But, in my experience, the first 2-6 weeks are the worst when switching from a very unhealthy diet to a much healthier way of eating.  I think you can expect a certain amount of calm and the beginning stages of normalcy after that.

I’m not talking about going full force in 2-6 weeks, from Kraft Macaroni and Cheese to soaking your own bread dough.  I’m just talking about going from Kraft Macaroni and Cheese to some more vegetables on your plate, whole grains and maybe some filtered water.

Anyway, these are the things that really helped us get from Kraft Macaroni (actually, we still have some from America around here somewhere… I still can’t bring myself to chuck it — I know..) to more vegetables, whole grains and filtered water.  Soaking bread dough hasn’t come yet for us either.

1. Satisfy your sugar cravings.

Instead of cookies or ice cream or whatever your vice is (mine is chocolate), start satisfying your sugar cravings in new ways.

Eat a cup of plain yogurt with granola and dried fruit or frozen berries.  You can even put honey on it if you want, although plain is delicious by itself, too.

Keep fruit around your house, especially those high in sugar like tangerines, bananas and watermelon.  It’s a quick fix for a sugar craving.  It can walk out the door with you and it’s not refined.  It’s got all the natural, fiber-y parts.  I’ve been known to eat 6 tangerines in one sitting when a really hardcore craving comes on.

Drink tea with honey.  It lasts a long time, it keeps your hands busy and your mouth full and warm and it’s sweet.  It kept me from searching out naughty desserts for a long time and it still does from time to time.  Don’t underestimate the power of just a teaspoon of honey.

Make muffins.  Muffins are yum and they are simple.  You can sub honey for the sugar (though add a little less honey because it’s sweeter than sugar), wheat flour for white, and use melted coconut oil or butter for the fat.  I like GNOWFGLINS Basic Soaked Muffins because I can start them at night and have minimal prep to do in the morning for a delicious muffin breakfast.  You also get to pick your add-ins.  Plus, there will be leftovers perfect for munching later on in the day.

2.  First, add more.

Don’t focus right away on giving up the bad things, first focus on adding in the good things.  Like whole vegetables and fruits, whole grains, grass-feds meats and dairy and yummy cheese.

We focused first on vegetables.  I made a point to get good, whole, fresh (or frozen from fresh) vegetables on our dinner plates every single night and it’s been great.  It’s something I can do, reliably, and every time I do it, I feel like I’ve taken a step in the right direction.

Remember, you need time to adjust.  You don’t want to give up your favorite comfort food before you even like the taste of your new food.  That’s just mean.

3. Go slow and offer yourself grace.

You need to give yourself time and grace.  Let yourself slip-up occasionally and learn to let things go.

One night, I sat down and ate enough chocolate to make the angels cry.  And I felt terrible.  It was like I had a hangover in the morning.  My head ached and I was dehydrated.  It was lame and I kicked myself real hard.  But, eventually, I had to simply offer myself grace, let myself off the hook, and just continue on.

Beating yourself up only helps to break your spirit and a broken spirit accomplishes very little.

4. Don’t make it optional.

Don’t allow yourself to downplay the importance of you and your family’s health.  You will feel so much better once the initial few weeks are over.  You just will.

And the less optional the whole endeavor feels to you, the more likely you are going to be to stick it out.

You simply have to eat well.  Remind yourself of this.

You and your family’s health is not optional.

5. Read and plan.

I guess these are really two different things, but I’m turning them into one.

One of the most important things I’ve done in support of our journey, has been to read.  Everything.  Blogs and articles.  Everything I can get my hands on that pertains to what we’re doing.  It’s absolutely eye-opening and the clincher?  Once you’re informed, it’s REAL hard not to act on that information.

The more you read, the better you’ll know what you’re doing and the more you know, the less likely you’ll be to slip back into old habits.  Reading up is absolutely essential.  Know your stuff because that will help you practice your stuff.

And then plan.  Plan, plan, plan.

