The Sun Chips Have to Go

Sometimes something someone says just sticks in your mind. You play it over and over again. At first you hum along to it like a catchy tune, then it starts to wear thin. You reach a point you want to exorcise your earworm like it’s a demon making your head spin.

I acquired my earworm in late May. Mia and I had gone to River Bend park to lead a group of moms and their children on a hike along the Potomac River and then picnic along its banks. (This is something I do on a weekly basis as part of a local attachment parenting group). It was a gorgeous day. The kids ran along the trail, and only one fell in—but not all the way in, and he wasn’t officially part of our group, so I could feel horrified without feeling guilty.

Generally the participants in our hikes are families who, along with practicing attachment parenting, also strive to base their diets on quality, organic, whole, local foods. One of the moms had packed her kids a variety of foods that included homemade hummus, some kind of homemade, flat, biscuit loaded with whole grains, nuts, and fruits, and fresh veggies. Her kids were attacking them like most kids attack a pile of gummy bears. Mia and I were eating store-bought sprouted trail mix (no chocolate, no sugar), fruit, and cheese. Other moms were pulling out similar lunches for their kids. And then the skinniest mom of the bunch whipped out a giant bag of Sun Chips.

Ah! The Sun Chip! My child’s face lit up like Fourth of July with all of the brilliant sparkle and none of the scary boom! “Chip,” she cried joyfully. Her new favorite word to go with her new favorite food—something we’d recently purchased in lieu of potato chips. “Those aren’t ours, honey,” I said, looking around the table at the other moms (and hoping she wasn’t going to hop down and run over to their side of the table to steal the bag). “We have our own chips at home,” I assured her, “and you can have some later.” Some of the other moms were looking at me and Skinny Mom like we were taking our kids for happy meals and a cigarette. “I know they’re junk food,” said Skinny, “But they’re whole grain so they’re not as bad as they could be.” I was grateful to her. Inside, I agreed. I didn’t want to limit my kid to nuts, grass and other rabbit food. And there it was. Skinny’s simple declaration became my earworm.

Mia asked for chips later that day when we got home. I played the earworm in my head and gave them to her. She asked for chips in the car the next day, my inner ear worm told me it was OK. They made her happy. She didn’t cry on our car trips if she had chips—something I’d been looking forward to since the day she was born, because she was NEVER a ride-in-the-car baby. Each time we shared a little serving of chips, it was a bonding moment. She fed them to me like she was giving me a huge gift. How bad could they be? She was having her first love affair with food, and I was blissfully joining her in it.

In the few weeks she was flirting and experimenting with Sun Chips, Mia stopped eating all the healthy food she had been trying since she first gummed a carrot at five months old. My moment of clarity coincided with the moment Brian and I determined that we would eliminate processed foods and ix-nay the restaurants. Either I take steps now to provide her with a better model for healthy living, or be destined to post frequent and whiney Facebook updates about my poor eater. That included saying good bye to the commercial foods that she associated with me, good times, and family and could later in life become things she reached for when times were tough.

I’m not saying that I think you are a bad parent if you give your kid Sun Chips. Clearly, healthy kids eat them. (And we can still hang if yours do!) What I was and am still concerned about is the way commercial foods enter into and play a role in my family life. Our family has a history—kind of like having a history of alcohol addiction. I am a recovered binge eater. We are recovering restaurant and processed food addicts. The Sun Chip had to go.

But, my little new-eater was so freakin’ excited about this processed food dusted in fluorescent cheddar powder and enclosed in crinkly, shiny bags. She had found a new love. She stopped wanting blueberries and yogurt—her previous favorites. She wouldn’t try the sandwich anymore, even if there were no chips in sight. All she wanted was the chip. “Chip” was her anthem. Feeding me a “chip” was a new expression of love. Eating a chip without her was betrayal. What could I make myself and put in its place? Crackers? It had potential.

Going processed food free is something like deciding on a whim to swim out to the sand bar in the middle of the ocean, fighting the fierce waves (which are always much bigger when you get out in the water than they looked from shore), arriving at your destination proud of yourself and out of breath, only to realize that you forgot to bring all your stuff with you. (I use this metaphor only because I have launched myself into the ocean to swim to the sandbars! I’m also the person who didn’t realize until I got out there that they were populated by copulating couples and I standing there with my teenage brother in law trying to ignore and redirect our attention from the mating going on all around us, but this is another story entirely…). In the case of crackers, it wasn’t something I intended to leave behind, but once on my path and committed to this lifestyle, I decided to go hard core about it.

I wasn’t raised making all my food from scratch. We made a good portion of our food from scratch and had a big garden, but growing up, we never took it to the level I’m taking it now that I’m a hard-core cook. Crackers in a box are easy. They come in all shapes, flavors and health conscious varieties. Why make them from scratch? Was I going to cave and go read the labels at Whole Foods until I found the nearest to perfect boxed cracker? If it had just one or two things I wouldn’t put in if making it myself, it would still be OK, right? No. Not in this new lifetime. Boxed crackers are processed food and along with trying to control all of the ingredients we put in our food, one of my goals was to get my hands, effort, and energy into every bite I feed my family. If sharing food was sharing love, how much more so if it was food we made ourselves!

