Quick--What Would You Like To Eat For The Next Year?

In trying to live without processed foods, this is the Question of the Moment here at Chateau Sutton-Goar.  The tomatoes are FINALLY on,

but still not as strongly as they were at this time two years ago, so now the questions begin.  What tomato canned goods are our highest priority?  How many will we need?  Do we want to use some tomatoes for new recipes or stick with the old?  If we run short of tomatoes again, what could we be most likely to buy without forbidden ingredients?

I've already canned about half of the vegetable salsa we use in a year

(Can you tell it's one of our favorites?)  I'll still need to make our signature carrot salsa supply for the year, and perhaps some roasted tomatillo-chipotle salsa.  

We did decide to try a few new recipes this year, so we now have 7 pints and 6 half-pints of roasted garlic tomato sauce:

which smelled wonderful while cooking, but is probably not nearly as thick as it is supposed to be, as even after "cooking until reduced by 1/3," I still ended up a lot more than the recipe said it would make, so I'm guessing they probably used Roma or some other paste-type tomatoes.  I have Romas growing, but we have such a short growing season that most of my tomatoes every year are Early Girls.  We just don't have time for anything else to really get going.

Of course, not everything in the garden is a tomato, so I have been making and freezing pesto and ice cubes of chopped fresh basil, and Saturday I made and froze three batches of this:

Andy discovered a wonderful recipe for green poblano rice that I love so much that I planted about 12 poblano pepper plants.  Even after me killing a bunch of them in the transplanting process--and Theo taking out a couple in a process we aren't going to discuss--I have a lot of wonderful mild chilies in the garden.  To make the rice, one chops up a couple poblanos in water or broth, to cook for a while, then purees them with some cilantro and salt--then you would cook the rice in the new vivid green liquid.  I made 4 batches and froze 3 right after pureeing, so all we'll have to do is add the rice and cook.  Of course, AFTER doing all of this, it occurred to me that I could have actually only used half the liquid in order to save space in the freezer, leaving half the liquid to be added with the rice, but there are a lot of peppers out there.  Next time......

I also grow a lot of jalapeno peppers so I can use them when I make salsa, but in order to have enough to make salsa, one really needs quite a few pepper plants, which means one also has lots of jalapenoes when one isn't trying to make salsa.  So...

I now have 6 jars of pickled jalapenoes.  I made these two years ago when I had a big jalapeno crop (they didn't do well with last year's cold and wet summer either), and Andy loved them.  Since he likes things hot and I don't really care much for the pickled jalapenoes, this year I left the seeds in to add a bit more heat.  

And I am happy to report that yesterday's soup adventure,

was hot but successful, and we now have 16 pints of vegetable soup.  There was a little left over after filling all the jars, and it was amazingly good stuff.  I'm a little less terrified of the pressure canner each time I use it, though I still am more comfortable with the traditional water-bath canning process.  Now that we've had most of the jars and all the canning equipment for a couple years, we're finally starting to see the return on investment in all of this.  If we were to buy 16 cans of soup (most of which are no long 16 ounces as my jars are but 13 to 14 ounces and shrinking), it would be approximately $1.50 to $2.50 a can.  So, I made about $32 worth of soup yesterday.  Of course, if you factor in the time spent in gardening and planting and canning, it's probably about $1000 worth of soup, but we're going to focus on the no artificial ingredients or chemical additives angle at that point.........

I Am Canning Soup!

And if you don't hear from me again, it will probably mean that I put a skylight in the kitchen with the pressure canner..............

Bring On The Heat!

Well, not really, but I seem to have no control over these things anyway. 

It's supposed to be HOT this weekend.  Like mid-nineties hot, which is a far cry from Arizona-style hot, but quite a change from the nice cool weather we've been having.  I took advantage of one of the cool days to make pickled carrots.

I've never tried them before, and these are store-bought carrots rather than homegrown, but one thing about trying to stick with non-processed foods is that "fast" and "easy" fly out the window.  Need a quick appetizer?  Hand someone a carrot or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but ONLY if the peanut butter, bread, and jelly are all homemade.  So you see the problem.  In the winter I can get away with making up various concoctions of hot squash dips to be served with the few kinds of plain tortilla chips that are allowed, but A) it's summer and I'd like some cooler options, and B) 12 months of hot squash dip gets really, really, REALLY old.  So I now have 7 pints of pickled carrots--3 with hot pepper and 4 without--and that probably means that 4-6 weeks from now, guests here at the Chateau can pretty much predict what they will be served....

