When I talk to people about our family’s plan for the year, I am always asked “how do you have time to do this?”
The short answer to that is, “I don’t.”
Or, at least, “I didn’t.” It’s not as if I had free hours in my day and just decided I would fill that time with making all of our food from scratch. I do have four children. It’s a matter of what you decide to make a priority in your life. For now, this is our priority.
And, as I’ve said, it’s an experiment. I don’t know that I’ll be making our own condiments for the rest of our life. :) I definitely will keep making the ketchup. So worth the effort. :) I do know that our eating habits will be forever changed. We won’t always eat perfectly, but we will eat well and focus on real foods.
In the meantime, I will continue to look for ways to make eating unprocessed foods more manageable. Here are a couple of tips:
1. Double a dinner recipe once a week. (You know you’re going to have those days when there is no time to make dinner from scratch. If you have a premade dinner waiting for you, there’s no need to rely on convenience foods!)
2. Spend a couple of hours on the weekend making a big batch of snacks for the week. (Even if that just means cutting up carrots or cheese cubes and packaging them for snacks. Or making packs of dried fruit and nut trail mixes. If they’re packaged and ready, the kids can just grab them and go.)
3. Make a weekly dinner menu. (This is probably the most important. It’s much easier making dinner during the week if you know you have all of your ingredients.)
This site is called Simple in the Suburbs – I want the idea of making your own food to not seem so overwhelming. This is day 1-2-3. I thought it was a good day to give some easy tips. :)