The Big Lug

My desire to feed my family more organic and local foods is often in a battle with my lack of time and energy. Thankfully there is a huge industry dedicated to feeding off my mom guilt by developing thousands and thousands of organic convenience food products! As long as I can keep the job that pays the bills and causes me to be away from home  (thus the guilt in the first place – it’s the circle of life) then I can buy the few great organic products that I rely on daily.

Luckily these are carried at my regular grocery store so I do knot have to make a special trip to the whole foods.*

First off are these great nuggets by Ian’s. As much as I thought my kid would not end up eating nuggets all the time, I was wrong. And if you’ve seen or read any of the popular books or movies on our food industry you’re probably wary of the bigger brand name nuggets out there. Bonus to these is that they are delicious!

Two other staples on our pantry are Annie’s Organic Mac and Cheese and Health Valley cereal bars. Both of these are purchased weekly partially because they are our only organic options in our grocery store. However both happen to be tasty and though slightly more expensive than their non-organic versions, reasonably priced.

Sometimes I think this extra money and effort to buy these products may be a result of effective marketing on the part of the growing organic food industry and my subconscious desire to project a certain image as a parent. But even if that is the case o think it can only do more good than harm to participate in this growing movement towards eating organic.

*I love Whole Foods but I cannot go there without leaving with some kind of organic lip balm or a yoga mat or something.

Bye Bye Giant Computer Chair

Prepping the house for the new baby coming at the end of June is a little bit like a puzzle or a logic word problem. To move the baby into what was the nursery (currently our son’s room) we have to move our son into his new room (currently the guest room) and move everything out of the guest room into…oh right. There ISN’T ANYWHERE TO PUT THAT CRAP.

The guest room is actually just a room of random crap that doesn’t belong anywhere which happens to have a bed in it. The room also has our computer and printer and 2 bookshelves full of books and photos.

Our kitchen is big enough to house the computer equipment so  we went to Ikea and purchased a better desk suited for that area – enabling us to move the computer out of the guest room.

What to do with the old desk, chair, and printer table? Well we freecycled them. I love freecycle. Freecycle is a place where you post the crap you don’t want any longer and lo and behold people PICK IT UP from your PORCH without you doing anything! So awesome and so much better than throwing it out. Within 2 days our desk, chair, and small printer table were picked up and hopefully put to good use. But more importantly OUT OF OUR HOUSE!

Find your local Freecycle and start giving stuff away or getting it for free!

I recently read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and started to think about how to feed my family more local foods. Though I found her goals in the book to be unachievable for my family (and her tone sometimes frankly preachy), I still agreed with the principle of the matter – we’re too disconnected from the source of our food.

The first step in my local eating effort was to try and buy our bread from a local bakery. (Bonus: they also sell delicious cinnamon buns). The odd thing about our bakery is I’ve only been able to get rye bread so far. Do they only bake rye? Do they not believe in wheat? I’m not sure.

Snowpacalypse

This worked for a few weeks until the tri-state area was buried in the snowpocalypse and I could only get to the grocery store.  It was great while it lasted and I do plan to go back as soon as we thaw out.

We also visited a local farm that sells meat from animals they raise. Everything we got there was really delicious and I know the money went directly back into a local community business. However I have no idea how they raise their animals – if they’re hormone free? Free range? I don’t know, but I still feel like it’s a step in the right direction.

For a few  years we belonged to a CSA until the demands of family on the weekend and during the week made it too difficult for us to make it to the farm and for us to find time to cook the abundance of veggies. This year we’ll have our own little farm in the backyard, if the snow ever stops!