Being Crafty in the Kitchen

Eating well requires being, well, crafty in the kitchen. Use this oil, avoid that saturated fat. Should we use wheat flour, or spelt, or oat? Will that modification to the recipe stuff it up? Have you got enough protein in that meal, or do you need to add more?

It's hard to be healthy all the time in the kitchen. After all, if you like being there, you want to be there more. You want to use your kitchen more.

I find it super hard to be healthy in the kitchen all the time. My downfall is that I love baking. Trying to be healthier in my baking is challenging. Eating wheat, for example, is bad for me, but I love bread! I fail quite a lot at not having wheat in my baking products, therefore this is a CHALLENGE! How to make those blueberry muffins you're craving but without using wheat flour! How are you going to make that crusty loaf without using bread flour? That zucchini slice is not going to bake properly if you substitute flour one-for-one! (These are all true! But able to be overcome.) Spelt flour is a good flour for me to substitute wheat for. I started experimenting with using oat flour, which is very different, but is absolutely wheat free. (Spelt, for example, is simply an older form of wheat, which might not sound better for you, but for people who have a wheat intolerance (NOT gluten, I should be clear about that here) it is a good substitute. It is not as refined as the wheat which is grown today, so doesn't irritate one's gut the way that today's wheat can.)

This blog's title "The Crafty Kitchen" has two meanings for me:

(1) To be crafty in the kitchen;

(2) To use your crafts in the kitchen.

I love cooking & baking, and I love sewing and crocheting. I have a personal committment this year to try and blog EVERY DAY on my other blog One Square At A Time and at this point on the 24 January 2012, I have 23 posts up, with another planned for this evening to make me 24 for 24. This will help me out over here, because bringing my CRAFTS into the kitchen means showing you how you can use your crafts in the kitchen: like making your own dishcloths, which are 100% reuseable & able to be thrown in the washing machine. Making your own teatowels, and decorating them. Making your own coasters to leave strewn (as mine often are) around the house.

But how to be crafty in the kitchen and cook healthily? It's a challenge!

Last year, me and the Mr put ourselves through the "Slow-Carb Diet" which is based on Tim Ferris' Four Hour Body and we loved it. We felt better! We lost weight! We enjoyed everything we ate! But I missed my baking. And eventually over the course of the year, we fell back into habits that are detrimental to our health. So, we're going back to it. I want to blog about it this year, and tell people of yummy recipes that I discover or make. I want to share how hard it is, and how easy we find it; to show that losing weight and finding your optimal healthy person that exists can be achievable.