Christa, Day 38: Being a Vegetarian Is Hard!

I like to think we eat well. Not well as in delightfully fancy plates of the sort I would eat daily if I had a personal chef, but rather well as in fairly healthy and possibly above average where Americans are concerned. Sorry, America! We eat vegetables every day and steer clear of ready meals. Our main utterly gross vice is boxed macaroni and cheese, to which we add real cheese, and the only reason it has become a fixture is because once P. tasted the box stuff once in Florida, she didn't want to switch back to homemade. And we do buy veggie sausages and our sauce is jarred unless it's pesto in the summertime or we get red sauce as a present.

Is that healthy? I feel like the older I get, the less sure I am. Fresh fruits and veggies, definitely healthy. Bread and pasta, though... healthy? Or going to kill you? Sometimes I long for the days when we ate the flesh of other living beings and dinner could be vegetables and meat, all roasted up nicely. That seemed pretty healthy. And easy, too. Being a vegetarian is hard!

Today's voluntary simplicity idea is as follows:

Eat healthy. It might not be obvious how eating healthy relates to simplicity, but think about the opposite: if you eat fatty, greasy, salty, sugary, fried foods all the time, you are sure to have higher medical needs over the long term. We could be talking years from now, but imagine frequent doctor visits, hospitalization, going to the pharmacist, getting therapy, having surgery, taking insulin shots … you get the idea. Being unhealthy is complicated. Eating healthy simplifies all of that greatly, over the long term. Read about how to simplify your eating habits.

So since I'm so befuddled, let's take a look at what ol' Leo deems unhealthy and talk about that. I've commented on each item.

1. Junk food. Most of the junk food we eat is still on the healthy or has-some-redeeming-value side. Our diet isn't perfect but we're not chowing down on chips and so on. It's also not raw macro-biotic vegan and all organic/local.
2. Processed food. This is one I'm confused on... granola is processed, but the good stuff isn't terrible for you. Bread is processed, but it also serves as a peanut butter delivery system. Pasta sauce is processed... We eat raw, whole foods aplenty, but I guess we do eat plenty of processed foods.
3. Fast food. Every now and then we'll lose our minds and grab veggie burgers and fries from Burger King, but fast food for us is usually veggie subs from Subway. Could be worse, right? Hello, vegetables.
4. Red meat. We're vegetarians, so no red meat in our houses or in our bodies!
5. Fried food. I love fried food. Can't help it. Fried is yummy. And we'll even fry at home because we're gross like that. But it's not like we're sucking down fries every night, and that's why I exercise daily. Cholesterol levels are a-ok. Bring on the fried!

Overall, though, like I said we're doing pretty okay on the eating healthy front, and I just had a checkup confirming that all my levels are within mid average range for a healthy adult. And we eat lots of olive oil, so there's that, too. Heh. I guess the whole process of expanding my cooking repertoire, as per yesterday's idea, will help with our little family eating even better. I'll let you know how it goes.

Julia's Day 38: Cooking everything makes it easy to eat healthy

I love these food-related assignments, it makes my life so much easier!

Rebecca, Day 37: Meal Planning

I have been wanting to simplify meal times for a while now. The reason? If we start making dinner at 6 p.m., anything particularly nice to eat (or, rather, more complex than a simple pasta dish, salad, or sandwich) won't be ready till close to 7 p.m.

If we start our preschooler on his bedtime routine around 7:30, that means that life after a full day of work can consist of:

1. day care pick up
2. food prep and cooking while struggling to occupy toddler (often resorting to playing videos for him)
3. eating
4. starting bed time routine
   

In other words, no quality after-work time with my child until the stories and snuggles that put him to sleep. Considering my priorities, the situation is really disagreeable to me.

Enter my new gadget: the slow cooker I requested for my birthday earlier this month. That plus recipes from A Year of Slow Cooking and a couple vegetarian slow cooker books have been making quite the difference.

Slow cooker recipes require advanced planning. I'm sure some people who use slow cookers a lot get to the point where they can just throw stuff in it and hope it comes out well; but I need to follow recipes. Therefore, I need to shop with specific recipes in mind, and think about what will make sense for that week.