My first step was to order whole spelt from our co-op. The closest thing we get to local grain comes from Ohio. My spelt arrived, two weeks later, golden and pure in small bags. The recipe called for soaking the grains for two to three days to sprout them and make them soft, adding celtic sea salt (which has more minerals and less sodium than a processed sea salt), and combining them with currants in a food processor to make a dough. The dough is then spread thin on a buttered baking sheet and baked for about 6 hours on the lowest setting. Break the crusted dough apart and you have wonderful, crisp crackers made with chewy whole grains!

But… THREE DAYS to make crackers! Commitment-phobes beware! Going processed food free is not for you. Would I remember to change the water every morning so as not to spoil all this lovely grain? Would they even be worth the effort when I was done? You never know until you try. So, I tried.

On the first morning, I put my spelt in a bowl, added filtered water, covered the bowl and put it in my pantry. The next morning, in the middle of making tea, before making eggs, and while the oatmeal was cooking (the oatmeal was a 12 hour affair on its own), I took the bowl from the pantry, changed the water and put it back in. On day three, while oatmeal cooked, I made the dough, spread it on the sheet and put it in the oven. I cooked the first batch for too long. They were great straight from the oven, but got tough a day later. But, one of the things about putting so much effort into the final product is that you tend to waste less. I broke them into their pieces anyway and offered them to Mia as “chips”. She loved them! And as a family, we ate our chips that week and did without commercial boxes of crackers and chips!

A few days later, I started again with the grain soaking. The next batch wasn’t quite brown enough because I took them out about two hours too early and they lacked some of the nuttiness of the first. On the third batch, I tried spreading the dough onto parchment and they stuck to it. I salvaged them by wetting the parchment, peeling it off and cooking the crackers a little longer. Other than a few odd pieces of parchment stuck to them, they were near perfect. Yesterday I made a fourth batch and realized that somewhere between the beginning of the chip affair and now, making crackers has become part of my weekly routine. And, the fourth batch came out of the oven nuttier, crispier, and tastier than all that have gone before them!

What have I gained from all this effort? First, these crackers are more filling than any I’ve ever had. The whole sprouted grains really do fill you up and give you energy that doesn’t crash and burn in the middle of the day. Second, I get the joy of seeing Brian and Mia’s faces light up when I serve them a picnic of strawberries, homemade crackers, and local, raw milk cheese from the co-op. And third, I got rid of that rationalizing earworm.

(I'll post pictures in a few days when I make my next batch... )

Prologue to a Blog

A little over six weeks ago, sitting side by side in our minivan, my belly full-to-bloated from a fairly decent, but not mind-blowing, meal of Indian food, I said to my husband, “I’m thinking about never going out to eat again.” This is something I had said to him before, but without the force of a real decision behind it, so his response, a quick, acknowledging, “Hmm,” was almost exactly what I expected. “No, really,” I said, “I think I’m over this whole eating out thing.” “I know what you mean,” he said as he flipped the turn signal. And, although we didn’t commit to it, that was our life changing moment.

We’ve been together since 1997. Before we were even dating, we were best friends who ate nine dinners out of 10 together at one of two favorite diners. Our first unofficial date (it felt like a date, but we weren’t sure if we were out as friends or dates) was at a Chinese restaurant—I accidentally walked out with the mustard colored napkin, which is still saved in his dresser drawer along with the broken glass from our wedding. Our first official date was for Indian food. We studied for our senior year finals at a bar that served chicken wings, bacon and brie burgers, and had something just short of a million imported beers on tap.

In 13 years, we’ve had four houses and five apartments in nine cities (not counting a summer in Philadelphia with his parents) and I’ve never felt at home unless we were regulars at a local eatery. The ritual of sitting down at a restaurant, ordering, having someone else bring us drinks, indulging in food we didn’t have to think about, and talking for hours with a table between us has in some part defined, or at least punctuated much of our relationship. I can remember cities and town’s we’ve lived in by the restaurants, dishes, and faces of our favorite servers. Rochester was Mt. Hope Diner, the bomber special, and Barb the waitress (who ended our patronage when she asked us if she could borrow $800). Fall’s Church was Anthony’s, chicken parmesan subs, and Maria (who still remembered us five years later when we brought our daughter there as a newborn). Raleigh, NC was too short a stay to be a regular, and maybe that’s why I sometimes forget we lived there. Nashville was Le Peep, Brenda, and steak and eggs, with a side of fruit, no potatoes. We knew we were home in Herndon when we found Lucia’s, Roland, and the Club Med Sub.

