Cooking

Recently, I have been cooking a great deal. I think the main reason for this is that I just moved into an apartment that has a GIANT kitchen, and I’m a little bit in love with it. Also, I now live by myself, and still don’t have all that many friends. I’m kind of sick-and-tired of asking people to hike, bike, visit a neighboring town or whatever else over the weekend, and having them tell me that they are much too busy taking care of their potted plant to have any time to hang out with me. WHERE ARE ALL THE ADVENTURE-LOVING PEOPLE THAT LIVE IN COLORADO!? I know where one of them is, though, and she’s moving in with me in 2 weeks! I cannot wait.

So anyway, cooking is fun in a big (mostly) clean kitchen, it kills time that I have over the weekend, and also, its pretty healthy. At least I know what all the things I put into MY mac-n-cheese, unlike in Annie’s Macaroni and Cheese which has “non-animal enzymes” and “organic annatto extract”. And that’s probably nothing compared to what is in Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. But I digress. So, I recently read Drop Dead Healthy, by A.J. Jacobs, one of my favorite authors. It is about his quest to be the healthiest person alive. The most interesting part to me was when he tried a bunch of different diets. The Paleo diet, and raw food diet, and so on and so forth. I started thinking about how what I eat affects me, and thought that maybe I should be more careful about what I eat. My old roommate was on the Paleo diet for a while, only eating things that people could have hunted and gathered. She ate mostly green vegetables (she couldn’t eat any starchy veggies for a whole other reason), lots of meat, and some nuts and seeds. Being around all this extremely healthy eating definitely made me examine my own diet.

I’ve always thought that I ate pretty healthily. Especially since I get paid next to nothing, I hardly ever buy potato chips or ice cream or anything like that. When I’m hungry in between meals I eat trail mix or a piece of fruit, or a muffin. When I crave sugar, I usually bake myself a batch of chocolate chip cookies, and that’s it. When I started to pay attention to how what I ate made me feel, though, I noticed that when I ate mostly raw veggies in salads, that is when I felt the best. The less processed my foods were, the better I felt. So, I’ve started to change what I eat.


First: I eat a lot of salad. Spring is here and I work on ranch that grows lettuce I can eat for free, so I have no excuse.

Second: I avoid eating so much wheat and corn. That is such a large part of the American Diet today, and I’m pretty sure the key to health is “everything in moderation” and to have a diverse diet. So I don’t eat sandwiches so much, or bagels (sadness, I love bagels), and cheerios are no longer a staple in my diet.

Third: I cut back on dairy. It is true that we, as humans, weren’t really designed to eat lots of dairy. I still eat yogurt and a little bit of cheese, but I try to keep it way down now. I can’t wait for our goat to start being milked, so that I can diversify my diet with goat yogurt and cheese.

Fourth: I try not to eat so much sugar, and this even means fruit. I sure do love eating yogurt, fruit and granola in the morning, but I’m going to try to cut back. Ranch eggs are a really good morning food, especially paired with some spinach. I heard somewhere that bananas aren’t the best fruit to be eating, and having run cross-country for 7 years of my life, this makes me very sad. I don’t know if I’ll be able to cut bananas out right away.

Fifth: Legumes. I’ve started eating way more legumes and way less meat. The meat thing is partially for health, partially because I’ve participated in the “harvest” of a number of animals, and I have seen how they lived. Chickens, even when they live in a flock of 80 with all the space they could want, are still very gross. They are dirty animals, and can become carnivorous. Yup - carnivorous. So I can’t imagine what kind of a life a store-bought chicken had. The only kind of meat I don’t have too much problem eating is rabbit. We raise rabbit on the ranch – they’re clean, they eat exclusively grass and hay, drink water, and are even easy to gut and clean.

All this having been said, don’t expect to find me eating salad for every meal of the day, and refusing to eat out or with friends because of the above guidelines I gave myself. I think that the kind of community formed around a grill or kitchen table is way healthier that following any dietary rules could ever be. I’ll try to follow my own guide, but I’ve never been one to care too much about what I eat, so we’ll see how this goes. So, salad-filled summer, here I come!!