simplifying life part 2: simple food tastes good

This post is best told in images, so I will begin with a brief description of how we have simplified food for our family, and then I'll leave the rest to some gorgeous pictures that b has taken of the food she's been making lately and how that food is gathered and prepared (for those of you who follow her blog, some of the pics will be repeats - sorry).

If you had peeked in our cupboards and fridge a year ago, you would have found a pretty typical assortment of prepackaged foods and snacks. Frozen meatballs from Costco, pre-made lasagna, chips, juice boxes - that kind of thing.

And I liked it that way. I am a completely typical middle class boy - I like salty, fatty, easy-to-make food. When you're young and your metabolism burns everything up, you don't care about what you eat. When you get a bit older, your metabolism slows down, and you have kids who you want to raise in a healthy way, you begin to think differently.

When we decided to make an effort to simplify our lives, food was the first place we started. We settled on the principles of fresh, local and home made. Obviously not everything we eat falls withing these guidelines, but a lot of it does.

You can't get any more local or fresh than your own backyard, and that's where our eggs and some of our produce come from. B's 12 chickens (the ones that don't like me) are starting to produce eggs, and her garden has yielded a lot of tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchini.

For other local food, we shop at the Corvallis Farmers Market and the Corvallis Co-Op. We also get a lot of good stuff from friends and family - like raw milk, pears, apples and berries.

It is so awesome to sit down to a simple, delicious dinner, knowing where almost everything on the table came from. And yes, simple fresh food does taste better (once you get used to it). I also don't think it's overly expensive - we spend less on food now than we ever have.

Two editor's notes on this post: 1) We still buy plenty of stuff at Winco and other grocery stores. We're not super hard core about everything having to be fresh and local, but we try. 2) I fully admit that this kind of lifestyle would not be possible without b's ingenuity and hard work. She is the one who raises the chickens, tends the garden, and pretty much makes all the food. The boys and I try to "help" but we usually get shooed out of the kitchen for making messes and eating stuff.

And now for the pictures: