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I got distracted and didn’t start roasting the chicken until 4:30 this afternoon. Fortunately, I bought two smaller chickens instead of one larger one, so the roasting went rather quickly. Alongside, I made green beans: raw for the kids and lightly steamed with butter for hubby and I. The kids love green beans, but won’t go near them if they are cooked! Beans fresh off the vine are a special treat for those that tend the garden, and I guess the raw snap at the table is reminiscent of lazy summer mornings in the sun. We also had dilled potato salad. I adjusted the NT recipe to our tastes a little, so I’ll post it below. After dinner, we nibbled on sweet potato cookies, made right from the recipe in NT. They were way too soft and didn’t firm up even after being refrigerated but they tasted delicious. Particularly fond of them were my children who like pumpkin pie.
I did no prep work for future meals this afternoon, which gave me time to write up next week’s menus and grocery list. I’m expanding our healthy diet to include breakfast next week. Although it is by far the most challenging meal for me to prepare (as the wife of an insomniac) it also stands to improve our lives the most. We generally eat cereal. Yeah, I know. But I have already taken two steps of improvement, one by purchasing only whole grain cereals with organic ingredients and no HFCS, and one by making whole, raw milk available to top it with. I will be cooking five breakfasts next week and have planned two days “off” if I need them. I have a pancake meal and three egg meals, one batch of muffins and porridge if I don’t need both cereal days. I’m not a huge fan of the amount of sugar in frozen fruit juice, so I’m thinking a rich fruit smoothie would be good with the pancakes and maybe some hot cocoa with the muffins. My milk allergic daughter is nearly through her most recent crisis, so I might be able to sneak just a little cream into her this week. Very little. Tomorrow I get to pick up my raw milk CSA order. I’ve ordered some Creme Fraiche, cultured butter and local honey along with my raw milk this week. I found a source for eggs from pastured chickens and left a message, but haven’t received a callback.
Warm Potato Salad
16 small red potatoes
1 slice sweet brown onion, chopped fine
1 bunch fresh dill, snipped
3 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1 cup homemade mayonnaise
Cut red potatoes into quarters and steam until softened but not mushy. Mix together remaining ingredients, toss with potatoes. Serve warm and pass the salt.
I’ve been learning about nutrition all my life. We all do, I think, from our first bite of solid food. This food gives me a tummy ache. That food smells like home. I have a daughter who is absolutely convinced that Dr. Pepper is poisonous because she drank some one day just before she exhibited signs of food poisoning! (There’s a food she’ll never eat again!)
There are a lot of voices today. Television pipes them into my home with their sincere faces. The internet brings their writing directly to my email inbox and answers my Google queries. Their heads shake sadly at my choices as headlines blare out from the magazine covers at the grocery checkstand. How on earth do you decide which voice is trustworthy?
It’s not foolproof, but my main method is old: Follow the money. Now, some will say I’m a cynic, and perhaps I am, but in my experience, people will tend to talk louder, more insistently and with more studies to back them up if they have something to sell. The bigger the institution, generally, the more force behind their words. There is an internet doctor of some fame to whom I would listen closely. I didn’t blindly follow all he claimed, but his words held more sway with me than many experts. The longer I was part of his Inner Circle, the more his health bulletins became sales pitches. No, he didn’t change, I did. I “heard” better the intent to sell me something. He wasn’t entirely wrong, many of his recommendations I still follow: coconut oil, sea salt, sunshine. But that grain of salt I had to take his advice with was always there.
My allopath is the same way, but more so. His sales pitch is so thoroughly ingrained in his thinking that I don’t believe he even realizes it. I have chronic pain left over from a dozen failed knee surgeries in the 1970s before there was such a thing as microsurgery. Most days I’m fine with my meditation and breathing techniques, but some days I need more of an assist. I have taken a very low level pain med for 35 years on these days, the same med, without ever becoming addicted. When I first moved to this area, I went to the insurance-assigned doc with my medical records. I was having a very bad pain day and my BP was 120/90 (my normal is 80/50, btw, so you can see this is very high for me.) He wrote a scrip for BP meds. He didn’t even look at my legs, but after I described the pain, wrote me a scrip for restless legs and another for vericose veins. He wrote one for physical therapy (which I’ve had at various times in my life, without much benefit) and one for a sleeping pill for those rare nights the pain keeps me awake. He wrote one for a statin drug, because he puts all his patients on them once they reach a certain age, and recommended liposuction at the clinic he had just opened downstairs. He never dealt with the pain med request, instead referring me to a pain specialist. I dropped the scrips in the exam room’s trash can on my way out. The pain specialist said I deal well with the pain and sees no reason I can’t continue with occasional use of my requested med. But, not being an MD, she couldn’t prescribe it, for that I’d have to go back to…
My distrust of the mainstream medical community runs deep. From being told I was “too fat to breastfeed” my firstborn (I was 20 pounds over my ideal weight when leaving the hospital delivery room) and “too old to breastfeed” my last (I was 41) to the flouride pills that destroyed my first child’s teeth, to the steroids my youngest was on for allergies, I’ve seen some of the worst that allopaths have to offer. I’ve also seen the best. There was one doctor who, upon diagnosing hubby with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in 1991, did endless hours of research. Each week he would share his findings with us. Homeopathy, herbals, acupuncture, there was no medical discipline off-limits to his quest. Not once did he reach for a prescription pad without educating us on benefits and side-effects first and asking if we wanted to try this route. I felt we partnered with him, so when he said, “How about we try this Anti-Candida Diet?” we really invested ourselves. It’s not an easy diet, but because I felt he was working with us, we gave it our best.
In all the words on my TV, on glossy magazine covers and newspaper articles, on my glowing computer screen and in my head, the ones that speak loudest to me come from those who search, not those who sell.
This post is part of the Natural Cures blog carnival, hosted by Hartkeisonline.
We’re trying to get more veggies in our diet. To help that along, I am trying to serve at least two vegetables at each dinner meal, and devote one day to meatless (but not animal-fat-less) meals per week. I started this recipe several days ago by soaking a pound of black beans in water to which a little kefir was added. I left the beans at room temp for 24 hours. Now I’ve heard that some people have trouble getting beans to cook to the soft “done” stage soaking in cultured milks, but we didn’t have that problem. I don’t know if it was because we used mostly water with a little kefir for soaking (to accommodate milk allergies) or because I got stuck in traffic and the beans cooked for four hours instead of two! But they cooked up soft and delicious.
We went out in the afternoon and didn’t get home until right before dinner, so I wanted to just throw something together fast. I’m glad I had those black beans ready! In one serving bowl, I tossed together three tomatoes, a half bunch of cilantro and half an onion, all chopped into smallish pieces. I juiced three lemons and tossed the juice of two of them with the veggies. I took the other lemon’s juice and stirred it into a mashed avocado in another serving bowl. That all set while I fried a bunch of whole wheat tortillas in coconut oil and warmed the beans in a pan. Then it was time to call everyone to the kitchen where they assembled their tostados buffet-style.
Turns out I was the only one to eat the guacamole, but that’s fine with me, I love the stuff! The salsa recipe was something I asked about at Baja Fresh. They told me what was in it and I couldn’t believe it was that simple. I don’t mind onion, but spicy just isn’t my thing, so regular salsa is just not something I’m interested in.
Oh, the other half bunch of cilantro? It didn’t go to waste. My two cavies (guinea pigs) loved it!
The Dark Side of Fat Loss
