How To Plan For Your First Whole 30 Challenge

Perhaps a better title for this post might be "How We Planned For Our First Whole 30 Challenge".  Every family is different, and every meal planner is different, so it may not look the same for you.

1. Know the program.  The first thing I did was read all over the Whole30 website to really nail down the rules of what's allowed and what isn't.  I started at the link listed, but I read several other posts about the different categories that are eliminated and why, the basic pantry/perishable lists, and the frequently asked questions.  My favorite was the Whole30 Timeline post, which I have a feeling I'll be referring to often.

2. List the meals you already eat that might work.  Once I felt like I had an idea of where we were headed, I got out my kitchen binder.  I made a list (of course!) of all of the recipes we eat regularly that fit with the Whole 30 rules.  I also included things that could be easily modified by eliminating one ingredient (a tablespoon of honey in a sauce) or could have substitutes (switching from half and half to coconut milk in a creamy vegetable soup).

I organized my list into breakfast, soups, and entrees.  Spoiler alert: Breakfast was pretty much "eggs and...."

3. Find new recipes to try.  Which brings me to my final step: search the Internet.  I didn't start here, because I wanted to go with the foods that we already eat first.  Then we can start experimenting.  If we start out trying new meals, and end up with three duds in a row, it's going to be really discouraging.  I've been enjoying the Whole30Recipes Instagram account, and I've copied a few recipes from there to try, and I set up a Whole 30 Planning board on my Pinterest.

Bonus Step #1: Don't forget to budget!  It's really easy to jump into this, find all these recipes that sound delicious, and buy all the things.  Realistically, we can't afford to eat meat at every meal, so I'm planning on as many vegetarian meals as I can, or meals that use meat as a topping rather than the main deal.  I'd like to buy coconut aminos as a soy sauce replacement and nutritional yeast because I've heard that's good when you're missing cheese, but those aren't things we normally purchase, and I don't have the time or money to find a good source.

Bonus Step #2: What about the kids?  Jesse and I want to do this for us.  But aside from the girls' gluten sensitivity, the kids are doing fine with eating a mostly real food diet.  And let's face it, I'm a lot better about what I feed them than about what I feed myself.

So the kids are getting what I've termed a Whole 30 Plus diet for this month.  They'll be eating most of the same things we will, but they also get the following:

• Gluten free pasta
• Rice
• Beans
• Oats
• Bread or tortillas
• Peanut butter
• Milk
• Yogurt
• Sugar only in granola and muffins and homemade breakfasts and snacks (i.e. no cookies, ice cream, etc.)

They don't have food problems that they need to fix, and they're growing, and sometimes, they just want more food, you know?  The one thing they're not having that they might be sad about is cheese.  But cheese may tempt me more than anything else on that list.  No lie.  And they'll be sad about the lack of sugar, but that's something I've been working on anyways.

The photos in this post are a sneak peek at some of the food we'll be eating this month.  I ended up going with a "semi-freezer cooking" approach, which is what I normally do for food, since we grocery shop every other week.  So yesterday I prepped part or all of 14 meals!  This is huge for me to actually get food on the table, especially on busy days.

I did a lot of research going into this challenge.  I looked at the Whole 30 rules, I looked at all the meals we normally eat and enjoy, and then I looked for some new recipes that still fit with the flavors we like.  After all that I kept the budget and the kids in mind.  It took a lot of work, honestly, but I'm really excited to see how it all turns out!

Why We Want To Do A Whole 30 Challenge

As I mentioned in my Weekly Goals post, we are planning on doing a Whole 30 Challenge for the month of March.  (If you don't know what that is, head here).  But why?

Jesse and I are tired of being overweight and tired.  We do reasonably well with eating mostly real food for our meals.  Snacks are a completely different story, and we tend to splurge on extra food more often than we need to.  By doing a challenge like this with very strict rules, we're hoping to reset some of those habits.

I haven't had so much success with less strict options.  I've been tracking my calorie intake on the My Fitness Pal app for almost 2 years.  I also gained about 20 pounds last year (below is a part of that).  It's really easy to fudge the numbers, or to know that you're making bad choices and make them anyways, because it's "just a little bit" or "I deserve it".

This is my weight tracker from My Fitness Pal.  Ignore the big dip in the middle - our scale went wonky for a day as the batteries died.  But you can see the steady upward trend over the past 6 months.

