Starting Fresh

First off, this is a little embarrassing to admit. While I tend to go on and on about how much I love food and being in the kitchen morning, noon and night - we tend to frequent more than a few drive-thrus. I hate it. The problem isn't cooking, it's all the little unexpected turns that our days take that make spending time in the kitchen nearly impossible. I know it's a cop-out, but sometimes it's just so hard to get motivated to add to the mess in the kitchen or brave the grocery store with two littles that have a meltdown every single time we step foot in the store. I know it's my fault for being unprepared and sometimes (like last night) I feel almost as if the guilt is suffocating. I want to keep my family healthy and I want to become a better cook - so it should be simple, right? Cook healthy meals for my family. Done. End of story.

Well, that usually lasts about 6-12 hours and then we are back to square one. Sad, isn't it? In a panic I pulled this book off the bookshelves and was re-inspired to give the recipes a go. I had tried several of them a while back and they were delicious, but Austin was so delayed in his eating that I put it away and just forgot about it. While I was reading the book last night it kind of put everything back in perspective and reminded me that it's not too late to start fresh. We are going to spend the next few weeks cooking our way through the book and I couldn't be more excited. Tyler Florence is one of my favorite chefs (and um, hello smoldering stare! Ha!) and I am totally on board with his approach to cooking. Sure, I want to lose weight, but all I really want is to be healthy and watch my kids love to eat REAL FOOD. I'm going to be posting some of the meals that we actually eat with some notes on how the kids reacted so please (pretty please with the low-glycemic sweetener agave syrup on top) keep your fingers crossed for us!