Having a child can make you examine your own eating habits a bit more closely. It’s true that Ava is only consuming breastmilk and baby food at present, but soon will come the day when she’s eating table food alongside Jody and me and I want that food to be as healthy as possible. Also we just found out Jody’s cholesterol is a little on the high side, so that’s another motivating factor for me to attempt to cook a bit more healthfully.
I have to say that for the most part our eating habits aren’t that bad. We rarely eat fast food (thanks in part to how turned off we were after watching “Super Size Me” – definitely worth watching if you haven’t yet seen it) or when we do it’s Taco Bell, and I try to make a lot of our meals from scratch though I do use box mixes or prepared foods as well.
I’m happy to say that since an organic co-op market opened up in our neck of the woods, I’ve been buying more of our food there (at least what I can afford). And I’ve discovered the wonders of bulk items like brown rice, millet and quinoa. I feel like a kid in a candy store filling up my bags full of these things. Hee hee. I used to be all about buying boxed instant brown rice, but now that I’ve made slow-cooked brown rice I’m never going back to instant! There’s a huge difference in the taste and texture of it. Slow-cooked is so much tastier! :)
It’s thanks to some of my friends that I’ve added words like millet, which is a grain, and quinoa (pronounced keen-wah, who knew?!), which is like a grain, to my vocabulary, and now I even know how to prepare them. (Woohoo!) Both are very healthy and I didn’t even know they existed. I have a feeling there are a lot of healthy foods out there that I’ve been missing out on. ;)
So far I’ve made the millet in a stirfry, using it as a substitute for brown rice. It’s really tasty. The texture is kind of crunchy, and I guess it feels almost like a nut. I made the quinoa with black beans which we used as a filler for burritos. It was pretty good, but I think I prefer the millet over the quinoa.
Anyway, I’m excited to have come across this grain and pseudo-grain. Now I need to go scour the ‘net for some recipes to incorporate them into our diet in new ways. :)
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