Beautiful Blueberries and Thinking About Back to School (already!)

It's blueberry time!  I've been out of frozen blueberries for a few months now and I'm determined to fill my freezer while I can.  We use blueberries in smoothies, tossed into yogurt,  the occasional batch of muffins, or dessert such as pie or my favorite, crepes with cream cheese filling and blueberry sauce.  Eva eats her pancakes with blueberry sauce too claiming that maple syrup hurts her stomach.  So far I've been picking 3 times for a couple hours each time and probably have a couple of gallons or so in the freezer. I want more!  I'd like to try my hand at blueberry wine and also freeze some blueberry syrup (lightly sweetened with a touch of honey).  We'll see how far I get! 

According to my family age-old wisdom, blueberries should NOT be washed before freezing.  Of course, I've been notified that some people do wash them, but I pick wild berries way back in the woods on my parents' land so washing is unnecesary. If you do wash your berries make sure they are very dry and then freeze first on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper before storing in containeers.  I  pick fairly clean to begin with, but later I also pick through lightly and pull out any twigs , leaves or bad berries I find.  Then dump into a container, snap the lid on and put in the freezer!  Simple!

Today I also made pancakes with coconut flour and buckwheat flour and they turned out really well.  Ben, my pancake addict, ate them up.  I also made some with mashed banana and am going to work on them until they make a really good school lunch snack.  I realize I'm going to have to be more creative this year to figure out how to incorporate all the changes I want to do with our diet.  For one thing, I may not have any bread to work with, or if I do it will be very different. 

Thankfully I've been able to talk with Eva  a lot already about the changes and why we're doing them. She's had a really great attitude so far and really seems to be understanding the basics of gut healing and nutrition.  I've already got a fair amount of homemade chicken stock in my freezer and she's looking forward to taking a thermos of that in her school lunches (she drinks it with a straw, I'm lucky she's always liked it so much).  As soon as my in-laws travel back home in a few days I'll be ready to really dig in, though I still have to order the GAPS book and read it!  I'm not sure if we'll follow it exactly or not until I read it all but I think we'll be following at least 90%  from I've read on their website. 

Gluten-Free, GAPS, Gut Healing...etc, etc,...

I've been scouring the web looking for info.  The kids will be arriving home this weekend and I'm gearing up for big changes around here.   I've been diving back into Nourishing Traditions, checking out the GAPS diet, looking at tons of gluten-free recipes, and percolating.  I've got my first couple of batches of kombucha brewing and some beet kvass ready to store in my fridge as well.  I'll also be lining up an appointment for Eva with Dr. Gleixner as soon as she gets home, apparently our supplemental health insurance will cover 80% of the cost up to a certain amount each year, YAY! 

I'm not sure how difficult this is going to be, I do know that the change will not be fun at first, especially after coming back from grandma's house, a processed/refined food nightmare (I try not to think about it).  I'm thinking about school lunches, I'll have 3 in school this year.  I'm thinking about all the food available at school from breakfast club to halloween, christmas, and valentine's parties, to birthday cupcakes sent in by other moms.  How will I deal with all this?  I'm considering having the school freezer stocked with a few cookies and other healthy treats for those unexpected treat days if possible. 

So in all my surfing, here are a few great and very interesting sites and blogs I've run across:

The Spunky Coconut, a blog written by a mom of two young children with various health challenges who has authored a cookbook that I WANT. 

The Art of Gluten-Free Sourdough Baking, an intriguing concept I think, with recipes (and recipe ebooks available) and thoughts by Sharon A. Kane who I discovered when she commented on one of my posts

The GAPS diet, based on Gut and Psychology Syndrome by Dr. Natasha Campbell-Mcbride.

How To Make Your Blood Boil! Govenment Dietary Guidelines....

I hope other parents out there are aware that your child, if in the public school system anyway, is being indoctrinated into life threatening nutritional lies.  Of course I don't blame the teachers or anything, but it's something to keep in mind as you try to find the delicate balance of teaching your children the truth about nutrition in a way that is respectful of those who are sincerely wrong though their intentions are wonderful.  These teachers are just doing their jobs of course, they're not educated in real food. 

But somewhere there are many rich and fat men who are at least somewhat aware of the lies they are perpetuating.  Adding purposefully addictive ingredients to foods they KNOW has absolutely no nutritional value, foods they KNOW are killing people.  I just read an article about the new USDA dietary guidelines (which is pretty much based on the same ideas as the Canada Food Guide) for 2010 on the Weston Price Foundation site and it makes me so angry!  How can these people who have so much power and control and influence over how people think about food continue to recommend such horrible food choices????  I feel the food industry is linked with the pharmaceutical industry and they have a very happy money making scheme, the first makes everyone sick, the second drugs and sedates them all so they die slightly more slowly  in a semi-conscious state. 

