Another Baking Weekend

This past weekend was another successful weekend of baking. Cookies, muffins and bread keep me standing in the kitchen for 3-4 hours, but the end result is more than worth it! Last weekend it was bread, multi-berry muffins, oatmeal scotchies and chocolate chip cookies. This weekend it was bread, chocolate chip muffins and oatmeal raisin cookies.

As I've mentioned before, we are a family on-the-go, so we need quick out-the-door breakfasts. The muffins are perfect, and we can change it up weekly depending on what fruit is on sale, or just use chocolate chips for a treat, like I did this week.

Lunches consist of organic milk boxes for Michael, Almond Milk for Marcus (he's lactose intolerant) and water for me, a piece of fruit, a sandwich and cookies. For the sandwiches, I make the bread, and we use Hormel Natural Choice meat, because it is nitrate/nitrite free. Cheese goes on Michael's and my sandwich. We like provolone or swiss cheese. The hubby usually takes the dinner leftovers, or he enjoys a salad.

Dinners have a bit more of a challenge since we're always on-the-go, and last week our house was a construction zone and without a kitchen (redoing the floors after a flood). Monday night ended up being sandwiches. Tuesday we ate at the ball field. Wednesday, I took my crockpot over to my mothers and made a pot roast with potatoes. Thursday and Friday I still didn't have a kitchen, so these days were grab and go too. We'll have to see how dinners are this week! I will also post our recipes.

Why I Say Preservatives are Bad, and Our Changes!

You are what you eat?!?!? That’s why I say preservatives are bad. While some preservatives are okay in limited quantities according to the FDA, such as Sorbates, Sodium benzoate and benzoic acid, Vitamin C and Citric Acid I challenge you to look at the ingredients of what you eat every day. How many things that you eat have the above mentioned ingredients in them; most? I’d say chances are you are consuming, as most people do, more than a limited quantity. I know my family was. Now, that being said, limited quantities of these things wouldn’t be bad. If the aforementioned things were all that was in my family’s diet, I wouldn’t be on the rampage I’m on to rid our diet of preservatives all together. I dare to say we were eating quite a few things that had “bad” preservatives in them such as butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) and butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT), Sulfites, Nitrates. The aforementioned all have horrible side effects, including the possibility of cancer. Having already had thyroid cancer myself, I am on a mission to be a little more vigilant about what this family eats!

We still haven’t used up all of the boxed and canned food in the house yet, but I’m not one to let things go to waste…so we will continue to use that up. However, we are starting our preservative free campaign.

We are still a typical American family and very much on-the-go. Both my husband and I work full-time jobs outside of the home. Two of our three kids are in school, and the other one attends daycare (where they feed him all organic food J). So, it has been muffins during the week so far for breakfast, and everyone seems to like this. I bought a great cookbook King Arthur’s Flour Cookbook, and it has provided me great options for muffins, breads and the like. Today I will attempt to make my very first loaf of bread! I’m not above buying sandwich meat, but this family is only going to buy nitrate/nitrite free sandwich meat, such a Hormel Natural Choice. For snacks, we’re going to make cookies instead of eating chips, and we’ll make crackers and eat fresh fruit and vegetables.