Make a game plan.  Decide what you’re going to add to your diet and what you’re going to remove from your diet.  Don’t be all grandiose about it and start thinking you’re going to change everything overnight, but put some of your plans down on paper.  Come up with a few, simple guidelines.

Then, meal plan.

I know, everybody says it and I, too, am just now taking the challenge.  It’s a process, for sure, but it’s such a helpful one.  Even now, I have rice soaking on the fridge because, last night, I knew I was making paella, so I could get things started then.

Menu planning can be flexible and it can be by the week or by the month.  You can, then, make a shopping list based on your plan, which can help a lot with budgeting.  We budget by the week (by which I mean, we divide our money up into so much per week), so I plan by the week, taking into consideration other things we’ll need the weekly money for, etc.  Then, I shop for the week.

I also have a pantry full of staples, so my weekly shopping really only includes vegetables, fruits and meats and the occasional off ingredient, so that makes it easier.

Remember to remain flexible.  The menu plan is there to serve you, not vice versa.  If you’re tired on Tuesday, move the difficult meal to Wednesday and make Wednesday’s casserole instead.  Or don’t make difficult meals… that’s what I do!  Haha.

Anyway, reading will help you plan, because by reading, you will stumble across delicious recipes and also way more (and better) advice on meal planning.

6. Don’t go cold turkey.

Don’t give up everything at once and don’t try to add everything at once.  These are recipes for disaster.

If your major vice is like my chocolate, you can’t even fathom giving it up.  It just doesn’t compute.

So, don’t.  Don’t just give it up.

I keep chocolate in the house, out of the way, out of my line of everyday sight and I eat it after dinner only.  At first, I allowed my five pieces, then four, then three, you get the idea.  I’m down to two and on my way to one and it’s going fine.  I never feel like I’m dying inside and, maybe someday, I won’t eat chocolate every single day.  But, for right now, I know I can have chocolate every single day and that kept me a lot less frantic in the beginning.  I didn’t feel like I wanted it all the time because I knew I could have it, just not right then.

Regardless, I feel better.  Even though I’m still eating two pieces of chocolate (complete with refined sugar) every single day.  It won’t happen all at once and this goes hand in hand with giving yourself grace and going slowly.  By keeping your vice around and weaning yourself off it, you’re giving your brain and body a more natural amount of time to deal with the change.

Those are my six tips.  These six things have gotten us through the first six weeks (I know it’s only day eleven of the blog, but we’ve been working on this for just a little longer than that — though, not much!) and, despite a few bumps and glitches, we’re doing really well and we’re feeling so, so good.

That, alone, should be an encouragement to you.  You will feel better.

I’ve almost lost my cravings for sugar completely, my blood sugar doesn’t do the whole going-from-full-to-hungry-in-a-matter-of-minutes plummet thing anymore that it gets from white flour and sugar and we’re just happier.

Hope these work for you like they do for us!

- Catie

I think what doesn’t get advertised along with all this, is how much work you’re going to put into it.

You’ll spend a lot of time making granola and then, when it runs out, you’ll have to start all over.

It’s absolutely a rewarding and amazing lifestyle change, but it’s absolutely a lifestyle change as well.  We are used to a consumer culture.  If we want granola, we go to the bins at Winco and buy it in bulk (in America we do, anyway).  If we want something, we just go and BUY IT.

But now we have to think.

What’s in granola?  What’s in that ketchup?  If I’m making yogurt every week or so to keep my starter going, what are ways we can use the yogurt up?  How can we make jam in the summer without store-bought pectin (unavailable here) and without sugar?

I honestly don’t mean to complain because I don’t feel badly about the process at all.  I just feel a little more overwhelmed than I have so far and, mostly, I feel tired.  Like taking a nap.

I haven’t been sleeping well.  I might know why, but I might not know why and I’ve also been having some anxiety which comes along with the depression I’ve already been diagnosed with for several years now.

The depression is completely under control…. when I take my medication.  Haha.

