The secret to cooking from scratch is having a well stocked pantry. Granted I still buy my canned products of tomatoes and tomato paste as I no longer can food products for my families needs.  But by doing this you can get the flavors you want in the food you serve to your family rather than what someone else has created.

I have a collection of cookbooks to draw on for my inspiration plus recipes I have created from other media sources such as food network and several food blog sites.  The secret to getting the food on the table after work is to have a game plan in place when you get home. I have done food prep two ways. Mise en place which is everything cut and measured before I start to prepare the dish or prepping while in the process of preparing the dish. Both methods work well and it depends on what works for you.

I tend to have menus lined up on my refrigerator for the week and take a shopping list to the market with me, so I don’t purchase the items I don’t need. If you are focused in your pursuit of food, you will not be tempted to buy the impulse items on the end caps in the store. 

Basic pantry items include:

flour

sugar

tomatoes/tomato paste

noodles

spices

vegetable broth

etc.

With these few items you can make lots of food.  I will find a true list of good pantry items to have on hand for my next post.  Because I am a vegan, the pantry will take on a different character then the normal pantry. As long as you have the right ingredients to cook the meals that is what counts. Your purposeful planning makes perfect execution of any meal a breeze.

So when you find a recipe in a magazine or on the food network that strikes your fancy you can write down the ingredients and head off to the store to get the supplies and find yourself with dinner on the table in no time.

My husband will have grilled rib eye and loaded baked potato tonight for dinner. I am still contemplating what I am having for mine. I have leftover coconut tofu from a Thai noodle bowl I made for dinner a few nights ago. I could pair with a baked potato and a salad and be perfectly happy for the rest of the evening.

I also made a recipe of Cuban beans and rice. The beans were good and the added banana made them slightly sweet to the palate. Yum! I actually made a cherry pie for dinner this last weekend and boy did it go fast. Too long not baking and I miss it.

I remember in the fall growing that the apples were in season and that mean’t going out to the orchards to pick up several bushels for canning and baking.  My aunt Anna had an apple pie recipe that was out of this world and I can still taste it on my lips to this day.  I often wonder what she would think of my vegan diet. She and grandma were born in the horse and buggy days and new ideas were seldom given much credibility.  I have pictures of them working the dairy farm on Mica Peak just outside of Couer’dalene Idaho. Grandma was a good cook, too. She made some hearty meals for everyone and the portions were such that you could eat the leftovers for days to come.

They would have huge family gatherings at the dairy and the kids were destined to play outside until the meal was ready to be served. These gatherings were all the brothers and sisters and cousins, their kids and families. So crowds could be as big as 100 people or more. But there was always plenty to eat and no one left hungry.

Are you looking into the lean meats and chicken breast for your daily bread? That is if you are still following the Standard American Diet. This way you can help stop some of the extra fat from clinging to your arteries. Little steps make the biggest difference in how you feel and what you eat has a lot to do with that feeling every morning.

Let me know what changes you are making to your diet to give you a longer life and more stamina.

It would be fun, if we all sat down a few minutes a day and journalized our actions. If you did that you see what kind of activity you were putting your body through and what you were feeding it. The general concensus is that nobody really wants to do this. Why do you think that is? When you write down everything you put in your mouth and all of your activities during the day, you get a visual picture of what your body looks like. Am I wrong? This kind of truth is straight forward. It is just like taking a group picture and all of sudden you see yourself as the chubby friend in the picture. That visual will either make you take action to not be the chubby friend or send you into a feeding frenzy.

I keep my journal everyday because I want to see changes I am making in my diet and my glucose levels. Without the journal, when I went to see the doctor my words would be subjective for him, but my journal is hard copy proof of the changes I am making on a daily basis to get this right.

