Harvest For Your Health

My daugher "Saphara" processed a pumpkin ($2) at the local grocery. She made amazing things with it including these muffins. The little girls "helped"

I know what you're probably thinking "sure she hasn't posted on this blog in eons, she must have fallen off the wagon... hard" or maybe "she must have struck it rich as the next "whose who of unknown blog authors"". Uh...no. Really, its been an upside down crazy fun summer followed by a busy Autumn. Children's home school correcting and assigning is always at the forefront of my thoughts when school begins. Not to mention that, but my house has been filled with company. My new foster daughter requires uh "special attention" ;-) And whats more its harvest. Ahhh harvest.... which brings us to this forthcoming post!

Back in the days when I was 50 lbs heavier, I couldn't figure out how to incorporate eating healthy on a budget. Even if I wanted to, when I was at the grocery store, the last thing in the world I wanted to do was to go home and munch on a nice salad. No, the delicious pictures on the boxes of frozen pizza called my name from the moment I stepped into the diabolical grocery mart. Yes, time and time again, I was just plain sucked into the vortex of fat. After all, who wants to wash vegetables after an exhausting trip to town anyway? I want something EASY CHEESY....mmmmm. Problem is, "easy and cheesy" do not make my thighs happy. On the contrary, it suffocates them, and alas, healthful eating is of necessity.

When I really became desperate enough to do anything, I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to afford living on grocery store produce. The kicker is that nobody has to. It IS impossible for normal people to afford a lot of that stuff. As I began seeking out alternatives, I found healthier ones were literally right there :-) Here's one of them :

My good girlfriend from church, the one who saved Super Catman's life (another story for another day), told me about this orchard years ago. It was so cool, because the day I showed up (about 3 years ago), I asked the lady how much the apples were and she told me "FREE"!! It had frosted and she couldn't "guarantee" them, so she was allowing people just to help them selves. HOWDY!! That day, the kids, I and some visiting relatives picked between 600-800 pounds of them!! It was a tremendous blessing and as it turns out, they were the best apples I'd ever had!!

This year, that good ol' girlfriend of mine told me about them again and invited me along. Boy howdy was I all about that. They did charge this year, but only at 30 cents a pound! Now if you were to buy Gala and Honey Crisp apples (with no guarantee of freshness) at the store you know it would be maybe 3 to 5 times that price per pound. Mine will last in the basement till Christmas and maybe beyond, besides the ones I process will be around a lot longer than that. You can do the same thing. There are lots of orchards all over. Its not hard if you make a few calls, with a little determination, you too, can do this ;-)

Just don't forget to pay attention to how you're storing them. It was wet the day we picked, and I was glad I went through them today. The plastic tote I had some in had pooled water on the bottom. A cardboard box with some other ones had 2 earwigs crawling around at the bottom. In another box one of the kids had inadvertantly thrown a rotten one. Any of that stuff would have caused rot and waste had I not discovered and fixed those problems.

It was a crazy adventure (as they always are). It was raining out that day, so we picked fast. Thankfully the rain had let up so we didn't get too wet. It was a blast picking with my friends and their kids. Crazy as it was, I had planned to take home 100-200 lbs. We ended up weighing in at 319 lbs!! Ha ha ha. I laughed as I stuffed the boxes all over the place around the car and trunk trying to jam the children and apples in. It was a precarious ride home, but my husband didn 't say much about it. He said "you can buy as much as you can fit". Little did he realize, or did I. I had just sent all the kids off with boxes and in an hour or two we had a plethora!!

At any rate, it was outrageous fun and something I'm proud enough of to post on my fitness blog with the hopes that I will inspire somebody else to do the same........