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Over the course of my life, I’ve been on a multitude of diets and plans. As a teen, I went years never consuming more than 800 calories a day to stay fashionably thin. When I became pregnant with my first child, I said no more to those dangerous diets, knowing I was nourishing someone more important than I. Sure, I gained 20 pounds during the pregnancy, but I also grew two inches taller and two shoe sizes. My body finally caught up and finished growing after years of starvation.
In the ten years between the birth of my first and my second, I confess, I went back on the dieting rampage. I maintained a perfect size 7 for eight of those years, mostly by eating only bananas and nonfat milk one week, then brown rice and fruit juice the next. When it was time to think about having that second child, my first step was back onto a healthy diet. I won’t discuss what happened to my weight, but suffice to say a decade after my second was born, my final child was born and I was considered a “high risk” delivery because of obesity. I just figured that’s what happens to me when I eat more than 800 calories a day. I was eating what I was told was healthily, too, for the sake of my unborn and nursing babies. Lots and lots of soy protein, raw veggies, non-fat milk fortified with additional milk powder, and whole grains made up my daily diet. I’d never heard that grains needed to be soaked or sprouted. Of course I was eating non-fat, I was obese and that was bad and eating fat makes you fat, right?
Never once did I stop and think about the five thousand years of humans wandering the earth before me. The first time I read “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration,” I thought it was a cute idea, but kind of wild and unreasonable to expect a modern, enlightened homemaker to feed her family that way. I mean cooking? Really? Standing over a stove? Me?
Little by little, news reports and medical “research” started making me wonder. Why is heart disease on the rise so fast if we know fats are bad and have such easy access to a dizzying array of non-fat foods? Why are all the (supposedly) nutritionally superior “enhanced” foods available to us not keeping us from becoming the most obese population the world has ever known? If non-fat is really what the body needs, why is there not a rule in the Bible about it? I mean, there are lots of rules in there for proper preparation of food, and I couldn’t find a single mention about not drinking the cream of the milk.
Ding.
The lightbulb went on, I slapped my forehead and uttered a loud “DUH!” People have walked the planet for thousands of years eating fermented foods, animal fats and whole, raw milk. Obviously they were healthy enough to reproduce because we’re here talking about it. Until the industrial age, they walked to travel, tended farms and animals, wove their cloth by hand, built homes for themselves and had enough strength and energy daily to accomplish whatever was required. Only recently have we become, as a race, fat, tired and unhealthy. What changed?
Ding.
Today marks the end of my first month on this journey. I know I’ll have many more “Duh” moments. I look forward to them. Because, like “K” said in “Men in Black,”
Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.
I can’t wait!
This post is part of the Nourished Start Breakfast Carnival hosted by The Nourishing Gourmet.
Coffee Cake, but healthier
It’s our practice to let the kids set the menu on their birthdays. Risky, I know, but it’s their special day and they love being able to eat food they like. Today is Kate’s 14th birthday. She asked for coffee cake for breakfast, chicken noodle soup for lunch and a skillet bean dish I make called Smoky Beans and Cheese for dinner. Also, because we have one and sometimes two birthdays a month between January and June, we don’t always have cake. Sometimes we have pie or doughnuts or whatever the birthday partier wants. One year John asked for s’mores. Kate has asked for a Doctor Pepper float. The mere idea makes my stomach do flip-flops. I think I’ll stick to just ice cream.
But just because they choose the food doesn’t mean we have to buy boxes and cans and really forsake our foodstyle for a day. Chicken noodle soup isn’t coming out of a can for lunch, it will come from my homemade stock, simmered slowly with carrots and celery, with cooked chicken and rice noodles added a few minutes before serving. The Smoky Beans and Cheese will remain the same, with upgrades to some ingredients: nitrate/nitrite free bacon, sprouted beans, raw milk cheese. The coffee cake recipe has had a pretty significant overhaul, so I’ve posted it below.
