Eating Real Food During a Move

Over the last 7 or so years, I've gone from eating pretty much whatever/whenever to being a lot more mindful and informed about my food choices.  The title of the post refers to "real food", which has kind of a lot of different definitions depending on where you go around the internet.  But for my family, eating real food means making most food from scratch, using whole grains, trying to choose the lesser "evil" on the rare occasions that we eat out, and avoiding the most obviously egregious ingredients (corn syrup, MSG, artificial coloring, artificial sweeteners, unfermented soy, and most vegetable oils [when cooking we only use olive oil, coconut oil, or butter]).  I personally avoid caffeine, milk, ice cream, and large loads of processed sugar, due to their effects on my health.  This is all just FYI, so you'll know what I'm aiming for during the highly stressful and kitchenless time of packing up and moving cross-country.

This is the third time I've moved cross-country by car in three years, so I'm just going to tell you what I've done.

Before the Move

First of all, we pack up the kitchen almost last.  About a month before the move date, I take inventory of all the food I want to use up before the move, and I make a month-long dinner menu to try to use up as much as possible and avoid buying extra. (Normally I make a dinner menu at the beginning of each week.)  I fill the last week or so up with frozen dinners.  I start stocking up a couple months before by freezing sufficient leftover portions of our dinners.  This is easy for me to do at the moment, as I only have to feed two adults and a 4-year-old.  Other families might need to do some dedicated freeze-cooking, or make double portions some nights.  With frozen dinners planned for the last week, I can pack up the kitchen without worrying about cooking at the same time.  The last day or two before we leave, we'll eat dinner out or pick up something to go.

Things I leave out of packing up the kitchen and bring in the car:
*my deep skillet and lid
*large plastic serving spoon
*paring knife
*wire cheese slicer
*small plastic cutting board
*toaster
*hot pot
*scrub brush and dish soap

Those allow me to heat up the frozen dinners on the stove and also make sandwiches, breakfast, tea, etc.  (I can also hard boil any leftover eggs before we leave.)

While we normally do not use paper towels, paper napkins, paper plates, plastic cutlery, or disposable cups, we use all of these things liberally during our moves, with no guilt.  I start using these when we start eating the frozen dinners.  Then around the beginning of the last week before the move, everything in the kitchen is washed and ready to be packed up. 

During the Move

During the drive to our new home (the last two years we had 5 days of driving), we make two meals a day and snacks from what we've brought with us, and eat out for the third meal (whether it's lunch or dinner depends on the day's driving schedule).

Here is what I typically pack in the car:

In a medium-sized cooler:
*lunch meat
*cheese (string, block, and/or slices)
*sour cream
*butter
*baby carrots
*cucumber
*hard boiled eggs
*bottles of kombucha
*cod liver oil

In a box or other receptacle:
*crispy nuts
*raisins, dried cranberries, dried cherries, etc
*bread (sometimes bagels)
*crackers, chips, rice cakes, etc
*chocolate chips
*salt
*ranch dressing mix (I find this tasty on sandwiches and sad fast-food salads)
*apples, bananas, oranges, etc
*fruit leather, Larabars, etc
*peanut butter
*honey
*a sturdy Tupperware-type container with the paring knife and cheese slicer (for chopping things and assembling sandwiches)
*disposable plates, napkins, cutlery
*our regular vitamin supplements

Then we also have these things, which we mostly just take out in the hotel rooms:
*coffee and one of these
*tea bags
*travel coffee mugs

We eat toast, hard boiled eggs, tea, coffee, and fruit for breakfast. Sandwiches, chips, and fruit for lunch or dinner.

After the Move

This might be the hardest part for me.  First of all, unpack your kitchen almost-first (I think my mental list goes: beds, couches, some of Lucy's toys, kitchen).

One box at a time is best, I find. Put the stuff approximately where you think it will live, but it doesn't have to be perfect. You can rearrange things later.  You just want it all out of the boxes so you'll have room to move around and cook. 

