniel - working late), Meatloaf, Corn, Potatoes (Miriam


Aaaand, that's what we ate. And of course the week I decide to do this is the week Daniel's on call, working from dark to way-past-dark and eating alot of fast food, which is not typical! Well, it can be typical for his late days or on call weeks when he doesn't get home until really late (and I mean after 9 or 10pm). He has been working very.long.days this week and we are both ready for life to return to something more normal again. I guess the upside is that he does get paid overtime so that helps offset meals he ends up buying.

I'd love to hear any thoughts or questions you have (but please keep it nice and polite)!

P.S. Banana Pancakes are not nearly as good leftover... and I don't like them first-over as well as I thought I might. They're not BAD, just not something I'll make often.

Nourishing Foods - Grocery Shopping

Last week I started a mini-series on what my weekly grocery shopping looks like as we're trying to eat foods that are better for you and more nourishing. Here is this week's grocery purchases:

Horizon Organic Milk (they were out of Homestead Creamery's Whole Milk)
Orange Juice
Canola Oil
Chips - Daniel's been eying "my" bag...
Cottage Cheese
Organic Yogurt
Spinach
Organic All Purpose Flour
All Natural White Whole Wheat Flour
Wheat Gluten
Brown Sugar
4 Kiwi
2 doz. Brown Eggs
2 Mangoes
(10) "1/3 Less Fat" Cream Cheese

Total: $60.56

A few notes about what I bought today:

I need to do some digging to see if there's a better option for when recipes call for oil. I did purposely stay away from "Vegetable Oil" as it is just soybean oil (very bad for you). In the meantime, I'm about out of oil and decided to get some more for now.

The Cream Cheese was part of a Mega Sale and while I'd love to make my own one day, I was out and this was a good time to stock up a little. The Cream Cheese added $10 to my bill, so I'm happy :)

I am curious, though... if you have a whole/real foods-type diet, what does a grocery shopping trip bring home and for how much?

Nourishing Foods - Grocery Shopping

I know some of you have wondered what the "nourishing foods" journey is doing to our grocery budget. And I promised I would post about that. As our eating habits have changed somewhat, so has the grocery budget. We're still not where I'd like us to end up with our food, so this is a continual work in progress. To help me figure out a ball-park weekly grocery budget, I thought I'd share a mini-series of my weekly grocery trips.


This is not a typical week for groceries. Pepsi & Dr. Pepper are not a weekly purchase, and neither are the chips or Bratwursts! But for keepin' it real, this is what I bought today.

1/2 Gal. Homestead Creamery Cream Top Whole Milk (local dairy, hormone free)
1 Gal. Orange Juice
5lbs. King Arthur All Natural White Whole Wheat Flour
Chips
Frozen Green Beans, Breaded Okra and a Stir-Fry Blend
Organic Stonyfield Plain Yogurt
Pineapple Juice
5lbs. Cara Cara Oranges
2 Mangoes
2 Onions
7 Organic Gala Apples
2 Doz. Cage Free Brown Eggs
2lbs. Brown Rice
Beef Roast
Whole Chicken
Marked-down Bratwursts
Dr. Pepper & Pepsi ($9 of the bill!)
*oops! Not pictured:
(3) 8oz. bricks Kraft Cheese
1 lb. bacon

Total: $86.60
($2 of that is a deposit for the glass milk bottle which I'll get back when I take the empty bottle back to the store.)

This week we also replenished our ground beef supply (13lbs. for about $38) and yeast (2lbs. for about $3.50 if I remember right). The ground beef will last quite a while, and the yeast lasts a LONG time.

Now, what will I do with the food I brought home? Stay tuned!! I think another mini-series, "Nourishing Foods - What We Eat" will be coming soon :)

Nourishing Foods - The Beginning of The Journey Part 2

Part 1

My food radar was suddenly more alert than it had ever been. I wanted to know all the "whys." Why is brown rice better for you? Why shouldn't you eat HFCS? Why should or shouldn't you eat butter, or margarine, or whole milk or skim milk? And I wanted to know what the most nourishing and nutritious foods are, what are REAL healthy foods? Not just what is labeled "Low Fat," "No Trans Fats" or "Natural". I want to provide not only Susannah, but our whole family, the best, healthiest, nourishing foods I can. I didn't know where to start and I wanted tried and true information from someone I know and trust.

I fired off a message to a friend who immediately replied. She gave me the solution to my yogurt dilemma. Now Susannah gets Organic Whole Milk Plain Yogurt. The ingredients are plain and sensible: Cultured Pasteurized Organic Whole Milk, Pectin, Vitamin D3, Six Live Active Cultures. (I very well may make my own someday.)

She also suggested two book to me and was kind enough to loan them BOTH to me! One is Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon:


and the other is Super Baby Food by Ruth Yaron.

They are both blow you away full of amazing information. Stuff that I never knew before. Stuff that the everyday John Q. Public probably has no idea about. These books have changed a lot of the way I think about food.

