step one of many

Today began my pantry make-over. Out with the processed sugar, the all-purpose white flour, the ultra-refined canola oil. Organic or not, there isn't much to these foods that makes them worth eating (from a nutritional standpoint, anyway).

After the usual trip to Trader Joe's to pick up groceries for the week, I headed to Whole Foods with Heidi Swanson's Super Natural Cooking in hand. I spent almost two hours standing in front of the grain, oil, sweetener, and flour sections, paging through the book and choosing new and exciting natural foods to play with. The only requirements were that the products must be organic and, whenever possible, whole.

With not much of a plan in mind, here's what I brought home:

Bob's Red Mill old fashioned whole grain rolled oats
Sucanat, aka dehydrated cane juice (Whole Foods store brand)
Two scoops of hard wheat berries from the bulk foods aisle
Eden Organic soba pasta (70% spring wheat, 30% buckwheat)
Arrowhead Mills whole grain amaranth
Lundberg "Sweat Dreams" brown rice syrup
Spectrum virgin coconut oil (unrefined)
San-J Shoyu sauce
Arrowhead Mills whole grain barley flour
Arrowhead Mills whole grain pastry flour

(I also grabbed a bottle of capers, some chives, and a container of fresh cranberries, but I know what to do with those. The brown rice syrup and barley flour, not so much.)

Project number one will be to revamp my favorite vegan pumpkin bread recipe, replacing the sugar with sucanat, the all-purpose flour with whole wheat pastry flour, and the vegetable oil with coconut oil. Seems straight-forward and hard to screw up, right?