More canning....

During all the hectic-ness of the beginning of the school year, I canned 60 pounds of peaches.  Due to a minor miss communication, the day that I picked up the peaches, they needed to be canned.  Like yesterday.  While canning isn't terribly complicated, it is time consuming.  The last thing I wanted to do was spend an otherwise free evening canning...and making a big sticky mess in our kitchen.

However, I am SO thankful that I got these peaches at a great price, had all the stuff already on hand that I needed, actually had a free evening, and got it done.  And the best part is -- these peaches are paleo!  Normally when you can fruit, you use a boatload of sugar.  But you don't have to!  I used some pure, unsweetened apple juice.

While Brandon and I don't eat a large amount of fruit, our kids do.  And these peaches, along with some Paleo Granola make a great, quick breakfast or even just a snack.  And one that we can take with us when we travel too.  So while I may have spent a long evening canning, I save us some time on busy mornings by doing so.  And I would trade a long evening for some extra shut eye in the morning any day.

When the canning season is all said and done, we should have two plus cupboards full of paleo canned goods.  Right now, we have peaches and pizza sauce from this year and pickles and a few pears (not pictures) from last year.  I just ordered 120 pounds of apples, so soon we'll be knee deep in applesauce as well!

Traveling

Eating Paleo while traveling doesn't have to require a ton of planning ahead. It does require a little more thought than the McDonald's drive through, but not that much more. For example, on Sunday, we decided, while sitting in church, to head to the beach for the afternoon and take advantage of the beautiful weather. We came home, fed the kids some salmon burgers while we grabbed towels, sand toys, a few snacks and water bottles. We hopped in the car and made a quick pit stop at Trader Joe's on our way out of town. We were making an effort to stay on budget with our grocery and eating out money (more on that next week), so we wanted to be prepared. Here's what our snacks/dinner consisted of:

We had some almonds, bananas, apples, and hard boiled eggs at home. We picked up some roast beef, carrots, blueberries, coleslaw, and some citrus almond salad. Kind of a variety of things, but it gives you an idea of what a quick run into a store (Brandon and the boys actually just waited in the car) can get you.

Brandon also had to be out of town a couple of days this week for work. He will have some meals provided for him, but he wanted to make sure that he had enough good stuff to eat and wasn't stuck eating cafeteria mac and cheese or something of that sort. So, we looked around the house and came up with all this for him to take:

He's got sunflower seeds, prunes, almonds, avocados, pumpkin walnut muffins (from The Primal Blueprint Cookbook), coconut flakes, tuna packets from Trader Joes, snap peas, almond crackers (I'll be blogging about these next week!), and some bacon wrapped dates. We had everything on hand except for the avocados and dates. So, it may look like a bit of hodge podge, but it's definitely enough to get him through the few days he's gone.