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.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Friday, July 9, 2010
Looking For Amazing Recipes? Gluten Free? Low Sugar/Carb?
My wonderful amazing friend Lydia from Divine Health has put out her first e-book!!!!! I just finished ordering mine and can't wait to try out the recipes, the pictures look soooooooooo good! Please head over and check out her blog and consider buying her Divine Living Ebook – July 2010 edition. Here's the description:
"This month’s ebook includes 8 entire meal plans, so you can have 2 new dinners per week to add to your repertoire, plus a few extra recipes, such as muffins, brownies and a divine chocolate recipe you won’t want to miss! I am selling each monthly ebook for $7.95 – (that’s $1 per meal plan)."
You may also subscribe and pay one discounted price to recieve a new ebook full of creative and nourishing recipes each month for a whole year!
"This month’s ebook includes 8 entire meal plans, so you can have 2 new dinners per week to add to your repertoire, plus a few extra recipes, such as muffins, brownies and a divine chocolate recipe you won’t want to miss! I am selling each monthly ebook for $7.95 – (that’s $1 per meal plan)."
You may also subscribe and pay one discounted price to recieve a new ebook full of creative and nourishing recipes each month for a whole year!
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.
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.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Fermented Pineapple Drink and Oatmeal Muffins
I have a pineapple, so I googled 'fermented pineapple drink'. Now, this is what I've found and I think it looks very interesting and summery.
Fermented Pineapple Drink (Guarapiña o Mavi de Piña)
The recipe actually says to soak the oats for 10 minutes in buttermilk, so I figured, why not longer? And why not throw in some oat flour with it? Of course it says to use all purpose flour, 3 cups to be exact. So I used half that amount of oat flour, and for the other half of the flour I used half as much coconut flour (so that would be 1 cup) which I mixed with all the dry ingredients for the base. I followed the rest of the recipe except adding an extra egg to offset the coconut flour a bit, the oat flour also offsets the dryness of coconut flour because it's so moist.
Here's the recipe which will make 3 dozen, half it if that's too many muffins for your house!
Oatmeal Muffins
3 cups rolled oats
1 cup oat flour
3 cups buttermilk (or soured milk, or equal parts liquid whey and water)
Mix this together in large bowl, cover, and soak for 12-24 hours.
When you're ready to bake the muffins preheat the oven to 375 and stir the following together in large bowl:
1 cup coconut flour
1 1/4 cup rapadura
3 tsp ground cinnamon
3 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 tsp real salt
Then add 2/3 melted butter and 5 fork beaten eggs to the soaked oat mixture. Add to dry ingredients and stir just until moistened. Fill buttered or papered muffin cups about 3/4 full and bake for 20 minutes.
Variations:
mix 2 tbs rapadura and 1 tbs cinnamon together and sprinkle the tops of the muffins
decrease butter to 1/2 cup and add 3 cups grated peeled cooking apples to the egg mixture
Fermented Pineapple Drink (Guarapiña o Mavi de Piña)
The great thing is, you use the skin of the pineapple which I normally throw away. The skin can also be used for pineapple vinegar, also known as cortida, which is supposed to be yummy as well. In fact, this recipe is probably very similar to making vinegar except the addition of sugar and optional spices, the fermentation time would obviously be much shorter for a drink. I'm going to try this in the next day or two so I'll let you know how it goes!
In other news, I've just made a big batch of one of my kids' favorite muffins. But this time I fooled around with the recipe quite a bit and did some pre-soaking. I don't think I've ever done conversions yet involving soaking so I'm quite pleased with the results. Here's what I did:
The recipe actually says to soak the oats for 10 minutes in buttermilk, so I figured, why not longer? And why not throw in some oat flour with it? Of course it says to use all purpose flour, 3 cups to be exact. So I used half that amount of oat flour, and for the other half of the flour I used half as much coconut flour (so that would be 1 cup) which I mixed with all the dry ingredients for the base. I followed the rest of the recipe except adding an extra egg to offset the coconut flour a bit, the oat flour also offsets the dryness of coconut flour because it's so moist.
Here's the recipe which will make 3 dozen, half it if that's too many muffins for your house!
Oatmeal Muffins
3 cups rolled oats
1 cup oat flour
3 cups buttermilk (or soured milk, or equal parts liquid whey and water)
Mix this together in large bowl, cover, and soak for 12-24 hours.