I use food as a reward all the time.  That's a mindset I'm really fighting against.  When I have to do one of those adult things I hate, like make phone calls or clean the toilets, I tend to make myself feel better by rationalizing that I can have a treat when I'm done.  When I'm stressed, or sad, or bored, I turn to food at those times too.

So why now?  When I'm right in the middle of working on my gluten-free muffins cookbook, which contains many ingredients I can't have during the challenge.  When we have a child's birthday that we still haven't figured out how to work around, other than making cake for the kids and just not eating it.  When I'm not completely sure we can afford to buy the food we need, or the time to make it, or find recipes that the kids can eat too, or...

There are lots of reasons why this isn't a good month.  But really, any month is going to have challenges.  There are going to be things like birthdays, or projects, or picky eaters.  So we may as well jump in and do it.

We tried eating a modified paleo diet at one point.  We still included oats, rice, and beans, and probably a few other things I'm forgetting.  Jesse and I both really liked it, and we developed some good habits then.  I'm hopeful we can do that again.

If you're still reading my rambling, gold star for you!  I'll be sharing more of our meal plans, thoughts, and results as we go through this process.

Plastic Containers vs. Glass Containers

Am I the only one who likes peeking into other bloggers' kitchen cupboards?  It's like an up close and personal look at how you do food.  I also like seeing your house in an organized (or real life) state.  Really I just sound creepy now, but hopefully I'm not the only one who does this!

I've slowly been switching my food storage over from plastic to glass.  There are many posts about why plastic is bad and glass is good from a food safety perspective.  Glass also has other benefits too.

So the picture at the top of this post is where I am today.  I have a lot of glass jars and pyrex containers, but I also still have a fair amount of plastic containers.  The problem for me is that the size of container I use most is the individual portion square type, and most of those are plastic.  See that one with the green lid?  That's my only glass rectangle for leftovers.  Otherwise it's tiny bowls or big bowls.

So over the past week, I challenged myself to only use glass for food storage.  What that meant is that sometimes I had a small portion of leftovers in a large bowl.  It's not the most efficient use of space, but it did help me to see what I need more of.  I also realized that some of my baby glass bowls are currently hijacked in the freezer with chopped jalapenos, and it might be better to dump those all in one jar and use the bowls for other things.

I've already been doing a good job of saving things like homemade broth in jars, and I have a stash of baby food jars that I use when I make my own (although we're almost out of that stage already!).

If something is going to get reheated, that gets first dibs on a glass container.  If it's a bread product, or something that's going to be dumped out into another dish, it's not as big of a deal right now.  For now, for the transition, this works, at least when I'm intentional about it.

My big dilemma is freezer ziplocs.  And I don't know if that's an easy thing I'm willing to give up right now, because I use them a lot.  I use them for my freezer meals, for applesauce, for chopped veggies.  Basically for whatever I want to freeze that I don't have a container for.  And I don't know a good way to do my freezer meals not in a bag.  If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

What about you?  Do you use plastic, glass, or a mixture of both like me?

My One Tip For Making Cooking From Scratch Easier

I make a lot of food from scratch.  It takes time, and energy, and it's not always the most fun thing to do (although I found a way to make the time more enjoyable!).  But there's one thing that always makes cooking from scratch easier.  

I do the dishes first.  

Here's before:

The counter has remnants of the first half of the day, and there's not a ton of workable space.  But with the dishes done?  Lots of room:

You'll notice there are still a few dirty dishes in the second photo.  That's because cups, bowls, plates, and silverware are done by the boys after dinner.  So I just did my dishes.  Most of theirs stay in one half of the double sink.

I first got the idea of having a completely clear counter from Crystal at Money Saving Mom.  And I loved it!  I'm a big fan of cleared off flat surfaces.  I think they look so much nicer, and they help keep me calm.  That's why I make sure to do all the dishes and have this counter cleared off 99% of the time before I go to bed.

Everything is easier with a clear counter.  You have space for all your ingredients and pans and bowls and a helper or two.  And when you're done, all that's left are a few dirty dishes.

Garden Totals 2015

After the past few cold blustery days, and a few overnight freezes, I think it's safe to say growing season is officially over here in northern Iowa.  I wrote down the last few jalapenos and peppers that we harvested last week (including several jalapenos from a plant that grew in our compost pile), and entered the totals in my spreadsheet.

Here's how we did:

Total produce: 99.65 pounds. For the sake of easy reading, I'm going to round the decimal points.  But the specific total was just shy of 100.  If only we had one more tomato...