Here is our old coffee cake recipe:
2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
2 cups firmly packed brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 stick margarine
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 cup buttermilk
Preheat oven to 375°. Spray 9×13 pan with pan spray. Combine flour, sugar and salt in small bowl and cut in butter. Set aside 1/2 cup of this mixture for topping. Stir baking powder, baking soda and cinnamon into flour mixture. Beat egg and buttermilk together and add to mixture. Stir just until moistened. Pour into prepared pan, sprinkle with topping and bake 30 to 35 minutes, until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.
Healthier Coffee Cake
for cake:
2 cups freshly ground whole wheat flour
1 cup buttermilk
1 teaspoon coconut oil
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1/2 cup maple syrup
6 tablespoons melted butter
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 eggs from pastured chickens, lightly beaten
for topping:
1/2 cup bulgur flour
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
2 tablespoons melted butter
Soak 2 cups flour with 1 cup buttermilk for 24 hours at room temperature. Preheat oven to 375°. Using fingers, rub 9×13 pan with coconut oil (rub the rest into hands and lips, ahhhhh.) Mix together topping ingredients and set aside. Add maple syrup, salt and melted butter to soaked flour. Stir baking powder, baking soda and cinnamon into flour mixture. Beat egg and add to mixture. Stir just until combined. Pour into prepared pan, sprinkle with topping and bake 30 to 35 minutes, until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.
My 11-year-old daughter, Christy, was very mildly oxygen-deprived at birth. The doctor tells me this is why she has 20/20 vision in one eye and 20/200 in the other. We were clueless until she was 6. We knew she had horrible handwriting and had trouble knowing what a clean dish or clean bedroom looked like. It wasn’t until one evening she was sitting on my lap with her head turned almost completely sideways to see the book I was reading to her that we decided there was a problem. The eye doctor said she was too old for exercises or any possibility of improvement and that glasses were our best option.
I just returned from the eye doctor. As of a year ago, her vision had not improved since the initial checkup at age 6. But today the doctor came out with a wide grin. “I don’t know how, but her eye seems to be growing! The cornea, the lens, the optic nerve are all showing signs of…I don’t even know what to call it. Growth? Regeneration? Improvement, to say the least. She still needs the glasses, but she can actually see out of them now, better than ever. We never see this kind of rapid improvement in a child past age two. It’s just a miracle! Can you bring her back once a month for a while so I can watch this?”
Absolutely! How exciting! My heart is doing back flips just to think that something measurable in one of us is changing and improving. There has been nothing different in our circumstances other than the testing of nourishing foods during January and a full-scale commitment in February. That there might be changes already—actual, measurable, verifiable, medically relevant changes—is staggering to me.
This post is part of Natural Cures blog carnival, hosted by Hartkeisonline, and Prevention, not Prescriptions.
One of the things I love best about this foodstyle is that the meals are cooked so quickly. I’ve never been one to stare at the fridge at 4PM and throw together a culinary delight. No, that would be Blair. She’s creative and instinctively knows what food flavors work together. Me? Not so much.
But, I’ve got my menu plan, my rice is soaked, I know I have all the ingredients and Nourishing Traditions is open to the recipe page and in the cookbook holder (nifty birthday present, that.) So, after a morning trip to the eye doctor with Christy and an afternoon trip to the dentist with John, it’s a short hour until dinner.
First order: start the brown rice. Because it was soaked overnight, it will only take 45 minutes to cook up fluffy and soft. My store didn’t have fresh wild-caught salmon this week, so I bought some frozen Coho fillets. Coho is denser than Silver or King Salmon, and doesn’t have the same delicate, layered flavor. I made a marinade/salad dressing with some sesame oil, rice vinegar, soy sauce, chopped green onions, grated ginger and minced garlic and marinated the fish in a 9×13 pyrex baking dish in about half the marinade for about 20 minutes, then put a piece of foil over the top and baked it at 400° for 20 minutes because it was still partially frozen. Fully thawed it would have only taken about 10. By the way, the marinade is terrific to sauce up the cooked rice, too. While the fish marinated, I scrubbed and shredded six carrots, and tossed them in a bowl with a half a bunch of chopped green onions, a new little green bell pepper from my garden and used the other half of the marinade as salad dressing.
