Top Fruits and Veggies to Buy Organic – Gaiam Life.

Here’s an easy to follow guide for which fruits and veggies to buy organic…

1. Peaches

2. Apples

3. Sweet Bell Peppers

4. Celery

5. Nectarines

6. Strawberries

7. Cherries

8. Lettuce

9. Grapes (imported)

10. Pears

11. Spinach

12. Potatoes

Here is a list of produce you need to be least concerned with in terms of pesticides…

1. Onions

2. Avocados

3. Sweet corn (frozen)

4. Pineapples

5. Mango

6. Sweet Peas (frozen)

7. Asparagus

8. Kiwi

9. Bananas

10. Cabbage

11. Broccoli

12. Eggplant

How to Be Organic on a Budget, an article on Giam.com is a great guide to  help you get started on buying organic foods and products.  I just went through the list to see how I am doing and so far, pretty good.  The list is  great way to help you get started and also a good way to check your progress and maintain what you are doing.

On the list, the two things that I agree with most are the #1. Buy direct from the farm, #6. Learn your labels, and #7. Learn what to buy organic and what to not buy organic, and #12. Don’t be a slave to the word “organic”.

The reason these stuck out to me the most is because by buying your food directly from a farm you can have more control as to what your buying.  You have access to the farmer and can ask him/her how they control pests and about their growing methods.  If you don’t agree, go some where else.  Also, buying from a farm means you get lower prices, the freshest in-season fruits and veggies, and most importantly, you help support agriculture in your area.

Learning your labels is also very important.  Make sure you are spending your money wisely and actually buying fresh, organic food.  Labels can be misleading and lots of companies are trying to ride the organic wave.  Be informed, it’s important!

Learning what food to buy organic is also important.  Obviously, if you could buy all organic food that would be best, but that isn’t always the case.  Many of us are on a budget and we want to make sure we spend our dollars effectively.  That being the case, read up on what fruits and veggies are loaded with pesticides and stick to organics for those.

Lastly, don’t be a slave the the term “organic”.  This is really important because there is really great food out there that is grown organically but doesn’t have the money to have the organic label.  This is especially true with farmer’s markets.  Being labeled organic by the USDA is a hefty process, requiring lots of time and money.  Many small, family farms can’t afford to do that.  That doesn’t mean they aren’t organic and don’t let that keep you from buying.  Farmer’s markets are great because you can talk to the farmers and ask about growing practices and decide if it is worth spending your money on.  Also, these farms might be the best and most  environmentally friendly farms to support because they are local and have a smaller footprint than larger, organically certified farms from across the country.

I hope this information helps you navigate your way through the world of organic foods.  Let me know what you think about Giam’s list at How to Be Organic on a Budget, and which items speak to you.

Happy shopping!

If you’ve noticed by many of my blogs food is not only apart of my life three times a day but I am constantly thinking and learning about it…and probably enjoying a little too much of it:)

Being more aware of the food in your life is such an amazing experience and one that everyone should enjoy.  Understanding where our food comes from, the work it takes to grow it or get it ready for sale is outstanding.  While I love to eat out and enjoy someone else’s cooking, by doing so I sacrifice control over what I am putting in my body, which for some can be scary and for others a relief.

One of the most important things I’ve learned in my Green Journey is that supporting local farmers and restaurants is huge.  The food is amazing and you get to help build up your community.  Amazing!  If you find yourself really supporting your community by eating out a lot, your not alone.  Many of us are so tired at the end of the day the only thing we can think about is someone doing the work for us.  There is nothing wrong with that.  However, with many of us trying to find ways to save money and to shed a few pounds, there is a different way to approach food (unless of course  you get too crazy with the Clean Eating Meal Plan, ha!)– start cooking at home.  I know, by the end of the day who has any energy left to cook and then clean the kitchen.  Well, once you start, believe me, it’s pretty addicting.

Luckily, technology is there to help us get started.  The Huffingtion Post has a great list of apps for getting started for your adventures in the kitchen.  I also posted a few apps and those can be located under the “Local and Organic Food Section.”  These apps can help you plan a grocery list, scan items to see how eco-friendly they are or how healthy they are, it’s so easy!

Also, if you need some more motivation, the Huffington Post is recruiting people to join “The Week of Eating In.“  All you have to do is sign up and chat with others who are taking the challenge.  I signed up and can’t wait to hear about how you and others do with this week.  I guarantee you wont be disappointed and you’ll be surprised how fun your family can have cooking together.

Happy cooking!

If you tuned in last Monday you might already be aware of my very depressing grocery shopping trip.  If not, I will fill you in…last weekend I was reading the magazine Clean Eating and decided it would be a great idea to follow their eating  plan.  The magazine, as nice as they are, already listed out all of the foods I needed.  So instead of doing it myself, I followed them blindly.  What a mistake!  After spending what felt like forever in the store, my husband and I walked out with a full shopping cart and $270 dollars less in our pockets.  What happened?

When I originally wrote about our shopping trip I think I was still in shock.  Now, as the week as passed I’ve been able to experience the food and understand why what we bought was just waaay to much for two people and I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to make this food last longer than one week.

