Monday, June 1, 2015

Food Talk

It's been about 6 months since I've done any regular posting about food. I used to post every week in conjunction with the Frugal Girl about my food waste. With that public accountability, I got pretty good at having little to no food waste each week.

After a while, I added a True Food Confession to my Friday food posts. Here I would talk about our eating for the week with a goal of cooking more and eating out less. I hoped that public accountability would help me here also. This had hit or miss results. Since cooking is a chore that I don't really like, it was easy to be distracted and often not get around to it until it was too late. Granted, there were good reasons like frequent migraines, but there were plenty of not-so-good reasons, like talking to my sisters on the phone, that kept me from cooking more. Ward likes to cook less than I do, so he was happy with ordering out. So public accountability did not really help in this area.

Now I'm going to try a new tactic. I'm going to post positive things about food and eating in our family. I am going to use the same formula that I do in a Second Look each week where I look at the interesting and the beautiful and ignore the chores that didn't get done and the negative things I see. Doing a Second Look has been very good for me and how I see my yard and maybe it will do the same for me in the kitchen. Instead of feeling guilty about not eating as I think we should, I hope to see things in a more positive light.

This Week's Look Around the Kitchen

Theo's Birthday Dinner

Theo's birthday was this past weekend and we had a birthday dinner for him that included a smoked pork shoulder that Ward smoked in our homemade smoker. I'm not that big of a pork eater and I really liked it. The males loved it. We also had a Greek salad with 6 kinds of greens from Uncle Billy's garden and roasted cauliflower. We grilled pineapple and asparagus (some of the last from Uncle Billy's garden). And for dessert-vanilla ice cream with fresh strawberries once again from Uncle Billy's garden. Uncle Billy's garden sure did give Theo great birthday presents.

We spent all day cooking this meal starting in the early morning with the smoker moving on to picking and cleaning vegetables, but boy, were the results good. We all enjoyed the meal, and we were able to send Theo home with enough leftovers for a couple of meals. At this point in his life, that was a perfect birthday present for him.