A lot of the food and ingredients I was buying and making were pretty empty of it's natural nutrition. Our bodies don't process or absorb manufactured nutrients very well, so why do I want to eat something that my body can't get any good from?

**I will say right here and now that I do believe moderation is key. There are some things I am going to change, and a few things I will leave the same.**

Some of the areas that I have changed already would be:

Flour. Instead of using your "usual" white flour that is quite a bit more than just flour (read the ingredients list), I am using All Natural White Wheat Flour. It is flour, plain and simple. Yes, the flavor is different, but it is not as harsh as red wheat flour, and we like it quite well. I hope to buy a grain mill early next year and start grinding my own flour for all or almost all our baking. With grains, as soon as the shell of the grain is cracked it starts losing it's nutrients. So flour that has been sitting on the store shelf for weeks (and who knows how long it sat somewhere else before it reached the store) has had lots of opportunity to lose all it's healthy, nourishing goodness.

Meat. For Daniel's lunch sandwiches he now gets sliced roast beef from a roast that I season and roast myself. It tastes much better and is much better for you that the salty, artificial flavorings added, processed lunch meat. Surprisingly, the price is comparable! Eventually, someday, when we have our dream home on many, many acres, we'd like to raise our own beef. In the meantime, we are checking into buying part of a grass fed steer from a local source.

Eggs. Since I am feeding Susannah egg yolks (hard boiled) for her protein source sometimes, the yolks need to be protein rich. Coincidentally, about the same time we started making these changes, some people just a few miles down the road from us started selling eggs! They are considerably better than store bought eggs for just a little more money. The yolks are a deeper yellow and the egg white is thicker :)

Fresh Fruits and Vegetables. Salads made with Romaine Lettuce and Spinach are a regular part of our diet now. I happily buy Kiwi (high in Vit. C), Avocados, and other fruits to enjoy.

I make trail mix (or "bird feed") for Daniel with Sunflower Seeds, Sliced Almonds, Pumpkin Seeds, Raisins and M&M's (yeah, the M&M's are the unhealthy part :P ). Nut and seed laden homemade granola is a staple on our shelf - for breakfasts and snacks. Peanut Butter that is just peanuts; Coconut Oil instead of vegetable/canola/etc. oil; Brown Rice instead of white rice; Hormone free milk; White Cheese instead of orange cheese (artificial coloring); and other little things here are there are among the ways the contents of our refrigerator and pantry are changing.

I don't plan to go off the deep end, but I do plan to keep instituting changes as I go to provide the best I can for our taste-buds, tummies and health. This week proves that eating healthy and nourishing will not keep all troubles away; Susannah has a double ear infection and I have been battling cold-like stuff for a while now. Hopefully as we put better quality stuff into our bellies for our bodies to live and thrive on, our immune systems will grow stronger and we won't get sick as often or as badly.

I know some of you are probably wondering about the budget side of this. But you'll have to wait until next time :)

Nourishing Foods - The Beginning of The Journey

One of the things on my list of Goals for 2010 was to "Find or create the happy medium for eating healthier without going over budget." Yes, for a while I made sure we had salad ingredients on hand, and actually did pretty good about fixing a salad to go with or eat before the main part of the meal sometimes. And then our world was changed forever :) For several months, as long as there was some kind of something to eat when we were hungry, I didn't really pay much attention to - or care! - what it was.

Then came the time to start Susannah on solid food. Baby cereal. Then pureed fruits. Then pureed vegetables. (The fruits and vegetables I cooked and pureed myself with stuff that I had either canned or frozen.) And then she needed more than that - she needed protein. I thought yogurt would be a good protein to start with, plus it's healthy for you. And she was old enough to eat yogurt. I wasn't sure what I wanted for Susannah in yogurt, but I wanted it to be good for her; nutritious. In the yogurt section of my favorite grocery store, for as far as I could see everything was "Fat Free," "Reduced Fat," "1/2 the Calories," ... and I KNEW one thing for sure - Susannah did not need diet food. She needed full fat, full calorie yogurt. I looked through all the labels and found the one that had the most calories and fat in it even though it still touted some healthy/diet-type line on the front.

We came home and the next day I fed her some. She liked it. The next day I fed her the rest of the little container. Day #3 I went to open container #2 and on a whim glanced through the ingredients. This is what I saw:


Susannah did not get any yogurt that day. I wasn't sure what purpose those ingredients served, but I did know that it was not JUST yogurt with a little sweetener or vanilla flavoring. Aside from the fact that it was made with not-full-fat milk, THE SECOND INGREDIENT was SUGAR!!! Aside from pureed fruit, she gets very little in the line of sugary foods. She gets a bite of cake, cookie, or even sharing an ice cream cone on occasion, but my thinking is that her little body doesn't need loaded full of sugar or High Fructose Corn Syrup, whatever that is.

And it was then that my mama-bear instincts turned on full force and I started thinking "what am I putting in her mouth - and ours, too?"

I emailed a good friend of mine who I had noticed fed her little boy very good, nutritious foods, and asked her for some recommendations in the nutrition/healthy-food department.

Stay tuned for more, as I get to it :)