Challenge Wednesday #1

It's Wednesday {just in case you were wondering}.  Which means its time for Challenge Wednesday.  This is the day that Tracey and I will be giving each other challenges and reporting on how they went.  Of course, we have to start somewhere, and so Tracey is delivering the first challenge to me.  

Here.  And now.  Read on, my friends, read on.  

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Well, here we are.  Time for Jen's first challenge.  This is so exciting, isn't it?  Why don't you all join in too?  You can always leave a comment with how it goes - we'd love to hear your thoughts.

I hope you don't mind making something, Jen, with all that's going on in your life right now.  Believe me, most of this is easier than it seems.

Drumroll please…..MAKE A STAPLE FOOD ITEM FROM SCRATCH

Convenience foods seem easy, but can be loaded with ingredients that have no nutritional value and are far from healthy.  Although it seems daunting to make everything from scratch, getting a few staple items in your repertoire makes things simpler and easier for a couple or reasons:

• you can stop reading labels because you know what you've put in your food
• you can take advantage of local, in season produce when it tastes best and costs less
• less sugar, more good stuff (especially with sauces where you can be sneaky with veggies)

Ok, so I won't sound too preachy, I'm just going to stop there.  Except one more thing:  it actually gets kind of fun.  Believe me, I am no cook.  But get this:  you don't have to be to eat delicious food.  Just try it.

You can make whatever you want, dear friend, but in order to get you started here are a couple ideas:  ranch dressing or pizza sauce. 

Or, you could even ditch the frozen waffles and make a batch of buckwheat pancakes and store them in the freezer.  They heat up in the toaster exactly the same way.

It's really up to you what you decide to make, but believe me when I say that whatever it is, it will probably taste better than the store bought version.  Good luck!

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Oooh, thanks Tracey!!  This IS a challenge.  I am the queen of convenience {which, like Tracey mentions, sometimes can barely even be considered to be convenience} foods, so this is going to be good for me.  In fact, I think I might even take it up a notch and add this to my bucket list.  Make some food from scratch each week.  

How about you?  Do you make foods from scratch?  What should I try out?  The ranch dressing, pizza sauce, maybe baby food?