It’s always been the goal of Food Is Fuel Friday to encourage my readers to focus on nutrition at least one day a week. Most of you know by now that I was able to shed a bunch of pounds by simply controlling my diet and eating habits, but also by gradually cutting out processed foods.

If you’d have asked me four years ago if the habits of my family regarding food were healthy, and I would have told you that they were fine. Now that I’ve come so far, it’s easy for me to look back on my past habits with a critical eye. I thought that something, like a canned soup, for instance, would be healthy for you because it had vegetables in it. I didn’t consider the amount of salt, not to mention the chemicals and preservatives that are used. I also really didn’t consider that my diet might have more of an effect on my overall health than I thought. I wasn’t aware, at the time, that I was constantly living with a flare up of asthma, as many of those chemicals and preservatives cause my asthma symptoms to become quite difficult to manage. It was only through elimination that I became aware of what my life can truly be like when it’s free of these harmful processed foods.

Living a life free of processed foods is a difficult commitment that requires patience and persistence. It’s not something that a person could (or should try to) undertake all at once, as it requires creating new habits as well as new menus. It has taken me a lot of time, a lot of reading, and a lot of failure to get to a place where I am confident in my cooking as being nutritious and flavourful, as well as acceptable in the eyes of children.

Now that I have a good base of recipes that I know how to create using fresh and delicious ingredients, I find that I have more time to experiment with things that I would have thought I’d never have time for. The truth is that healthy cooking, or cooking from scratch can take a lot of time that busy or working moms just don’t have. I don’t, however, subscribe to the school of thought that eating healthy has to be more costly than eating crapola, you just have to get used to buying smart to save your dough.

This week I wanted to get into something a bit more high maintenance than what I normally make. Read: MISTAKE. I’ve never tried my hand at making homemade pasta, but it’s one of the things that I currently buy in a package. Pasta is inexpensive to buy, but it’s also really inexpensive to make by hand. All you need to spare is the time and the energy, of which you’ll need a bit.

Without a pasta maker to speak of, or a desire to find one, I set out with the idea to make some amazing little pillow ravioli’s that my daughter would be able to help me with. We set off to the library to research pasta making methods. I’d love to say that what we came up with was an awesome recipe that worked really well. It did not go that way. In fact, I wound up spending from 3pm until nearly 6pm working on two batches of ravioli that failed miserably. I thought this weekly feature was doomed for today.

But then it occurred to me. Half of this battle is losing, failing and getting up to try again. It’s not the first time that I’ve tried something out and had it kind of fizzle on me. This experience was one of those.

Part of me was really frustrated. Especially because I had been envisioning some pretty incredible homemade pasta. It was just one of those things that I need to practice more before expecting it to be edible, I think. But I’m not willing to give up!

Even though this meal didn’t work out and we wound up ordering pizza, I still wanted to share with you some pictures of what would have been my delicious ravioli. Because even though they were just too thick and not very flavourful… It was a great experience for Abby in the kitchen as well.

As for the recipe for ravioli? Well, I’ll get it to you as soon as I figure it out. The filling was amazing, so it will definitely be a challenge I’m going to try again.