Clean Eating is a great magazine, don’t get me wrong.  But, these sections of an organized list just aren’t my cup of tea.  The article said I should feel more energized, lose weight and overall, feel amazing.  Well one week later, I am the same weight, didn’t feel  more energized, and I feel worse because I spent so much money at the grocery store.  Sorry Clean Eating, this didn’t work for me.  Despite the negative aspects of this experiment there were some good things that came out of this.

1. I didn’t go out to eat

I couldn’t justify spending any money on food this last week and so spent more time cooking and less time out.  This, I will say, made me feel good because I didn’t do the last minute meals that leave you feeling too full and broke.

2. We still have enough food for this week and next (Hopefully!)

Looking in our refrigerator and pantry we still have a bunch of food.  Things are getting low but if I can get creative, I think I can stretch out the duration of this food to last us through the next 2 weeks with having to only buy the staples (milk and eggs) from the grocery store.

3. I tried new things

This is by far the best part of the experiment, trying different foods.  In high school I over did ham and swiss cheese, I put it on everything.  I haven’t eating it really since until this last week and I am in love again!  The ham I used was uncured ham, which is a little bit more expensive but so much better.  Other things I tried, Greek yogurt, putting unsalted sunflower seeds in oatmeal and salads, a fajita salad recipe, an amazing mango and vanilla protein shake and incredible egg and ham turnovers (a great alternative to fried or scrambled eggs in the morning).

Overall, I am glad I tried the Clean Eating Meal Plan but I don’t think I would do it again.  Instead, I will take recipes from the Plan and incorporate them into my budget grocery list and shop smarter and healthier.

Until next week…I will be eating carefully and creatively and will tell you all about it:)

Have you tried to grow kitchen herbs and failed miserable?  I have (with the help of my plant sitter).  Everyone says growing herbs is so easy but the more I read about them, the harder it seems.  You have to consider lighting, heat or cold, water and nutrients and the type of containers your using.

I just found these amazing containers by GroBal, that actually take care of almost everything for you.  All you have to do is find the perfect spot to place your plants.  I think I can handle that, hopefully.

The reason GroBal herb containers are so amazing is that there is a reservoir in the bottom with water and nutrients that the plant can use as it needs it.  All you have to do is check the water level indicator and refill when needed through the Nutriport.  The other great part about these, they are totally unique and stylish and they will make your herbs and plants look amazing.

Shhh…you don’t have to give up your secret and tell anyone your container is doing all the work for you.

Katie Couric of CBS News covered the very important topic of antibiotic overuse on farms and the effects it has on the farmers and people that are eating the meat.

If your not too sure about the effects of antibiotic overuse take a look at this video.  If your already familiar, let me know what you think about the coverage of the issue.

Animal Antibiotics (VIDEO): A Threat To Human Health?.

With it being Monday and all I have to fess up to last weeks eating and grocery store adventures, which started off great until Saturday.  If you didn’t read last Monday’s post I will give you the quick story as to last weeks foodie adventures.

My husband and I had made a vow to eat all the food we bought from the grocery store and try to eliminate wasting any food.  We were doing great and because of the meals we had planned for and prepared the week prior we had enough to last us through last week, all we really needed were basics.  We spent about $50 on groceries last week and I was nervous we weren’t going to be able to survive without going back to get more groceries.  But, we did great.  We splurged on Wednesday night because we didn’t feel like cooking and we wanted to try a new restaurant that just opened down the street.  Also, on Friday, we meet up with friends for Hibatchi, which was super yummy and felt very worth it since we had been so good.  By Saturday morning after breakfast our frig was bare-bones.  We’d make it through the week and didn’t waste any food and got off paying very little. Amazing!

So, rewind to today and now it’s a different story.  On Saturday I got this great idea to try out a food plan from the magazine Clean Eating.  The food plan is supposed to make you feel great, energized, lose weight blah, blah, blah.  All the key words to make me wanna try it, why not.  So I showed the shopping list to my husband, repeated all the same buzz words to make it sound great and off to the store we went.  Bad idea.  The list of food items IS extensive and are all over the place.  Unfortunately, the “food plan” is all over the place, a different kind of meal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Which, variety is awesome but when you are trying to save money on food, not the best plan.  So long story short, we spent FOREVER in the store making sure we had everything right and once we got to the register to check-out we realized we had made a mistake.  Maybe I should have paid more attention to the budget meals instead of this amazing plan because once ALL of our groceries were accounted for, we had spent $270 dollars!!!

Yikes!!! What did we do?!

As we thanked the cashier quietly and walked stunned to the car to unload our heavy bags of perishable food we couldn’t help but wonder what went wrong.  We had done SO well the week before, bought only the essentials.  $270 dollars!  This was going to be the last time we let a magazine make our grocery list for us and that was for sure.

As we drove home we were silent.  Two people.  $270 dollars.  One week.  The only thing we could think about was how we could make our newly filled pantry and refrigerator last us for 3 weeks, would it be possible?

