I can learn the names and properties of foods I don’t currently know exist, and I can make a habit of cooking myself fresh tasty foods for every meal, and I can try things out of my comfort zone, and I can watch Iron Chef (I love how this show turns cooking literally into a sport) with bated breath until I’m blue in the face, but I have realized I can never be a real foodie.

Real foodies have to do the seafood thing. I don’t think you are allowed to omit such a large percentage of edibles and still qualify.

I guess it’s a matter of how badly I want it, but… not gonna happen.

I can learn the names and properties of foods I don’t currently know exist, and I can make a habit of cooking myself fresh tasty foods for every meal, and I can try things out of my comfort zone, and I can watch Iron Chef (I love how this show turns cooking literally into a sport) with bated breath until I’m blue in the face, but I have realized I can never be a real foodie.

Real foodies have to do the seafood thing. I don’t think you are allowed to omit such a large percentage of edibles and still qualify.

I guess it’s a matter of how badly I want it, but… not gonna happen.

Strategic spending for eating better, cheaper.

I have finally found something here in Houston (excluding the hypothetically transportables, such as friends) that I would miss if we moved to New England: the Central Market on Westheimer. I now live for food shopping. (More than before.)

There is a chain by a different name (that I understand is owned by the same company) in the mid-Atlantic but it does not extend past New York. I’m sure there are many similar markets available in New England but I never came across one anywhere close to my parent’s house and I do know there is nothing this large. I told Trevor I need to fly my mom down here JUST to take her to the market; that is how much I love it! I guess if I wanted to come across as a die-hard organic farmer’s market kind of girl, I would just play it cool and act as if this is the only place I ever shopped. But the fact is that this is all new to me and it is so exciting to discover something that you never knew was your thing because you didn’t really know it was there, and then one day you find it and it fits and you’re in love!

We decided to do our shopping here first, and then go elsewhere for the rest of our stuff. Hopefully that will inspire the majority of what we eat to be better for us. I am not going to be obsessive about everything we eat being organic, because it’s just not really feasible unless you have the time and money to be way hardcore… but I am going to start paying attention. Fresh speaks to me. While it’s all good and preferable if the production process was organic, the most important thing is that I like knowing everything that is in what I eat, and I like knowing what all the elements of the ingredient list are instead of reading off preservatives and partially-hydrogenated oils. It does a body good.

This place is very very large. On Saturday afternoons they have live music and an abundance of free samples. I love how you put your produce in a bag and then type the number code into the keyboard on the scale and it spits out a little barcode sticker for your bag, so you know exactly how much it will cost and when you get home the name of what you bought is on the bag (handy if you buy something unfamiliar). On our first visit we focused on the produce (17 varieties of potato, anyone?) and last time we lingered in the bread (fabulous ciabatta so good!) and I bought some roasted pepper ravioli with mozzarella and basil. Fresh-made and real and yummy. We tried wasabi peanuts and tamarillos and Maine maple syrup, among many other things. I am trying to focus on only a few new things each time. Next time I am hitting up the chocolate blocks!

It is all I can do not to just giddily laugh out loud to myself right here right now.

I am soooooooo making these the first chance I get!

My husband has been really into “being green” lately. At first I pretty much glossed over this as all things green are just so over-the-top trendy right now. On top of that Trevor has a habit of being gung-ho about an idea for a very short period of time until he comes up with a new idea to be gung-ho about, and then the old one becomes so last week! I love this about him; it makes life exciting and adventuresome (and he is by no means incapable of sticking with an idea; he follows through on the realistic ones better than anybody I know) - but it means I sometimes have to take things with a grain of salt. Like outfitting the roof of our new house entirely in $40,000 worth of solar panels. Right.

Back to green. So, I resisted, but he’s converting me. There’s lots of ways to support the environment and use less energy without solar panels. Even if it’s all-pervasively trendy and more expensive, it’s still good to be green. I think he’s seriously into the general sentiment of this idea, enough that it will have some small lasting effect on our choices.

But that’s not what I really wanted to say. What I wanted to say is that along with being green apparently comes being healthy. Organic. As long as we’re taking care of the world, might as well take care of our bodies too, right? I like this. I’d like to live a long life. And it justifies all the expensive fresh fruits and veggies I want to buy at fun places like Whole Foods where I’ve never gotten to go. Here’s an example of a small way our lives have changed: soy milk. Disgusting. That’s what I said when he bought it at Target. And that’s what I said when I drank it and my gag reflex kicked in.