While I was out running errands, Kate found this recipe for homemade chocolate candy I’d printed out and whipped up a batch. We usually have dessert on fish day to entice reluctant eaters, but I had totally forgotten to get anything together for that. What a wonderful surprise to find these little fudgy buttons in the fridge! They were very good, too. They were softer than I was expecting, more on the order of fudge than candy, and so very good. The kids said they weren’t quite “right,” (that’s what they say when something is really good and they want it again right away) and we needed to test with some mint extract once, and could we find a way to test with raspberry and cherry, too? In my house of food critics, that’s a rave review! Thanks, Kelly The Kitchen Kop, for the great recipe!
Did you ever think a video game would inspire a local, nourishing mentality? I love to play on our family’s Wii. I have a couple games I enjoy, although time is usually too tight to play for long. One game I am particularly fond of is Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility. It’s the ten-year-anniversary game in a series of farming and ranching simulation games. Now, I don’t like all the games in the series, but this one is near and dear to my heart.
With my physical challenges, I have resigned myself to the idea that I’ll probably never be a farmer. Oh, but I would love to grow enough plants to provide food for our family. Of course, we’d need a cow for some good raw milk. And a chicken or two, to clean up after the cows (an idea I got from The Omnivore’s Dilemma in a section on Polyface Farms.) And if I had a sheep to shear for yarn, I could make sweaters…
Oh yes, back to the game. Sorry, I love dreaming like that. Anyway, in the game, your character is a young woman (or young man) getting started on their own farm. The work is hard and you run out of energy quickly at first. Weeds must be cleared, rocks broken, trees chopped down, fields cultivated, planted and watered and eventually you get a tiny little harvest. Nothing is free. You have to save up for a pot and a skillet to put in your house, seeds to plant and animals. But the area is blessed with forageable herbs both for cooking and dyeing thread and yarn, a river and ocean well stocked with fish yours for the catching, and trees that will drop fruit from time to time. Food just doesn’t get more local than that.
That's a lot of tomatoes!
The “recipes” in the game use your harvested crops and foraged food to create dishes to restore your energy (and woo a mate, if you seek one.) The recipes all use whole, raw dairy in the forms of milk, butter and cheese; fish and shellfish and fresh fruits and vegetables. There are a few grains: breadfruit grown in spring becomes flour, rice and buckwheat for noodles. If you want something sweet, you’d better be sure you have flowers planted in your field to bring the bees that will occasionally leave you a pot of honey. There is no store from which to buy processed foods, although you can purchase a cooked fish from the tackle store, or a bit of stew at the hotel. You can purchase medicine at the doctor’s office, but it’s made with (can you guess?) raw milk, foraged herbs and honey.
The kitchen item I didn’t understand until just recently was the “aging pot.” Foods would go in and come out…different. For example, an egg, turnip or eggplant would go in raw and come out pickled! Rice, buckwheat or a blueberry would go in and come out as a cocktail. Until I read Nourishing Traditions, I was truly mystified. Now I understand: this aging pot is where you put foods to ferment! There are some silly elements like “makers” where you drop the milk into the machine and cheese or butter magically pops out, but it’s nice to see real, whole raw milk somewhere other than my own fridge.
When my daughters play this game, it opens a door for us to discuss food origins, natural preparation methods and ideas for our own meals! It was nice to point to the Halibut Meuniere that Christy wasn’t particularly interested in eating and remind her that’s a dish her Harvest Moon character eats all the time!
Real Food Wednesday today asks, “How has learning about, finding, budgeting and shopping for, preparing, serving and eating Nourishing, Traditional Food affected our family?”
