Live to eat/eat to live

One should eat to live, not live to eat.  This has been attributed to none other than the full-figured Benjamin Franklin.
Apparently, he stole it from Socrates (also no slouch himself) who said famously: 
 “Thou shouldst eat to live; not live to eat.” The joke has been that the French live to eat, but the Brits eat to live. I am insulted. I LOVE British food! The Cornish Pasties! (no not the things the strippers wear on their nipples) Genuine Fish and Chips served in newspaper. With malt vinegar. YUM. Okay, well, that's about it. The steak and kidney pie is er, interesting. The English breakfast is a little, er, pukey: runny eggs, toast, okay the marmalade is yum, a "rasher" of bacon which isn't bacon like we know it. (Here's where France has it all over the Brits. The French breakfast: Croissants! Chocolate Fudge hot cocoa in a BOWL. Can you say "petit dejeuner"? which isn't really "petite" at all!)

I have been in love with food for nearly all my life. I think everyone should have amazing food to eat in the time frame between breast milk and Ensure. I have no idea where my love affair with food started. In the middle part of the last century there were many new inventions: The TV dinner. Who can forget the awesome little metal tray (pre-microwave era) that came with an entree! side dishes! dessert! And THEN the HUNGRY MAN size dinner was invented!

This yummy dinner contains 1450 calories, 58 grams of fat, 174 carbs. 

 Then there were fishsticks! Tater Tots! (250 calories, 14 grams of fat/150 calories, 7 grams of fat respectively) Hey, is that for the whole bag???? What? A serving? What the heck is a serving anyway?

In any case, my taste buds have, uh EVOLVED. I appreciate good food in all its forms. This does not include fast food, however. Okay, the smell of KFC can send me reeling....
But other than that, I want food to not only be pleasing to the eye but to the palate. (Just as a point of reference, a woman I know once said to me at a church potluck: "I love following you in the buffet line because your plate looks like art."  That still makes me happy when I think of that for some reason)
Anyway, I digress. Why does food have to be one or the other? Why is it considered a sin of gluttony if you profess to enjoying food? Now I have been at buffets where I have been stunned to see people pile food so high on their plates they can hardly balance it.

I confess my DH and I once sat at a buffet in Reno watching with amazement two people eat plate after plate after plate for two hours, long after we had finished. Okay, now that might be gluttony. But I am not talking about that, I am talking about making and eating beautiful food. I have always been interested in the freshest food possible. I have used canned food in the past sparingly (fruit/sauces/tomatoes/olives/some soups) but in the past few months, I have severely limited any processed foods and have gone to probably 90-95% fresh food (this includes frozen which is not processed per se, but which is nutritionally close to fresh). I have always said if the label had more than 5 ingredients, then I don't want it in my kitchen. Well, in the past few weeks, it has been even more so. The other thing that I have always tried to do was eat seasonally: Not buying watermelon in December for instance. I do this for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is that sometimes foreign countries do not have the checks and balances when it comes to safety practices. And yes, I wash my spinach and bagged lettuce that clearly states: Triple washed! Ready-to-use!

   I get ticked off when some vegetarians state: "Well, if you didn't eat meat, you wouldn't get e.coli." I wish it were that simple! But how does that explain how lettuce, tomatoes, green onions,sprouts, etc have been recalled due to e.coli and other lovely things that have sickened and killed hundreds of people?
But I must confess, preparing beautiful food IS time-consuming. How can the average person (that has an outside-the-home job or has multiple children grabbing/pushing/pulling you every which way) make the time to prep beautiful food that nourishes the soul as well as the body? PLUS you have to SHOP for the food? What can you do? Here's a few tips that have worked for me:
1) Pre-prep as much food as possible. I cut fresh veggies and place them in individual bags for snacking ahead of time.
2) I pre-cook chicken in bite-size pieces and freeze in family size portions for later meals.
3) My famous meat mix: 1/3 ground sirloin 1/3 ground turkey breast 1/3 ground turkey sausage. I use this for everything from meatballs to taco mix to a base for casserole-like dishes.
4) Try to plan menus around the veggies you get. For instance, I like to buy a large bag of spinach and a large container of mushrooms, but then I create lots of menu items around it: Spinach/mushroom scramble with egg whites for breakfast. (I do not buy egg substitute...I throw out the yolks of my eggs, cheaper, healthier. )
Spinach salad with mushrooms for lunch, spinach lasagne for dinner.
5) Add healthy ingredients to menu items, even though a recipe may not call for it: add black or red beans to meat in the lasagne. For instance, I added lentils to the meat mix for the moussaka.Yum.   6) Don't throw out the salt shaker, just hide it. Use lots of herbs and spices to flavor your food. 
Okay, this went way to long...stay tuned for more later!