Homemade mac and cheese

Need a healthier version of your favorite childhood Kraft box of mac and cheese? Here's one that will keep the kiddos asking for more! And it's soooooooo easy! We don't eat a whole lot of pasta anymore, but my girls just love this so I do up for lunch about once a week.

All you need:
Bag of whole wheat macaroni
8 oz block of white cheddar cheese
Cup of milk
Tablespoon of unsalted butter
Tsp of garlic powder
Salt to taste

I only use half the bag/box of pasta and half the block of cheese.

1. Boil macaroni, strain and rinse.
2. Shred cheese. Add all other ingredients and continue stirring on medium heat until it all solidifies. Add milk if it seems too thick or to whatever creamy consistency you like :-)
3. Serve. Sometimes I add Parmesan cheese on top for added cheesy goodness!

So easy, right?! It really takes about the same amount of time as the boxed stuff but so much healthier!

day 1

Hey Everyone. So I figured I'd share on something that my husband and I are recently starting. In fact, it starts today. So this marks day 1. Brandon recently really felt like the Lord was calling him to fast for a elongated period of time and wasn't sure what the fast may look like. But we both wanted to seek God pertaining to strategy.....a God-given blue print for the city of Rochester. Vision is a wonderful and powerful thing, but where's the steps to put it in action? And when we try to do things in our own way, our own time, most times the plan fails. So we're asking God for HIS strategy.

It then dawned on us as we were sharing about how sick the food industry makes us feel. That it is as if they have set people up to fail. And as the words came from my mouth...."is it even possible to eat a completely unprocessed diet?" and it hit us both. That's what our fast was suppose to be. No processed foods, no not one. The hard part about it all is even some "organic" foods are still processed so this changes things for us a lot. No cereals, no pasteurized dairy or juices, nothing prepared by someone else's hands, just simply foods....back to the basics of basics. I'll be honest I don't know if i can do it. But I'm asking God for grace and creativity. I'm VERY pregnant right now, but I'll be needing to make my own bread, prepare my own dairy (yogurt, butter, cheese), and prepare all my meals from scratch with no aid of a processed food. It's a lot to think about, but I think thats the point of the fast.

I really feel as we eat food that has been undefiled and untouched by man, that it is a prophetic act of God revealing a plan, a strategy that is also undefiled, untouched by man....a heavenly blue-print.

Also there are some things happening today that I think are really timely to everything. My mother (in-law) is coming into town to help me. Lately I have been in a lot of pain from the baby and how low she is sitting. I've had severe sciatic never pinching causing numbing and pain in my back and legs, along with LOTS of pressure of my pelvic bone, which has been making things difficult for bending and going up and down stairs. I've been been going to the chiropractor with some relief, but only for a couple days. So she's come to help, so focusing on simple things (like what i should eat) should be more of a joyful process than strenuous one :-) I'm really excited to have the extra help. I'm just not able to do what I normally do at this point.

I'll be sharing any new recipes I try on here. This is all pretty new to me and I never really found a good enough reason to try this, so now that I have I'm super excited. I plan to try quite a few recipes as well from Covenant Health's website....they have lots of great recipes from simple raw foods that look delicious.

so here's to day 1!

dirty dozen and clean 15

Trying to save while buying organic?

With summer here my taste buds are in bloom just as much as the flowers and fruit are! When I walk into Wegmans, with all the lowered prices on produce and wide variety of veggie and fruity goodness its hard to remember what I know about all these delectable pieces of food.

In fact, for a while there, prices on strawberries were so low that I caved and bought a bunch, hoping that a nice cold soak would rid of the 13 different pesticides found on one strawberry. yikes! I seriously had one strawberry as big as a small apple - thats just ridiculous). So anyways, I was really excited to see Wegmans recently add some local strawberries to their selection, making things a little more reasonable. Though not completely organic, sprayed much less and usually only on the leaves until the plants flower.

With that said I decided to do a little refresher "course" for myself so that I would feel a little more prepared going into the grocery. Although I highly recommend finding local farms as this time of year they'll be booming with fresh produce that ultimately is sprayed less, with less harmful pesticides and worked with more hands on. I love the Rochester Public Market but you've got to ask lots of questions to find out what they're really selling and sometimes that's difficult when the market is as busy as it is this time of year. South wedge Farmer's Market are ALL local farmers, and most organically raised and grown. And though they may be a little higher priced, its still cheaper than your commercialized organic section in the grocer.