When you're ready to bake the muffins preheat the oven to 375 and stir the following together in large bowl:
1 cup coconut flour
1 1/4 cup rapadura
3 tsp ground cinnamon
3 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 tsp real salt
Then add 2/3 melted butter and 5 fork beaten eggs to the soaked oat mixture. Add to dry ingredients and stir just until moistened. Fill buttered or papered muffin cups about 3/4 full and bake for 20 minutes.
Variations:
mix 2 tbs rapadura and 1 tbs cinnamon together and sprinkle the tops of the muffins
decrease butter to 1/2 cup and add 3 cups grated peeled cooking apples to the egg mixture
My kids approved the recipe changes and I'm limiting muffin intake as I type! They also LOVE the apple version, though I haven't tried it yet with the new changes. There's no reason it shouldn't work just fine!
Another Saturday, Another Trip to the Farmer's Market!
Here in NB, we may not have access to the best of everything this world has to offer, but our local farmer's markets (yes, we have TWO) which are open Saturday mornings all year round, are absolutely amazing. Local farmers and artisans gather every week and sell everything from prepared foods, fresh meat and produce and wine and maple syrup, to jewellery and handmade wooden toys. I buy all of our meat products and most of our produce and dairy from this wonderful local source. I love being able to chat with the farmers as well!
To give you an idea of the great things I usually pick up, today I brought home buttermilk, yogurt, raw cheese, sour cream, fresh sourdough breads, chicken livers, bacon and back bacon, maple syrup, beets, sweet potatoes, pears, peppers, tomatoes, and bagged baby lettuce mix. It was a light day for me at the market since last week a bought a box of beef with tons of steak, 2 roasts, and lots of ground beef.
Make sure to check out your local farmer's markets! Ours are the Dieppe Market and the Moncton Farmer' Market.
To give you an idea of the great things I usually pick up, today I brought home buttermilk, yogurt, raw cheese, sour cream, fresh sourdough breads, chicken livers, bacon and back bacon, maple syrup, beets, sweet potatoes, pears, peppers, tomatoes, and bagged baby lettuce mix. It was a light day for me at the market since last week a bought a box of beef with tons of steak, 2 roasts, and lots of ground beef.
Make sure to check out your local farmer's markets! Ours are the Dieppe Market and the Moncton Farmer' Market.
Friday, June 4, 2010
Baby Foods...
It's funny that in our culture we are instructed to offer babies difficult to digest processed grain cereals as a first food. With my first I never thought about it, I just did the 'normal' things everyone else was doing, right down to the dry cheerios for snacking. By the time she was 2, she was waking up begging for marshmallows and cookies and having violent fits that lasted up to 45 minutes. That's when I first started learning about nutrition. I knew I didn't want to live that way, and I didn't want my children living that way either.
Still, information on good starter foods for babies is somewhat difficult to come by. There is a very small section in Nourishing Traditions, and they have some helpful articles on their website http://www.westonaprice.com/. I don't think it should be complicated and there's certainly no need for bottled and prepackaged baby foods.
My youngest son loved mashed bananas and sweet potatoes with lots of butter or coconut oil and sometimes cinnamon. What could be easier than mashing up a banana with a fork? He loved to have a bowl of homemade chicken soup (drained a bit) and pick through it with his fingers (I often kept broth or gravy aside to mash with his veggies later as well) . He ate tons of yogurt and berries or raw cheese pieces, and loved black olives. Basically he ate what we ate modified a little for his convenience or age if necessary, and there really wasn't much he wouldn't eat! And he had a crazy big appetite, still does.
My youngest is 7 months old today and up until today, not particularly interested in any foods I've offered. I've tried banana several times, sweet potato pureed with butter, and cooked apple. While she accepted the food she made many faces and gagged over and over. I think she still swallowed some but it didn't appear she particularly enjoyed eating it. I haven't been really persistent, just trying every few days to see if she's ready. She seems to be hungrier so it seems like she might want to eat something!
Today I had the sudden idea to try feeding her some coconut milk, I thought the texture would be perfect. She absolutely loved it! I've been trying to find out whether this is a good baby food (I can't think why not) and all I could really find was that coconut jelly from young coconuts is the first solid food given to Thai babies. So I'll watch and see how she reacts to it, but so far so good.
