Too Much Too Soon...

Okay so the first super grain that my family tried out was Quinoa. Quinoa is considered a super grain because it contains all nine necessary amino acids to be a complete protein. Quinoa is also readily available in grocery stores in the United States, as well as on Amazon. My personal favorite place for buying Quinoa is Costco. Quinoa is also super easy to prepare. You prepare it the same way that you do white rice. You can make it either stove top or in a rice cooker. Personally I am a huge rice cooker fan, so that's how we roll. Two days after my discovery of grains as complete protein sources I sat waiting for my Quinoa order from Amazon to arrive. Truthfully I was barely able to stand myself while I waited. I was so excited. We were going to eat Quinoa like rock stars. In my mind we were never going to use something as inferior as brown rice again. After all we were on the path to better nutrition. After waiting for what seemed like an eternity, that blessed man, the UPS driver delivered my Quinoa. So there I was Quinoa in hand ready to change my families lives forever and then I opened the package. I thought to myself....hmmm this doesn't smell like rice. Never did I consider that we needed to ease into the transition from rice to Quinoa. So off I went making dinner, using Quinoa. And in my head a little song of triumph played. We had made the transition to healthier grains and it had only taken us one meal. Let's just say that when I served that meal, the song stopped playing. My husband and I loved it! But my kids, well, they needed a slower pace of transition. And so it started. We are a four cup of cooked rice family. In the beginning we only added a half cup of uncooked Quinoa to our 1 and a half cups of uncooked brown rice. We did this for a few weeks, and then we went to one cup rice, one cup Quinoa and so on. And after about two months we were up and running, eating Quinoa instead of brown rice, and everyone was loving it. So my advice is to take it slow. Don't bombard your family with new and unexpected flavors all at once. Give everyone a chance to adjust and get used to the new tastes and textures and soon enough everyone will be loving the change, if they even notice it. Truthfully we were Quinoa only for a few months before we even told our kids that they were only eating Quinoa and not rice. They hadn't even noticed the transition. Let the happy Mama dance begin.

The Beginning

About a year ago, I came across Chef Brad. Chef Brad has a cooking show entitled Grain Fusion. I began watching it because it was all that was on, but after one episode I was hooked. Chef Brad emphasizes using healthy grains as part of every day cooking. By the end of episode one, I had ordered some quinoa off of Amazon and I was on a mission to get a grain mill and pressure cooker of my own. My sister and brother-in-law gave me a grain mill for Christmas, and I got a pressure cooker for Mother's Day. It took a few months, but I was finally ready to go. The big question was now what? My husband had just returned to school to get his Master's of Education, so we were/still are on a college student's budget. I had always heard that healthy was more expensive, but I have learned that it isn't. We started out with a food budget around $475 a month, and now it's $300 a month and the amount of nutrition we are getting has improved ten fold. So not only are we saving money, but we are eating better. Say what? I know, one year later even I can't believe it. So that's why I am creating this blog, to share what we have done and what we are doing, as well as how we are doing it.