Ingredients

• 4 potatoes, cubed
• 3/4 cup chopped onion
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon seasoning salt
• 1/4 teaspoon sage
• 4 1/2 cups chicken broth (watch this, especially Swanson’s brand, check ingredients)
• 1 cup grated Parmesan cheese
• 1/2 cup margarine (I prefer unsalted butter)
• 1/2 teaspoon dried basil
• 1/4 teaspoon celery salt
• 1/4 teaspoon onion salt
• 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon dried thyme
• 6 cups milk (you may not want to use non-fat, some non-fat milks mix with powdered milk *yuck*.  Non-fat milk will also make it a bit more “watery”)
• 12 slices crisp cooked bacon, crumbled

Directions

1. Cook the potatoes in boiling water until tender.  You can also bake them if you’d prefer, I do.
2. In a soup kettle, saute onion in butter or margarine until tender.
3. Stir in flour and spices. Gradually add broth, stirring constantly. Bring to a boil; cook and stir for 2 minutes. Add potatoes, and return to a boil. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer for 10 minutes.
4. Stir in milk and cheese. Heat through. Stir in bacon

Options – you can toss some chives on top of each bowl too to add just a little bit of something something.  You can also put a little garlic in, not too much or you’ll destroy the batch by overpowering the flavors.

It takes about an hour to make this soup and it refrigerates well if you want left overs.

Okay, that may be a bold statement, and it’s just my opinion of course, I have no evidence that Heinz is “evil” despite my opinion that their actions and the actions of their subsidiaries is morally objectionable.  Heinz puts HFCS in just about every ketchup product they produce, they also own Lea and Perrins and it’s in their Worcestershire sauce.  It’s in the barbecue sauce, it’s in Heinz 57, it’s in just about everything.

Heinz does produce an organic labeled ketchup but you know what?  If you’re going to make a non HFCS product, shouldn’t you be doing that for EVERYTHING you make?  If you’re not going to, you are just profiting from both sides.  Shit or get off the pot, take a stand, Heinz!

Heinz owns a number of companies that I never knew they owned.  This is essentially a boycott of Heinz and any company they happen to own.

Here they are, I should also state that all logos, trademarks and service marks below are the property of Heinz and I did not get permission to use them.  I look forward to receiving a cease and desist from Heinz so that I can post that too.

I should also mention that I did not obtain these logos from the Heinz website as the Heinz website clearly states that ” BY USING THIS WEBSITE OR DOWNLOADING MATERIALS FROM THIS WEBSITE, YOU AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT JUST AS IF YOU HAD SIGNED IT.” Since I did not download from the Heinz website, I did not “sign it” and I don’t agree to those terms.

We just bought some Classico sauce too…  shit.

Post.

Thank you Post!

Imagine this.  Post cereal has Shredded-Wheat.  Lightly frosted.  Mini.

And right on the front of the box, what does it say?

No High Fructose Corn Syrup.

I LOVE YOU, POST!  Thank you, thank you, thank you.

And I had a bowl of it, it’s really good.  So much better than the Kellogg’s crap.  You can actually taste the wheat, what a concept.

I found this at Central Market in Poulsbo.

I also found Ketchup that is made in Woodinville which doesn’t contain HFCS.  It was $3.49/bottle, about twice as much as a bottle of Heinz that’s twice the size but like the chocolate, maybe we’ll eat less of it and appreciate it more instead of treating it as a novelty like we did with the Heinz, which was poured on everything.

Heinz did have a bottle of organic ketchup that had no HFCS but I decided to not support them since they made a product that did have it.  Shit or get off the pot Heinz, don’t sell to both sides, take a stand and just make all your products HFCS free.

I suppose the same is going to go for Post since they still have some stuff that had HFCS in it.  I think I’ll write them a letter/email.  I’m going to do the same with Costco and ask them to carry the Post frosted shredded wheat instead of Kellogg’s.  I’m sure it won’t be read.

Today was our first day shopping and actually looking at labels of the food we buy.