Everything’s felt so out of whack, though, recently, with all the changes in routine and spending a lot of extra time in the kitchen that I’ve forgotten either the first or second half of my medication now five days running.

Well, it’s obviously time for an overhaul, the problem being that I don’t focus well at all when I get like this and tend to just kind of sit like a lump.

So, I’m off to gain some inspiration and I’m sorry for the complaining.

I don’t mean it.

Not any of it.

And I’ll be back to normal soon.

- Catie

On Saturday, we went to Costco for some frozen bluberries (they’re one of our only organic finds here and they’re so good in yogurt) and a new water filter (which takes out chlorine, I am impressed with it) and we found a bunch of red lettuce on sale for cheap.  Way cheaper than we could find at home and it’s the one green in Korea that I do know tastes good.

At home, we’ve been spending a lot of time setting our spare room up into a food pantry (Korean homes traditionally don’t have a lot of kitchen storage — nothing like what we’re used to), so we worked on that unti late-late-late.

At midnight, we both realized we were starving.

And this is what we whipped up.  I always feel like I need to have a bunch of different greens on hand in order to make a salad, but this time, all we had was red lettuce and it was still great.

Chicken Bacon Ranch Salad

(makes 2 individual salads)

3 strips bacon

1 small head red leaf lettuce

8-10 cherry tomatoes, halved

1 medium carrot, chopped

2 hardboiled eggs, chopped

1/4 c. cheese, grated (we used monterey jack mixed with cheddar because we had it on hand)

1 cup cooked chicken, shredded

1 handful chopped walnuts

In a skillet, brown bacon until crispy.  Let cool and drain, then crumble.  I like to hold several slices together and cut them to bits with my kitchen shears.

Wash and chop the red leaf lettuce into bite sized pieces.  I also cut out the big chunks of stem because they weird me out.

In two individual bowls, evenly divide and layer lettuce, tomatoes, carrot, hardboiled egg, cheese, shredded chicken, bacon and walnuts.

Top with Lacto-Fermented Ranch Dressing.

Lacto-Fermented Ranch Dressing:

1 cup Lacto-Fermented Mayonnaise (from Cheeseslave)

1/2 cup yogurt

1 1/2 teaspoons onion powder

1 teaspoon garlic powder

1 teaspoon dried parsley

1/8 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon black pepper

Whisk together all ingredients and refrigerate 1-2 hours before using.  Believe me, it tastes much yummier after sitting a while.  Sort of like a buttermilk ranch, only with all the yumminess of lacto-fermentation.

I would have a picture except… we sort of ate it all.

I mean, you trundle into things, just thinking, “This will make it better, right?  This has to make it better.”  You’ve just eaten whatever was put in front of you for so long, whatever sounded the most delicious.

You forget the simple things.  The great, grand simplicity of granola.

Oats, sunflower seeds, pecans, walnuts and almonds together with honey and butter, a splash of water.  Roasted and toasted.

All those things from the ground with their complex nutrients and fiber.

The sweetness of honey and yogurt and cranberries.

I can’t tell you.

You think, going into this thing, that you’re really gonna miss your favorite foods.  That you’ll never be the same.

You take the plunge.

But you’re nervous.

And then something wonderful happens and you find out God didn’t make crappy food!

The Granola

I used the Granola recipe from Kitchen Stewardship.  Have I mentioned that her site is my favorite?  Maybe it’s because we have the same name, I don’t know, but I just find her to be an absolute wealth of knowledge.  Plus, the way her blog is designed makes it real easy to access things.  Everything has a category and they’re all alphabetized down the left side.  She’s had so much to say over the course of year, too, that you’ll always have something to read.  And she’s come so far in a year.

Which is nice for Ben and I to think about.

The recipe was amazing.  I browned it a little much, something she warns against and I think next time I’ll take her seriously and actually stand in front of the oven the whole time.  Also, maybe I’ll turn the oven down a notch.  For the first batch, I actually browned it a lot along the edges and got nervous, so threw it all into our big wok skillet and just stirred it frantically over the stove until it browned properly.

