Before we began eating Real Food, I never bought organic. In fact, I was kind of proud that I was so good at keeping to a budget when shopping and didn’t “waste” money on the (mostly) more expensive organic items. When I began learning about what’s in our food I quickly realized that the only way to avoid the “bad” stuff – GMOs, pesticides, sewage sludge (yep), hormones, etc.- – was to eat organic. This meant I had to come up with a game plan to start “going green” without spending all our green. Here are my top tips to start the shift to organic in your own family. Continue reading
Have you ever noticed when you learn a new word you start hearing that word everywhere? When I first started paying attention to our food I also started to notice (in a good way, not in the annoying way it used to seem) how often my kids and husband would ask me what they could eat. How many times a day do you hear, “Can I have a snack?”, “What’s for dinner?”, “What can I eat?”, “I’m hungry!”. It finally occurred to me that as CEO of food in our house I have the opportunity to make changes that affect us throughout the day and, actually, throughout our lives. Sounds great, but no one said being CEO was easy! I started with a few ground rules that basically resulted in our pantry and refrigerator being completely emptied of almost all of the food — not a popular decision in my house! And the biggest revelation at this point was that my 3 year old was addicted to goldfish crackers. He quickly started exhibiting his withdrawal symptoms by rolling around on the floor kicking and crying, and I quickly started searching for a “gateway snack” that would get the kids excited for our transition to Real Food. Nothing works better than chocolate chip cookies and I was thrilled to discover a recipe on nanaclareskitchen that fit into our new eating plan. My version of this recipe is below, but first here are the top four Real Food Rules that we’re trying to follow. Continue reading