I think I will try the soft boiled egg yolk next, something none of my other babies really cared for. I also hope to make some homemade chicken broth and soup and try pureeing that for her, perhaps she'll be more interested in real hearty food like that, especially if she takes after me. Oh, and I'm going to get a little more adventurous than I generally have been and try to pick up some grass fed chicken and/or beef liver at the farmer's market within the next week.
Here is a good link on learning more about the many health benefits of coconut. If anyone out there has more information on feeding babies coconut, I'd love to hear it, thanks!
Still, information on good starter foods for babies is somewhat difficult to come by. There is a very small section in Nourishing Traditions, and they have some helpful articles on their website http://www.westonaprice.com/. I don't think it should be complicated and there's certainly no need for bottled and prepackaged baby foods.
My youngest son loved mashed bananas and sweet potatoes with lots of butter or coconut oil and sometimes cinnamon. What could be easier than mashing up a banana with a fork? He loved to have a bowl of homemade chicken soup (drained a bit) and pick through it with his fingers (I often kept broth or gravy aside to mash with his veggies later as well) . He ate tons of yogurt and berries or raw cheese pieces, and loved black olives. Basically he ate what we ate modified a little for his convenience or age if necessary, and there really wasn't much he wouldn't eat! And he had a crazy big appetite, still does.
My youngest is 7 months old today and up until today, not particularly interested in any foods I've offered. I've tried banana several times, sweet potato pureed with butter, and cooked apple. While she accepted the food she made many faces and gagged over and over. I think she still swallowed some but it didn't appear she particularly enjoyed eating it. I haven't been really persistent, just trying every few days to see if she's ready. She seems to be hungrier so it seems like she might want to eat something!
Today I had the sudden idea to try feeding her some coconut milk, I thought the texture would be perfect. She absolutely loved it! I've been trying to find out whether this is a good baby food (I can't think why not) and all I could really find was that coconut jelly from young coconuts is the first solid food given to Thai babies. So I'll watch and see how she reacts to it, but so far so good.
I think I will try the soft boiled egg yolk next, something none of my other babies really cared for. I also hope to make some homemade chicken broth and soup and try pureeing that for her, perhaps she'll be more interested in real hearty food like that, especially if she takes after me. Oh, and I'm going to get a little more adventurous than I generally have been and try to pick up some grass fed chicken and/or beef liver at the farmer's market within the next week.
Here is a good link on learning more about the many health benefits of coconut. If anyone out there has more information on feeding babies coconut, I'd love to hear it, thanks!
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Real Bread vs. Fake
Just put my sourdough starter in a nice big jar, so should be whipping up some loaves of sourdough spelt bread in...9 days? Can't wait to try it again. My one and only attempt at sourdough a few years ago didn't impress me much. It was ok, but nothing to be excited about. I didn't realize that the flavours and techniques take time to develop and I think now that I"m older and wiser I'm ready to try again. While gluten free has many benefits and some people are forced down that road whether they like it or not, I'm honestly not willing to give up bread. I would be if I thought I should, but I don't seem to have a problem with properly prepared breads in moderation.
What I am going to give up is flashy new versions of wheat that pale in comparison with older varieties in terms of nutritional value. And I'm on board with soaking and fermenting flours properly. I've pretty much totally replaced whole wheat with spelt, and I love to mix in other gluten free flours in my other baking (such as coconut flour or buckwheat, sometimes oat flour) as well as do a fair amount of gluten free baking. I just think wheat and gluten are eaten so disproportionately that I want my kids to have a fighting chance, they'll be faced with all sorts of gluten and cheap wheat horrors every time they step out the door of home.
I'm using the sourdough recipe I've found in my new cookbook "Forgotten Skills of Cooking" by Darina Allen and love the little into to the bread section "What's Happened to Our Daily Bread?" She talks about how up until about 1960 bakers made bread in traditional ways which took 5 hours or longer, and used traditional ingredients. But as food became industrialized new methods (such as CBP, ADD, and the Do-maker process) that saved time and money but never bothered to take nutrition into account became widespread. The typical bread you pick up at the grocery store takes less than 2 hours from start to finish, and the wheat used is far inferior to traditional varieties. Many of the other ingredients used are not even food, and may or may not find their way onto the label.