So do you want to shed a few pounds or maybe not take so much medicine for something that can be controlled by diet and exercise? I challenge you to set up a journal to keep track of your food and exercise activity everyday. You will be amazed at the transformation once you see what kind of calories you are putting into your mouth and how little activity you physically doing. This is your jumpstart to making a positive change in your behavior and extending your life a few more years.

I have to be OCD about this because this is my body and my health. No one is going to take care of me better than me. How do you feel when you go and visit the doctor? Do you just accept your fate or do you go out and strive to make your health better without having to depend on the prescribed medications the doctor has given you to treat the symptoms and not the source?

A lot of our problems stem from our poor eating habits. They call the american diet SAD! SAD stands Standard American Diet. One change a day in your diet will lead you to the road to health and longevity.  Suppose you are a male with 50 pounds of extra weight on your frame. That extra stress on your body will transpire in the form of aching knees and backs. It will also cause sleep apnea, digestive issues and high cholesterol.

Now instead of living in your current situation, why not make some small changes. Eliminate soda pop from your daily calorie intake. Walk the stairs instead taking the elevator. Add more vegetables to your lunch and dinner menu. With these small changes, all of sudden the weight starts dropping and your knees and back hurt less and your digestive tract is working better.  You keep going with some more small changes and all of sudden you are back to high school weight and you feel young again.

The idea here is that you are the one making the changes and being proactive about your own health and not leaving it up to the doctors to determine which side effects you will experience from the myriad of prescription drugs they are prescribing to maintain your current health. As we age quality of life becomes more important to us and each needs to monitor our health requirements with less dependence on the medical community doing it for us.

This is just food for thought and maybe time for some self-evaluation of your current health and the reasons for your maladies.

Diets must become live-its. Think of this way…..if you want to lose weight, you have to choose a program that you can live with for the rest of your life….you can never go back to your old eating habits because that causes yo-yo dieting. Your body accepts and adjusts to any diet that you put it on and the minute you step back into old eating habits the weight reappears with a few more pounds added than you lost to begin with.

Let’s put our best foot forward America and be proactive in our health maintenance plan. You can do it, you just need to make a plan and stick to it. Find the plan that addresses your current health issues and be proactive to make it happen, so the doctor can start to take you off the myriad of prescription pills you have to eat every day to live.

Now here is the interesting part. I went to the hospital cafeteria thinking they would have a vegan option for me to get nourishment. But that was a major misnomer. The menu only contained items with meat. I did not investigate any further but went directly to work, because I had packed some nourishment in my lunch pail on the mere fact that nothing out would fit the bill.

I find out on Wednesday afternoon, how well I did on my glucose tolerance test.

I have been tracking my daily glucose levels 3 x a day and doing an average to find out what my daily A1c levels are. I fall in the normal range every time even when I have a slight spike in one reading of the glucose test. Normal range for diabetes A1c is 4.5-6.0.  I fall somewhere between 4.5-5.5 every single day. I give this good reading to my vegan diet because I have eliminated the foods and the sugars that would be causing the spike in my blood sugar.

For those that are interested in treating Diabetes correctly, I suggest reading and talking with your doctor about Dr. Neal Barnards book..”Reversing Diabetes through the Vegan Diet”. If you are diabetic or even pre-diabetic, get off the meat laden diet, it will literally kill you. I suggest going plain vegetarian at first, still using the dairy and eggs and then in 6 months eliminating all dairy and eggs from your diet. The animal based products are contributing to your diabetic tendencies and the American Diabetes Association diet does not control them for a long period of time. I eat whatever I want on the vegan diet and I watch my portion sizes. I keep a daily food journal and glucose test section every single day and just by doing my own monitoring I can see where I am fluctuating and why.

I know too much information. But the whole thing is fascinating to me.

I love having the extra energy and the ability to eat mostly what I want. Although in the past I have been drawn to the French style of cooking with lots of fats and butter, I no longer need them for satisfaction. There are so many options available in the vegan recipe arena, that even a die hard meat and potatoes person would find the meals satisfying and flavorful. It depends solely on how you season and flavor each element of your dish while preparing it.