It worked.

And, a little too brown maybe, but delicious.

I think, next time I’ll try to soak the nuts and oats.  I’m not sure, though.  Not because I don’t think it’s necessary, although I’m not entirely convinced yet, more because it feels a little overwhelming and, often, I just need to remind myself to slow down.

Baby steps.

Like Bill Murray in “What About Bob?”.  That’s what The Flylady says and I have to follow along with her or my house will get dirty, so I’m following along with her.

Granola isn’t very cheap here.  In a place where oats are about a dollar a cup, and nuts comes in tiny bags for two dollars.  But it’s something fast and something I can make quickly.  Something I can eat for breakfast without a lot of worry.

Still, eating here, we will never know about things like our nuts and seeds and oats.  It’s hard to tell where they come from, what went into them, and whether there’s something I should be eating instead.

I find it really difficult to let go of the process sometimes and just trust that some is better than none.  I want to go whole hog.  I want to be back in America, right next to our food co-op again, only this time taking full advantage of it.

Instead, I am here.  We are here.  And we’re doing what we can.  I have to find grace for myself even when I think there has to be more I could be doing, some way to find out.

In Korea, the reality is that, no, there probably isn’t some way to find out.

We’re not to ask questions here.  It’s a Confucian society and we’re to do as we’re told, as we’re taught, and to do it right the first time, following in line, one after the other.

And it’s not a bad thing, per se.  It’s another country.  In some ways — like my nose piercing — I rebel (it’s what I do…), but in other ways, I have to give in.

This place isn’t mine.  I don’t know the rules.  And, often, all I can do is ask kindly, with genuine curiosity and accept the answer I receive.

The answer is usually: “Oh, we just don’t ask.”

Haha.  Hard to hear.  Yeah.. it’s hard to hear.

But we won’t live here forever.  And there is certainly no harmony or peace to be had, trying to living in a country

Sweet enough that I don't even need to add honey to the yogurt. What's in the granola is more than enough to quench a sugar craving.

where all you do is make cultural waves.

So, I will offer myself grace.  And begin, again, learning to let things go.

In the meantime, I just want to say that God’s pretty good.  Giving us all these nuts and oats.

And this granola rocks.  Especially over my yogurt.

I am impressed with it.

The recipe was super easy to follow and made it a cinch to make without a thermometer (I can’t find a food grade thermometer anywhere here — probably not looking in the right place).  I would still like to be able to get it incubating faster (Crock Pot method took 5 1/2 hours), but we can’t always get what we want.  And it’s still really simple and, can I just say how exciting it is to open your first crock full of yummy-smelling, set up yogurt?

I kept wanting to check it, but I didn’t.  Only opened it twice to smell it.  I was so afraid it wouldn’t set up.

But, when I opened it at 3 this morning (I know, we stay up LATE), it was so beautiful!  Creamy and surprisingly thick.

It’s so amazing how just 8 hours of incubation can bring milk to yogurt.  We’re not very far into this thing, but every new little step we take toward eating better and making our own food at home makes me wonder how we’ve strayed so far as a culture.

Homemade yogurt is simple.  And it tastes just light years more delicious.  Even when made with corn-smelling-tasting milk and fructose-sweetened Activia yogurt.  How did we get here?

It may be a little faster to simply drive down to the store and buy my yogurt, but it won’t taste the same, it won’t do the same things for me.  I may not necessarily know what’s in it, even if I read the label.

But now I know what’s in it: Milk.

I’m not saying everyone should make their own yogurt.

I obviously can’t make proclamations like that.

But I do wonder if we couldn’t all make something.

There is so much joy in the simple process of things, a joy that was lost when we gave all our food preparation over to the factory.

I guess what I’m saying is that this way of eating goes beyond simply filling yourself and your family with wholesome, healthful foods.  It’s a process of being humbled by the sheer vastness of God’s providence.  And dumbfounded by the simplicity.