Then there's the first trip to a strange grocery store.  Plan that for the time of day you have the most energy, after you've eaten, and plan for it to take five times as long as it should.  Of course make a list before you go. Then you'll have to go back two days later for the stuff you forgot to put on your first list.

Then I personally start the long process of building kitchen momentum back up.  By that I mean, getting my freezer stashed with cooked brown rice, cooked pinto beans, chicken broth, etc; starting to make homemade bread again; starting to put away freezer meals; finding a kombucha scoby.  Once you get going, it's easy to keep going, but staring at an empty freezer at first is so depressing! 

 

[First meal cooked in the new house this time. It feels so great to cook again after a week or more of fast food!] 

Christmas 2012

It's the Twelfth Day of Christmas, so I'm just fitting this in under the wire!  (We go to an Episcopal church now, so it's totally allowed.) 

We had Christmas!  Lucy is now 3.5, so she was way more into it this year than any time previous.  And she has chosen to believe in Santa Claus, even though we do absolutely nothing to encourage (or discourage) that.  She's also old enough to listen to and start to comprehend stories from the Jesus Storybook Bible, so we followed this plan for the duration of Advent.  Lucy also decided that the nativity set was just more toys for her to play with. (Should have seen that one coming!)

In the spirit of our spend-time-and-money-proportional-to-how-much-you-care philosophy, we spent all of 15 minutes taking our Christmas card photos (including getting Lucy dressed). 

Lucy was an angel in the Christmas Eve pageant.

We helped set up for the Norman Community Christmas Dinner.

Our own Christmas dinner consisted of roast chicken, green salad, soft pretzels, mashed potatoes, gravy, and champagne. 

Lucy got Scotch tape in her stocking. She was super excited!

I made Norman another shirt.

Norman bought me a book for those who are questioning.

Then on Saturday we had Christmas with Norman's parents and siblings. 

Lucy's uncle designed and created this bear blanket for her!  (It rolls up into a bear.)

Norman got some sonic screwdrivers.

And I got a dress form!  I still can't believe it!

And I made hot pizza dip, which I can now highly recommend!

Yeah, that pretty much covers it.  Oh, except for the part where the weatherpeople were predicting this big crazy snow storm for Christmas Day, and then it just iced and sleeted and then snowed a little.  But then a couple days later, they said we might get some flurries, and it snowed like 4 inches!  They were a little confused.  Merry Christmas!

Lucy's 3rd Birthday [Recap]

Lucy's birthday was last Thursday, and her party was last Saturday.  First, the actual birthday:

Nothing too fancy.  Put the Happy Birthday banner up after she went to sleep the night before.  Norman had to be gone during dinner, so he came home in the afternoon and took her to the park.  We had chicken stir fry for dinner.  (Not her request, exactly, but I've deduced that it's her favorite dinner. She likes to eat it with ketchup.)

And she got presents! 

 

[The Muppets]

 

[Tangled]

And... her own camera!

It's a little noisy for my taste, but I highly recommend it.  It takes photos and videos, and the lens swivels around so you can take a photo of yourself while still looking at the screen.  And it has a menu of silly hats and hair that you can superimpose over your photos.  It's really easy to use (Lucy already has it all figured out), and it takes pretty decent photos for being so cheap.  (It goes for $50-$60 on Amazon, but I got mine from eBay for less.)

Here's a collage of some of the photos she took in the first two days:

 [She seemed to delight in putting cat ears on her legs...]

OK, so that was Thursday.  Then came the party!  I had already thrown two of these things, and they both looked pretty much the same.  But this was new and weird.  We don't know very many people here, and we don't know them very well.  Our house is too small to host, and we couldn't plan on having it outside since it rains so much here.  But our church said we could use their gym!

So it was pretty much like last year's party, but in a gym, with different people.  We invited everyone at church and everyone at playgroup.  In the end about 30 people showed up, I think.

The food:

 

Cupcakes from scratch. Lucy did all the sprinkle work.  I accidentally bought jumbo cupcake liners, so I had to whip up another batch of batter after having already doubled the first recipe.  So there were chocolate and spice cupcakes, so we only put sprinkles on the chocolate ones. 

