What's for breakfast, Momma?

I've been meaning to do another, "What's for breakfast, Momma?" post but always forget to take pictures, or never get around to uploading them. So, I apologize, but this, "What's for breakfast, Momma?" post is picture-less.

Lately, Dan and I have been making a serious effort to eliminate processed foods, additives, preservatives, anything fake from our diet. Mara has been suffering from night terrors and tummy issues, for several months and it was related to some sort of food allergy, but we could never pinpoint what exactly. So, more recently, we decided to transition into a raw food diet. I am not a fan of all the fancy, gourmet, mock raw recipes that can be found all over the internet, so when we stumbled across Fully Raw Kristina and her youtube videos, I was inspired to try her raw approach, which is pretty much eating just fresh fruits and vegetables.

We are still transitioning, I still steam/saute some vegetables, continue to cook brown rice, and we've had a few slip ups along the way. The biggest challenge has been grocery shopping. It's easy to find resources on how to eat raw on a budge for one person, but what about two adults and two (almost three) children? It's been quite costly, we don't have a local CSA, co-op, or grocer that sells produce in bulk. We easily spent 1/2 of our monthly food budget, in under a week.

So we have tried to make a list of what produce we absolutely have to have, what produce is a luxury (berries are very costly!), and how we can get the most out of backyard garden space when its to plant stuff (we had totally planned on amending the soil this upcoming weekend to get things ready for planting at the end of the month but we got a random winter storm, so that is on hold.) The beauty of Kristina's Fully Raw concept/approach is to have this unlimited abundance and eat to your hearts content because what you are eating is good for you. Costly, but good for you. I am determined to find a way for us to do this without going over our monthly budget.

Since a raw diet, requires more to get in your calories, I have pretty much let Mara and Porter eat whenever they please through out the day. I was concerned about this at first, since I thought they needed a structure, but, fruits and vegetables are so low in calories, and with all the running around they do, their little bodies use up those few calories, fast! We still have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I'm just much more open to letting them snack through out the day, since it isn't junk. So what have we been having for breakfast? Fruit, and lots of it!

Normally when we get up, Mara wants to eat, so once both babes are dressed, I begin preparing a large plate of fruit. Lately it's been one half of a honey dew, one half of a watermelon, two varieties of berries, banana, and grapes. We sit down together and eat until we are full. Typically there is fruit left over, to snack on through out the next few hours before I have to pull out any new fruit. Right now, oranges, bananas, and kiwi's are what was cheapest this week, so those are snacks, as well as the grapes. I also picked up some dates that were on sale, but have not gotten around to making the homemade "larabars" I have wanted to make with them as a snack.

When Dan is home and I have help, we've been juicing, and just bought a blender yesterday so I am looking forward to trying out this breakfast smoothie, that is loaded with oranges and banana. Hopefully over the weekend I'll be able to snap some more photos and share some juices that are Mara and Porter approved with you guys.