Do you want your family to eat more real food, but you don’t know where to start? Use this easy-to-follow guide to help you get started with real food! Nix the processed ingredients and start nourishing your family with God’s amazing whole foods.
What’s the definition of ‘real food’ anyway?
There seems to be so much confusion about this in the healthy living community, but let’s be clear – the term ‘real food’ does not refer to any specific diet. It’s not Vegan, Keto, or Paleo.
Real food simply refers to food that hasn’t been processed, adulterated, or changed from it’s original form as God created it. It has everything to do with how the food is grown and prepared. It includes a wide variety of foods, as outlined below.
Read next: Why Our Family Eats a Traditional Diet
Must-Have Foods for Your Real Food Kitchen
A real food kitchen contains the following nutrient-rich foods:
- Meat and organ meats from pastured, happy animals (not filled with hormones and antibiotics)
- Eggs from free range hens roaming in the sunshine
- Dairy from pastured animals (preferably raw) from a clean source
- Lots of vegetables and fruits grown locally without the use of pesticides or GMOs
- Real fats from animals (butter, lard, tallow) or plants (coconut, avocado, olive) that have been used for centuries. No newfangled processed rancid oils like corn or Canola oils.
- Bone broth or stock made from meat carcasses (nothing gets wasted)
- Grains, legumes, and nuts that are soaked, sprouted, or fermented to aid digestion
Read Next: 7 Simple Natural Living Changes You Can Make Today
Nice-to-Have Foods for Your Real Food Kitchen
We’ve outlined the basics of a real food kitchen above. The following are staples that are nice to have, but not 100% necessary:
- Fermented foods like kombucha, kefir, or sauerkraut
- Unprocessed sweeteners like honey, maple syrup, or unrefined cane sugar (Sucanant is my personal favorite that I use in a lot of my recipes)
- Imported real foods like coconut milks, exotic fruits, spices, and teas
- Healthier baking items like dark chocolate chips and shredded coconut
- Homemade bread. You can definitely live without bread. But if you choose to consume it, learning how to make your own sourdough is a wonderful healthy addition to a real food kitchen. You can even grind your own flour for more health benefits!
Simple Guide ~ How to Create a Real Food Kitchen
1. Find inspiration.
Browse Pinterest and find accounts that use whole, natural ingredients in their recipes. Save some recipes that appeal to you and add them to your typical, well-worn family favorites. Some of my favorite accounts to follow are Don’t Waste the Crumbs, Traditional Cooking School, and Raising Generation Nourished.
Oh, and don’t forget Healthy Christian Home! 😉
Please come join me on Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook! And obviously, join my email list where I send new recipes and inspiration regularly. You’ll also get a free one-week meal plan with recipes when you sign up below!
2. Use the great-grandma rule.
When trying to decide whether something is okay to eat, use the great-grandma rule. Would your great-grandmother have recognized this as a food and eaten it? Then it’s probably okay to eat.
Or is it something prepackaged or ‘modern’ she wouldn’t recognize? This is a great rule of thumb to live by.
3. Cook once, eat twice.
We live by this principle in our home. Because let’s be honest – having a real food kitchen is more work than buying everything pre-made. But it’s sooooo worth it.
To make the work load lighter, I cook in big batches and freeze the rest. For example, I soak a huge pot of beans and and another of brown rice overnight, cook the next day, and divide into freezer bags to use in meals for the next couple of weeks.
We do the same with bone broth in the Instant Pot. I also like making a whole chicken on the weekend, dividing it up and using it for meals throughout the week.
Cooking from scratch isn’t hard – it just takes a little prep work to make it easy.
Learn more tips and tricks on how I do this in my post 10 Kitchen Hacks to Help You Eat Healthy.
4. Prioritize the budget.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have the $$ to splash out on all things food? When most people dream about the cars and houses they’d buy if they were rich, I dream about all the amazing foods we’d eat daily!
There’s a running joke in our house when we really love a particular food that’s pricey. We say, “If I was Donald Trump, I’d eat raspberries every day for breakfast, and steak every night” (or whatever food we are currently loving).
But the point here is, find which items are the most important to you and prioritize them.
Here’s an example:
Did you know that animal foods are the most important to buy organic? That’s because toxins accumulate in larger proportions in meat/dairy products.
So in our family, we choose to ‘splash out’ on hormone-free, grass fed meats, organic dairy, and even raw milk from a local farm on occasion. Then, I choose conventional produce most of the time to make up the $ difference (and make sure to wash it really well).
