I’ve been doing a lot of talking with my bestie about health, clean eating, and specifically what we feed our kids. Between the two of us we’ve come up with a plan to start tracking our healthy food purchases in the hopes of logging what it really takes to keep our diets clean and wholesome. We’ll be doing a weekly post, and we even made a logo!

So here’s the first installment of Active Health! First, her thoughts from last week:

So I wanted to make baked ziti for dinner tonight, but I switched out the majority of the ingredients. Here’s what I got:

• 2 boxes of Whole Grain Penne ( couldn’t find whole grain ziti)
• 1 Green pepper
• 1 red pepper
• 1 head of garlic (used 3 cloves)
• 1lb of organic ground turkey
• 2 jars of organic tom. basil spaghetti sauce
• 2 bags of natural mozzarella cheese

I cooked the pasta, then mixed all of the ingredients together, then put it in the oven for 40 min at 350. IT. WAS. AMAZING! I normally put sausage and use sausage sauce and regular noodles and tons of cheese. This batch tasted, well, fresh. You could really tell the difference. Total price of dinner: $24.61 This will last us the majority of the week. I’ll pack it for lunches for Toddler and I too. Husband even said it was really good and that he would eat it again.

Another product I switched out was my peanut butter. I got Jiff Natural Peanut butter which was on sale for $2.69. Normally I think peanut butter runs at about 4 bucks. It does not contain partially hydrogenated oil. Ingredients are peanuts and less than 2% molasses. Joy! I understand what those two things are!

I got grapes, strawberries,apples, mango’s, fresh green beans, bananas and cucumbers for a total of $20.38

They also had organic sea salt…I picked that up because I was out of my regular salt…$1.79. Is it strange to say that it tasted less salty? Because it does.

I also switched out our salsa for some black bean salsa: $3.00 and to go along with it I purchased a big bag of stone ground tortilla chips: $2.99. That will last us about a week. Steve loves chips and salsa…lets see if he notices the difference.

The last thing I switched out was the frozen pizza. Yea, I always have one or two on hand because sometimes, I’m just lazy and don’t feel like cooking. Got the Nature’s Promise thin crust cheese pizza for $3

I purchased a few other items too like mac and cheese and pirate booty cheese puffs, pomegranate juice. We’ll see how those work out.

While the organic aisle had a good selection, I was also surprised to see more organic items sprinkled throughout the store, you just gotta look for them.

I’m really happy with the choices that I made and am happier with choices of food in the house. Also, I don’t feel like a slug after dinner….so that’s good.

We did our grocery shopping too, so here are a few of my thoughts from the trip. We shop at a wholesale store (BJs) and then occasionally grab a few things from Walmart or Target when BJs doesn’t carry the right thing or we don’t want a ten pound vat of whatever it is.

Yesterday we spent $140 on groceries for the week, which is about $15-$20 more than usual, but we also bought $13 worth of batteries and $7 worth of plastic baggies. Other than turkey hot dogs and canned white meat chicken, everything we bought was what I consider “clean.” To me, clean means simple ingredients and not a lot of them.

We paid about $0.50 extra for Evi’s yogurt this time by opting for ProBugs over Go-Gurt. That extra half-dollar got us about the same volume of yogurt, but here’s the difference in ingredients:

PROBUG INGREDIENTS: Organic Grade A Pasteurized Cultured Milk, Organic Cane Juice, Organic Blueberry Juice Concentrate, CONTAINS MILK, GLUTEN FREE

GO-GURT INGREDIENTS: Cultured Pasteurized Grade A Lowfat Milk, Sugar, Modified Corn Starch, Kosher Gelatin, Tricalcium Phosphate, Potassium Sorbate, Carrageenan, Natural and Artificial Flavor, Blue #1, Red #40, Vitamin A Acetate, Vitamin D3

The ProBug has more vitamins, no artificial flavor, no weird chemical colors. I imagine it’s still not perfect, but it makes me feel much better and Evi thinks it tastes better too, so I’m thrilled to pay a touch more for it.

For our $140, we also got some canned fruit, a 12pack of canned peas, a megaton of baking soda, 2 big bottles of grapefruit juice, 2 big bottles of mango carrot juice, a gallon of skim milk, 2lb baby carrots, 3lb bananas, 1lb baby bella mushrooms, 3.5lb plums, 3lb sweet cherries, dried onion flakes, whole wheat bread, and our favorite chips. They’re reduced fat kettle chips and the ingredients: Potatoes, Canola Oil and Salt.

I still have a lot of adjusting to do to get it “right”, but I feel like I’m on the right track, and that thrills me.