We are still at the start of our journey with nourishing, traditional food, so many of the effects are yet to be seen. But this journey is already beginning to change us.
We are more connected to the community. From going out into the farmer’s fields and talking to him about his growing practices, and meeting “my” chickens, to getting to know the source of our raw milk and grassfed meats, we have been making friends and meeting neighbors other than the checker at the grocery store. I’ve always been a loner, and this experience is getting me out of my home and connecting me with those that produce the foods my family eats.
My grocery trips are more frequent. Those locally grown, organic fresh fruits and veggies don’t last as long as the super-processed frozen “nukeable” foods we used to survive on. I am going to the store once a week for a large trip, twice a week for fresh produce, and then making a couple mini-trips for raw milk, fresh eggs, and other items we don’t get at a regular store.
My grocery list is shorter. I’ve noticed my grocery list contains fewer items. The recipes I use to cook our meals contain fewer ingredients as well. These fewer ingredients cost about the same as the larger list I used to carry, because the individual ingredients tend to cost more.
Cooking is a continuous activity. Instead of an hour of cooking followed by a half hour of eating, I find my food prep tends to go for days. The sprouts for Wednesday’s salad have to be soaked by Sunday night or they won’t be ready in time. There’s a continual preparation for the next few days’ meals. I don’t mind this because most of the advance work can be accomplished in four or five minutes between other activities. It also cuts down on the temptation to call for pizza. One evening I might be a little low energy, but if the beans are ready now, we will eat them. If the beans weren’t ready, we’d probably take a short cut to the drive thru.
Budgeting is in flux. In these early days, I’m relying on the availability of higher-priced foods at the grocery store as I transition to locally available sources. Paying $10 a pound for coconut oil is painful. But it is an item high on my priority list and I am highly motivated to find alternative sources.
I am running out of room in the fridge! We only have one refrigerator and freezer, and it is full to the brim with quart jars of raw milk products, lacto-fermented veggies, homemade salad dressings and all the other necessities. It’s time to watch Freecycle for some used appliances for the garage.
The Dreaded Beet Kvass
While reading Nourishing Traditions, I came across a strange drink made with lacto-fermented beets. Now, my family doesn’t even eat beets at all, in any form, ever. I kind of chuckled and read on.
Then I downloaded an article from Wise Traditions that said there was a family out there drinking this stuff as part of their “snack” at least once a week. My interest was tickled, but not piqued.
The real kicker came when I read that beets purify the liver and blood. Now, I’ve known for years that hubby suffers from low liver function. I’ve had him taking milk thistle and/or dandelion herbs to help with that. But if I could get some of this in him…
So, I planned it. I’d make the kvass then find something to mix it with. Sure enough, at my health food store I found Black Cherry Concentrate. It’s unsweetened, just pure juice. I know cherry helps with inflammation, something we both experience, so that’s a plus.
Today was the big day. My kvass was done and it was time to serve it up. I wanted to make six servings: two four-ounce servings, two eight-ounce servings and two servings of whatever was left over. I carefully measured out a cup into a two-quart pitcher. I took a small taste. Ooohee! Yeah, that needs some help. I added half a cup of cherry concentrate, and two and a half cups of water. Needed more cherry, still too much beet, so another 1/4 cup of concentrate went in. That was good, I thought, but a little concentrated still, so I added another two cups of water. Just right, I thought. I served the concoction over ice with popcorn, hoping the salt would make hesitant snackers thirsty enough to at least try it.
Here are the comments:
Rose: “Yummy! I’ll have that anytime! Can you make it less sweet next time, though?”
Christy: “Yeah, it was a little too sweet, but it was good.”
Kate: “Got any more!?!?”
John: “Ew, Mom, are you trying to kill me? Why can’t you just make Kool-Aid like a regular mom?”
Hubby: “I drank it, but I didn’t like it. It’s too much like tea, too watered-down.”