It was also the first day that we decided to go to Cash & Carry to get bulk deli meat and cheese to slice ourselves with our new handy dandy meat slicer we got for Christmas.  We bought a 10 pound turkey and a loaf of colby jack but we strolled the aisles looking at all the labels.

Hershey’s Chocolate syrup is out.  Damn, that sucks, how are we going to make chocolate mile?

We found a 64oz bottle of Torani Chocolate Sauce that is made with sugar and premium cocoa.  It was $10 a bottle, 2.5 times more expensive than the Hershey’s.  Maybe this will make us ration  it a little better instead of giving it to the kids with every meal just to get them to drink milk.

I suppose at this point I should be clear about what we’re doing.  HFCS is certainly a bad, bad thing.  So is sugar.  Our goal is not to replace HFCS with sugar, it’s to cut down on eating sweet things in general but if and when we do eat or drink something sweet, it will be with sugar, agave, or something other than HFCS.  I hope that makes sense…

Heinz, Hunt’s and some brand called Fancy all had HFCS in them.  How disappointing.  Cash & Carry had no ketchup for us to buy.  Or Mustard…

Campbell’s Tomato soup, no go.  HFCS in it and once again…  WHY!?

We looked at every loaf of bread they had there, all from some company owned by Franz and everything had HFCS in it.

We bought our meat and cheese and headed off to Costco for the big shopping.

Tonya watches kids for friends at home so we have a fairly large food budget every month, about $700 for the 6 in our family and meals for the kids she watches during the day.  Since it’s a house full of kids all day, you can bet there’s plenty of snacks around the house but for the most part, there isn’t a whole lot of sweet stuff with the snacks.  It’s dried fruit, dried veggies, crackers, granola and fruit bars, etc.

As we made our way through Costco, we actually found that we didn’t have to change much at all.  We were already buying products that didn’t have HFCS in them (or things we couldn’t pronounce) but we were disgusted that most of the samples ladies were handing out yogurts and GoActive labeled “healthy” stuff to people under the guise that it was good for you.  Just about everything had HFCS in it or some crap we couldn’t pronounce.  We watched all the people suck it down with a, “Mmmm, that’s good!”  Yuck.

Kellogg’s Frosted Mini-Wheats.  One of my wife’s and my youngest son’s favorite every morning.  That’s out.  HFCS.  In-fact, just about every Kellogg’s cereal that was on the shelf at Costco had HFCS.  And the Special K yogurt stuff 3-pack of strawberry, blueberry and something else?  All 3 of them were flavored apples and had a list of ingredients a mile long…  And this is supposed to be good for you?

My Multi-Grain Cheerios were good to go!  WooHoo!  We’re going to have to figure something out.  Doc will eat my Cheerios but he doesn’t get too excited about it.

Bread.  Kirkland 100% Wheat 2 loaf pack, the cheap stuff we’ve always bought.  This stuff MUST have bad stuff in it, it’s the cheapest wheat bread they have.  Well guess what?  IT DOESN’T!  Brown sugar, Raisin Juice, no HFCS!  Way to go Costco!

We strolled out of Costco with just about everything we always get, just no Ketchup, no Mini-Wheats, no BBQ sauce…

I did get a 24-pack of Mexican Coke, in 12 oz bottles.  It is very tasty.

Mark Twain said, “A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.”

How true is that?  For years my wife and I bought food that we thought was good for us.  We grabbed the name brand stuff, the Heinz Ketchup, the Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup, the Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce and we never thought anything else of it.

If you have  these products in your home, all three of them contain High Fructose Corn Syrup.

The big question is WHY!?

As of today, it is the Croman Family’s resolution to no longer eat any foods that contain high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), ingredients we can’t pronounce or ingredients that we have no idea what they hell they are.

We will also make an effort to as a family to start growing some of our own fruits and vegetables.

It will be our goal to not only live a healthier lifestyle but to teach our children (and anyone else that wants to listen) the importance of knowing what you put inside your body.

We will document it all on this blog so that others can see either how easy or how hard it really is.