I also thought it might be nice to plan something cool for the weekend, so I took what might be the last of the strawberries,

mixed it with some overripe bananas,

 and wildly overestimated the capacity of my popsicle mold. 

Oops.  So we have two frozen smoothies as well.  At least I'm not cleaning goo off the counters and cupboards like I normally end up doing when I estimate volumes so insanely far off.  And I have that whole "air-conditioning" thing as a back-up plan just in case................

Back To Food History...

I haven't been writing about food research for a while, mostly because I'm up to the 1960s and 1970s in the 2 part Harvey Levenstein food history work, and it's complicated and sometimes downright weird.  On the one hand, Ralph Nader is making some justified attacks of the food industry, and some that were probably completely over-the-top.  On another hand, linked to the hippie movement are THE most bizarre food fads since pre-World War 1.  On yet another hand, the successful but completely manipulative method of attacking the messenger in order to taint the message was exploding, which to me is almost the most interesting part.  I had read another book that had attributed this technique to the tobacco industry and their fight to discredit all the reports that linked (quite correctly) smoking and lung cancer, but in the food wars, it seems to go back into the 1960s, and I thought the tobacco industry didn't start defending itself until the 1970s, but I could easily be wrong.  

I'm not sure what I had exactly expected to find when I started studying food history, but what I have discovered is that the history of American food is really the history of America itself.  It has everything:  racism, greed, optimism, idealism, complete quacks and loonies, patriotism, pomposity, humor, sensuality--in fact, the only thing I'd say it seems to be lacking is moderation and common sense.  No matter what time period I've studied, the wackier the claim, the more popular the diet.  The more outrageous the claim--especially if it was a claim that assigned blame for health problems to anyone BUT the individual behavior--the more likely it was to hang on even into today's climate.

This strikes a resounding note for me, because I spent three years working as the Director of the American Diabetes Association's Idaho office.  During that time, I was regularly assaulted by adherence of the Adkins diet (horrible diet in general and harmful if one has diabetes) and the Nutra-Sweet-causes-cancer brigade.  There were lots of other too, but those two were the regulars that could be counted on to badger me at every turn.  Adkins was almost always being hawked by a chiropractor who had read Adkin's book and felt qualified to dole out nutritional advice in spite of having no actual training in the subject whatsoever.  The Nutra-Sweet Brigade were 99.9999999% of the time affiliated with a "natural" nutritional substitute, and without fail their "proof" was a badly photocopied article written by an Asian doctor extolling all the studies done to prove that artificial sweeteners were almost guaranteed to cause cancer.  Now for one thing, if I am being given "facts" by someone with a financial interest in you being led to believe those facts, I am automatically highly suspicious.  For another, while I don't think artificial anything is actually good for us, there are currently almost 26 million Americans with diabetes.  You know who has been the most targeted market for artificial sweeteners ever since they came out?  People with diabetes.  Know what their increased rate of cancer is?  None.  Increased heart disease, depression, risk of death because of flu or pneumonia, and increased rates of stroke and heart attack.  26 million test subjects--I think they would have noticed an increased rate of cancer.  You can verify all this at the American Diabetes Association's website here:  http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/diabetes-statistics/

So, the more I read, the more I wonder how much we really know about food.  The easy answers are so tempting--like in a recent article in a health magazine I was reading rated products that would add fiber to your diet.  I think the selling point of the things was that they were tasteless and so you wouldn't notice them.  And, by sheer coincidence I'm sure, the top-rated products also had placed advertisements in the magazine.  Gee, I wonder if there was a connection.......and in all honesty, I'll bet not a single one of them would work nearly as well as adding a little winter squash to one's diet.  But then again, I haven't heard of a winter squash lobby that can place ads................

Pandora's Box

Andy and I now know for sure that we feel better not eating processed foods.  There is no doubt in our minds that our new lifestyle is better for us, and that the time spent gardening and canning is really worthwhile.  No questions. 


And after having canned 22 quarts of pickles and 10 pints of salsa in the last couple days, I really wish I could completely forget all about it and buy neon-green pickles just like everyone else.  It would be SO much easier!!!!!!

Allergies?

