lots of little changes... Big impact.

I've been thinking a lot about how to make our eating habits better. We eat better than most people but we are far far from where I would like us to be. I'm going to attempt to start making lots of little changes and hopefully by this time next year our eating habits and food budget will be looking much much better.

A lovely friend of mine stumbled across this cool website were a mom is attempting to actually feed her family of 4 real foods, organic, all that good stuff for 400 dollars a month. Lots of blogs have written about doing a "Food stamp challenge" but the majority missed the point and had lovely stuffed stocks of healthy food they "shopped for free" also rules about how they got a certain number of meals that didn't count each month, totally cheating and not really helpful. This mom made her rules much stricter and as close to real life working family who might be on food stamps like as she could. You can check it out here 

Anyway, I'm hoping to pick up a few tips on how to add more organic goodness into our diet and eat better without breaking the bank. I'm hoping to get a little better at going after manufacture coupons for natural stuff we actually use and figuring out how to combined them if possible with store sales to save a little

The 1st little change I want to is give up canned beans and make the switch to only using dried beans preferably local when we can get them and by 2015 100% organic.  We use a lot of beans mostly black, pinto, and garbanzo. We also do a lot of lentils and I want to work on making sure we are getting those as organic and local as we possibly can as well (shouldn't be to hard I wouldn't think we do live in the lentil capital of the world.) 

My hope is that, while we might not save money switching from convectional canned beans to organic bulk that they will at least come out the same cost wise, health wise the switch is a huge improvement, since it would basically cut out 60% of our canned foods usage (tomatoes and coconut milk are all that's left)

The second little change is switching from using oil in baking to only using cold-pressed coconut oil (occasionally I'm still not a big fan of it in baking) or using organic applesauce.  I'll still use real EVOO in cooking and things but my hope is to seriously minimize the amount of oil we consume.