Nourished Kitchen Real Food Challenge Week 1

I joined the challenge a week late but I wanted to share my progress on the challenge now anyway.

Challenge 1: Clean out the cupboards
This is a challenge that we failed. I am so thrifty that I just can't throw out everything that is processed. We are not a family that eats a lot of processed food anyway, so what we are going to do instead of throwing away or setting aside all the processed food is to use them up and not replace them--this includes breakfast cereal, crackers, white sugar and sugar-free syrup. We are going to make quite an effort to eat almost exclusively the Real Food way for this month.
Challenge 2: Choose wholesome food
This challenge was super easy as we already had all the suggested items: extra virgin olive oil, butter and full fat dairy. We also checked out the local food coop and whole foods market for other food recommended in Nourishing Traditions. Giant gleep felt when we saw the prices.
Challenge 3: Improve your grains
I made oatmeal porridge to supplement our normal breakfast of eggs and sausage. The sour smell of the fermented oats was a little off-putting but the final result was fantastic. Everyone loved it especially with a little butter, cream and maple syrup.
Challenge 4: Start sourdough
I got to this late--I just started it today. Hopefully it will turn out okay although I am using rye flour from the food coop--not milled by me.
Challenge 5 and 6: Sprout grain and mill it
A couple of things kept me from doing these--I don't have the equipment for drying and milling the sprouted grain so I didn't see the point of creating sprouts and all I have to sprout is old brown rice and old pearl barley. Not sure those will work. Nourishing Traditions talks a lot about sprouting grain but the recipes are all soaked grain recipes--I think this is what we will probably do more often than not. We did find an internet source for milled sprouted grain and we bought some sprouted grain bread. My better half thinks he'll order some milled sprouted grain and work with it.
Challenge 7: Relax and evaluate