When we have more wiggle room in the budget, I’d love to buy more organic produce using the dirty dozen & clean fifteen list as a guide.
Priorities are different for every family. Can’t live without steak? Then have porridge for breakfast! It’s all about balance.
Awesome resource: My current favorite book for traditional cooking on a budget is Traditional Meals for the Frugal Family by Shannon Stonger of the Nourishing Days blog.
This book is genuinely impressive! I can’t wait to make a bunch of these recipes – they are simple and prepared traditionally while also helping families save money. The Better Kefir-Chia Soaked Granola is next on my to-make list! I love how Shannon also explains the food preparation concepts and gives lots of practical information along with her recipes.
5. Cook from scratch.
You can’t have a real food kitchen without making at least some items from scratch, and most of us are fairly good at cooking dinner from scratch. But I think the biggest area most of us compromise on are snack foods and lunch foods.
I’m totally guilty of this, because it’s when we are most likely to reach for convenience for the lunchbox or that mid-afternoon pick-me-up. While many healthy snack-style foods don’t require much preparation (think fruit, boiled eggs, cheese, nuts), other foods like baked goods and fancier snacks take a little thought and planning.
But start small! Try a couple super easy snacks like frozen kefir bark or peanut butter banana bites. Then branch out to pumpkin choc chip muffins and avocado chocolate mousse.
For easy real food lunches, try ‘snack plates’ of real proteins, cheeses, fruits, and veggies. Or leftovers are always a great option!
6. Embrace local food.
One of the most fun ways to adopt a real food kitchen is to embrace what’s local. Find a farmer’s market near you and buy some veggies or meat.
Another great thing to do is to shop seasonally. Seasonal fruits and veggies taste best and are usually cheaper because they are in abundance. Here’s a wonderful guide to which foods are in season and when.
Or, start growing some food in your backyard – you can’t get any more local than that!
7. Invest in some good appliances.
Having a real food kitchen is easier when you’ve got some trusty tools to simplify things. Of course, you don’t need fancy appliances to eat healthy – people have been doing it for thousands of years!
That said, here are must-have tools we use daily:
- Blendtec high-speed blender
- 8-Quart Instant Pot
- Toaster oven is a great alternative to heating in the microwave
- This stand mixer is next on my wish list!
8. Never Stop Learning!
Guys, learning to eat real food happens in baby steps – especially if you weren’t raised eating this way. To give you an example, here’s a quick timeline of my real food journey. Each of these bullet points took months to master before I started on the next thing:
- I started off replacing processed foods with real or homemade versions.
- We began making smoothies every day to get more fruits/veggies.
- I learned about the importance of soaking grains and started soaking my own beans, rice, and oatmeal overnight.
- I wanted to learn about fermented foods and tried my hand at kefir and kombucha.
Next on my list is learning to bake our own sourdough bread, but I’m not there yet! And one day I want to learn how to garden and can my own food.
It feels daunting, but it’s not! Learning and growing is a gradual, step-by-step process. Just keep plugging away and you’ll get there!
What does a real food menu plan look like? {a sample menu for our family}
Okay, all these guidelines and tools are great, but what does real food eating look like on a day-to-day basis? I’m so glad a reader asked for a sample menu from our family so I could share with you!
I’m not a Type-A organized person, so I tend to bristle against planning. But the past couple weeks, I’ve started making a menu plan and it’s making dinner times a lot easier!
Here’s our plan for this week:
M: Chicken black bean Enchiladas
T: Butter chicken veggie curry
W: leftovers
Th: Wings, soaked brown rice, veggies
F: Homemade pizza
S: White Chicken Chili
Sundays and Wednesdays are always leftovers because of church services. This way we have the convenience of not having to cook, plus we can go home and rest and not spend extra money.
Richard and I typically go out to eat on Fridays while the boys are at school (it’s his day off). We love eating stuff I don’t normally make at home, like sushi or steak!
Breakfasts are usually boiled eggs with toast or soaked oatmeal, always with a fruit and kefir smoothie.
Lunches are usually just sandwiches or snack-style plates with cheese, a protein, fruit, raw veggie, etc.
And remember, if you want a detailed real food meal plan with 3 breakfasts, lunches, and dinner plus desserts and snacks, sign up for our email list below!
Does your family eat real food? What are you working on next in your real food kitchen?
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