• Broccoli: 2 lbs.
• Butternut squash: 20 lbs.
• Garlic: under 1 lb. (really I think we only got one bulb - the rest never took off)
• Green beans: 14 lbs.
• Green peppers: 5 lbs.
• Jalapenos: 4 lbs.
• Onions: 3 lbs.
• Peas: just under 1 lb., although with the amount Jonah ate while picking them, probably over 1 lb.
• Potatoes: 3 lbs.
• Radishes: 3 lbs.
• Raspberries: 1/2 lb.
• Red pepper: under 1 lb. (only one pepper turned to red - the rest we harvested green)
• Strawberries: under 1 lb.
• Tomatoes: 37 lbs.
• Watermelon: 5 1/2 lbs.

The total does not include:

• 2 pumpkins, because we didn't eat them. We just set them on the front porch for decoration.
• Any of the apples from our tree, because I didn't feel like weighing the basket full all at once.

Overall, it was a pretty good haul for the minimal work and money we put into it.  We probably spent around $50 on seeds, starter plants, tools, and buckets.  I should have kept the receipts so I could tell for sure, but I didn't.

Most of the food we ate right away, although we still have some green beans and tomatoes in the freezer.  I was going to attempt canning, but I didn't have the right tools at the right time, so I just chose to freeze things instead.  There's always next year.

We went into this year pretty much knowing nothing, and eager to try a lot of different things.  We learned quite a bit.

We need to weed.  Our pepper plants and strawberries got pretty choked out by the weeds.  They would have done a lot better if we had kept up on things.  We kept putting it off because we were busy, and then it became too big of a task to catch up on, so half of the garden just kind of became a weed patch.

Squash and pumpkins will take over if you let them.  This was pretty good for our squash harvest.  Jesse pulled the pumpkin plant out a couple months ago because it was getting mildew, which we read could spread to the squash and tomatoes, so we elected to save those instead.  Smart move, since those were our biggest producers.

Starting from seeds inside is a lot of work.  It's a lot easier to buy starter plants, or wait a bit longer to just plant seeds outside, depending on the plants.  Most of our plants that survived were from the starter plants, not the seeds.  

That's the story of our garden this year.  We still have to get it ready for winter.  Jesse wants to mow down the remaining weeds and cover the garden so that they'll all die before next year, and we have a pretty thriving compost pile to spread on there in the spring.  Any other tips for our first winter?

I Like Periscope!

If you follow me on Instagram, you may have noticed an orange bowl popping up on the side of some of my food and kitchen pictures.  That's because lately, when I'm in the kitchen, I've been plopping my phone in there and turning on "one of the ladies", as Hannah calls them, on Periscope.  (That's a speaker trick I found on Pinterest, by the way)

I'm in the kitchen a lot, people.

Behind homeschooling, making food is how I spend a big chunk of my day.  So why not make it more fun?  While I'm chopping veggies, mixing up a batch of muffins, or doing a load of dishes, I can listen to one of my favorite bloggers talk about something I'm really interested in.  I usually spend about an hour before lunch, and at least an hour before dinner, working on food of some sort.

The reason I was hesitant about Periscope in the first place is because my house is loud.  Four kids are noisy.  There's no way around that.  But the two times I'm most often in the kitchen are usually times when the kids are either outside, or have just gotten done with a chunk of school and want to play.

Lately Hannah has been my kitchen helper, but she mostly just likes to hang out in the same room as me, and she doesn't do more than try to ask me questions occasionally or help dump ingredients into a bowl and ask to hold something.  Elizabeth crawls in and out of the room, but again, she's not too loud on her own either.

So it works.  I get food prep done, and I enjoy it a lot more because I'm engaging my brain.  I'm learning more about budgeting, natural living, books, food, making money from home, and who knows what else.

So who do I listen to?  These are my favorites (the links take you to their blogs, and their Periscope handles are in parentheses):

• Crystal Paine (moneysavingmom)
• Stacy Myers (stacymakescents)
• Ruth Soukup (ruthsoukup)
• Erin Odom (humbledhome)
• Tiffany Terczak (dontwastethecrumbs)

I follow a few more bloggers I like, but they haven't actually done any scopes yet.  Even if they did, I don't know if I would add more to what I'm listening to right now.  Crystal is doing two scopes a day right now for her book launch, and both Tiffany and Ruth are running 31 Day challenges in October, so they're scoping every single day (except Sundays, I think).  So I have plenty to listen to, but I don't want to add more unless some of the current ones slow down.

