One of the major initiatives I’ve taken upon myself since moving back home is to actually eat at home for all of my meals. The last time I think I consistently ate three meals a day that I actually made for myself was probably back in high school.
Since moving out here, I’m happy to say that I’ve been fairly successful eating at home. It does take a lot of effort though, and I find I have to hit a grocery store every second day or so just to top up produce and what-not. The nice thing about being out here though is that it’s easy to bounce between various specialty stores in the same trip.
In Vancouver, most of my grocery shopping was done at the Urban Fare in Vancouver. Out in Chilliwack, I’m bouncing between three places routinely: a little gourmet meat shop near my house, Price Smart, and Fraser Valley Meats, a locally owned butcher shop. The last one has actually opened my eyes a bit with regards to some of the purchases I’ve made in the past. For example, I have always purchased bacon in those little packages at the supermarkets, but have started buying bacon direct from the butcher here. The difference is pretty astounding, and the fresh stuff just tastes so much better. In addition, the prices are usually a bit cheaper at the local meat shops, which is an added bonus.
Something else I’ve also noticed is that my fridge out here seems to keep things fresher and colder than my fridge in my old apartment. I was always tossing things out of that fridge that had gone bad, but everything seems to stay relatively fresh here, which is also pretty awesome.
I’m quickly going through my repertoire of recipes, so I have a few new cook books to go through to learn a few new tricks. But given that I’ve been eating relatively healthy out here, and have been getting about 8 – 9 hours of sleep a night on average, I’m actually started to feel quite a bit better. I’m really looking forward to the spring and summer here, and am gonna start prepping my camera to take some new HDRs in the next few months.
Ah I love going to the little meat/butcher shops and getting my fresh meat. Always good!
I too find we go to the produce market every couple of days to reload on fruit and veggies. Damn things aren’t cheap lol eating healthy I find is not a cheap thing either. Oh well my body is happier for eating healthier.
What do you have to do to prep your camera for HDRs? Yours are always quite amazing 🙂
Good question — I have some dust in my camera I gotta get out.. And yah, eating healthy isn’t cheap at all. Couple that with a low-carb kind of lifestyle, and it’s even more expensive. But worth it when it tastes good and is also pretty good for you.
Hey Duane! I’m guessing a less stressful environment might be a contributing factor in how you’re sleeping. Just a guess. As for your diet, now that it seems you have more time for it, by all means take control of what you’re eating. Those smaller shops sound like great places to buy fresh (and local too?). For some tips and the like, I came across this site through another blog.
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/
It’s got some interesting info there.
Cheers! And have a great weekend!
PS. *jealous* about Mexico :-p
Good stuff! I’m digging your tweets on the stuff you’re making (when you tweet about it). It’s definitely tough to balance a healthy lifestyle with lower carb options.
Looking forward to more of your HDR stuff too!
Hey Duane,
I know what you mean about the bacon from a butcher being incredibly better than the stuff that came wrapped in plastic.
A couple of years ago, there was an episode of Corner Gas where some characters complained that a guest coming to dinner brought a bottle of good wine and ‘bumped them into a different wine bracket’, meaning that they could no longer enjoy the cheap wine they had been drinking for years, knowing what they could be drinking. We’ve come to use that phrase and variants (like ‘bumped into a different bacon bracket’) to describe any time that we know we can’t go back to some inferior (and usually industrialized, supermarket distributed) version of a food or drink.
We’ve been doing 90% of our shopping at the Granville Island Public Market for about a year and a half now, and that means that we don’t eat much packaged or prepared food. You’d think that would translate to higher food bills and tons of time spent cooking, but I honestly don’t think we spend all that much more in money and time than people who frequent Urban Fare and go out a lot.
If you ever need some recipes for this stuff, let me know. In the meantime, I can heartily recommend the series ‘The Best Recipe’, from America’s Test Kitchens, which includes the book by that name, as well as several others covering Stews and Soups, Italian Food, Baking, Barbecuing, International Dishes, etc. The folks who work on those books (culled from issues of Cooks Illustrated Magazine, a sort of Consumer Reports for cooking) really do try 10-20 versions of a recipe until they determine the absolute best way to do it, so they almost never disappoint. In addition, once you start to learn the patterns of what nearly always makes stuff taste good, you can do more on your own.
It doesn’t surprise me that you’re feeling better, too. I’ll bet that’s a direct result of the change in diet.