I admit--we haven't quite been as stringent about being back on the "no processed foods diet" as we should have been.  For Easter, Andy bought me some chocolates of my very own (meaning he won't polish them off when I'm not looking), so I've been having some chocolate & high fructose corn syrup every day (and whatever else is in Whoppers), and then I had opted to use "illegal" chicken stock in the pad thai I made earlier, and thought we "might as well" use up some microwave popcorn in the pantry....so, obviously still ignoring what I know we should do.  Seriously, it was still a minimal amount compared to a "normal" diet, but for us, BIG time illegal.  Yesterday I woke up with a whopper of a headache (lame pun totally intended), which just wouldn't go away in spite of pain killers.......

.....which is the allergic reaction I get to milk and the only reason I really ever get headaches.  Now chocolate has never had enough milk in it to trigger a reaction, BUT what we are sort of wondering is:  If my body gives me headaches because it views milk as a toxin, did it view the food additives as toxins and react accordingly??????  (And, what I have always wondered:  What sort of a stupid reaction is a headache anyway?????) 

I was only 6 or 7 when the milk allergy was discovered, and the way we determined that it was milk was to eliminate the top 10 food allergens totally, then introduce them one by ones in mass amounts.  The first one to cause a reaction was the winner.  I have strong memories of the onion week, so that might have been the first one.  I remember having really loved milk at the time, but if every time you took a drink of milk & someone smacked you upside the head with a stick, you're soon lose your liking for it.  Trust me on this one.  So....I'm torn between curiosity to know if I have inadvertently given myself a new "allergy" and the realization that trying to give myself a headache on purpose is a remarkably stupid thing to do.

I did behave myself completely yesterday......and woke up without a headache of any kind today. Hmmmm....

On the good side, the no processed foods diet would be sooooooo much easier if it was a Pavlovian response instead of just a willpower thing.........

I Just Can't Look Away.....

You know how when you see a car wreck or something really gross, you just can't look away no matter how disgusting it is?  Well, yesterday I discovered that the lovely folks who brought us bacon-flavored lip balm have a website.  It turns out that they have an entire range of products.  For the movie lover, there's Bacon Pop

for those who were thinking that crossing popcorn & pork rinds would be a REALLY good idea.  Or, if you've ever been mailing out bills and thought, "Damn, a little bacon would be good right about now," there's

bacon flavored envelopes!  In case paying bills doesn't make you nauseous enough.

And, for the parents who just can't wait to get their children started on the road to heart disease and obesity, it's

Bacon Baby!!!  Solving the problems of childhood obesity by......making it infant obesity!

Whew!  And I thought the lard quest was as disgusting as my food research was going to get.......

We're Back On The Diet

So........while it was fun to have a bit of a food free-for-all for the last 3 months, we're back on the no-processed foods diet.  We're trying to work out some new rules that will keep us from being ill, but make things livable.  So far we're thinking about:

*  1 Diet Pepsi a week (in the cans, not the big massive bottles)
*  2 cheats a week
*  1 meal per week can have forbidden ingredients IF there is no suitable way to make it without it
*  Soup Night can use canned chicken broth

While we're hashing this out, we're back on the diet.  Why you might ask?  My stomach hurts.  AND, strangely enough, not only was I starting to gain weight, I was gaining it in my abdomen. 

Now, neither Andy nor I are one of those lucky people who can eat anything and never gain weight.  We can gain weight with the best of them.  However, I'm a bit more the traditional sort of female type--a "pear" rather than an "apple."  For my entire life, even if I did gain weight, it was never abdominal.  Like most women of the time, it always went straight to my hips and thighs (where it settled in, planted roots, and hung on for dear life).  Imagine my surprise when--in just really two months of slightly returning to "normal" eating, I was beginning to inflate like a balloon.  Totally freaking out, I shifted us back to our "no processed foods" diet last week......and suddenly my new "puffy" look was gone.  One week. 

Now, that isn't a scientific study by any stretch of the imagination, but it really was enough to freak me out.  Back to green food!!!!!!!

What The Heck Is That?

At the library one day, I ran across a book called A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives.  After disturbing everyone by screeching, "Where was this last year?!!!!!!!!" I checked it out and began perusing.

Our rules for last year were rather simple:
1.  No high fructose corn syrup
2.  No ingredients we didn't know
3.  No food dyes

To be quite honest, I have no idea if there are any health risks associated with food dyes or any of the ingredients we eliminated, so I can't just completely condemn anything as "good" or "bad," but I did end up with a lot of questions about what things were & why they've been added. However, this is not a book for the timid.  Or for those who don't know their science terms.  A few of my favorites:

*  Locust Bean Gum:  St. John's Bread. Carob Bean Gum.  A thickener and stabilizer in cosmetics and foods. Also used in depilatories.  [Though hopefully not as the active ingredient......]