Soy milk, however, seems to be an acquired taste. Two days later, around the third or fourth try, I stopped feeling nauseous. And your mental state can really help it out a lot. If you drink it expecting bean water instead of milk, it’s not too shabby. The texture reminds me a little of horchata. I still won’t put it on my cereal, but for all that omega-3 and soy protein, it’s worth a shot. (And a shot size is about all I can handle drinking in one sitting so far, but I’m improving.) It’s got all the omega-3 of my daily walnuts, with significantly less fat.

Trevor already has decided to love it and is on his second gallon.

(This picture makes me want to say, tastes like chicken!)

Except next time he’s going to buy plain instead of vanilla. That might be where I draw the line.

There’ve been few times in my life I’ve even remotely thought it might be nice to be a vegetarian. I can count them on one hand. One of them was yesterday when I had an actual slab of cow sitting on my counter.

Pepper steak. What I really wanted was a recipe for like black pepper “real” steaks. If I’d read closely, they meant steak with bell peppers.

Also I think I need to officially branch out from stir-fry-looking dishes.

And I forgot to make the rice on time and we didn’t want to wait. I think that’s why instant rice was invented - for people like me who always do that.

But YUM.

Italian in general isn’t venturing out for us; it’s our food life. But, I had yet to try gnocchi and figured now is as good a time as any!

It does not taste like potatoes. It does not taste like pasta. It tastes like, actually, how I imagined a potato pasta would taste even though that makes no sense. It is kind of mushy except you like it and you eat it anyway. Except Trevor said it’s not supposed to be quite as soft and sticky as ours turned out.

But I didn’t mind because the sauce was amazing. It smelled better and tasted better than any pasta sauce I’ve ever had. I might even choose it over bechamel and that is saying something.

I’d like to pass this off as vegetables:

Mmmm, chocolate carrot cake! Trevor was so helpful as to grate three whole cups of carrots for me while I put a screaming Max to bed. It turned out yummy. I’ve never been a huge carrot cake fan, or even a huge carrot fan - it is so amazing to me that something so highly carrot-dense is so tasty. Chocolate is a miracle worker. And props to whoever discovered you can put carrots in a cake.

The only thing I would do differently next time is put a thicker frosting layer in the middle of the two cake layers. All in all, I am quite pleased with how it turned out considering my last adventure with cake frosting.

Also this week (this fits in with vegetables I guess) I made Mediterranean Chicken with Rosemary Orzo, except really it was with mezze penne because we didn’t have any orzo. The chicken looks all washed out in this picture from the flash, but pretend it looks great.

Trevor loved this. He’s my official judge, so, there you have it. It has great taste without being creamy which is a big plus in his book. I enjoyed it too because it felt healthy. And stuff. I don’t even like zucchini. I seem to be enjoying a lot of things lately that I thought I didn’t like, though!

I love feeling much more confident with my recipe books now. I used to look at them and see very little that I thought I could make. Now, I look at them and think “Oh, why didn’t I mark that? It looks great, and easy!” and the only reason they don’t get made is because I forget to put the ingredients on my grocery list.

For those who asked, most of these recipes are coming from two places: a Betty Crocker Cookbook from my Aunt Carolyn, and the Taste of Home Annual Cookbook (2006) from June Tompkins. I received both at bridal showers and love them!

This week my adventures were supposed to be a sampling of pomegranate and cactus (yes, grocery stores in Texas sell cactus), but when we went to actually buy them they were out. Of both. So I did not have any foodie adventures this week.

My site was also not working for me yesterday so I couldn’t write.

However, I did make a habit of replacing some of my regular diet with walnuts. Walnuts, if you didn’t know, have lots of omega 3 AND the good fats AND I already loved them because they taste amazing and they have such a delicious effect on banana bread. I cannot resist their texture or how they chew on my teeth or how they are bitter and sweet and nutty all at once.

Trevor pointed out today that he used to just eat things, but now he tastes them. Me too. We enjoy this!

Check out this page to read about the “next generation” of top five super foods.