Why I Blog

I have always loved to cook and I have always found it to be a therapeutic experience since my early adolescence.  I don't know about you but the kitchen and food was the hub of my family.  Growing up in a family with strong Italian, Polish, and German roots and influences the kitchen is where the family congregated and food was at the center.  My grandmother with her Polish and German ancestry married a full blooded first-generation Italian.  At the heart of their kitchen and most of my childhood memories is the creation of food and how the ingredients for a good recipe always called for a little something from "old country", fresh ingredients, and laughter.  Oh and maybe some good old competition of who cooked the best in the household Grandma or Pa (Grandpa).  My mother is also an excellent cook and we never missed having family dinner around our kitchen table.

Of course, like most people, when I went to college and learned I could eat pop tarts and drink pop every day without anybody there to tell me all that sugar was bad for you, I jumped at the opportunity.  I cringe a little to think about my eating habits back then and I think my husband would agree that once upon a time I considered twizzlers a food group.

After making 2 major moves, living in 3 states in 3 years, making the decision to buy our 1st home, and planning a wedding all in the same year it seemed it was time to make 1 more major change: our eating style.  By then I had already cut out the twizzlers, candy, and a slew of unhealthy things, but I still drank at least 2 Diet Mountain Dew's a day and still bought my fare share of pre-packaged foods.  Since I had a new kitchen and an empty pantry to stock, I took advantage of the clean slate.  I started researching and really trying  out clean eating recipes and what the heck is this paleo thing people keep talking about?  I slowly started to realize that I could do this and it wouldn't be that hard.  What I recognized was with a few tweaks, everything looked like the food my grandparents made, minus the sugar and white flour.  So I took the plunge and I haven't looked back.

Now 2 years later we have made great progress in our journey of living a clean lifestyle.  We live in an amazing neighborhood in Dallas and still partake in delicious meals from restaurants, but we still live an 80/20 clean eating lifestyle.  We have switched our cleaning products over to chemical free and I am in the process of switching over my beauty products.  Like I said this is journey and this is where I am in my journey, but I did not start out here.  Everyone finds themselves coming to this lifestyle in different places and we shouldn't feel shame or guilt of what place we are in. It is our journey and that is a beautiful thing.

Through all my research I really began to see the grocery store in a different light.  The food industry had changed immensely even just since I was a child and definitely since my grandparents were children.  I come from a small farming community in North West Ohio and what I began to see was the food that is on our grocery store shelves are disconnected from the local farmers.  That the food is processed and manipulated so we don't really know what we are eating.  Even in Europe you can still go to your local baker, your local butcher shop, your local produce store and buy from the farmer down the road.  This is not what is happening in most of our grocery stores.  Between the pesticides, preservatives, and GMO's the food industry is not so simple anymore, in fact it is probably one of the most complex necessities out there.

How do we change it; we learn and we control to the best of our abilities where we put our money and what we put in our mouths. I ask myself a simple question, "Is this how my Great Grandmother would have bought this product, or has it been manipulated and changed to a point it is unrecognizable?"

I hope you will follow me in my journey to living a clean, whole food lifestyle. I hope we will learn from each other and be able to share recipes that tell our stories just like I did in my grandparent's kitchen.