*  Tetrahydroxypropylethylenediamine:  [which is being included here because it is the longest word I've ever seen] Clear, colorless, thick liquid, a component of the bacteria-killing substance in sugar cane.  

*  Xanthum Gum:  [besides being a killer word to know for Scrabble fans, this is what made most mustards off-limits for the year]  Used to thicken, suspend, emulsify, and stabilize water-based foods, such as dairy products and salad dressings.  It is also used as a "pseudo plasticizer" in salad dressings to help them poor well.  [Mmmmm, yummy!]

And, as I am trying to convince myself to get out there and start working up those garden beds, the book has a nice list of produce that is waxed:

cantaloupe

egglplant

oranges

peaches

grapefruit

rutabagas

persimmons

squash

cucumbers

sweet potatoes

tomatoes

and the list is not all-inclusive.  Apples should probably be on there somewhere as well.  I don't exactly mind them waxing cantaloupe or oranges, since I don't end up eating the wax, but just how much fruit can I eat before I have consumed an entire candle?  These are the things I wonder about when I'm really needing some coffee......

Fat Follow up

(Can't wait to see where THAT puts my blog on Google's search engines!)

A friend of mine has very nicely explained some of the fat terms I keep running across and/or discussing, so to follow up on the whole fat problem from yesterday, more information can be found here:

Secret Weapon Science

The Pop Tart Problem

Remember when I mentioned the homemade Pop Tart recipe?  Well, there's a problem--it needs butter AND shortening.  Like Crisco.  Now as far as the "illegal" foods label goes, I've pretty much written Crisco off as being pretty close to the top of the list.  According to their website, Crisco is hydrogenated vegetable oil.  According to Wikipedia, hydrogenation:

is widely applied to the processing of vegetable oils and fats. Complete hydrogenation converts unsaturated fatty acids to saturated ones. In practice the process is not usually carried to completion. Since the original oils usually contain more than one double bond per molecule (that is, they are poly-unsaturated), the result is usually described as partially hydrogenated vegetable oil; that is some, but usually not all, of the double bonds in each molecule have been reduced. This is done by restricting the amount of hydrogen (or reducing agent) allowed to react with the fat.
Hydrogenation results in the conversion of liquid vegetable oils to solid or semi-solid fats, such as those present in margarine. Changing the degree of saturation of the fat changes some important physical properties such as the melting point, which is why liquid oils become semi-solid. Semi-solid fats are preferred for baking because the way the fat mixes with flour produces a more desirable texture in the baked product. Since partially hydrogenated vegetable oils are cheaper than animal source fats, are available in a wide range of consistencies, and have other desirable characteristics (e.g., increased oxidative stability (longer shelf life)), they are the predominant fats used in most commercial baked goods. Fat blends formulated for this purpose are called shortenings.

Got all that?  Okay, so it's hydrogen added to vegetable oil to make a shelf-stable fat. So, getting out the little Crisco can that I keep around for seasoning cast iron pans, I discover that it contains:

        sunflower oil, soybean oil, fully hydrogenated cottonseed oil, mono- and diglycerides


and that it has gone rancid because I really don't have to season cast iron THAT often.


The OTHER option (besides giving up this entire endeavor is:

LARD.  Yep, rendered pig fat. 

So, I WENT LOOKING FOR LARD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

and managed to find out that there are types of lard and that I got the wrong one.  I found the shelf-stable one, which contains some hydrogenated lard, as well as an emulsifier and antioxidants.  Turns out I need to find artisan lard, which is without additives and must be kept frozen or refrigerated.

How good could those damn Pop Tarts possibly be anyway??????

Dang!  Where am I going to find gourmet pig fat.......?

Perspective

I'm still reading Grandma's Wartime Kitchen, and I thought I'd share this little snippet with you:

“Because of rationing I had a new way of life. I made lye soap to wash baby clothes, picked wild greens, canned all garden vegetables and fruit, helped raise broilers [chickens] and milk 29 cows by hand. We butchered our own meat, also caught fish and had frog legs.” --Marjorie Marzolf, Salina, Kansas

Did I mention that I've sworn to whine a whole lot less during canning season??????

So Did I Mention We're Back On the Diet?