Of course, the obvious question then, is are you on Periscope?  Is there anyone I absolutely have to add to my list?

Initial Thoughts on the Living Well Spending Zero Challenge

I came across a link for the Living Well Spending Zero Challenge on Instagram, I think, while we were on our trip last week.  The idea is to cut out all non-essential spending for the month of October.  Since we didn't get home until October 3, we didn't technically start until October 4, but we are doing this challenge for the rest of October. This is going to be a long post, but here goes.

Day 1: Commit. First thing first: we filled out the commitment sheet.  We are committed to doing this challenge and getting our out of control spending back on track.  We are Dave Ramsey fans in this house, but lately we've been what I describe as "gimpy gazelles".  Our paying off debt has been paltry at best, and we've fallen back into some bad spending habits.

Day 2: Ground Rules. Then we laid out our ground rules.  It might be kind of hard to read in the picture, so here goes:

Groceries. We are allowed to buy groceries.  Some people have enough of a pantry stockpile that they just eat from what they have.  We don't have that.  But we are limiting ourselves.  We are lowering the grocery spending to $275, and carrying over the extra $75 for holiday food over the next two months.  I usually go over budget from careless spending and expensive meals, so I'm trying to focus on meals that are cheaper, have less meat, and use up our freezer veggies and extra garden produce as well.

Background: Our normal grocery budget is $350, which we get on an EBT card every month.  We also have WIC vouchers for the three youngest kids, and $57 in Farmers' Market WIC vouchers that we've had all summer and haven't gotten to, which we are going to use hopefully this Saturday. (We don't plan on using these resources in the long run, but while we are paying off debt, we are taking advantage of them because our income more than qualifies us).

We are also lowering our household budget from $100 to $50.  This will allow us to still buy diapers and toilet paper.  I'm going to try to get a $25 Amazon gift card from Swagbucks as well to help with this.

We are also skipping these from our budget this month:

• Netflix. Yes, it's only $7.99, but it's something we talked about getting rid of once regular fall tv shows started up again, and we mostly watch it out of habit.
• Gifts. We save $35 per month for gifts, but we are skipping that this month.
• Homeschool.  We save $50 per month for school supplies and curriculum purchases, but we still have some in the envelope, and we don't have any large purchases coming up, so we've chosen to skip it this month.
• Car Tabs. We had been saving $20 per month for this, but we got the vehicle information in the mail, and we had more than enough to cover it for this year, so we are not only skipping this, but we actually had some extra money to deposit in the bank from this envelope!

Planned Exceptions.  My brother gets married later this month.  Our hotel is already paid for, and most of our meals will be covered by wedding stuff (rehearsal dinner and reception), so we've budgeted $100 for gas and the meals that we need to get while we are there.  I'll be bringing breakfast and snacks with, which I'll make ahead of time at home.  And if anyone offers to buy Starbucks the morning of the wedding, I won't turn them down!

We are also budgeting a little bit for Halloween candy, since we actually live in a house this year and might get trick or treaters.

Will Not Buy! The main culprits of our spending have been Chinese takeout and pizza, as well as random gas station visits on walks, where we buy drinks, donuts, and random treats.

Day 3: Pantry and Freezer Inventory. I was initially going to skip the freezer/pantry inventory, but I was surprised at how much stuff we had for "not having any extra food around".  I won't list everything out for you, although you can click on the notebook page above if you really want to know, but here are a few of the extras that we've had for awhile:

• unopened canister of corn meal
• unopened hot sauce
• molasses that we bought to make gingerbread cookies once, which we're going to use for another batch or two of cookies, as well as an attempt at homemade graham crackers maybe!
• ranch dip in the fridge, which we are going to eat with carrots for snacks 

I only found one expired item - French dressing in the fridge that expired in May, which makes sense, because Jesse is the only one who likes it, and he usually defaults to ranch dressing like the rest of us.

Day 4: Menu Planning. We will be having a lot of repeats on the menu plan, with butternut squash playing a prominent role in some of our meals, because we have a ton!  As I mentioned above, it's more about focusing on the cheaper meals for me, because we don't necessarily overbuy on most ingredients during our normal shopping.

Days 5 and 6 have been about different food things - making restaurant copycat meals, and freezer cooking.  I do a couple copycats already, and obviously if you've been reading here, you know I'm a fan of freezer cooking, so those have kind of given me a chance to catch up without having to do a lot.