We've been prepping the ingredients for our slow-cooked meals after our son is asleep, refrigerating them, and then beginning the slow cooking process in the morning. This means that at 6 p.m., we're not starting the process of cooking; we're sitting down to eat a nice, warm, high-quality meal.

And what a huge difference this makes! It may not save tons of time--prepping a good slow cooker recipe takes as much time as prepping any recipe, and I've always felt that food prep work is the long boring part--but it is reorganizing our time in a way that makes sense for our family.

And I'm really happy about that.

Note: I've also checked out a couple library books on pressure cooking. We got a pressure cooker for our wedding in 2000 that we've used, maybe, twice? If I can get comfortable using it, I think we could use this pressure cooker to similar advantage. We'd prep food in advance, but instead of having it cook all day, throw the ingredients when we get home and see it ready to eat in only a few minutes. So far, I'm more drawn to the idea of food ready to eat as soon as we get home, freeing up the evening for walks and playing and other fun stuff--but I think the pressure cooker may have its place, too.

Christa, Day 37: This Is the Post Where I Ask for Your Help!

I wrote briefly on Day 5 about my dislike of cooking. That hasn't changed, even though I made amazing crepes tonight. It's not that I can't cook and cook well, it's that I dislike the drudgery of cooking and the cleanup and how fast the fruits of one's labors are thanklessly consumed. It's like every meal is Thanksgiving where someone is pouring their soul into the food and it's sucked off the bone in five minutes flat, after which everyone wants to go watch football. No thanks!

Which brings me to today's voluntary simplicity idea:

Create a simple weekly dinner menu. If figuring out what’s for dinner is a nightly stressor for you or your family, consider creating a weekly menu. Decide on a week’s worth of simple dinners, set a specific dinner for each night of the week, go grocery shopping for the ingredients. Now you know what’s for dinner each night, and you have all the ingredients necessary. No need for difficult recipes — find ones that can be done in 10-15 minutes (or less).

I tried this. Really, I did. Somewhere in one of my old, entirely filled to the brim to do notebooks with all the old items crossed off there is a list of six meals corresponding to Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, with Sunday being a wildcard day. It seemed like a great idea at the time, but from a grocery shopping perspective... not so much. It just didn't seem to work as far as perishables went. And then summertime came and I wanted different foods every day. I guess this is silly and picky of me, but if I say that on Thursday I'm going to eat X, invariably I want Y. So I kept cheating and then threw my weekly meal plan out the window.

Only the fates could know that the idea would be presented to me again as part of this project!

It's hard to get jazzed about simplifying in the kitchen when the chore is one I don't like - and don't like a lot - but of course there have been other days and other posts in which my fellow contributors have encountered a chore or responsibility that vexes them. I assume they handled it with grace and fortitude and also sucked it up and dealt. Which is what I ought to be doing. The logical part of my brain says that simplifying a chore that one doesn't like can only make that chore easier. The emotional part of my brain says something like "COOKING CAN GO TO HELL RAWR RAWR FOOD PILLS BRING 'EM ON, NASA!" For indeed, I would be the first in line to purchase nutritionally balanced food in easy-to-swallow, utterly non-messy pill form.

Where was I? Oh, right, meal planning. I did a week-long meal plan around Day 16, and it worked well for one week, by which I mean I tolerated it. And I know I ought to do it again, but I think I need some help. Amy's Day 37 was inspiring, but I think I need some very specific ideas for foodstuffs that don't require much cooking or prep time since I get home at 4 p.m. and I want to spend as much time at that point in the day with my child, not doing a lot of chopping and mixing and so on. Does anyone know any easy foods besides crepes and omelets and lentil soup and roasted broccoli that I will start me down the road to a broader mealtime repertoire? Like I said, I can cook. I just don't want it to usurp the time I have so precious little of!

Julia's Day 37: Meal planning for people who love markets

I prefer to have the market drive my meal plan rather than vice versa, but that might be a function of the fact that I'm really more of a farmer's market person than a supermarket person.