O and P

We've been keeping ourselves quite busy.  Just to make our alphabet eating that much more challenging, we've gone hiking each day for the last 5 days and did an overnight trip last night.  Davan and I had talked about camping this last week for a couple of nights, but couldn't really figure out how to do that food-wise and still complete our game.  We want to see it through now that we've started - and are over half way - so we decided to other things instead.  I do want to post more about those things eventually...maybe today even.  I think I'm going to have to break down and actually get pictures off my camera onto this computer.  Sigh.  I'm pretty bummed that I may never finish my walk posts because those pictures are stuck at the moment and, while I'm sure we'll get them sometime, the moment may have passed for reviewing our walks. Sigh again.

O was our most challenging day yet, in good part because Davan is in an anti-oatmeal phase.  She's liked it before, but...well.  We still had some, though.  Our list for yesterday included:

Oatmeal
Olives
Onion Rings
Oreos
Odwalla Bars

Today is P and has been looked forward to for a long time.  While the list doesn't look diverse, it has a lot of foods on it that make people in my family happy.  We have had/are going to have:

Pancakes
PLTs (Pickles, Lettuce and Tomato Sandwiches)
PB & J's (for Anthony because he likes neither pickles nor tomatoes)
Pizza

If we want it after pizza, we're going to make a pizookie, as well.

Being half way through our little game, we do have a few suggestions for anyone who may want to try it.

One:  Don't do it in the summer.  We're sad about not taking full advantage of the summer bounty of fresh fruits and veggies.

Two:  Do what you can to make it healthy still.  This may seem contradictory, considering that we ate Oreos and Odwalla Bars for dinner last night while camping after having had a lunch of Onion Rings and Olives, but that was an off day.  I've made an effort to incorporate fruits, veggies and whole grains whenever possible.  Pretty much every baked good mentioned has been homemade using whole wheat or oat flour.  Our lentil soup was chock full of veggies, including carrots, kale, onions and celery.  Our oatmeal yesterday may have had more fresh blueberries than oatmeal by volume for some of us.

Three:  Don't be too rigid about being pure, particularly if you're doing it with kids.  At the outset, we'd mostly talked about A being apples, apricots, avocados, asparagus, artichokes.  Then we stretched to apple crisp or apple pie and the like.  In the end, we had African Bean Soup.  Most anything we call by the name that starts with that letter is good with us, although we do still have standards.  A few examples of cheats in our minds:  No Chinese Food on C.  Whole Wheat Bread is B for Bread, not W.  No creating a brand new dish and naming it something that starts with a challenging letter.  I'm the first to admit that we may be a little arbitrary, though.  (We did have Irish Soda Bread on I.)  It's our game and it should be fun, even if it's also challenging, right?