Processed Food Purge

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On April 24th, Donnie and I started on a new diet.  Well, we really don't consider it a diet; we really consider it a lifestyle change.  We've been reading up on and generally following the principles of the Weston A. Price Foundation.  Four months later and 25lbs. less each, we remain committed to the new habits we've incorporated at meal times and during grocery shopping trips.  We enjoy our meals, aren't going around hungry, and feel great too.

We started out slowly on this new way of eating by reducing our bread intake, cutting out desserts, and adding in higher quality meats and veggies.  Then we ditched diet soda to cut our caffeine intake as well as the chemicals we were consuming.  Donnie has even given up coffee although I am still drinking the equivalent of two cups a day. We started adding healthy saturated fats back into our diets.  Vegetable oils of any type were out, and coconut oil and bacon grease became standard. We also began to make smart choices about organic produce.  Refer to the Dirty Dozen here.   

At first I vowed to use up all the processed foods I already had in the house.  Why waste money, right?  But as time has gone on, I found that I just couldn't stomach serving up the processed foods at meals.  I just felt like one box of xyz that had 50 ingredients I couldn't pronounce in it wasted all my other efforts over the day to try to eat healthy.  So this weekend I decided it was time to purge the pantry and the refrigerator of all the processed foods still in the house.   I filled up about 8 boxes with soups, canned veggies, cake mixes, and pasta.  We won't miss these products, really.  And, our local thrift store, Guardian Angel, said they'd be glad to take any non-perishable food products not out of date.

Those of you who have been in the large walk-in pantry that I'm blessed with know that from time-to-time it has been anything but walk-in:-)  I'm pleased to say that there is now a lot of room in it.  You could almost do a jig!  Now that I'm done with purging the processed foods, I will make an effort to better organize my kitchen gadgets and the food items I still need to store outside the refrigerator.

See the pic at the top for a view of the emptied back of the pantry.  I'd say we're 85% processed food free and/or organic only now.

It's amazing when we eat fresh or fermented foods just how much activity goes on in our refrigerator and freezer instead of in the pantry.  In this shot of the freezer, you'll see a lot of beef from Wilkerson Farms and some pork from Rainbow Meadow Farms.  I'm low on chicken right now.  We signed up today to cowpool to get an 1/8 of a side.  Soon the freezer will be filled with even more grass fed beef.

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In this shot of the refrigerator, you'll see Maple View Farms milk, kumbacha, butter, sauerkraut, lacto-fermented ketchup, local eggs and homemade bbq sauce.  Lots of cheeses and veggies hidden in the drawers too.  

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I cook a real dinner almost every night, and on the nights when we don't eat fresh, we eat leftovers from the night before.  Lunch often consists of quality leftovers too.  Breakfast is eggs and bacon or sausage most days as well.  When we travel, we pack lunches to take with us for picnics and make smart choices at restaurants for breakfast and dinner.

Donnie and I guesstimate that we are spending about the same on groceries now as we were before.  When you don't eat out much, you can afford to buy better quality foods to prepare at home.  But we sure are eating what we feel is much better now.

Male Juvenile Cardinal

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I watched the father cardinal feed this male juvenile 'baby' for a few minutes while I was preparing dinner last night.  I can always hear their distinctive chirp, chirp when they come to the feeder and birdbath.  I missed the daddy putting the sunflower seed in the baby's mouth but was able to capture this pose of the baby on the birdbath.

Monday is back to school for the boys, and we've been school supply shopping!  In our state and our county, we are asked if not required to buy quite a long and expensive list of supplies to send in with the kids.  This is most of of the stuff for Johnny who is entering second grade.  Although there are some variations from teacher to teacher and grade to grade, the bulk of the lists is the same featuring items both for the student's private use as well as some items for use by all the kids (i.e. plastic bags and baby wipes).

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Grouper from Haag & Sons Seafood.

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Robot Warriors

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These robots are from the Lego game Robo Champs. I bought it some time ago and decided to open it for Johnny today. He loves robots! He built them all on his own following the instructions and proudly presented them to me when he was done. I decided a photo shoot was in order:-) I tweaked the original quite a bit to give it a bit more of a futuristic if not realistic look. Johnny was quite pleased with the finished picture and framing.

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Omlette Anyone?

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Donnie made breakfast yesterday. Look at that omlette he made Johnny! Mushrooms sauteed in butter and then folded on top one egg with Wisconsin cheddar cheese and some Canadian Bacon and a strip of real bacon too. Yum!  Donnie recently got us this de Buyer Blue Steel Crepe Pan from Williams and Sonoma. We read the reviews saying that it works well on eggs, and it does.  Specifically, the 24cm works great on 1 or 2 eggs.  Donnie found 3 eggs at a time to be a bit too much.  We eat eggs everyday now.  Such a great nutritional food wrongly avoided for cholestoral in our opinion.  And, our eggs come from a local source not the grocery store.  The eggs vary in size and color and are ever so yummy!