I have been watching the stats on this blog and I know there at least 11 people interested in what I have to say about my new lifestyle. I also think that once the recipes hit the blog that word will spread about this way of eating and much of the health problems associated with this area will go down substantially. If you watched the series the Food Revolution with Jamie Oliver, you understand the impact of making the right choices for your health. We talk about the “Good Ole Days” when grandma would make all of her meals from scratch. Yes they were fat laden heavy meals, but farmers used to burn the calories in the field and needed the extra calories just to maintain their slender figures. We need to return to the creation of healthy meals from scratch again. Our children are not even aware of where there food comes from, because they are so used to the  mass production foods. The stores make the processed foods less expensive on purpose and the choices for every item blows your mind every time you go to shop.

Being a full time Logistics analyst and a part time student, I still find time to build a grocery list and a menu before I head to the store. I usually shop the outside aisles and the frozen section for my meat alternatives and bread. Occasionally, I will need to buy tea and baking supplies. I also shop the bean and grain aisles. When you know what you are preparing for week, it is a less stressful way to shop. I come home from work and work out for 45 minutes on my Tony Little Gazelle and then prepare dinner. Dinner usually takes about 30-40 minutes to prepare depending on the entree I am fixing. We eat and then I clean up the kitchen and grab my book and go study for an hour or two. It is possible to stil prepare from scratch if you are willing to make the compromise from catching dinner out from fast food or fine dining and your pocket book will thank you.

You do not need to go cold turkey on this, just one or two meals a week, should be prepared at home. This will give the family members a chance to catch on the weeks events and also a chance to relax from the day to day stress.

Are you ready to go back to family dinners and teaching your kids where there food actually comes from? You may even get the nerve to plant a family garden in a container or small plot so the kids can actually harvest the crops from seed to bounty.

That is why I stopped posting. It would be good if you stuck around to see and try the new recipes. You might be amazed that being a vegan is not all that bad. And those nasty few pounds you need to shed might just fall off without much effort on your part. The magazine stands are full of this diet and that diet…but the key to making any diet work is making it your lifestyle. Yes, I still get asked if I eat chicken and there is always the famous line out of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” that goes, ” Good, I will fix lamb”. Poor Tulla and Ian just could not get around the fact that Ian was a vegetarian to her family. Yes, most people look at me funny as well. My dietician even had to ask where I was getting my protein from. Of all people, she should already have studied this particular diet and its health benefits. Why am I going to a dietician when I am only 132 pounds? Well, seems my A1c is up a little but I have been calculating my A1c the last week off my daily glucose monitor readings and I am right in the normal range. So it seems I had a day when it spiked in the doctors office and he freaked out.

Anyway, I am convinced that a proactive diet that you make your lifestyle works. But are you convinced? Please let me know if  this might be something you might be interested in and I will oblige with the most wonderful eats you have ever tasted.

With a full time job, weight loss has to be a conscious effort in order to succeed. A journal has to be kept to keep track of everything you put into your mouth. Also, home food preparation is a must in order to make sure that your portion sizes are correctly monitored. You also need to think about some exercise program into your routine. This is what helps to burn the calories you are intaking on a daily basis.

I know I am lecturing, but it is sad to hear the ailments of those who are carrying around too much weight for their frames. Personal responsibility for our weight has to be the front line. Doctors can only prescribe more medications that actually cause more dependencies on the medication instead of fixing the ailment through a more natural form.

You would be surprised with your self and how much better you feel if you make the choice to change your lifestyle in order to lose the extra pounds and add exercise into your daily routine. We all need to be proactive about our diet and health instead of reactive to the bad symptoms from eating a poor diet and no exercise.

No one really gets healed from taking prescription drugs as long as they never change the reason why they have developed those health issues to begin with. It is a always a personal decision to decide to live with the status quo or make your life better through better health.