Getting Back on the Healthy Train

Well, after a few days of cleaning up my eating I must say that I am feeling awesome. I've been eating lots of natural foods - steamed veggies, rice puff cereal (where the only ingredient is...rice! can you believe it?), beans and fruit. Honestly, my digestive system has always done me well, but the past week when I wasn't at my top I noticed I had an upset stomach for a few days. After one day of eating really well, the upsetness was gone and everything seems to be working how it should be.

I started down a path of super-healthy eating when I lost a lot of weight a few years ago. I've mentioned it in other posts, but not gone into a tonne of detail. Before I moved to Vancouver, and even at first when I got out here, I really tried to not buy processed foods. Anything that came from a can or a box was usually not chosen. I hadn't read anything about these real food revolutions at the time, I just noticed my body worked better when I made certain choices. And I also learned during this time that I loved to cook. Making my own soup and crackers was an inexpensive way to make my food budget stretch up to a week. Baking and cooking things that I traditionally bought pre-made, like veggie burgers, pizza and pancakes not only gave me the confidence of knowing what was going into my body, but also gave me the pride of learning to make all of these things, and making them in ways that actually taste really good.

One of the down-sides of cooking while living out here in Vancouver comes from the fact that I have known since almost the time that I got here that I would be heading back to Ontario once I finished school. Vancouver is too far from home and I miss so much about my home community of Windsor, Ontario. Because I've known that, I've been really reluctant to buy much in the way of kitchen gadgets. When we got here it was just our luck that a guy had moved out and wasn't able to fit his box of kitchen supplies in his car, so he gave them to the building managers, who then sold them to us. This box, which contained spatulas, a whisk, a couple of graters and some other serving utensils has been used as the bulk of our kitchen tools over the past year and a half. I've supplemented it with some things - a can opener, corkscrew and garlic press, but for the most part we haven't bought much. We also own 2 pots, one large and one small. The large pot was very inexpensive and, as a result, not very good. I also accidentally blew up the lid, so it is lidless. We have 3 frying pans, which is more than sufficient, and some bake wear that is usually enough. But because of my love of cooking I want fancier things. I want an awesome stock pot that I can make soups and chilis in. I want a food processor. I want a strainer. Can you believe I don't own a strainer?


Anyway, one of the biggest things I'm looking forward to when I get home is having a bigger kitchen and being able to buy all of the kitchen gadgets that my heart desires. Do you have kitchen gadgets that you can't live without?