Clean food, romantic gifts, and farmer's market

Lately, Matthew and I have been doing a little research, and have decided to change our eating habits. We certainly don't eat a lot of junk, but I am cheap, and buy my food accordingly. Once Eli came along, it became more important to us to feed him wholesome hormone-free, pesticide-free food. Do we do that every day? Of course not. He would like to eat pizza and macaroni and cheese for the rest of his life. However, we usually offer him meal options that we feel will benefit his growing body. After researching clean foods for Eli, we, of course, began doing so for ourselves too. We watched the documentary Food, Inc. Have y'all seen it? Man, oh man. It really stressed the importance to us of eating locally grown, organic foods...not so much for the treatment to animals, but more so that we know where our food is coming from and what's happening to it before we put it in our bodies.

 I am not sure how directly related diseases like cancer are with diet, but we do believe that God created us as humans to eat off the land, using the bounty he's provided us with. With all our advancements, we have strayed far away from this concept. Plants and farms produce food faster, and bigger, which allows them to lower prices, but takes us far from the idea of eating what we originally designed to eat. It seems inevitable to me that our bodies will rebel and suffer some from all these chemicals and hormones we are ingesting on a daily basis.

 My own body lately has had some issues with the food I am eating, so we are making a conscious effort to change our habits and hope it will fix some of the problems I am experiencing. Whew...you still with me? All that to say, we have started our backyard garden again this year, and  are eagerly awaiting it's crop, although this lack of rain hasn't been too good for it. Our wedding anniversary is today, and we literally bought each other some pretty non-romantic gifts, but they are right up my alley. Matthew walked in the door yesterday and saw I had used an egg for dinner. He asked if I still had the egg shell. I was a little confused as to why he cared what I did with our scraps, but turns out, he listened to me months ago when I told him I wanted a real compost pail for our kitchen, and not an open-air stinky tin tray that I had been using. The pail is awesome...I'll show you later. I got him/us the two cookbooks above. Both promote the kind of eating I just talked about, and we are excited to cook through EVERY recipes together and tweak them to our liking- gluten free, etc. I added in Sheryl Crow's b/c Clean Food hardly uses any meat, and I married a hunter. Her cookbook includes lots of recipes for grass-fed, free-range meat. Plus, after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she changed her diet to include mostly antioxidant, cancer-fighting foods. We are both so excited about our lovey dovey gifts to eachother.

Last, on Saturday my mom and I went to our local farmer's market downtown. There is one closer to my house, but I missed the day it was held, so we trekked downtown at noon in the 97 degree heat on Saturday. We thought we might die of heat until I gave a survey for a poor soul and he gave us free water in return. I ended up getting red onions, tomatoes, goat cheese, spring onions, and red leaf lettuce. Don't those ingredients alone make you want a big ole' salad with homemade dressing?  Hopefully, this new way of eating will help me find some answers to the pains I've had--it's awfully frustrating to eat what I thought was a "safe" meal and experience crippling pain the next day because of it. If our new recipes our any good, I'll pass them along!