The frosting recipe: 2 sticks of butter, 2 blocks of cream cheese, enough honey to make it sweet. Beat with mixer. Then om nom your face off.  (Leftovers delicious on cinnamon raisin bagels, strawberries, and spoons.)

Fruit kebabs (grapes, watermelon, and pineapple on skewers).  Cripsy nuts.

Drinks: Herbal iced tea (a bunch of different fruit-flavored Celestial Seasonings teas with honey), and Magical Coffee. Ohhhhh my. Get yerself some magical coffee, STAT. (Thanks, Keely!)

At 10 p.m. the night before, it occurred to me to put together a slide show of photos of Lucy, since people here don't know what she looked like when she was younger.  Didn't actually take that long. Thanks, Picasa!

Activities:

Coloring table. Two dollar store coloring books and crayons I already had.

Painter's tape hopscotch!  I found this brilliant idea on some website or another.  Cheap and easy!

I made 3 bean bags to go with it.  (Real bean bags, filled with beans... because that's what I had.)  It had been bothering me for a week that I just wasn't sure if I had saved this fabric from the Great Purge before we moved last summer.  I've had it since high school.  Now that I have a toddler it finally comes in handy!

And other than that, we just filled the other half of the gym (that wasn't filled with tables and chairs) with balloons (plain ones and the punchy kind with the rubber bands) and pool noodles cut in half.  We figured the kids could make their own fun, and we were right!

 

[Norman kept back a bucket of balloons to dump on Lucy just to see the look on her face. :-)]

Punch balloon contests, sword and ninja fights, golf, baseball, etc, etc.

It was fun!  Nice and casual, and people could come and go.  We gave bubble wands as favors. (HT to Meghan for that one.)  In all, I think the party cost about $50 or $60 including food.  Not too shabby.  Looking forward to (but definitely not yet planning for) next year!

Playing with my New Dehydrator

I went crazy and bought this giant food dehydrator.  I'd been eyeing it for a while, plus the trays in my old round garage sale one just kept breaking more each time I used it.  I know I'll be using it to make big batches of crispy nuts and nut granola, but I also wanted to experiment some.  It came with this giant book of recipes.  Did you know you can dehydrate flavored yogurt and make something like fruit leather only, well, yogurt leather?? According to this book, you can.

But I thought I'd start slow.

Chickpeas (soaked overnight, then mixed with salt and garlic powder)
Rutabaga
Zucchini
Apple
Banana

I tried to slice them all thin and even without breaking out the mandoline.  I salted the zucchini just a bit.  At the suggestion of the Giant Dehydrator Book I blanched the rutabaga slices in boiling water for a couple minutes.  And I dipped the apple slices in a water and lemon juice mixture to keep them from turning brown.

Then I loaded them all into the Beast.  (Actually I think I might start calling it that...)

Because the only place in the house to put it is on my desk, and it doesn't even really fit there.

Results:

Apple chips -- Tasty, but not as crispy as Bare Fruit's apple chips, which are the best things ever and I just want to eat them until I die

Banana chips -- Meh. Tasty but chewy.

Zucchini chips -- Om nom!  Just enough salt, and crispy!  They'd be great with some sort of sour-cream-based dip.

Rutabaga chips -- Completely inedible.  I mean like doggie rawhide chew toy inedible.  Either I didn't blanch them long enough, or the Giant Dehydrator Book just flat out lied.

Soaked Chickpeas w/ garlic -- Umm.... These were really tasty all throughout the drying process.  I kept checking them to see if they were done.  And then they were done, and guess what!  They're hard as rocks!  I was trying to make them crispy like crispy nuts, but all I did was revert them back to dried chickpeas.  Duh.  Sooo... I think I'd make them again, but maybe leave them chewy and keep them in the fridge.

I'll definitely make the zucchini chips again.  The next time I use the dehydrator it will be crispy nut makin' time.  But I'm also excited to try some fruit leathers!  The great thing about this dehydrator is that the trays are square, and you can buy non-stick mats that fit the trays for making nice, even, square fruit leather pieces.  Woo hoo!