Four days and counting until the boys start their next school year.  In the meantime on these hot summer days we've continued to teach the boys card games.  Yesterday we added Spoons.  What a hilarious game!  We had a blast!  Donnie shared some happy memories of playing this game as a child with his brother.  He said sometimes at Thanksgiving there would be 13 spoons on the table making it easier to sneak 1 or more out of the pile without anyone noticing.  The most complex game we've taught them is Rummey.  We're running out of new games to teach them that are kid friendly.  They keep asking us to look up Trash.

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I also captured this American Lady butterfly on my lantana at the mailbox.

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Big Dragonfly

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We had a hot and soupy day at the house yetserday followed up by another round of severe afternoon thunderstorms.  Thankfully this time we weren't driving in it this time.  There was power out all over Raleigh, a tree down on the I440 beltline, and cars off in the ditches.  I had lots of small and some larger limbs to pick up in my yard on Blaze's doggie walk this AM.  I'm just glad it wasn't worse.

Before the storm, the humidity had the dragonflies out in force in my yard circling my ornamental ponds.  I finally went out to take a few pics not long before the first rain came, so there was cloud cover already...boo.   I tried to take shots with my Canon S3 IS which at ISO 100 has little noise, but there just wasn't enough light to get the shot I wanted so I switched to the Canon SX40 HS and took some shots at the lowest ISO I could and still get a fast enough shutter speed to not get hand held motion blur.  The ISO ranged from 100 - 1600.  The top shot was taken with a flash and at a -2 flash output setting.  I resorted to the flash to try to get rid of noise.  The bottom shot was no flash.  I had to do a lot of stuff to get the top shot where I was happy enough with it though.  It was originally way too dark.  Maybe I should have done a -1 on the flash.  Next time!  I added some contrast in Color Efex Pro, but it still didn't satisfy me.  I added a light green Vignette in Picasa, but then the outermost wings were covered.  So I used the select tool in PSE7 to capture the wings from the non vignette image and then put them as a layer over the vignetted one.  But then the face bothered me.  I lost details adjusting the contrast because that area had the most light colored part of the shot.  So I selected the face off the original exposure and layered it over the vignetted layer too.  I also removed a minor white spot on the lower right wing.  I dunno.  It's OK and I think an improvement over the ogirinal but I still much prefer other dragon shots I've taken over the past 3 years.  Still, it's the best of what I have from yesterday to share today:-)  When the light isn't right, you sure do have to do a lot of work to fix an image...sigh.  Even in the one below I've had to do a basic contrast adjust in Picasa to bring out the color tones. 

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Storm Cloud

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A picture of a storm cloud taken on our way home from a grocery shopping trip yesterday.  I liked how the rain appeared to be coming down out of the cloud.  Most of the storm was past by the time I took this image.  Boy was I glad Donnie was driving.  The rain and sky were quite intense for parts of our trip.  I measured 3 inches in the rain gauge at least over the last 5 days.

I used Color Efex Pro to enhance the details on the shot. I used Noiseware to remove noise.  I did an hdr version, and I pulled out a few details from the hdr image layered on top of the Color Efex Pro image to add a few more details (whitest area of picture).  I also cropped to 8X10 and adjusted the curve in the grass with the clone tool.  Not my best shot or best pp work but am improvement over the original I think.

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Window at Marbles

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The kids and I went to Marbles Kids Museum yesterday.  As we walked up the stairs, the light coming through the big skylight caught my eye.

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We had a picnic on their patio and then went inside.  I love the kids having fun in the submarine pretending to be marine biologists (lower right).

I really want to put Madi surfing on the fountain (shot lower left in the collage and the following shot).  Maybe sometime:-)

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Swimming with the Sea Turtle!

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I picked a shot from our vacation last week to pp for today's shot.  Johnny is on the left and Joey is looking back at you delighted that the sea turtle is 'swimming' with him.  There is one sea turtle in the huge 'shark' tank, and she loves to swim with folks at the glass.  We were told that they remove her to the diver's cage a couple of times a day to feed her separately because her diet is veggies vs. the 'meats' that the other fish in the tank eat.  She sure did delight the kids.

Yesterday we went bowling yesterday with new neighbor and friend Andy.  A good time was had by all!  We won't talk about the scores;-)

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I removed a couple of lights showing up in the glass and ran a noise filter on this.