Ruined

My sister-in-law has ruined my life. Let me explain.

About two months ago she sent me two books, one I read right away and one that I've had a harder time diving into. The book I ate up was called Real Food for Mother and Baby. Honestly, I didn't expect much from the book. I felt like I ate a lot of real foods. Margarin is a food I only force myself to eat at other peoples homes. . . I couldn't be that bad off, right? Wrong. So wrong. Turns out I've never properly eaten flour. And when I say flour I'm not even talking about white flour, I mean, I've never eaten whole wheat flour the correct way.

Sprouted grains. That's where it's at people. Now, the thing about sprouted grains is that if they are not stored correctly, they actually become less nutritious than non-sprouted grains - they have a very short shelf life and need to be frozen if they are not going to be used. What does this mean? It means that if I want to eat sprouted grains that I am going to have to start soaking, dehydrating and grinding my own grain into flour, because buying sprouted grain is very expensive and when you buy those grains off of the shelf at Whole Foods (or whatever the name of your health food store is) the nutrition is already gone. Makes me glad that I didn't spend $7 on a half pound bag of flour the other day. Long story short, right now I am on a flour strike until I find the time to go get some real whole grain. That hasn't ruined my life though.

I got a tortilla press for Christmas from my mother, and I recently started making my own corn tortillas. These are delicious and have 3 ingredients in them, best of all, Jonathan can eat them because they do not have gluten. Eventually I'll probably read that I need to grind my own corn, but, I haven't gotten to that part of the second book yet, so, life goes on. Although, I used to fry all of my tortillas and make tostadas. Because I no longer believe in yellow oil, I cannot fry these. Well I could. I could use coconut oil, butter or olive oil. . . here is why I don't. We all know that olive oil is really lousy when it comes to heating up to a high temperature. Coconut oil does great at high temps, but, I don't love the taste. Butter. . . well, that's another story.

The higher the fat content on your food, the more important it is that that food be real. Hormones and antibiotic residue is stored in fat, when you eat that fat you are taking all sorts of things into your body that you do not need there. Long story short, butter is very fatty, so if you can you should buy organic, and if you really want to do things right you'll not only buy organic butter, but you'll buy organic pastured butter. . . which can only be made seasonally as cows don't always have access to fresh green grass. So, it's very expensive. There is one nice thing about the expense though. . . you start treating butter better. You don't waste two sticks of butter in a batch of chocolate chip cookies that you don't need to eat, and can't eat because you don't have any real flour. But, if you could make those cookies the right way, they really wouldn't be all that bad for you.

Eating organic is more expensive. Some people (cough, Kyle, cough. . . ) think it's all hype and not important. It's hard to know anything for sure. Some people smoke a pack a day, snack on candy and white bread and live to be a hundred, others don't. All of our bodies are different. I drink whole milk like water, eat butter, love steak and salt everything like crazy (real salt. . . salt that actually has minerals in it) and I have low cholesterol, low blood pressure, a low resting heart rate and don't exercise all that much, I'm 5'6" and usually weigh under 137 lbs, I'm sure there are other people out there who eat the same way and weigh in at the Drs office very differently. Why does that happen? I haven't a clue. What I do know is that I feel good about eating organic, I feel good about knowing exactly what I am putting into my body.

I say that my sister in law has ruined my life, but in all honesty January has probably been one of the best months of my life as far as eating and cooking goes. I've made dinner most nights or we've had left overs. I've stretched a piece of meat further than I knew it could be stretched. I've wasted less food. I've made meals that I feel good about serving. The bread I've eaten has been sourdough (another story) and the breakfast "cereals" I've eaten have been soaked and prepared properly. I haven't had a perfect score card, we've gone to Chipotle and I ate a pint of Ben and Jerry's in three sittings, also there was a bag of sea salt potato chips in there. I don't feel bad about those things, and I won't let myself feel bad about them in the future. I know that I will eat the wrong things, intentionally and unintentionally. The last thing I want to do is become a nuisance to people because of the way I want to eat.

Time to go make lunch. . .