It all just makes sense.  People have eaten this way since the dawn of time (thereabouts).  And who am I to question that?  But, in favor of plastic and chemicals, we’ve left our own traditions by the wayside and just trundled on, getting sicker and frailer and bigger.  And then it seems the only answer we receive to these problems is just to eat more chemically altered, processed, “enriched”, low calorie, low fat foods.

I wonder if, at the point we lost sight of our culinary traditions, we didn’t also lose sight of our place in the world.  Aren’t we all linked like that?  I wonder if when you grow your own food, subjecting your diet to the whim of the weather and the turn of the sky, you don’t come to realize a few things.

Our food is more than just something we eat.  It’s something we’re given the opportunity to work with and grow, wash and preserve.  Something we can carefully prepare, with our families in mind.  At Starbucks, they have this chimey, trite little term they use when referring to learning more coffee and coffee production. The “Learning Journey”.  And I think that’s what this is.  A Learning Journey.  And perhaps as we walk it, we eventually come out, not only better fed, but wiser on the other side somewhere.  And more fulfilled.

God didn’t provide us with food so we could ignore it and make our own.

He provided us with food so that we would thrive in health and so that, perhaps, as we took it into our mouths, we might remember him.  His providence, and his grace in offering us always the best.

This diet was meant for us.  And I just find a lot of security in that.

We sit at desks now, encased in cubicles with computers instead of windows and no tangible way to gauge our progress, our hands’ work or our success.

This way of living gives us all those things.  And I’m certain that’s on purpose.

If God had wanted food to be easy, HE would have invented McDonald’s.  He could probably figure out how to make their cashiers happier and their drive-thru move faster…..

But he didn’t.  He wanted us to work at it, the way we’re supposed to work in the world.  With purpose and conviction and a history of knowledge behind us.

In more than simply diet, we’ve gotten far from our roots.

This is one chance I have to find my way back.  To take the gifts I’ve been offered and share them with my husband, someday my children and to cherish the work I put into it, knowing that the work, too, is a gift from God

Perhaps we’ve made our lives too easy and now the ease is killing us.

God never said things would be easy.

And maybe he never meant them to be.

Anyway.  Sermon over.  I’m just impressed with the gift of the process.  That’s all.

So, the yogurt turned out beautifully.  I’m storing it in a giant, glass jelly jar from Costco.  There was too much to fill the jar, so I am turning a good portion of it into yogurt cheese (one of Ben’s favorites) and whey.  I’m still not sure what I’ll do with the whey, but something.  It tastes delicious.  I think — in my excitement — I may have stopped the incubation before I should have.  It’s not quite as tangy as I’d like it to be, but the milk taste will be real great for cheese and it makes it easier to get Ben to eat some of it.  I’m able to eat it this milk without any sweetener and it’s still just yummy.

So, I’ll probably do a couple things differently next time.  I think I’ll make a little less (I was afraid to play with proportions too much my first time), let it sit a little longer, and maybe add some heavy cream to it for fat.  I’m never sure what is going on with the fat in Korean milk.  They don’t go by the percentage system, it seems like most of their milk is 1% or 2%.

Although… today, at LotteMart (a big superstore type place with two floors and tons of… stuff), I found some organic milk.  I think it’s whole milk, but they don’t do the percentage system here like we do in America, so it’s always hard to tell exactly we’re getting.  I am certainly hoping the organic will not smell or taste like corn, but I’m sure, whatever happens, it will be okay.  Maybe this will keep from having to add heavy cream.

The organic is ridiculously expensive.  Almost 4,000 won for less than quart.  That’s about.. 3.50 US?  I think.  We can afford it, but I think we’ll end up drinking a little less milk.  And, of course, we’re going to plow through what we have first.

That’s the yogurt story.

Tonight, I think we’ll try California Chicken Wraps from Kitchen Stewardship.  I’m pretty excited.  They look delicious and, while we don’t have avocados (those good Omega-3′s) or red onions (I think I’ll grill some yellow onions), I think they’ll still be great.

