I love to cook. I like having lots of new foods to experiment with all the time. One of my favorite pass times is to look at recipes on Pinterest. I made a rule for myself that I can only pin things that are nutritious or for someone or something specific. Otherwise I would have only oreo pancakes and peanut butter brownie batter cookie dough cake pinned. I like to think that I take after my mom in that I am a pretty good cook, even though I make things she would either never make or think is gross.
That being said, simplifying what we eat has always been something I stray from. I made a resolution this year to “simplify.” When I made that resolution, I had easy things in mind like simplifying my shoes and clothes and stuff like that. I have successfully simplified many areas of my life, but not food. Why take away something I genuinely enjoy doing?
When I looked at what we spend most of our money on, it ended up being mostly food. We are good about going grocery shopping just once a week, but those trips are a bit pricey. So, as a challenge to ourselves (especially me) we have decided to simplify our diets for the next 40 days. We made a list of 11 foods that we are committing to purchase for the next 40 days as our grocery list. We are going to continue using the stuff we have in stock in our pantry and fridge, but if we run out, we run out. We will only buy these eleven nutritious foods:
- lentils
- quinoa
- sweet potatoes
- avocados
- berries
- spinach
- fish
- wheat bread
- peanut/nut butters
- eggs
- milk
We went grocery shopping for these items today. We ended up spending a fourth of what we normally spend. As our first meal, I made sweet potato burgers. They were pretty tasty. I am looking forward to challenging my culinary skills and trying new things using just these ingredients. Do you guys have any great recipes using these ingredients that you would like to share?
[…] from the book. For example, we are experimenting right now with our food consumption. I wrote a post a few months ago about simple eating where we ate 10 foods for a few weeks. That was quite a […]