We’re making some changes around here. Calculating our cost for certain meals was part of the motivation, and hubby’s recent weight loss is another. We’ve made some short-term changes in celebration of the changing seasons that we want to continue with: we are enjoying the return of reasonable prices on fresh produce and have exchanged a good portion of our meat & cheese consumption for bananas, cucumbers, tomatoes, oranges, etc.

We don’t eat the average American diet – very few of our foods are prepackaged, and sodas are a rare treat. However, we do go through a lot of sugar and white flour, we eat a lot of meat (including hot dogs, sausage, etc.) and desserts are not chosen with healthful ingredients in mind.

We don’t want to become health nuts (or to borrow a phrase from a cynic I know, Food Pharisees). However, we are trying out some substantial shifts:

1. There is 1/2 cup of white sugar left in the house, and I don’t intend to buy more right away. We are finding that brown sugar works very nicely in nearly anything from coffee to Grandma’s Wacky Cake. I bought a 25# bag of brown sugar at Costco for the same price/lb as what I normally pay for white sugar. I realize there may be no substantial difference between the two, but I think this might help us develop less of a taste for refined sugar – a step in the right direction.
2. We don’t eat meat every night for dinner now. This is a huge change!
3. With the money saved by not consuming 4-7 lbs. of meat every day, we can start every dinner with a large appetizer platter of fresh veggies.
4. The meat we do eat will be generally less processed. Not organic, but not hot dogs either. We’re looking for a happy medium.
5. We’re making whole-wheat bread with freshly ground wheat, honey and other healthy stuff.
6. I have learned to cook beans in my crock pot using the hard water from our well.  I have learned to do this long before I need them so that they will have plenty of time to get soft before I need them.
7. I will be working fresh ground whole wheat flour into many of our recipes. Like changing brown sugar for white, I’m hoping we will find that many or most recipes can be changed without negatively affecting the results. Unlike changing brown sugar for white, this will represent a substantial change in nutritional value.
8. Friday night pizza will go on as planned, with crusts made entirely of white flour.

We think we can accomplish most of this without spending more for food than we do already because we’ll be cutting back on some of the more expensive elements in our diet, namely meat and cheese.

We also think we might be crazy (or go crazy) and all fight each other like a pack of sharks for that last bag of cheetohs in the pantry, but we’ll take it a day at a time and see how it goes.

Our household has recently gone crazy over bananas, thanks in large to The Boy. That kid will eat 3 bananas before breakfast and 3 more over the course of the day – in addition to 3 hearty meals and a snack here and there. That boy can eat. We have begun to call him “Manna Man” before 9 or 10 AM, because all he does in the morning is ask for mannas.

Influenced by him, the rest of us have upped our banana consumption as well. I am guessing we eat 30 lbs per week, conservatively. I mean the guess is conservative; we eat them liberally.

All of this is leading up to my epiphany, though none of it was really necessary info. I just felt like sharing all that. Here is my grand realization. As I was standing at a gas station, munching on a banana while a bathtub worth of gasoline gushed into my gas tank, I realized that there are at least 3 wonderful characteristics of bananas that combine to make them uniquely convenient:

1. They can be eaten unwashed, since you peel them.
2. They can be eaten with unwashed hands, since you peel them and hold them by the peel.
3. No need to wash afterward, since you hold them by the peel.

How many other healthy, all natural foods could you eat with no prep while pumping gas with no concern over contamination? Well, I guess you could worry about fumes, but I was going to breath regardless of whether I was cramming food in my mouth…

As an additional note of interest, can anyone tell me what common element of punctuation I did not use in this post? Here is why: my computer (or maybe it was a decision of WordPress) has decided to open a search every time I hit a particular key. Normally this happens when I hit Control+F, but tonight it happens when I try to use that particularly handy bit of punctuation. Bizarre? Yes. But I never claimed to live a normal life.

See? My life is never boring, and it is not always because of the children.