Kitchen Makeover

We fell off the healthy eating wagon. It's not like we jumped....it wasn't intentional....as the truck slowed down we didn't notice the tailgate had dropped and we slowly slipped over the edge. We bounced along on the ground for a while, occasionally noticing the view was not quite the same, but I don't think we were really aware.

This morning I woke up to the fact that lots of little things have slipped, and lots of little things multiplied together become A Big Thing.

So I'm about to drag together all the little things from the dusty corners of the kitchen and the even dustier nooks and crannies in my head, and Make An Action Plan.

It all started over a year ago when the oat groats we got from our organic farm were full of husks. For a few weeks we tried all sorts of things - cooking with husks and trying to ignore them (impossible), cooking with husks and picking them out, picking out husks after flaking but before cooking, soaking and seeing if the husks would rise to the top of the water (they didn't), grinding the oats into flour (the grain mill got plugged....every time), dehusking the oats before flaking (now there's a job for monkeys).....and before we knew it, we started buying "shop oats"....just once or twice, to mix in with the husky oats.....then three or four times......then to eat just on their own...meaning we still have an almost-25-kg bag of oat groats sitting in its bin in the garage.
When you get out of the habit of flaking your oats, soaking them and cooking them up in the morning to make a nutritious porridge, you start thinking about other cereals (especially when you are actually stopping in the cereal aisle at the supermarket to buy oats!)...and so now we have a big batch of muesli sitting in the pantry. To be fair to ourselves, we did make it....but it doesn't change the fact that porridge is Better For You (and much easier on the wallet).
So I think if I sorted the Husky Oat problem, we would be well on the road to recovery.
That is, after we get rid of the white flour that somehow found its way into the cupboard. That came on the heels of wholemeal flour.....you see it's a slippery slope; you stop grinding your own flour (for a not entirely ignoble reason - the farm ran out of wheat) and resort to buying shop flour....when you pick up a bag of wholemeal, it doesn't seem quite so bad to then grab just one bag of white and before you know it the kids are saying "oh I like white bread"
So the shop flour needs to go - I've emailed the farm to see if they've got any more wheat in stock yet. And if not, I'll bite the bullet and buy it from our local organic shop who charges an arm and a leg (pity he won't take tummy rolls or fat from the hips instead!)
And with no white flour, the kids may lose their interest in making chocolate chip cookies and so the big bag of white sugar may last a bit longer...then it can be replaced by organic dehydrated cane juice instead and if said kids want to do any more baking they can choose something from Nourishing Traditions.
Perhaps I should remove the recipe books from the kitchen - except for my well-worn copy of NT, of course.

Now why is it that making lacto-fermented cabbage does not hold the same appeal as making chocolate brownie? If I could just work that one out, then I could convince the kids to take over making the pickles each week and we would be bouncing around with a renewed zing! In the meantime we can pile up our sourdough bread with the pickles in the fridge. In the recipe book it says they improve with age - I wonder if the author had twelve months in mind?

Thankfully, dinner hasn't been such a problem. We're very much in the habit of roasting a chook or a leg of lamb and then making soup from the bones the next night and stretching it with lots of garlic and chilli to do a third night...and it's been very soupy kind of weather recently. I'll go easy on myself and just continue the same ol same ol. One day I'll become an Interesting Chef (or not).

Taking the time to Stop and Think was all I needed to get back on track. No need for an action plan. I'll just go and tell the kids we're back to porridge with yoghurt or cream or butter-n-salt for breakfast, eggs and sourdough bread for lunch with as many lacto-fermented veges as they can eat, and if they want to bake, I choose the cookbook! I might even insist on the drop of cod-liver-oil and a half-cup of beet kvass before breakfast each morning. You're sure to hear their groans when I mention that one.