Now that it’s Monday and I am determined we will not eat out EVER again I am feeling a little bit better about our shopping trip.  I am more determined to follow the “food plan” more than ever and I guess it’s now worth knowing if it truly will make me feel more energized and lighter.  Don’t worry I will keep you posted.  For now though, my advice to you is to forget the planned diets in magazines and stick with buying fresh food and things you can use throughout the week before they go bad.  Good luck!

Let me know if you’ve ever made this mistake before and what you learned from it.  I am anxious to know I’m not the only one to buy too much food at the grocery store.

On a final note, the funniest thing about all this food we bought, I feel like I have to eat all the time now to make sure we don’t waste any of it.  So much for losing weight, ha!

Switching to organic foods might not be in your future just quite yet because you might not be ready to spend the extra money.  But, if you are curious and are thinking of starting to slowly implement organic foods into your diet this article gives some great guidelines on what foods you should buy organic and which ones you can buy conventionally grown.

Save Money On Organic Fruits And Vegetables – Low Pesticide Foods – thedailygreen.com.

I just starting reading Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food and I have been blown away by the information that Pollan has given me in only the first part of the book.  As this year started I really began to look at how I eat and where my food comes from, which is very clear from my earlier posts.  This journey has been very eye opening and Pollan puts it right in front of your face. He talks about how we as a culture have completely changed how we eat and instead of focusing on the foods and combination of foods that are good or bad for us we focus on single nutrients.  Pollan’s goes on to explain that as we focus on single nutrients we lose the information about how a combination of foods actually works in our bodies.  Each of our bodies are different and we obviously eat a variety of things together or alone so why are we so focused on single nutrients.

One quote from the book that really stood out to me was:

“‘Worrying about food can’t be very good for your health.’  Indeed.  Orthorexia nervosa is an eating disorder not yet recognized by the DSM-IV, but some psychologists have recently suggested that is time it was.  They’re seeing more and more patients suffering from ‘an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.’”

After reading this, it was totally clear.  We are a culture that is obsessed with healthy eating, myself included.  OMG, I think I might have Orthorexia nervosa! We are constantly looking at the newest diet, what’s low-fat, sugar-free, the latest book telling us the secret of eating.  Why are we doing this?  What happened to eating your vegetables, a little bit of meat, and some bread and butter?  Instead we have all these foods with amazing claims that can lower your cholesterol and provide more calcium.  I think it’s time to go back to the basics here.

Here is a link to a video of Michael Pollan on Oprah.  It’s a short video but really good.  Pollan talks about how we are able to afford junk food but we can’t as easily afford things that are actually healthy for us.  Scary!  Pollan always say we have the power to make a difference by knowing where our food comes from and how we purchase it.  The power is in our forks.

Michael Pollan On Oprah: Let’s Vote With Our Forks VIDEO.

Happy Monday Everyone!!!

After spending a month exploring and eating organic foods I have decided to share all of my successes and failures as an amateur cook as well as my spending habits at the grocery store (this will include my husbands too, which can be a little bit more outrageous than mine).  Like I mentioned earlier, my husband and I have decided to ditch the regular grocery store and start exploring Whole Foods.  So far, we absolutely love the switch and we figure once we learn to stick with our grocery list (there are a lot of great things to buy there) our grocery bill will go back to normal.

The best thing about Whole Foods is that there are so many different types of foods that we haven’t heard of or tried before.  For example, when I was reading Barbara Kingsolver’s  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (P.S.), I read about fingerling potatoes, which I had never heard of or seen before.  The next time I was at the market, as I was slowly making my way through the produce section, I found them and couldn’t have been more excited to try them–Kingsolver has a way to make your mouth water when you read about vegetables. The potatoes are much smaller and are a variety of colors, including blue.  Now, I don’t particularly care for potatoes unless they are in the shape of very cooked french fries or potato chips so I was shocked when I feel in love with fingerlings.  The potatoes are super easy to cook, I put olive oil, Kosher salt and Thyme on them, and they taste amazing!  They are the creamiest potatoes I have ever tasted.  I was actually stealing some off of my husbands plate and that never happens.

For years I was getting bored with food and was just eating and not really enjoying my food choices.  But now that I have stepped out and started exploring organic, seasonal food I couldn’t be more excited about cooking and eating.  The best part about eating these foods is that they taste amazing, actually last longer than conventionally grown food (the food spends less time in a truck and more time with you, your buying fresher food), have more nutrients and antioxidants and I am spending less money.  I was really surprised yesterday when I was looking in my refrigerator to start making my grocery list and saw that we still have a ton of really great food to eat.  Yesterday, I only spent $53 at the grocery and I think we are going to be able to last the full week- that’s amazing!  I, of course, will keep you posted if we had to go back but hopefully that won’t be the case.

My goal for this next month is to try at least one new food a week and see if I can spend less money at the grocery store and be a much happier, healthier eater.  I think, so far, I’m off to a good start.  From now on, Monday will be my day to check in and make sure I am following my goal and let you all know what I have found to be good, great and even bad.  If you have any suggestions for me let me know, I always like to try new things.

Next week, I am going to try spaghetti squash.  Everyone says it’s super good and a pretty funny vegetable since it looks just like spaghetti.  I will let you know how it goes.  Stayed tuned.