Heavenly Homemakers

If you missed them, you may want to go back and read Part One and Part Two.
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Okay, let’s see now. Where were we?

Oh yeah, it was 15 years ago, and I had just met and married a (really cute) soccer player from California.

Now that I was a newlywed…I had the MOST fun setting up my household and my very own kitchen!!! I LOVED having my very own kitchen! I had exactly one shelf in my little kitchen, for which I lovingly sewed a crooked little curtain. Crooked or not, I was so proud.

Matt and I were both college students for the first year of our married life. We didn’t have a lot of money, so of course I bought the cheapest food I could find at the store. I don’t remember using coupons in those days…just buying cheap canned and boxed foods. And low fat.  Don’t forget about my low fat thing. I baked a lot and loved experimenting with new recipes (surprise, surprise).

Most of our friends at the time were unmarried. We liked having company over and (surprise, surprise), I got a big kick out of feeding everyone. Our friends enjoyed home cooking since they were used to college cafeteria food…but I’ve gotta say…they sure did put up with a lot of goof-ups from me. Even though I had cooked a lot with my mom…I had mainly just helped her. I had A LOT to learn about cooking. (Like, leave a pancake on the griddle until it is bubbling very, very well…and then flip it. Otherwise the pancakes will be a doughy, gooey mess and…yuck. My company had fun trying to be polite about those that night.)

None of the above information has much to do with our journey to healthy eating…but it is, I suppose, all a part of my cooking journey. 

If you recall, I grew up on green beans, corn and peas (as well as the occasional salad or carrot). So, guess what I served my new husband at every meal?

Green beans, corn or peas (with the occasional salad or carrot).

After a few weeks of these side dishes, Matt lovingly suggested that maybe sometime we could try a different vegetable (you know, just for fun), like broccoli.

Broccoli?  Really? People eat that stuff? Huh.  How do they eat it? 

Steamed, Matt suggested. 

Ooh, we’d gotten a vegetable steamer as a wedding gift! I could try steaming some broccoli in my handy dandy steamer!

So I did, and it was good! Cool! 

Little by little, I ventured out of my fruit and vegetable comfort zone and tried a little more variety. I suppose that was our first, tiny step toward healthier eating.

Beyond that though, I was still preparing food with the least amount of fat as possible. We drank skim milk (white water, Matt called it), used margarine (since it was SO cheap), white flour, low fat cheeses and sour cream, fat free yogurt.

OH…and I’d also decided that real sugar wasn’t good for me…so I’d switched to diet pop and sugar free everything else. I started consuming ALL kinds of artificial sweeteners…mostly nutrisweet. Lots of it. (Remember, I LOVED drinking pop.)

Looking back at some of these diet trends and such…all I can say is, Thank You Matt for Putting Up With Me! He just ate or drank whatever I put in front of him. Even if it was “white water” and sugar-free, fat-free, flavor-free ice cream.

Did I mention that the sugar free, fat free ice cream gave me terrible gas? 

Did I seriously just share that?

Wo-ow, I think I just did.

It was a great way to start out your first year of marriage. We speak fondly (not really) of the sugar free ice cream days.

Okay, puh-lease, let’s move on from this subject….

After we’d been married for almost three years, our first son Asa was born. During his first year, I read The Weigh Down Diet, which was quite life changing for me. It taught me to “just eat when you’re hungry and stop eating when you’re full”. Wow, what a concept. I didn’t need to count calories or be obsessive about eating low fat or make my husband pass out because I had bad gas because of eating freaked out toxic ice cream? Nope, just eat regular food…but don’t over-eat.

So, I stopped buying everything “low fat” and “sugar free” and just started buying the cheapest food possible. When Asa was 15 months old, we moved to Colorado where there were lots of cool grocery stores. Thus began my days of being ” The Coupon Queen”.

To be continued….

(And also, I’d like to say a big thank you to you for coming back and still looking at me the same way after reading about…*the gas*.)  ;)
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This post is linked to Frugal Friday.

I suppose if I’m going to tell you about our healthy eating journey…I should start from the beginning.

Matt was raised a “city boy” in California. He was a very adorable little boy, so blonde headed his hair was white. That piece of information is completely irrelavant to this post, but I just felt like saying it anyway. As far as he can remember, his family ate a very basic diet of meat, pasta or potatoes, bread and vegetables. His family almost never had desserts in the house and they hardly ever ate out.

Thousands of miles away…..

I was raised on a farm in Kansas. The first few years of my life, we drank raw milk…not neccessarily because of it’s health qualities…but because we had a milk cow available. I hardly remember drinking it…we probably only had the milk cow until I was eight (ish). After that, we bought our milk from the store. We ate beef and pork that my dad raised. I don’t remember eating a lot of chicken. 

My mom had a garden (which, ironically, I hated helping her with). She grew a million (bazillion) green beans, some tomatoes, onions and peppers for her salsa…and a few other vegetables that none of us liked but her.

Which leads me to the fact that I was pretty much raised on green beans, corn and the occasional pea, because those are the veggies my dad ate. Every once in a while we had salad…but I didn’t learn to like it until I was almost in college. Oh, and we ate carrots when they were cooked with a roast on Sundays.

We were a steak and potatoes kind of family. We always had desserts in the house and ate wheat bread from the store. 

My mom cooked and baked almost all of our meals from scratch. We baked cookies with white flour, white sugar and crisco. We almost always had Kool-aid and pop in the fridge during the summer.

As much as possible, we ate at home…but we went through phases of eating out more often depending on sporting events and crazy busy high school schedules. 

I don’t think my mom would mind me sharing that with the exception of  the last few years of her life, she struggled quite a bit with her weight. As a result, she was often trying different diet plans. 

I was thin, but took an interest in my mom’s diet plans during my high school years…mostly because I was very interested in staying thin. I never (thankfully) developed an eating disorder, but I did get somewhat obsessive about not wanting to eat foods that had any fat in them. I really felt like eating any fat at all would make me fat, therefore I was scared of fat. I made my sandwiches with fat free mayo (blech) and ate fat free chips (cardboard). I would treat myself to fat free candy (my favorites were candy corn and circus peanuts)…feeling like I was “doing well” by eating sweets that didn’t have any fat in them.

This low-fat/no fat way of thinking took me into college. While there, I would go in phases of over-eating higher fat foods (like pizza and mac and cheese and cookies), thinking that “well…I’ve already blown it, I might as well eat three more”. Therefore my weight started to fluctuate a little bit. I was very “on” or “off” with the dieting thing…and I thought about (and felt guilty about) food a lot. 

During all of this, I met a very adorble white headed California boy who had grown into a 6’2″ blonde headed soccer player. Wonder of wonders, he thought I was cute too and in 1994, we got married.

To be continued….