The results so far. What I've found so far is that without all those extras, we are readjusting our palates to less sugar and more wholesome foods, and we're also readjusting our stomachs to eating less, because when there are less extra snack options, we don't eat as much.

I'm getting back into making some extra things from scratch, like tortillas and bread, when we run out, instead of running to the store for more.  It will be interesting to see how the food side of things plays out over the rest of the month.  Jesse has already decided he is splurging on takeout once this month is over, and I think it will be a well deserved treat at the end of a challenge, instead of what has become a fairly commonplace habit.

Would you do a month-long no spending challenge?  It's not too late to join in...

Extra Fun Homeschool Activities for Jonah's Birthday

Even though it was Jonah's birthday on Wednesday, we still had school.  But instead of all of our normal things, we did some extra fun activities.

We did a Dinosaur Dig!  We've been learning a bit about archaeology in history, and this week was Letter D for letter of the week.  So I printed off and laminated the dinosaur silhouettes in this post, and made the clay recipe linked there as well.  I should have made my clay dinosaurs thicker, because they kind of broke into more pieces than the three to four I had cut them into.  It was still a fun activity for the boys though!

We played Kitchen. I got the idea from this list of A-Z Sensory Play Ideas, and we did this for the first time last year for our Letter K letter of the week.  Ever since, Jonah asks to do this all the time.  I usually say no, because I don't want to use up all of my food supplies, but every now and then I let the boys go crazy, and it usually ends up that they "cook" for 40 minutes or so.

These are obviously not everyday activities, because they took extra prep work and made extra messes, but every once in awhile, it's fun to have a day like that.

Jonah's Blue Lego Ninja Birthday Cake

I like to let my kids request what they want their birthday cakes to look like, and then I try to make it happen.  It doesn't always work out, but they seem to enjoy it anyways, and I like the challenge.

I was proud because this year I actually got the colors to turn out right!  That does not always happen.  In case you do not have young boys in your house, this is Jay the Lego Ninja:

I think I got pretty close.

Also, here's a tip for you.  When making round cakes, first spray the cake pan with nonstick spray and line with wax paper.  Use a sharp knife to cut around the edges, so that the wax paper is only on the bottom.  Pour batter in and cook as normal.  After cooling 10-20 minutes, run a knife around the edge of the cake, flip it out, and peel the wax paper off.  Comes out clean every time!  My mom taught me that one...

How Pancakes Reminded Me About Being Frugal

It was the day before our big twice-monthly shopping trip, and I was supposed to make pancakes for dinner.  Our usual gluten-free pancake recipe calls for 3 cups of oats.  I started measuring, and got to about 1 and 2/3 cups before I ran out.  In the past, I would have run to the store quickly for that one ingredient.  But I knew there had to be something else I could use.

So I grabbed the Rice Krispies off the shelf, measured out the missing amount, and mixed the whole thing up with my immersion blender.  It looked fairly close to normal, so I kept going.

The Rice Krispie pancakes did not flip well at all.  They definitely weren't pretty to look at.  They actually tasted fine, although Jonah didn't appreciate that the banana flavor came out more than usual.

But they taught me that we almost always have something we can use to make do.  I need to remember this more often.  To look at what we have before I go look for something new.  To see what I can substitute to save money and a trip to the store (and not just for food necessarily).

We're trying to pay off debt, mostly school loans.  And it's slow going.  But these little things do help, slowly but surely, to add up to bigger things.

Garden Update: Little Plants Are Growing!

Little plants are growing!  Vines are growing!  Trees are blooming!  Flowers are pretty!

One of the cool things about moving to this new house has been seeing all the things that were already planted that we get to enjoy now.  The previous pastor and his family did a lot of landscaping and planting, and I feel a bit spoiled that we get to just come take over.  We're trying to add to it and make it even better.

Let's start with the purely pretty things.  Last month the tulips were in full bloom.  They're mostly gone now, but now these have popped up.

There's still a few purple and yellow tulips on the other side of the front porch (there were also pink and orange a few weeks ago). 

They're just gorgeous!

On the side of the house are some other flowers, so we've been learning what they are as well.

In the backyard, the apple trees (2 different kinds) are flowering, which gives me hope for lots of apples for applesauce this fall.

We also inherited both a grape vine

and several raspberry bushes. Sorry for the weird picture angle, but the neighbors were out and I didn't want them to feel weird about me taking pictures.

So.

