What I Mean by Eating Well at Home

Eating well, in this house, is everyday work. It is shopping, cooking, sitting down together and using what we bought. It is not a cleanse, a challenge or a personality. It is how a full household in Anthem, Arizona, tries to eat at a pace we can keep.

We shop at Sprouts, Fry's, AJ's Fine Foods, Costco, and online, and I source most of my grains online. We eat only organic. We don't keep a garden, except for basil and rosemary.

We cook with Lodge skillets, an Instant Pot, and a bread machine. I bake a loaf of fresh bread every day. The machine is set to a timer, along with the coffee, and the house smells amazing in the morning. We love fresh fruit in the morning too. That is one of the quiet ways this kitchen starts the day, and I wrote more about those tools in Tools I Reach for When I Cook. Recipes from this house live in the Recipes section.

Most nights the meal is home-cooked. We eat by candlelight every night, with beeswax candles we buy in downtown Flagstaff for that purpose. Everyone packs a lunch. Those rhythms belong in any honest picture of how this house eats.

A table with every generation at it

Dinner in a house like ours is not one appetite. Spice, chewing, bedtimes and energy don't line up neatly. Eating well, for us, has to mean meals that can land without turning every evening into two dinners, and without pretending everyone at the table is the same person.

I wrote about the household itself in One Roof, Three Generations. The kitchen is where a lot of that life becomes visible. Someone may have cooked. Someone may be tired. Someone may need the simpler version of the same meal. The win is not a perfect plate. The win is that we ate, and that the food was worth the trouble of making it.

What "at our pace" means at the table

On March 14, 2016, I had a massive stroke. My balance isn't what it was, and fatigue is part of how I have to plan a day. That includes the kitchen. Cooking when energy is short is a different job than cooking when you can stand at the counter as long as you want. A stool, a one-pot meal, asking for a hand and stopping before I am spent are not aesthetic choices. They are how a slower body stays in the work of feeding people.

The principle is the same one I use when I travel. The day has to be shaped around the energy I really have, not the energy I wish I had. A meal can still be good when it is simple. Leftovers, in a full house, are not a failure of planning. They are often how a bigger cook earns its keep the next day. I wrote more about that in Leftovers Are a Feature in a Full House and in Cooking When Energy Is Short.

Heat belongs in this picture too. Anthem, Arizona, is home, and my body doesn't handle heat the way it used to. A summer kitchen has to take that seriously: hydration, cooler meals when the house is already working hard to stay livable, and not treating a hot afternoon as the moment to prove something.

The everyday work, not the performance

When I say "eating well," I mean a few ordinary things:

• Food that starts as real ingredients more often than not, cooked at home when we can.
• A grocery run that actually feeds the people who live here, with a full fridge and Arizona heat in mind, not a perfect pantry.
• Sitting down, when we can, instead of treating the meal as an errand.
• Using what we bought, including the leftovers, so the good food doesn't become waste.
• Enough of a rhythm that Wednesday is not a surprise, without turning dinner into a project.

The stores are real, and so are the herbs on the counter. Eating well is work we repeat, at a pace a real household can keep.

What I mean by "organic"

This section of the site is called Organic and Whole-Food Eating. I want that title to be true, not aspirational marketing. In this house, we eat only organic.

How I Read a Label walks through the official USDA organic categories. What's Worth Prioritizing at the Produce Aisle looks at public produce lists and official residue data. Those pages are a way to read the public information, not a shopping list.

Whole food, in the ordinary sense, is easier to say. I mean food that still looks like what it came from: vegetables, fruit, meat, beans, grains, things you can cook without a long ingredient list. I don't mean a rulebook. A life at our pace still has to have room for a simpler night and the kind of meal that simply needs to get on the table.

If I learned anything from traveling, it's that food can be excellent when it is simple, and that being tired is not a reason to skip eating well if you have planned for it a little. I wrote about where we ate in Japan, and would eat again, on Japan at My Pace.

My mom's voice belongs in this kitchen

Terrilyn Miller is my mom. She lives with us, and she will author articles on this site. She has used food to fight cancer. That is her story to tell, in her words, and a write-up from her is on the way. When those pieces are ready, and she has approved them, they will live in this hub alongside mine.

Food can be a serious part of how someone faces illness. It is not a cure I am selling, and this site is not a treatment plan. Her author page is Terrilyn Miller, and it will stay short until her own writing is in.

If you are here because someone you love is ill, or because you are, please take anything you read on this site as one family's experience. Talk with your doctor before you change how you eat, especially during cancer treatment or recovery.

What's in this section

This section holds the practical side of a household kitchen: cooking for every generation at the same table, leftovers, labels, cooking when energy is short, and the tools I reach for. The recipes are in their own Recipes section, from a kitchen that eats only organic.

If you want the life around the table, read One Roof, Three Generations. If you want the reason the pace of this kitchen is slower than it used to be, read After the Stroke, Life Had to Slow Down. Eating well, at our pace, is the work of feeding the people in this house, and leaving room for my mom to describe it too.

Nothing on this page is medical advice, a diet or a treatment plan. I'm sharing how our household thinks about food. If you have a health condition, including cancer, talk with your doctor before changing how you eat.