For as long as we’ve been a couple, we have probably averaged about one meal out a day. We have, of course, gone through periods when eating out tapered off to once a week, but then there were also those gut-busting periods when we frequented restaurants two and three times a day. I don’t want to think about what this has cost us. I know for certain that one year the total was around $6000.00, but that was the year we cut back. In the interest of honesty, I will say that I am sure (though I have not gone over our records in that kind of detail) that at least a few other years have gone as high as $10,000 or $12,000. In perspective, that is (in any given year) one-third the price of my brand new mini-van, a single year's worth of my undergraduate student loans, or the full cost of the new hardwood floor I want to put in my house. And although it sounds like a ridiculous amount to spend dining, it’s not that hard if you spend around $30.00 a day, which—in cities like DC—is the low end of average for a two person meal.

Plainly, we are addicts.

The irony of the conversation in the minivan is we had no reason to believe we would finally make the attempt to quit eating out, much less quit cold turkey. We’d had the same conversation dozens, if not hundreds, of times over the past several years. Usually while on our way back from yet another restaurant meal. Sometimes the conversation started because food eaten out never tastes as good as what we get at home. Other times it was because we’d had terrible service. Many times it was because we were bloated and uncomfortable after having had a meal that was way too high in refined carbohydrates, refined sodium, refined sugar, and hormone full, grain fed meat.

Motivation to make the change was slow in coming. It was easy to say we weren’t addicted because we’d already taken many other steps to improve our health. We’d started ordering healthier at restaurants—more salad and veggies on the side, fewer potato chips and French fries. We’d both lost quite a bit of weight. I’d gone to therapy for an eating disorder, and had gotten seriously into exercise—even beginning at-home training courses to teach fitness classes. We had made regular evening walks part of our daily lives. We had reduced the level of processed food we ate (to things like pasta, crackers and cereal) and bought about 90% of the food we ate at home from a local, organic co-op and CSA. But while these things were wonderful advancements, our progress was stalling and it was becoming impossible to deny the very real damage eating out was having on our health and our lives. We were both beginning to loath the habit and really hated seeing our daughter starting to mimic us in her tastes. (She pointed at the pizza place and said, “Eat” when she was about 14 months old!) Not to mention that with a baby who alternately cried, threw food on the floor, and tried to scale the booths, eating out was becoming more of a pain in the ass than a pleasure.

At several moments in my life, I’ve realized that I have a strong (non-schizophrenic) inner voice, and when I have tuned in, really listened, and committed to it full force, it has lead me to meaningful, rewarding, and fulfilling life change. When I said I was done with eating out, this time there was force behind my suggestion. I felt inner resolve that is nothing like the feeling of holding yourself back and instead is a complete realignment of thought and action. I decided to just plan meals, and rather than forbidding myself to go out to eat, give myself a choice at each meal, with each bite. When we got home, I made a menu for the next week and we didn’t go out again for a full week. At the end of the week, we went out, ate very little and went home tired, bloated and unhappy. We ate at home for another full week. At the end of the second week, we tried a higher quality restaurant (to celebrate eating in all week) and felt like someone had let the plug out of our energy stores and our overall good moods took a hit. We have not been out to eat since.

In addition to not eating out, I have cleaned my pantry of any and all pre-processed and prepared foods. This includes pre-made flour—with the exception of rye, which I am keeping for sourdough starter until I can find a good supply of whole rye. Our pantry is 100% void of store-bought ketchup, mayo, pasta, crackers, soda, and bread. Brian surprised me with a countertop electric grain mill and I now mill most of our flour, with the goal of transitioning to milling it all over the next year.

I’ve become a hard-core traditional cook and have dedicated myself to completely eliminating pre-processed foods in our diet. I soak and cook our grains and legumes, and many of the things I make take days to finish—like whey preserved vegetables, overnight pancakes, and sourdough bread. I have big plans to grow most of our own vegetables next year, to learn to make traditional yogurts and cheeses, and to attempt to brew my own soft drinks and other beverages. I want to try many new-to-me traditional recipes, from cookbooks and even master family recipes lovingly prepared by my grandmother. My family will not just be along for the ride, but active participants. (Mia already likes to stand up at counter level and knead bread dough, and when I’m too busy, it’s Brian’s job to maintain the sourdough by “feeding the culture”.) I also plan to transition my kitchen to be more conducive to traditional cooking, including reducing the use of plastics and permanently retiring my microwave. All of these things will take time, thought, and step-by-step progress.

In the last six weeks, I’ve found that cooking this way has given me a lot to think about. Yes, I feel terrific physically, and I’ve lost some weight, but more importantly, life has taken on a rich, nourishing, aromatic, textural quality that it never had before. Traditional cooking has folded itself into and molded many of the other actions that I am taking for my physical, mental, emotional, and creative health. It has made a profound difference in how I feel about myself, my life, and my world.

This is a blog about where the decision to become a hard core traditional cook (and eater) is taking me and my family. The positive changes we see in our lives because of our journey and the bonding experience of meeting the challenge of living a somewhat unconventional life in mainstream, DC-suburbia. We have some big changes and challenges ahead of us, including balancing socializing at mealtimes, eating according to our convictions, and taking a restaurant free, processed-foods free vacation in August! I look forward to blogging about this journey and sharing my experiences with anyone who wants to read!