Taking baby steps toward making our own tortillas someday…

And, we just realized today that we’re not sentenced to Skippy until we move back to America.  We can  make our own peanut butter as soon as we acquire a blender.  More on that, later.

- Catie

One of the most alarming things to Americans about Korea is the milk.

The Koreans don’t seem notice.  They heart their milk.  There are fifty seven (lie detector says: maybe twelve) different kinds of milk at our small, local grocery store alone, which surprised us as we didn’t expect any milk.

Asia seems a little adverse to dairy.  I remember in China there’s almost zero milk, except for what comes in these juice boxes with a sort of clear-blue tint and a creepy, sweet after taste.

But anyway, the point is that Koreans drink a lot of milk.

And they still don’t notice it.

The milk here smells and tastes exactly like corn.  Not just sort of like corn.  LIKE corn.  Corn on the cob type corn.  Like, “who dumped all this corn in my milk?” corn.

I’ve never been a big a milk drinker, so this hasn’t been a problem for me really.  I put a little on my oatmeal sometimes and as little as possible in my cereal.  Often, I’ll use soymilk (probably not a way better alternative, but…) just to keep from smelling it.

Regardless, it’s what I have to work with and so, for now, I am working with it to make yogurt.

I waffled over whether it would be better to use Corn Milk or powdered whole milk, but in the end, Corn Milk was closer at hand and won out.

It wouldn’t weird me out so much if I didn’t know how smelly milk worked from growing up in Idaho farm country.

Your milk smells like what your cow ate.

And if my cow ate only corn,

A. I feel real sad for the cow who must live a miserable existence.

B.  Like I NEED anymore corn.  Didn’t you just put it on my pizza last week?  That was enough to hold me over, believe you me.

Anyway, fingers crossed in hopes it won’t taste like Corn Milk.

I’m banking on the fact that yogurt is just good for you and, in the absence of The Best Yogurt, The Ehh Yogurt will have to do.

The recipe I wanted to use was Easy Homemade Yogurt over at Kitchen Stewardship (no dishes involved!), but, unfortunately, we haven’t a cooler here in Korea and I was afraid that if the yogurt wasn’t properly incubated it wouldn’t set up.  So, I chose the Crock Pot Yogurt recipe from Nourishing Days because I do have a Crock Pot (we were so happy to find that they do have crock pots here) and bath towels.

I’d still prefer the quickness of the Easy Yogurt, because you get it to incubation pretty fast, but this is what we’re able to pull off.

And that’s what cooking over here is all about: What I can and can’t pull off.

It’s pretty fun, actually.  I’m not complaining.

So, at 2pm, the milk went into the crock pot.

At 4:30, I shut the crock pot off.

It is now 5:23, and I am waiting very impatiently to be allowed to stir in my store bought yogurt and start to incubate.

Am I excited?

You have no idea.

Here’s why:

Korea LOVES yogurt.  And when I say, “LOVES”, I am understating the love we have here.  For yogurt.

They eat it.  They drink it.  They make it themselves in yogurt machines.

They’re outta control.

But all you can buy is sweetened yogurt.  Even plain yogurt comes sweetened.

And, in the US, even I — the terrible eater — am much more fond of plain yogurt I can sweeten myself than anything sweetened before it reaches me.

I grew up on plan, whole milk yogurt.  We stirred in homemade jam, or applesauce or fruit.

I miss my yogurt.

So, I have a cup of plain Activia yogurt (as far as I can tell, the whole point of Activia is that it has active cultures, so I’m banking on that being true) that is just a little bit sweetened and I am hoping the sweetener doesn’t kill me.

Or my yogurt.

I don’t see why it would (since the cultures eat sugar), but I am feeling, so far, like this thing is a very delicate process.

Hopefully, if it does work, after this I will be able to keep my own yogurt as starter and, eventually, the sugar from the activia will be all diluted out.

