Fill A Jar & Cutting Down On Sugar

One thing no one warns you about with having children is all the "parent taxes" that you have to pay. 

Our school is particularly bad for this. Every few weeks there seems to be a non school uniform day with a charitable donation attached. 

Sugar Is Not Evil

Someone I know had shared a great little video of someone making camp bread in a zip lock bag (a clever idea really) but with the following caption:

Screen shot from my Facebook

People commenting and posting things without doing any research is one things that really winds me up. 

I don't need to tell many of you, but a little sugar is often needed in bread, for the yeast to activate, for the crust and for the taste. Now American bread is certainly sweeter than English but most of us add sugar, I know some french breads and sour dough's don't.

When I pointed this out he then started to tell me that sugar is just "empty calories" with "no nutritional value". 

I think this idea of blaming sugar is wrong. 

What's wrong is people's inertia. If you're sat on your ass all day then it's easy to blame sugar for your increased girth. 

There's no such thing as empty calories, it's all fuel for the fire. If you've ever sat on a roof in the middle of a cold January with rain beating down on you for 9 hours a day, you will understand that that chocolate bar you ate at lunch is giving you the energy to get back out there and keep earning your living. Or that night your lambing and been up for hours, that sugary breakfast helps you get the kids ready for school. 

People love to tell us what is good and bad for us when they don't know what our bodies are going through. My whole body is adapted to my lifestyle, I eat a lot because I burn a lot of fuel, some of that happens to be sugar, I eat many other things that provide the other essentials for life, but sometimes I just need a bit of extra energy. 

What's your take on sugars current reputation? 

Do you eat much sugar in your diet?

Shelves For Flour

I added a little more food storage last weekend. 

The under stairs cupboard has been much better since I added my can rotator door but there was still a lot of wasted space. I decided to add some shelves one side and a board the other to hang things on.

Shelves added alongside my can rotator door

 The shelves were made out of some plywood off cuts, so nothing fancy again, but they do the job and the sheet of ply the other side just makes it easier for me to put up hooks and things when I want.

A board added to the other side to easily fix hooks and hang things on.

I know it's not huge amount of extra food storage but every little helps especially as this will be easy to keep organised. The plan being to keep just flour and sugar on these shelves, the flour can then be easily  rotated so the oldest is used up first. Having flour here will also save space in the freezer as hopefully when we get a bread maker we'll be making bread daily(ish) rather than buying it once a week and freezing it all.

Also if I ever get a grain mill then the bags of flour will be replaced with kilner jars to keep it in and stored in the same place. Keeping it all in one place means that I can see when we're running low and buy more in - I hate running out of anything!

Anyone else been putting more food storage in? No matter how small!

Sugar In My Cereal

Ever since I was about 7 years old I've started the day with a big bowl of muesli covered in milk, then as I've got older covered in soya milk (whey doesn't agree with me so no milk or cream in my life).

But as my mornings are a slower affair than they used to be I've been eating "pink por with yeah yeahs." Or to a normal person, porridge with jam and a few raisins chucked on top (we've no idea why Ev calls raisins "yeah yeahs" but we're fairly sure it's on of those names that's going to stick!).

As I'm sat there munching away I've been feeling a little guilty about having a teaspoon full of home-made jam on top of mine (the girls only get enough to colour theirs) and thinking about how much sugar that is. 

30g of sugar

I then looked at my normal muesli and read how much sugar that contains - Average serving 13.3g of sugar. The trouble is I easily have three times what they call a "average" serving, and I know it's this much because I weighed it! That means that on average I'm having over 30g of sugar for breakfast! 

It makes a teaspoonful of home-made jam on my bowl of porridge look much better and I'm also controlling what goes into the jam (sugar and fruit). This isn't even looking at the fact that a big bag of porridge oats last about five times as long as a box of muesli and costs a fraction of the price!

Anyone else been shocked when they've looked into what they've eaten lately and changed their habits because of it?