Recipe: California Breakfast, OU Cafeteria Style!

When I was a freshman at the University of Oklahoma, I ate breakfast in the cafeteria two or three times a week.  I found that I really enjoyed taking my time, reading the paper, and eating a nice big breakfast before my 10:30am class.  And my favorite thing to eat for breakfast at the OU cafeteria was something called "California Breakfast".  It was a casserole made out of hash brown potatoes, strips of bacon, really runny fried eggs, and cheese.  Sooooo good.

Well, nearly 10 years later, I finally decided to try to make my own version of this.  I searched the OU Housing Services website to see if the ingredients were actually as simple as I remembered.  Well... yes and no.

Ugh.  (Insert montage of me lamenting the years and years of my life spent eating crap, clueless about its effects on my body and emotions.)  But essentially, yes.  Hash brown (shredded, fried) potatoes, bacon, fried egg, and shredded cheese.

So I followed Laura's hash brown instructions.  (You must let them cool in the fridge overnight.  I tried this once without letting the potatoes cool completely, and it was a miserable failure.)

I preheated my oven to 350 degrees (or somewhere around there).  I fried up a bunch of shredded potatoes and put them in the bottom of a greased casserole dish.  Then I fried strips of bacon and put them on top of the hash browns.  Then I fried some eggs until the whites were barely done and put them on top of the bacon.  (Undercook the eggs so that the yolks will run down into the hash browns.  That's the best part!)  Then I shredded some cheese on top and put it all in the oven just long enough to melt the cheese. 

It turned out awesome!  Just as I remembered it, but, of course, better.  And I forgot to take a photo until it was mostly gone.  That's how good it was.  (Reheat leftovers in a toaster oven, not a microwave. Soggy potatoes and rubbery eggs are really not what you're going for here.)

Cookie Dinner!

A couple months ago, Lucy kept talking about eating cookies for dinner.  I suspect it had something to do with watching Sesame Street every day.  But it got me thinking -- wouldn't that be fun? To have cookies for dinner?  So I asked my Facebook friends what kind of well-rounded foods could be made to look like cookies, and I got some great responses.  And I filed them away (in my brain).

Well, this week I pulled them out.  I knew Lucy and I would need some fun while Norman is away at a conference.  So, I present to you, Cookie Dinner!

[Lucy took this one of me. She's getting pretty good!]

[Actually saying "Cheeeeese!"]

First, in the afternoon, we made a project of making these healthy chocolate chip cookies.  They turned out really good!  The amazing thing about these cookies is that they don't take any sugar.  The bananas act as sugar and (I suspect) as egg, as well.  (They're also gluten free if you use GF oats.)

[Gives her a hobby...]

We ran into a little trouble when I decided to use frozen bananas.  Everything was going fine!  I remembered to take them out of the freezer to thaw while we ran errands, and frozen bananas that have been thawed are practically already mashed, so that was nice.  But the recipe calls for slightly warmed coconut oil, so that it's a liquid.  Wellll.... coconut oil solidifies at 76 degrees F, so when it hit those semi-frozen bananas, it just chunked back up.  I kind of mashed up some of the oil pieces, and microwaved it a little, but in the end I had to add a little extra olive oil to get it wet enough to stick together.  But the cookies turned out great!  They kind of remind me of those little bite-sized cookies from Paradise Bakery, except that they kind of taste like banana.

So in addition to actual cookies, we also had...

Roasted potato slices with ketchup frosting

 

and sour cream frosting and bacon sprinkles

And slices of havarti cheese, cut out with cookie cutters, topped with pear slices.

It was all pretty tasty!  I highly recommend the potatoes with sour cream frosting and bacon sprinkles.  I just sliced up a couple potatoes and roasted them in the oven with olive oil and a little salt and garlic powder.  Yum!

Lucy seems to have had fun.  I mean, she ate some of everything!  And it was a nice creative outlet for me.  So I'd say Cookie Dinner gets a B+.  (Points off for my lack of presentation. It's just who I am.)

