a nutritional overhaul {day twenty-two}

I had an interesting conversation with my littles while we were eating dinner tonight.  In our house, taco night is a favorite of all.  But tonight, my oldest littles commented that the tacos tasted a little different.  I explained to them that it was because I used homemade taco seasoning and slow cooked black beans (instead of the canned beans we usually eat).  Of course, inquisitive 9 & 10-year-old minds wanted to know, “why?”  So, I went on to further explain that many of the packaged foods that we purchase in the grocery store contain preservatives and that I didn’t necessarily love the idea of feeding preservatives to my family.  When they asked what preservatives were (because I knew they would!!) I told them that preservatives are man-made ingredients that are put into processed foods in order to help them stay “good” longer.  But that these ingredients weren’t really the best things for us to ingest (okay, so I used the word “eat” with the littles).  I was very pleased to hear that their response to this information was, “Mommy you’re the best mommy ever.  You always do what is good for us.”  Awww….warms a mommy’s heart.

All of tonight’s dinner conversation got me to thinking.  It’s not as difficult as one might think to put a little extra time and effort into preparing meals for our families from scratch.  But we feel that we are so rushed that we “just don’t have the time”.

While that may be true for some, it is not true for this momma.  I actually love cooking and baking and trying out new recipes.  Making dinner is one of the more relaxing things I do all day.  The kids love helping me with dinner and sometimes I seclude myself in the kitchen (if it’s been a particularly frazzling day), turn on Pandora, pour myself a glass of Moscato and go about preparing dinner.  And with the recent-ish boom of Pinterest, we have a never-ending source of ideas for homemade goodies!  I have found some of the most amazing recipes on Pinterest….I am only slightly obsessed with pinning. 

As you might recall from day twenty-one’s post, I am going to be looking into ways that I can be more intentional in a lot of areas in my life.  One of those areas was health and nutrition.  So, I decided today that I will be doing a major overhaul in the way our family eats over the course of the next 12 months.  And I’m really excited about making this change.  I want to feel better about what goes into my body and the bodies of my loved ones.  I know that I personally feel like crap when I eat like crap.  So, it stands to reason that eating more wholesome natural foods will help me to feel better, right??

If you’re by any chance interested in seeing the recipe that I used for our homemade taco seasoning, you can find it here.  It really was very tasty.  And I was able to double the recipe when I made it because I had an abundance of spices in my spice cabinet that needed to be used up!  I’m also going to be using this recipe for making homemade ranch seasoning, which I use in several recipes that my family loves.

Here’s to a year of healthy meals and healthy bodies!!