I’m thinking next time of trying it with pomegranate syrup, or a berry syrup that is more tart, and not adding that last two cups of water. Here’s how the final recipe worked out:
Can’t Beet a Kvass with Cherry
1 cup beet kvass
2/3 cups black cherry concentrate, unsweetened
4 1/2 cups water
Mix all together, serve over ice.
We had High Enzyme Salad made right out of the NT cookbook for lunch. It was heavenly! Dinner was apricot almond bread with butter and a big pot of vegetable soup made with just green beans, zucchini, celery and parsley in chicken broth. We are still trying to get over the bug that swept through the house, and I think a lighter dinner might help us sleep better and recover.
Fellow food traveler, fear not the meek parsnip! I had seen the long albino carrot thing in the grocery store before, but never tried it. I read about their preparation method in Nourishing Traditions and decided to give them a whirl.
The Long, Albino Carrot thing
I’m glad I did! I scraped them, like you would a carrot, and julienned it, like you would a carrot, and sauteed them slowly in butter, like you would a carrot. And they tasted…not unlike carrots! There was a definite carrot flavor in there, but it was tempered with a lovely anise-like licorice flavor. This root veggie will be a welcome addition to our winter local fare.
Sauteeing gently in butter
Okay, so the idea of planning a category of food a day is a good one, but sometimes life intervenes. For example, this weekend I was straightening up my food storage area in the garage with Christy. Our garage stays a pretty even temperature year-round, probably because it is underground on three sides. I found some dried white beans as I was straightening a shelf and handed them to Christy saying, “Here, take these upstairs to the kitchen. I’m going to soak them for baked beans later this week.” I guess I was mumbling, or thinking out loud or something, because she proceeded to bring the beans up and soak them herself! I didn’t notice what was in the bowl (she covered it just like she’s seen me do) until I got out the soaked flour for today’s pancakes.
Pancakes for breakfast are such a mixed blessing. I don’t like making pancakes for breakfast because it can take a whole hour to cook as many as I need for my family. Someday I’d like to find a gigantic cast-iron griddle that will work on my electric stovetop, but I’ll bet it’s something I’d have to invent. I like making pancakes for breakfast because it gives me a whole hour standing at the stove to do prep for other meals between flips. I boiled eggs for egg salad, flip; I checked on my fermenting foods in the cupboard, flip; I rinsed my sprouting wheat berries and sunflower seeds, flip; I chopped and sauteed a couple onions and garlic cloves, flip, to which I added the drained soaked beans and got it boiling, flip. I even managed to do the dishes between flips! After everyone had all the pancakes they wanted, I put the leftovers on a cookie sheet in a 150° oven until they were crispy, which took about two hours.
I added some tomato paste, soy sauce, maple syrup, molasses, apple cider vinegar, red pepper flakes and dry mustard to the beans and scooped it into my slow cooker. It cooked away on High until dinner. They were good but something was…missing. Hm. I’ll have to think on that. I’ve never been able to make baked beans like my mother’s, partly because she uses white sugar and brown sugar and molasses and maple syrup and that’s just way too much for me. Don’t get me wrong, they are wicked good, but it kind of takes the health benefits away from the beans to drown them in that much sugar.
The crispy cakes went over well with all but John, who turned up his nose at the idea of pancakes for snack. Christy said, “It’s like having honey on a spoon, then eating the spoon!” Rose ate four of them, but not with honey, with blackberry fruit-only preserves. John has put in a request for scrambled eggs with cheese and toast for breakfast. That with a cup of his special eggnog should give him a really good start on the day tomorrow. I think I’ll go grate that cheese tonight, though, for safety’s sake!
John, my teenaged son, has trouble thinking things through sometimes. He’s got a 4.2 GPA, taking honors and AP classes. His teachers think he’s the smartest thing since capri pants. But when it comes to nutrition, the boy just doesn’t get it. He wants food to be all about treats and sweets and feasts.