She says: "During the last 50 years the sales of bread have plummeted and the number of people with wheat allergies and full-blown celiac disease has skyrocketed. Once the CBP was universally adopted all research was dedicated to producing varieties of short-stem wheat, strains of yeast and additives to facilitate this fast production method. Nourishment just simply wasn't a factor. Advances in functional properties of wheat have come at the expense of nutritional quality. Several research projects have shown that modern wheat varieties have less than half the mineral and trace element content of traditional wheat varieties."
These are things worth looking into, especially if you have children who love bread, any kind of bread. I know that if packaged white bread is anywhere around, my kids dive into it like candy, which is about how nutritionally valuable it is. In fact, some natural candies would be better. I don't keep that stuff in the house, though it does occasionally find it's way here through other people. I tend to toss it if it makes an appearance, hopefully before the kids find it! My oldest son loves anything that resembles bread, which is good and bad. On the one hand he can't resist the saltines at nanny's, but on the other he'll even eat my soaked spelt hockey puck biscuits (which I won't be making again any time soon LOL).
We are blessed, as I've mentioned before, to have a great source of real bread at our local farmer's market. A traditional German bakery that uses whole grains and no yeast, only real sourdough methods. The spelt bread I get there, and sometimes other varieties, is amazing and has good shelf life for fresh bread as well. Lately I've taken to frying a slice in bacon fat and OH MY GOODNESS, its soooooo good! The other day I fried a slice and topped it with fresh tomato slices and grated raw Gouda and broiled it for a minute, mmmmm. But I still just have to make my own bread! It's a part of my heritage, though the homemade bread I remember was always white...if I could look back a little further I'm sure I'd find sourdough...
What I am going to give up is flashy new versions of wheat that pale in comparison with older varieties in terms of nutritional value. And I'm on board with soaking and fermenting flours properly. I've pretty much totally replaced whole wheat with spelt, and I love to mix in other gluten free flours in my other baking (such as coconut flour or buckwheat, sometimes oat flour) as well as do a fair amount of gluten free baking. I just think wheat and gluten are eaten so disproportionately that I want my kids to have a fighting chance, they'll be faced with all sorts of gluten and cheap wheat horrors every time they step out the door of home.
I'm using the sourdough recipe I've found in my new cookbook "Forgotten Skills of Cooking" by Darina Allen and love the little into to the bread section "What's Happened to Our Daily Bread?" She talks about how up until about 1960 bakers made bread in traditional ways which took 5 hours or longer, and used traditional ingredients. But as food became industrialized new methods (such as CBP, ADD, and the Do-maker process) that saved time and money but never bothered to take nutrition into account became widespread. The typical bread you pick up at the grocery store takes less than 2 hours from start to finish, and the wheat used is far inferior to traditional varieties. Many of the other ingredients used are not even food, and may or may not find their way onto the label.
She says: "During the last 50 years the sales of bread have plummeted and the number of people with wheat allergies and full-blown celiac disease has skyrocketed. Once the CBP was universally adopted all research was dedicated to producing varieties of short-stem wheat, strains of yeast and additives to facilitate this fast production method. Nourishment just simply wasn't a factor. Advances in functional properties of wheat have come at the expense of nutritional quality. Several research projects have shown that modern wheat varieties have less than half the mineral and trace element content of traditional wheat varieties."
These are things worth looking into, especially if you have children who love bread, any kind of bread. I know that if packaged white bread is anywhere around, my kids dive into it like candy, which is about how nutritionally valuable it is. In fact, some natural candies would be better. I don't keep that stuff in the house, though it does occasionally find it's way here through other people. I tend to toss it if it makes an appearance, hopefully before the kids find it! My oldest son loves anything that resembles bread, which is good and bad. On the one hand he can't resist the saltines at nanny's, but on the other he'll even eat my soaked spelt hockey puck biscuits (which I won't be making again any time soon LOL).
We are blessed, as I've mentioned before, to have a great source of real bread at our local farmer's market. A traditional German bakery that uses whole grains and no yeast, only real sourdough methods. The spelt bread I get there, and sometimes other varieties, is amazing and has good shelf life for fresh bread as well. Lately I've taken to frying a slice in bacon fat and OH MY GOODNESS, its soooooo good! The other day I fried a slice and topped it with fresh tomato slices and grated raw Gouda and broiled it for a minute, mmmmm. But I still just have to make my own bread! It's a part of my heritage, though the homemade bread I remember was always white...if I could look back a little further I'm sure I'd find sourdough...
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