That’s the plan.

Now, if the clock would just MOVE faster!

- Catie

Update on sugar intake: Going okay.  I ate chocolate after dinner yesterday, but not very much.  So far, the plan is working.  When it’s in the spare room and I don’t just see it lying around, I really am much less likely to even think about it.

Until I wrote that down.

And now I want some… man!

I have the hardest time with sugar.

I seriously can’t deal.

There is not a lot of Valentine’s Day To-Do here in Korea, especially since this year it fell on Lunar New Year, one of only two really major holidays Koreans celebrate (the other being Chuseok — a sort of Thanksgiving equivalent).

But, it was still Valentine’s Day for Ben and I, so we acted accordingly.

This included, as one would imagine, following the American tradition of a great chocolate overload.

So much so, in fact, that there is still a huge amount of chocolate leftover that Ben gave me, although I did make him take the chocolate cheesecake I made him to work this morning because I knew that I simply could NOT say no to it if it were to be left in the fridge.

For me, the most effective way to keep from ingesting all the sugar put in front of me, is to just keep it out of the house.  Which, in my better moments, I’ve been (mostly) known to do.

We don’t buy much pop these days, which helps.  In fact, Ben never lets it cross the threshold (I love him for it… again, in my better moments), so I’m only able to drink it when we’re out.

But this chocolate thing.

I feel a somewhat emotional attachment to it since it was for Valentine’s Day, from Ben.  And it was so nice.

However, my rational brain wonders if my “emotional attachment” might not be somewhat influenced by the fact that me and chocolate are kindred spirits.

Still.  Sentimental.  Because I have to give up my yummy, tasty, kindred little friend.

Still, today, Day Two, I resolve to put the chocolate — all of it — as well as those weird marshmallows and the hot chocolate — into the spare bedroom.

Where no one ever ventures.

(We still haven’t cleaned it out from when we moved in and there may or may not be dead cockroaches — looong story.)

I do not see myself going in there to get it because I never go in there.  It’s gross.  And if it’s in there, I am hoping I will, A.) just leave it there and finally get this serious sugar craving out of my system, or, B.) simply forget it exists, and/or C.) never bring it back out since that room is so gross that it will probably taint my beloved chocolate beyond consumability.

If something goes awry, obviously I will have to rethink and take more drastic measures.

But for now, all chocolate and sugar is in the spare room.

I hate this.

- Catie

Before I was born, my mother was a vegetarian.  She knows the ins and outs, you know, all that stuff vegetarians eat.  She knew what to eat and why and how to prepare it.

She dutifully raised my two sisters and I on whole wheat bread, fruits and vegetables and all sorts of dishes that would be considered healthful and nutritious by traditional American standards.  She kept sugar and pop out of the house as long as she was able (at some point, kids get mobile).  And I stood alongside her, learning to can jams, fruits and vegetables, freeze berries so they wouldn’t clump and make applesauce.

We were always under the impression that this was what being raised healthfully was like.

Flash forward.

I’m 24, single and living on my own, eating fast food at <i>least</i> three times a week (I know, I know…), working at Starbucks and consuming about 15 too many sweet (mind you, delectable — I’m one mean barista . ), milky beverages.

So how did I get here?

As children, we were packed full of natural foods, mom even ground her own flour for a time.  We always had a garden and often had chickens of our own.  I knew a better lifestyle.

I know a better lifestyle.

I’m 26 now, married and living in South Korea.  We’re teaching English here (and by, “we”, I mean, “Ben”, my husband, is teaching English), and for the first time in about 10 years, I’m staying at home, without a job.

And I have all this time.

And I don’t speak Korean.

And we’ve got this laptop.

I knit — kind of a little bit like a crazy person who can’t breathe without yarn in her hands — so that kept me busy for a month or so, knitting some wool socks and a sweater for Ben, a couple more pairs of socks.

When you have a job and extended family and responsibilities, it’s fine that knitting is your only hobby.

