More New Year's Goals: Food

Along with my other goals for the new year, I also have some plans for learning and implementing some different ways of cooking.

Kimi of The Nourishing Gourmet is hosting a Nourishing Foods carnival today and has asked us to share our healthy eating and cooking goals for 2009.

I'm keeping it simple. Even though there's so much I want to learn and accomplish, I will have much better success with choosing a few key areas and working on those instead of a long list that will overwhelm me!

My desire is to continue learning about nutrition and preparing the very best foods that I can in order to promote good health for us. Our diet is already primarily whole foods and full of fresh fruits and veggies. We've made the switch to raw milk, better eggs,using good fats such as butter, olive oil and coconut oil as opposed to margarine and shortening and more recently I'm trying to purchase mostly organic or all-natural meats. There is so much more to learn! And baby steps seem to be the way to go about making these changes.

I chose four areas to focus on this year:

1)Learn to use my new grain mill.I'm eager to begin grinding my own wheat as soon as my grain order arrives!

2)Begin soaking grains.Start with bread and basic grains and beans and as I'm successful and produce a finished product that we both enjoy, branch out to include other baked items.

3)Drastically reduce our consumption of refined sugar products. I would like to eliminate them altogether but realize that may not be totally realistic right away. My husband has a major sweet tooth and we both love our chocolate! I've already reduced the amount of desserts we eat and will continue to make more healthy options available. My plan for this is to use Rapadura and honey for baking. We've been quite satisfied with the muffins and cookies I've prepared with Rapadura in the past.I just need to stick with it and make this a habit!

4)Eliminate high fructose corn syrup! This is in almost everything! Even canned beans. I make most of our foods from scratch already so where this affects us the most is with salad dressings, ketchup and barbecue sauce. I've already purchased some ketchup without HFCS and it is pretty good. More expensive, yes. But we don't eat a lot of ketchup so that shouldn't be too much of an issue. I'm going to experiment with some homemade salad dressings and barbecue sauce to find one or two that we really like!


Head over to The Nourishing Gourmet to read about more nourishing food goals or maybe join in!