Here's this year's Dirty Dozen (listed in order) - so if you can't afford to go completely organic, this would be the ones you don't want to compromise on. And then I'll list the "Clean 15" - those who tested the least harmful for pesticides and chemicals. You can also find a thorough list at EWG's 2011 Shopping Guide.

DIRTY DOZEN

1. Apples

2. Celery

3. Strawberries

4. Peaches

5. Spinach

6. Imported nectarines

7. Imported grapes

8. Sweet bell peppers

9. Potatoes

10. Domestic blueberried

11. Lettuce

12. Kale/collard greens

CLEAN 15

1. Onions

2. Sweet corn

3. Pineapple

4. Avocado

5. Asparagus

6. Sweet peas

7. Mangoes

8. Eggplant

9. Cantaloupe

10. Kiwi

11. Cabbage

12. Watermelon

13. Sweet potatoes

14. Grapefruit

15. Mushrooms

burgers and steak fries

So every pregnancy I've been anemic so I've been eating a lot more red meat and spinach this time around! But since we only eat locally raised grass-fed beef it can sometimes get hard on the budget. So with grilling season here ;-) I've been reserving our ground beef for some hearty cheeseburgers! I just added salt, pepper, garlic powder and little worcheshire sauce to my beef...roll into patties and threw on the grill. easy enough right?!

oh....and the drink is just pineapple juice and sparkling water with some lime. alcohol free and VERY tasty for summer time for all your preggos out there!

here's the lovely meal! And it was delicious! We paid about $3.89/lb and with 1.17 lbs. we got 5 burgers out of it. That's less than a $1 a burger, so its more reasonable for us than buying cuts like steaks, chucks or ribs. (Although I love those too!)

We get our beef from Seven Bridges Farms. They're located in Lima, but they also come to the Rochester Public Market every Saturday (they also do chicken and pork).

Something special I did for the burgers was pan fry some breaded onions. My husband loves onion rings on his burger so i just fresh cut some onions myself, breaded them and pan fried them. I personally thought they tasted way better than onion rings.

And lastly steak fries to top off a great burger! I just cut 6 medium sized organic potatoes into strips, drizzle them with olive oil or coconut oil and sea salt them. Put them in the oven at 425 for about 40 min (I like my crispy so may be less time if like them softer) - occasionally turning them a few times in the oven every 10 min.

What an easy and fun summer dinner!

high fructose corn syrup and sugar debate

So i feel like the heat on the whole CORN debate continuing to escalate and so I decided to do a small thoughtful process on what I really think about high fructose corn syrup. here's what inspired it all -

Sweet Surprise's ridiculous commercial:

Thankfully I've had plenty of research and learning under my "real" foods journey to know that high fructose corn syrup and sugar ARE NOT the same thing, but for a vast majority of people who don't have the exposure to the history of what has been happening with our food, it would be real easy to believe the propaganda of this commercial.

Apart from high fructose corn syrup being yet another processed food we consume made from corn, it is guarantee that it will be genetically engineered corn as well. And anytime we mess with God's design there's problems for me. I highly recommend Michael Pollan's book Omnivore's Dilemma. In his book he breaks down the GEO corn process, starting with a soak in sulfuric acid to break down the corn similar to the way it breaks down in our digestive system. This is how we are able to have the many parts of corn in so many different processed foods (whey, gluten, sugars, syrups, starch, big words we don't understand like xanthan gum, maltodextrin and zein and the list is much larger). Don't let us be fooled, our body processes GM products differently than whole foods. And, yes, even, raw sugar is a whole food because its a real food, from a real unaltered source.

Sugar comes from this:

:not this

For those who believe that your body processes HFCS the same as raw unaltered sugar, please consider this: "sucrose raises blood glucose and then crashes it, below fasting baseline, within 25 minutes of ingestions -- A FACT. This is why HFCS is being linked to diabetes rising in North America. HFCS or crystalline fructose or hydrolyzed fructose from inulin, convert to triglycerides and adipose tissue, within 60 minutes of ingestion, not blood glucose -- A FACT." - Dr. Mercola. That's those transfats everyone wants and talks about staying away from people! Real sugar does not break down this fast and you don't have the same "crash and burn" effects after eating unrefined raw sugar either. And I'm sure all of us mommies can testify to that when we see the reactions in our children's behavior to a piece of cake vs. an apple.

here's a rendition of the real truth behind high fructose corn syrup of the same commercial some students put together. And it's quite hilarious!

And just for my own entertainment here is one more video review on the commercial....a little more professional:)

So, what are your thoughts about the HFCS debate?

How did we get here?

Ever wonder why you should be giving your baby real food?