But then you move to a country where you don’t speak the language and you struggle to communicate simple things like, “shopping bag,” and “please, no live squid,” and you spend most of your days at home, wondering what you’re supposed to be doing, what other stay-at-home wives aredoing.

And after four pairs of socks and a sweater in a very short period of time, you realize: knitting just isn’t going cut it forever.

So, I started cooking.  At first, spaghetti and stir fry.  I can cook more than spaghetti and stir fry, but finding ingredients in the midst of soy sauce, red pepper paste and fish heads was a little intimidating in the beginning.

Slowly, though, I began branching out.  We found meat from the local butcher and cheese at Costco (glory be), sour cream, yogurt.  All kinds of things.

I still didn’t have everything I needed (I quickly came to realize that South Korea is not, in fact, America — weird, I know) and then something revolutionary started happening.

I began to realize that, before all our food was packaged up and readily available in dehydrated form, people still managed to make it.

Yes, but HOW?

I started looking up recipes:

Pumpkin puree

Evaporated milk

Chocolate syrup

And the further I delved into the archives of The Great Internet’s knowledge, the more it became clear to me that just about anything can be made at home.

And just about anything made at home will taste better!

I know, right?  I’m slow on the uptake.

It’s really taken living overseas for me to realize that everything is too easy in America.  You go to the store, you buy a box, you add some water and you have stuffing.  You buy another box, add a can of tuna fish and you have casserole.

These things, once reconstituted, seem like the real thing.  So, we think, they must be.

But, like our parents told us, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Anyway, the more I cooked, the more homemade ingredients and substitutions I had to find and all this got me thinking about what we (this time “we” refers to both Ben and myself) were ingesting.  It also had me spending a lot of time with The Great Internet, and I started stumbling across these blogs.

There are practically a million.

That tell you all the things.

About living naturally, conserving resources, eating healthfully, and about thinking.

Because that’s what I believe many of these blogs are really about.

Thinking.

About where your food comes from and what it will do for you and what it will do to you.  How it will manifest itself once it’s been digested and whether or not you want to deal with that fallout.

I had a lot of excuses when I was younger, because I worked a lot and had no time, always thinking I had better things to do than worry that what I ate was having adverse affects.

Unfortunately (okay, fortunately), however, I don’t have anymore excuses because I certainly don’t have anything better to do than cook for my husband and, as long as I’m cooking for him, why should I spend all that time and effort making something that won’t serve us — and our bodies — well?

So, here I am.

In Korea.  Wanting us to eat more healthfully, to consider our food options and, definitely, to start partaking in the amazing produce available to us here.

I’m not used to this.  I love chocolate and cookies and Pepsi and french fries.  I love french fries.  And I worked at Starbucks for three years, so let me tell you, I love me some caramel latte.

This is gonna suck.  I’m telling you.

But I have high hopes for us.

And these high-in-the-sky hopes whisper to me that we’re going to be happier, and more educated about the world around us and our bodies, and that this will serve us, as well as our future children, so much better.

So, this will be our journey.  From the very beginning.

I hope to preserve the pitfalls as well as the high points.

I feel like I go through things in my life and when I come out somewhere on the other side, or something, I don’t remember how I got there.  Making it difficult to help other people out.  And, also, making it difficult for me to recall where I’ve been.

So, this time, I am hoping to come out on the other side with a road mape – our road map — which obviously won’t work as a foolproof guide for anyone following, but maybe it can be a, you know, thing, at the least.  A thing that might help.

I’ve got high hopes.

And Korea’s got limited resources.

And we’re here until Summer 2011.

I foresee about a thousand compromises and at least a hundred substitutions.  We just don’t have the resources available in the states.

Here is where I positively KICK myself for never taking full advantage of the food co-op three blocks from our Boise, Idaho apartment.  Or the Farmer’s Market six blocks the other way.

But I can’t think too hard.  There’s too much else to consider.

Come along for the ride and we will just see how this pans out, won’t we?

- Catie