Not that we ever really had a big fling with processed foods--and we are enjoying having one Diet Pepsi a week as a special treat--but the weekend before this one, we made the mistake of going out to eat 3 times in 3 days.  I still don't know much about food science, or what processed foods really do to one, but when food leaves you whimpering in pain after eating it--your body is obviously trying to tell you something.  We'd like to have salad dressing once in a while, but have drastically cut that back and decided that we won't eat it at all in the summer when veggies are at their best.  We were trying to come up with new rules--like maybe 4 cheats a week if we needed to restrain ourselves, but severe stomach pain works quite nicely as a deterrent.  Not to mention--very few forbidden foods taste that great anyway.  Except chocolate--let's not be stupid.  Chocolate is, was, and always will be FABULOUS.

Since convenience is the real issue, this weekend I made a huge vat of totally legal spaghetti sauce with pumpkin puree & lots of tomatoes, and it's now divided up into little two serving containers and packed into the freezer.  I even labeled them for once--which makes me quite proud of myself.  During January we were playing a lot of dinner-is-whatever-the-heck-this-turns-out-to-be-once-it's-defrosted, and I think we're a little tired of that game.  And a little tip for you--minestrone and pasta sauce don't look all that dissimilar when they're defrosting, but minestrone makes a lousy pasta sauce.

Later this week, I shall be attempting to make a few breakfast cereals.  This should be entertaining..... 

Grandma's Wartime Kitchen

Today I'm reading a book called Grandma's Wartime Kitchen, which is a (so-far) fascinating book about women in America during World War II and the meals they made and how they coped with rationing.  I think we all know about the "Victory Gardens" Americans were encouraged to keep--I believe to free up the demand the industrial food that was to be shipped overseas, but I didn't know much else about it.  Two really interesting points so far:

*  Because of the influence of the dairy farm lobbyists (which there seem to have been), margarine had to be white rather than yellow, but one brand of margarine actually came with a little bit of orange food dye that could be kneaded into the white goo so it would have that yellow "buttery" glow.  Now I can't say for certain because I wasn't there, but would kneading orange goo into white margarine REALLY be preferable to living with white margarine???????  Or am I just a bit lazy about that sort of thing?

*  I'm just going to quote this for you:
     "The [American] government produced, and encouraged businesses to sponsor, pamphlets, articles, and posters that gave the home-front housewife all the advice she needed to work a ten-hour defense-plant shift, come home to serve a nutritious meal on an impeccably set table for her family, have the kitchen spotless in no time, and in the morning, look absolutely perky as she handed each family member a hearty lunch before she started the next long day."  
 
     I can only assume that women at that time had some sort of mental fortitude that I do not possess.  If I had ever received such a pamphlet with such "suggestions," I think I'd have a few suggestions of mine own to share...........

You Can Make Pop Tarts!!!!!

The other day I found this book in the library.  It looked interesting, and sounded like I might like it as the author talks about learning to make all the things we typically buy in the store, and how much better the homemade versions are.  Of course, doing things the hard way experimenting with food is right up my alley, so I checked it out. 

It wasn't until I got home that I discovered that she has a recipe for homemade Pop Tarts!!!!!!!!

Not that I've actually been pining for Pop Tarts or anything....or have even had any desire to have them past the age of 12....but this isn't the point.  It's just the idea of making my own Pop Tarts!  I am sooooo excited!

Stay tuned!!!!!

It Has Happened

I've been taking a bit of a break this month on the cooking front--well, all fronts thanks to the bronchitis episode--but I thought that I'd allow a few processed foods this month just to give myself a bit of a cooking vacation.  Yesterday I had a dentist appointment in the early afternoon, and I thought it would be a good day to try one of the Bear Creek soup mixes.

Until now, we've just experienced processed foods being disappointing or too salty--this time, however, we both thought it was just BAD.  In spite of cooking it according to directions, I had little blobs of flavor powder that just wouldn't dissolve, and the whole thing tasted like we were eating some sort of flavor powder.  I was stunned, as this was a soup I actually liked previous to our Year of No Processed foods.  I did not expect our tastes to change that completely. 

Yet another reason to continue eating unprocessed food, but the idea of just taking minutes to make something was pretty tempting........

Making Mustard

In trying to research more mustard recipes & tips, I've noticed a surprising lack of resources on the internet and/or the library.  There seems to have been a book on mustard published sometime in the 1980s, but I can't even find a used copy, and the book I recently borrowed from the library is seriously limited.  SO, since so many readers have expressed interest in trying to make mustard, I'm going to share my favorite recipe for you to try.