What can we do?  We can learn, we can teach our family and friends through beautiful delicious nourishing real fresh foods.  The way to the heart is the stomach, and believe me, you will win your children, friends, and other family over through fresh raw homemade ice-cream and juicy grass-fed steaks, crispy farmer's market bacon and fresh pastured eggs, hunks of creamy yellow butter melted generously over hot veggies fresh from the garden, sprinkled with real salt, a hot baked potato with lots of butter and thick sour cream..  MMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Take that margarine and fat free chemical laden sour cream!!!!  Would you like a chocolate covered granola bar now?  How about some tasteless white 'bread' or MSG chips?  These 'foods' are not real and once people get a taste of the real things and if they can realize these things are healthy and no guilt should be experienced when eating them, they will choose the real foods easily.  EASILY.  And we'll all feel better, look better, think better, love better.  Honest. 

OH, so here's the article called " PROPOSED 2010 USDA DIETARY GUIDELINES --A RECIPE FOR CHRONIC DISEASE" over at the Weston A. Price Foundation that set me off a little.  There are some good food guidelines at the end of the article.

Gluten Free--Never Say Never!

So I believe I've mentioned that one of the things I most want to see is my oldest daughter overcome some health issues she's had pretty much her whole life.  She's had stomach pain and problems associated with it (such as gas, constipation, and some other embarrassing symptoms) since she was a baby, she's also is very prone to blood sugar fluctuations, has vision problems (for which she wears corrective glasses), headaches, shoulder and neck pain sometimes, hay fever, and randomly breaks out in hives for seemingly no reason at all.  She got the poorest start in life compared to the other children because she lived the longest without the benefit of decent real food on a regular basis--I didn't start looking into nutrition until she was almost 3. 

When I first ransacked my kitchen and dumped any and all processed and refined foods she experienced immediate improvement in some areas, mainly her moods and temper tantrums.  Taking the sugar out really seemed to help her.  At that time I also switched to soaking all my grains, using raw milk and cream, natural sweeteners, more organic and grass fed meats and wild caught seafood, and plenty of fresh veggies and fruits.  I look back on that time as a time I never felt healthier or had more energy.  I've never really been able to recapture that feeling fully since. 

I've been searching the internet and books, reading, reading, reading....and listening to interviews ect...and I have to say I'm coming more and more to the conclusion that we need to go gluten free.  To me, this would explain why I did so well on Fat Flush the first time I did it when I was quite a few years younger.  I experienced such good results but since then it seems to take longer and longer every time I try it.  I think it may because the longer I keep eating certain offending foods, the more damaged my digestive system has become.  Just a theory anyway.  The other factors that I can't get away from are taking a look into my family.  Celiac itself is an autoimmune disease that contributes to a host of other autoimmune diseases such as diabetes (on both sides of my family), arthritis (rheumatoid, my grandmother), thyroid disease (on both sides of my family), Alzheimer's (on my mom's side) and more.  Celiac is very often never diagnosed and underlies so many of these conditions that I'm now very suspicious of our genetic predisposition of gluten intolerance whether it's truly Celiac or not. 

So when Eva gets back from her grandparents' house I'm taking her to see our local natureopathic DR. so we can hopefully get to the bottom of all this once and for all.  I could go gluten free on my own, but for her I think she will do much much better with it if she has a doctor explain it to her.  On the one hand I don't really want to go for the full fledged gluten free life, (which will NOT be just for Eva or even for her and I but for the the whole family) but on the other I'm already familiar with plenty of great recipes and have experimented a lot with gluten free cooking and baking.  I already make several cookie and muffin recipes that are gluten free, and even always make gluten free pasta and lasagna when we have it.   

And all this just after I said I wasn't giving up bread haha!  Oh, but I'm NOT giving up bread, I've already discovered a gluten free recipe for sourdough buckwheat rolls....and I have many more delicious alternative ideas percolating.... Once thing I won't do is use those gluten free recipes that I find nutritionally very weak or use weird and complicated ingredients.  Whatever we eat will have to be richly nourishing, extremely delicious, and simple to make!

Check out this great interview with Dr. Thomas O'Brien on Underground Wellness Radio on celiac disease and gluten sensitivity for more information on all this.