Everything up to this point in the blog post has been stuff that was already here.  Aren't we spoiled?

I showed you our tilled up garden plot a few weeks ago, and here's what it looks like today:

We bought several more plants at the garden center, so we now have the potential for watermelon, pumpkins, broccoli, peas, beans, onions, and tomatoes.  Some are doing better than others.  This is the year of trying a bunch of stuff and learning what works.

(broccoli)

(tomatoes in cages)

My favorite part is the strawberry plants.  We planted six of them, and while they're tiny right now, they're supposed to come back each year, so we are hoping to help them get nice and big!

Inside, we still have butternut squash, dill weed, some kind of lettuce, and a few more pepper, jalapeno, and tomato plants.  Those will be planted outside in the next week or so.  We still have some extra onion bulbs, which will probably get planted one per cup and take over the table in the window.  Might as well grow them, since we know we'll eat them!

We also got a parsley plant and a cilantro plant for me to keep inside.  The parsley is thriving!

The cilantro is not.

Most of the stalks wilted, so I picked them off to salvage the cilantro and dry it.  I'm trying to revive the remaining plant but I'm not too hopeful there.  At least we only paid about what I would have for one bunch of cilantro at the grocery store?

And finally, our bucket potatoes.

(Matthew's, mine, Jonah's, Jesse's)
We each picked a seed potato to plant.  We're having an unofficial competition to see who picked the best one.  Jesse's looks the biggest so far, but since we can't actually see the potatoes, we'll have to wait until fall to find out who picked the winner.

So that's our garden right now.  Honestly, growing things from little tiny seeds intimidates me, which is why I've let Jesse do pretty much everything so far.  I'm more comfortable with plants that are sturdy and close to harvesting, and then preserving everything afterwards.   Still, I'm really excited with the potential for all this yummy food!

Homemade Takeout: A Simple Dinner Recipe

Homemade Takeout 

(serves 4-6)

For a long time, Jesse and I have enjoyed getting Chinese takeout for a quick and easy dinner.  But eating out, even for just the two of us, adds up quickly.  Add in the kids and you're talking a lot of money for what is truly a simple dish.  Last week, I decided to see if I could recreate one of our restaurant favorites at home.  With a little prep ahead of time, this dinner came together quickly and easily!

Ingredients:

• 1 cup chicken, cooked and shredded ahead of time
• 4 cups cooked rice (I used about 1-1/3 cups dry brown rice)
• 2-3 carrots, finely chopped
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 2 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 eggs
• 4-6 Tbsp. soy sauce
• 1 cup frozen peas*

*You could also use a frozen peas and carrots mix and just skip cutting up the carrots yourself.

Directions:

Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a large skillet.  Add the carrots and onions, and saute until starting to soften, about 5 minutes.  Add the garlic and cook for 1 more minute.  Move the veggies off to the side, and scramble the 2 eggs.  Once the eggs are cooked, add the remaining ingredients, and stir everything to coat with the soy sauce.  Cook on medium low until everything is heated through.

What's In The Garbage: We Started A Compost Pile!

Last week, I showed you our garden beginnings, along with a sneak peak at our compost pile (next to the garage in the picture above).  I had a whole list of questions about composting, and I still haven't found all of the answers to them.  But on April 22, which was Earth Day, we decided to jump in and start anyways.  Want to know what prompted that change?

The episode of Curious George on PBS that morning was about composting.  Real life here, folks.

The kids got excited about it, so we decided to start.  We gathered up the veggie scraps and egg shells we had so far, added some banana peels later in the day, and some grass clippings a few days later.

Now we have a bowl like this on the counter, and any extra scraps or peels or shells go in there.  Every day (or every other day if it's not too full), someone takes the bowl out and adds it to the pile.  I dump my coffee grounds directly on the pile when I make my cold brewed coffee every week since it's less messy that way.

This was what our pile looked like that first day.  Jesse had made a big batch of carrot apple celery juice, plus there were a few other bits.

The pile has already about tripled in size between the food scraps and the yard waste we've been cleaning up.  It's pretty cool to know that that free stuff will help our garden grow!

One positive benefit we've already seen is about a 1/3 reduction in our garbage, right off the bat!  I'm really excited for that to continue.  Between getting back into cloth diapering with Elizabeth, making sure to keep everything we can recycle out of the garbage, and now composting, we're at our goal of just one bag/week!

I'm sure there's still more that we can do to lessen our waste, but it's really cool that we made it to this goal in just a few months!