My New Diet Plan

Hahahahahahahaha... OK, not really.  I'm just trying to eat a little better and move a little more.  I had an epiphany the other day, which was that if I want to have another baby, I'd better lose this extra weight I've got hanging on before I get pregnant, or it'll be as good as stuck there for a while.  I got back down to pre-baby weight at some point during Lucy's life (it was at that point that I finally got rid of my old pants -- if they didn't fit then, they weren't going to!), but it has crept back up.  This wouldn't bother me so much, except that I know I don't move around nearly as much as I should, and I eat my own version of junk food all afternoon, every afternoon.

So. The moving around problem I hope to remedy by buying Lucy a semi-expensive balance bike for Christmas, so I'll have put so much money into it that I'll feel compelled to take her on walks with it all the time. (Using the normal human misunderstanding of sunk costs to my advantage.)

And on the food front:

Yes, that it as extra large pill box filled with chocolate chips.  You see, lately Norman and I have been going through a 10 oz bag of Ghirardelli 60% dark chocolate chips every week by ourselves.  And that's reining it in to only one bag a week.  This cannot be good for me (especially when I'm so sensitive to caffeine and sugar).  So I now have my daily allotment in the pill box.  It's working pretty well so far -- I haven't cheated, but I did get a little snippy one afternoon.  But in my defense, it turned out to be a really bad week to cut back on the chocolate, reproductive-system-ly speaking.


I will leave you with this, which is on my refrigerator above my list of approved snacks:

This is the real reason I'm so strict with food, so it helps to be reminded.

(Here is the article in which Drew Carey said that.  I highly recommend it -- he is wise and inspiring.)

Thanksgiving 2011

Another Thanksgiving, come and gone. This one was perfect for us homebodies. (And by "us" I mean Norman and me -- I don't think Lucy could ever be misconstrued for a homebody.)  It was just the three of us, but enough food to feed... 8?  10?  A lot.

[The spread]

I made the soft pretzels (!!!) on Wednesday.  I hadn't made these in a while, and my bread kneading skills are much better than they used to be.  They turned out perfect.  Really.  There wasn't a single thing about them that could have been better.

Then Thursday started early with 5 bags of frozen green beans.  Now, calm down.  I had signed up to take a vegetable to the local Veteran's Hall.  We only kept about one bag's worth for ourselves.


These turned out really well.  I cooked up some bacon, then dumped it (and the grease!) into a pot with the frozen green beans.  Then I added salt, pepper, garlic powder, and dried minced onion.  Simple and tasty!

Then the turkey, which, sadly, I overcooked.  Especially sad because it was free range.  But the gravy I made from the pan drippings?  Ohhhh man.  So flavorful, but not fake flavorful.  Conventional turkeys are usually injected with a brothy liquid -- the ones at my local grocery store said they had up to 16% broth solution. That's a prime place for MSG to hide as "turkey broth", "natural flavorings", and "spice".  This is why we were so happy to be able to spend more on a free range turkey. 

Also, a standard post-Thanksgiving job for me, making turkey broth!  Turkeys are so big that I'll make two batches of crockpot broth from our 10 pound turkey.  And, once again, no MSG!

We also had sweet potatoes (actually yams -- I went to two stores and couldn't find any sweet potatoes!), but I cooked them two different ways.  Norman wanted them just mashed with butter and salt, so he could put gravy on them.  And I, of course, wanted them drenched in sugar!  I ended up mashing mine with butter, cinnamon, and nutmeg.  Then I topped them with this homemade marshmallow fluff and baked them!  Soooo good.  They taste just like some sort of Yankee candle smells.  (That's a good thing.)

We had wine, and sparkling pomegranate juice.  And for dessert I made pumpkin donuts.  Oh my.  This recipe makes about 50 donut holes.  And each one of them is fried in coconut oil (if you're at my house, anyway).  And coconut oil is seriously filling.  I have a feeling a bunch of these are going to mysteriously show up on the coffee table at church on Sunday, especially since we also still have a bunch of pretzels!

[Pumpkin donut holes]

 

[Om nom]