Shopping at "The Grainery" in Longview today

Feb 17, 2014 Mom picked us up a rice cooker/steamer yesterday at Freds and I am eager to try it out tomorrow. We have had a real problem cooking rice well the last several times we have tried it. Since so much of what we are doing is based on improving our health and decreasing our inflammation levels, we are trying to do as much from scratch and as little processed or microwaved food as possible. There will be links here to my other blogs if you want details, but I have a muscle disease with no known cure or treatment in which the inflammation in the muscles causes them to be destroyed and not be able to heal or regenerate. So I am trying to decrease the inflammation in my body in all the natural ways I can. My mom has MS and Arthritis. After much research, a plant based, (or Vegan) gluten-free diet seems to be the healthiest choice for us. Since we were Vegetarians for years and are animal lovers, it is not against any of our beliefs or lifestyle. However, we are having to relearn and adjust to make sure we do this in a healthy way. Today I cooked up Pinto and Red beans to work on making homemade veggie burgers tomorrow. I am looking up and Pinning recipes tonight. I also want to make Hummus and Falafel but could not find Tahini today when we went shopping. Any good fairly simple recipes you want to add or put links to on comments I am happy to add to our collection :-) I have been given a bread maker and am also going to be embarking on figuring out how to make gluten free bread over the next few weeks. LOL We never do things in a small way. Mom bought 20 pounds of fresh asparagus on sale yesterday and we are eating and freezing it tonight and tomorrow to have available. We are pretty tight financially right now, so we are trying to do all this on a very, very tight budget. So buying and freezing good quality stuff when it is on sale is one of the ways we figure it is going to work. What other ways can we make this more economical? We were excited to find the Grainery in Longview and how many things it had. No more waiting to go to Tyler or even Dallas to the big stores (Whole Foods or Fresh) to do most of our shopping! We are using a Vitamix and crockpots, dehydrator, and steamer to try to make this all as labor un-intensive as possible since we both have issues with stamina due to our health issues, and are busy with my daughter and her needs as well.