He’s been having stomach problems for about a month now. He has tended toward heartburn in recent years anyway, but now he is having heaviness in his stomach like there’s a rock in it, combined with irritable bowel syndrome. His acne has spiraled out of control again. As you can surely tell by our “About” page, this boy is in nutritional crisis. His sense of taste is so diminished that he is only interested in 8-10 food items. Everything else tastes wrong to him. He simply refuses many of the foods I cook, restricting his dinner to only the meat I serve.
This morning on the way to school, he was complaining about his stomach again and asking if he couldn’t stay home. I really laid it all out for him. I explained that his body knows how to heal itself and how to function properly, but he has to provide the tools and building blocks with proper nutrition. I stressed how important it is to eat even foods that aren’t sweet because they contain important nutrients his body can’t assimilate through the expensive vitamins he takes. I gave him some examples of things happening in his body that could be directly related to insufficient nutrition. We’ve had this talk many, many times. It usually comes down to him saying “I can’t.” It did again this time. And that’s when I said something really, really stupid.
“I’ll get up and make your breakfast if you’ll eat it.”
What was I thinking? Proof that I’m not a morning person, that crazy statement. My making breakfast usually involves second-degree burns and stitches. I am just not coherent early in the day, haven’t been since I was 10. And I just offered to get up at 5:30 every weekday morning to feed a boy who is plenty capable of feeding himself? OY! All I can say is I must have been desperate to see improvement to offer such an outrageous deal.
There was a catch though. “You have to eat it. And we have to agree on three months of no sodas, limited sugar and increased fruits and veggies.”
I can’t!
What do you usually have to eat at school?
A taco.
Lettuce and tomato?
Lettuce.
What color?
Yellow. (ew.)
Do they have fresh fruit at school?
Yes. They have apples and bananas.
Can you have one with your daily taco?
No, I don’t have time.
Are you allowed to eat anywhere but in the lunchroom, like in the hall on the way to class or between classes, what about on the bus?
No. Nowhere else.
Okay, so the schoolday is pretty much written off. I can help him before school and after. It’s a challenge, for sure, but one I am looking forward to. If I can just get him pumped up with some good calories, some serious nutrients and some fresh water, I know he’ll feel the difference. Once he starts feeling the difference, I won’t ever have to have that talk again. I know once he feels it he’ll be sold.
You’ll have to forgive my lack of a good, healthy post today. It’s Oscar night and we have a party that includes some pretty unhealthful food items. It’s been our family tradition to think of food items that go along with the nominated films, actors, cinematographers, etc. It’s a special night for us, though, and I wouldn’t change it.
I hope the Academy puts on a good show. I wish best of luck to Hugh Jackman, in his first attempt at what Billy Crystal calls “the toughest one night stand on the planet.”
Breakfast was muffins again today. I stirred some cut-up dried apricots into the batter. Hubby had some all-fruit apricot pineapple preserves on them, but I found that too sweet and opted for butter. If I didn’t have plans for it, I would have raided the homemade cream cheese!
Lunch was good old All-American BLTs with Cocomayo. I found some nitrite/nitrate-free smoked bacon at the store, and it smelled so good cooking. I used the first cuttings of three Red Romaine plants I have growing under lights and the first ripe tomatoes growing next to them. I’m getting really antsy to start my patio garden and get the room back where I have my winter garden growing.
I found local eggs! I asked first at my dairy farmer’s, but she didn’t have any sources. My CSA farm had a suggestion, but the poultry farm they recommended has scaled down to only meet their family’s needs due to economic pressures. I ran into a woman who was hanging up flyers for a local holistic health center and asked her. I don’t have any idea why I asked her, but I did. I called and set up an appointment at the farm she recommended. It is only 15 miles away, which suits my definition of “local” just fine. The chickens had heated laying houses and were “housed” on acres and acres of pasture. I asked about the chickens’ health, feed, exercise, the ratio of hen to rooster, basically every question I could think to ask. We came away with the names of the hens and three dozen beautiful eggs.
The Dark Side of Fat Loss
