Welcome to Thoughtful Kitchen! This site is dedicated to our family’s journey to eat more wholesome, delicious food on a budget while leaving plenty of time to enjoy life, family and friends.
I am Michelle, wife to a fabulous husband and mother to two precious children. I enjoy feeding my family delicious, wholesome, homemade food; I enjoy taking photographs of the food I make (and my family, too); and I enjoy sharing food, recipes and any other helpful knowledge I have gleaned with other people. I created Thoughtful Kitchen as an outlet for each of those things and, at the same time, as a way to challenge myself to get better at them.
Our family’s personal values with respect to the food we eat shape the choices we make, and the recipes and menus on this blog are the result of a balance between all of them.
Healthy and Whole: The word “healthy” can mean very different things to different people. In our family, we tend towards natural, whole, unprocessed foods. We eat whole grains and food made from basic ingredients, and we try to find new ways to incorporate more vegetables and fruits. Beans are becoming increasingly important in our diet while meat and dairy are becoming less so. We try to eat foods with lots of sugar and fat in moderation. We eat lots of unprocessed foods and make most of our food from scratch.
Natural and Organic: We eat organic when the benefit is worth the added cost, at least in my mind. This means that most of our fresh produce and fruit or vegetables in other forms are organic or close and our grains are generally not. We currently get our vegetables from a local farm through their CSA farmshare. When we do buy processed food, it is natural and often organic. We currently have grass-fed beef in our freezer, and the chicken we eat isn’t fed antibiotics or animal by-products and is humanely raised. I have still not quite figured out fish and seafood, so we eat it rarely (although I do know I am missing out on lots of health benefits in that area).
Frugal: My husband is currently working on a master’s degree and will likely be pursuing a doctorate in the near future. Since I stay at home to raise our two children, it’s absolutely necessary that we find ways to be frugal in every area of our lives. Eating well is not cheap, but I am always looking for ways to make healthier choices while still minimizing costs and without spending all my time in the kitchen.
Time-sensitive: There is no getting around the fact that homemade food takes time. However, there are lots of other things I enjoy doing in life besides cooking and cleaning up from it. I try to tweak and streamline recipes to reduce cleanup, make enough food for two or three meals at a time, or cook a basic ingredient (like beans or chicken) once to be used in several ways during the week or to freeze for later.
Delicious: We really enjoy our food. The other values are important to us, but we don’t want to sacrifice the simple pleasure of fabulous-tasting food for any of them. The recipes on this blog are ones that we truly enjoy eating and hope you will, too.
All photographs, recipes and other text are copyright Michelle Young at Thoughtful Kitchen.
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