In fairness to the author, the recipe is from The Complete Book of Small-Batch Preserving, and though I have already said so many, many, MANY times, I cannot recommend this book highly enough.  The must have recipes I've discovered in it so far are:

* Traditional Garlic Dill Pickles
* Favorite Dill Pickles
* Spiced Blueberry Honey Jam
* Cinnamon Rum Syrup (a knock-out on pumpkin waffles)
* Blueberry syrup
* Your Basic Multi-Use Tomato Sauce
* Old -Style Whole Seed Mustard
and the marvelous

Sun-Dried Tomato Mustard

1/4 cup mustard seeds (the regular yellow seeds, not brown or black)
1/2 cup chopped sun-dried tomatoes (not oil packed)

      (I used tomatoes I dehydrated from last year's garden)
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
2 tbsp dry mustard
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp granulated sugar

Cover mustard seeds with warm water and refrigerate overnight. Drain and rinse seeds. Place mustard seeds, tomatoes,vinegar, dry mustard, oil, salt, and sugar in a food processor. Process until almost smooth and thickened. Store in a tightly sealed container in the refrigerator for up to 1 month or freeze for longer storage.

Makes about 1 cup.

Of course, we usually go through the whole batch in about 3 weeks, so I have no idea how it does in the freezer, but this is amazing stuff.  

You HAVE to try it........

Making Dijon Mustard

Dijon mustard was off limits all year last year, and in one of my "great timing" moments, now that it is "technically" legal, I decided to make some. 


It started with this book from the library:

 which is a great book if you want to learn to make and use Dijon mustard. If you want any OTHER type of mustard it is totally useless, but it seems to be the only mustard book currently in publication, so beggars can't be choosers. 

It did answer a lot of questions for me, like the fact that mustard made without any ingredients that go bad won't go bad.  Add eggs & it will need to be refrigerated and will eventually go bad, but if it's just oil, water, vinegar--anything in that line--it can last indefinitely.  I had wondered, because you see mustard sitting out on tables in restaurants all the time, and since there weren't mass outbreaks of food poisoning, it seemed like it must be okay, but I'd always kept it in the refrigerator anyway.  I still have lots of questions about mustards, but to get back to the point: 

Mustard which has onions or garlic in it would go bad, because the onions or garlic would rot.  This recipe gets past that by simmering the onions and garlic in white wine

(which is a nice way to stink up the house) then it steeps for a while as it cools.  Then all the solids are strained out before adding the mustard powder, oil, honey, and salt, which is then cooked on the stove until thick:

(which is another nice way to stink up the house), then the entire batch is put into a jar and refrigerated for a few weeks to "mellow." 

I hope this turns out well.  Besides having no preservatives or unknown ingredients, it's about 1/4 the price of a bottle of Dijon mustard.  Isn't that crazy?

Like A Kid In A Candy Store

Yesterday I went grocery shopping.  Oh my!!!!  It was rather exciting to walk in and know that NOTHING was forbidden.  Not that we aren't better off NOT eating processed foods, but there seems to be a difference between knowing I can't buy something and knowing I'm not going to buy it.  I browsed every aisle....though that was mostly because they have remodeled my neighborhood supermarket and the aisles are INSANELY long and even if I don't need something at one end of the aisle, by the end of it there's something I want. 

I flirted briefly with the idea of buying some Ben & Jerry's ice cream, but I guess perhaps I've developed more simple tastes this year.  They have flavors like chocolate with chocolate pieces, or ones with 15 different things in them, and I seem to have grown accustomed to "chocolate" or "vanilla," or on a really wild day, chocolate with peanut butter stripes.  37 ingredients was a bit overwhelming, so no ice cream. 

There were a lot of things that were no longer tempting, but forbidden foods that I did come home with:

*  a Black Forest ham
*  a boneless pork roast
*  salad dressing
*  hoisin sauce
*  chocolate chips
*  cream cheese
*  black olives
*  Grape Nuts cereal

It was sooooooo exciting!  I've used the chocolate chips (and since I only really like the cookie dough and not really the cookies), they'll be frozen so Andy can occasionally have one with his afternoon coffee, and we used salad dressing yesterday (yay!), but I know enough not to make it a free-for-all.  I don't think any of my "forbidden foods" contain high fructose corn syrup, so that made me feel better. 

It was a bit of a shock how much more expensive processed foods are.  Even the small number of items I bought increased our bill by around 40%.  Holy cow! 

Just In Case You Were Wondering.......

....chocolate chip cookie dough is JUST as good as I remember.