Welcome to Almost Fit. Almost Fit focuses on improving your health by eating real food in moderation. This post is a continuation of the series of photographs of What We Eat. If you enjoy this post, please consider subscribing. Thanks.
Breakfast/Lunch, Tuesday morning
- Omelette: Bantam (Banty) eggs (pastured), artichoke hearts, small amount of bacon (uncured Niman Ranch), onions (from our CSA), a few capers, small amount of mozzerella, a bit of tomato chutney, topped with fresh salsa.
- Roasted potatoes: Fingerlings, garlic, and cipollini onions (from our CSA), rosemary (from our garden), extra virgin olive oil, butter, salt and pepper, hot sauce (for me).
This is not a typical mid-week breakfast for us, but we have guests visiting this morning so April made a heartier late morning meal. This will likely be the primary dish for breakfast and lunch today, with a mid-afternoon light lunch before supper. For supper with our company, we may recreate the grilled Albacore tuna dish from last week.
Welcome to Almost Fit. Almost Fit focuses on improving your health by eating real food in moderation. This post is a continuation of the series of photographs of What We Eat. If you enjoy this post, please consider subscribing. Thanks.
Summer supper outside, Sunday evening
- Fusilli pasta with yellow squash, zucchini, and cipollini onions all from our CSA, swiss chard from our garden, and frozen shrimp, cooked in a good quality extra virgin olive oil (quality is key), 4-5 cloves of fresh garlic (CSA), half of a fresh-squeezed lemon, several tablespoons of homemade whole milk sour cream, tablespoon of locally made tomato and pepper chutney (farmer’s market), 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese, salt and pepper to taste
- Sauteed carrots (from our garden) in olive oil and butter, salt and pepper to taste
- Fresh organic avocado, salt and pepper to taste
Ed. note: April would like me to clarify that we would normally have accompanied this with a fresh salad from the garden, but alas, it wasn’t meant to be this evening. We eat salad. We promise. 
Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to Almost Fit. Almost Fit focuses on improving your health by eating real food in moderation. If you enjoy this post, please consider subscribing. Thanks.
Summer supper outside, Friday evening
Photos of What We Eat #3
- Pizza number 1: Tomato, basil, and olive pizza: homemade olive oil bread dough, tomatoes from our CSA, basil from our kitchen garden, olives, and extra virgin olive oil
- Pizza number 2: Prosciutto, onions, and gruyere on a light béchamel sauce: Prosciutto with the fat trimmed, fresh lightly sauteed onions from our CSA, gruyere cheese, and a light béchamel sauce made from scratch. The one ingredient this is missing, believe it or not, is fresh pear. The light sweetness is a great balance to the saltiness of the prosciutto.
One sidenote: these pizzas look bigger in the photo than they actually are. Each was about 10-12 inches or so, which is about the size of a personal pizza at a lot of restaurants (not that I’ve actually eaten any of those. Heavens no.). Read the rest of this entry »
Summer supper outside, Wednesday evening
- Grilled fresh local Oregon Albacore tuna
- Cucumber in a yogurt and dill sauce (the cucumber is from our garden, the dill from a local farmer (via our CSA), and the yogurt is Nancy’s - another Oregon local product)
- Roasted beets and Fingerling potatoes (both from our local CSA)
- Blueberry and blue cheese salad with a light vinaigrette (all local produce)
Introducing a New Series: Photos of What We Eat
I’ve had several inquiries from readers on what exactly we eat at home, so rather than launching into some long diatribe on the subject, I thought I’d just show you.
This is the first entry in this series on Almost Fit which is tentatively named, “Photos of What We Eat.” (The title’s a bit long, but it’s the best I have at the moment). Today’s photo is locally caught Oregon Albacore tuna, served with a variety of locally grown vegetables that came either from our garden or from this week’s CSA box. And while I am certain you are going to get tired of me saying this, it was truly delicious.
By way of disclosure, in this series I will say that not every meal is going to be perfect - I’m erring on the side of candor, even if it means the photo is little more than a fabulously lit box of macaroni. While we strive to eat seasonally and locally as much as we can, we do buy products that fall outside the bounds of those guidelines. We still buy things like coffee and balsamic vinegar, and if I want an orange in January, well, I buy that orange in January.
We make responsible choices, but we are also realistic: with two young children, sometimes convenience is the order of the day. It is increasingly rare, but on occasion we have been known to feed the kids a bowl of goldfish crackers and a “natural” fruit roll up.
Ah, to be well rounded.
Hope you enjoy the photos. Comments and questions are welcome.
This article is the third part in a series on buying chicken. Part 1 is How to buy chicken without getting punched, and the second discusses how to save money on chicken at the grocery store. In this part, I’ll describe how to interpret the dizzying array of labels that are used on packaged chicken, and give you my purchasing priorities based on what I’ve learned so far. If you would like to learn more, please consider subscribing to Almost Fit. Thanks.
As I’ve made clear in the previous articles in this series, we have opted to seek out locally farmed, pasture-raised chicken. It means a little more trouble for us in terms of turning the chicken into a meal, but we’ve decided it’s worth the extra effort. But it raises the questions: Why buy pasture-raised chicken? Why go to the trouble?
It’s more than just nutrition
In our family, cost, health, and the social implications are all part of our buying decision. In particular, I think it’s important to consider into whose pockets we as a family are pouring our money. I would much rather benefit a local, sustainable farmer supporting a family and a sense of community than a large, faceless corporation who will go to any length to acquire my money.
Certainly some corporations benefit the big picture and do good things - they provide jobs for an awful lot of families for example, and often provide products at an affordable price. But for the most part, the goal of a corporation is to increase profits by squashing competition, lowering costs by any means they can get away with, and convincing consumers that they are selling a product that the human race simply cannot live without.
I don’t buy it. Read the rest of this entry »
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We had a great day picking berries today. Here’s an excerpt from a conversation that my four-year-old son had with a fellow berry picker:
Jonah: “I burped!”
Woman: “Oh my! Have you been eating a lot of berries?”
Jonah: “Nope. Just one. At a time.”
That, is my boy. Read the rest of this entry »
Ed. Note: This article focuses on the benefits of eating together for families with children. I believe that families come in all shapes and sizes; I just chose families with kids for today’s article. Thanks for reading Almost Fit - I really do appreciate it.
With the pace of life building at an ever increasing rate, for many of us, sharing meals at the dinner table is becoming a lost art. Often times if families eat together at all, it is in the car after having placed an order in front of an illuminated board of “value” options, yelling through a cheap microphone, trying to make it to the next activity only a few minutes late for once.
For a while we were sucked into this vortex of squeezing meals in between the “more important” things (as if meals were not critical to life!). Here’s an example. Read the rest of this entry »
