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This is a fabulous book with fabulous photos! I love beautiful books! But really, the information in this book is great, too. You can see why blueberries are so good for us, and what are the best fats to eat, and so much more. The thing I love most, is that Jonny Bowden is promoting whole food. Remember–If God created it, it is healthy; if man has adulterated it, it is not.
I am making homemade buttermilk this week from my raw milk. I let my starter go, so I’m starting over from scratch. I like to keep buttermilk on hand for pancakes, biscuits, etc. Plus it’s a great way to keep from wasting my raw milk. Once it’s cultured, it lasts a long time in the fridge.
You can use store-bought buttermilk as a starter, but I found that it only works well for a handful of times. When I start it from scratch myself, it lasts longer (the culture, that is).
Click on this link to see just how easy it is to make buttermilk at home.
If you need more information, check out this link.
Also, you can use this same method to make sour cream. Once you have a starter, either store-bought or homemade, use it to culture your raw cream. If you want it ultra-thick, you can strain some of the whey out (I use a coffee filter, basket-style).
The benefit of both these products, is that they are live foods, without any added junk. They contain necessary probiotics, and even if you are using the buttermilk to bake with, there is evidence that dead probiotics still benefit us (the heat will kill the probiotics)!
Other articles on live foods that you may enjoy:
I am going to start a series called Why? In it I will select a few things I do/supplements I take/food I eat and explain why.
While I was mulling over things to include in this series, I ran across this post on Cheeseslave – Top Ten Reasons to Drink Raw Milk. This post is wonderful! It includes all the reasons why I love raw milk. I love all the Powerpoint slides, especially the one regarding food-borne illnesses. Thank you, Ann Marie, for putting this together!
Since I asked you all to tell what babysteps you have taken, I thought you would want to know what I have changed.
Before I go into my changes, I will show you where I came from. Let me take you back to the beginning. I was raised on homemade whole wheat bread. All our pasta was whole wheat. We had to take cod liver oil and blackstrap molasses. We ate a lot of wild fish and game—trout, salmon, halibut, caribou, and moose. We had plenty of treats, they were just all sweetened with honey. There was never a box mix or canned item to be found in the house. Everything was made from scratch, from the pudding to the pies to the Thanksgiving dinners. We ate plenty of butter and cream.
We ate plenty of everything. I don’t remember moderation being taught in our home. I guess the thinking was that most of what we ate was healthy, so what was the reason to limit it. We were a family with high metabolisms. The limiting only came when the cost was high. We were a family of six and would occasionally go out to Burger King. We would share a couple orders of fries and all get waters. At Christmas time we would get a carton of egg nog and each get a small glass. I think it was just this combination that resulted in some over indulgence on my part once I reached adulthood. I remember when I was first married, I bought a carton of egg nog all for myself and then made myself sick because I drank too much of it. I admit that this is still a weak area for me, overeating. I am blessed with high metabolism still, but it’s not as high as it was in high school. J
When I was about 9 or 10, my younger sister and brother were found to be allergic to dairy products, so the whole family went on soy. We had soy milk in the house for the next 10 years or so. I never liked it too much so I remember choosing to do without whenever milk was called for. We had tofu and plenty of other soy products, as well.
Once I reached my teenage years I was embarrassed when friends would come over and all our food was weird. Whenever I was away from home, I would seek out the “good” food every chance I got. I would bring my lunch to school every day and throw it in the trash because I was so embarrassed. Years later I found out my sister did the same thing! I went to a small private Christian school with no cafeteria so I would just eat whatever the vending machine had to offer for lunch, a candy bar and can of pop or a bag of microwave popcorn. We weren’t allowed to leave the campus, but sometimes we would anyway, then I would get fast food for lunch. Little Caesar’s was a favorite, being right across the street from school. Loved that Crazy Bread!
I started cooking at nine years old. My mother was often gone, being a midwife. She called one day and told me to make some meatloaf for dinner. She told me to write down all the ingredients, dump them into a bowl and mix with my hands. Then throw it in a pan and bake. I kept that “recipe” that I had written down for years and years. I guess that was the beginning of my recipe collection. It now includes many years worth of cooking magazines, many cookbooks, and various clippings and printouts. Anyway, I did a lot of cooking for the family while living at home. Most of the things I learned to cook were from either watching my mom or just having to do it. This is why it is second nature for me to make everything from scratch.
Enter my husband. When I met him, he subsisted on KoolAid, soda, pizza rolls, ramen noodles, Kraft macaroni and cheese, and Little Debbies. When we got married I started trying out foods I had never had before. I worked fulltime so I wanted things that were convenient. We tried some Hamburger Helper and I can remember regularly making chicken and rice—the dish that calls for a can of Cream of Mushroom Soup. One of our favorites was a store-bought angel food cake with strawberries (with that strawberry sauce you buy in the tub) and Cool Whip. I made things from scratch at first, but slowly slipped into buying more and more packaged food items, like spaghetti sauce, granola bars, Yoplait yogurt, instant oatmeal, frozen fries, etc. I EVEN started buying Crisco for cookies and pie crust!!!!
To be continued…
For those just joining us, please read my article entitled, My Motto, it explains my philosophy of eating a whole food diet. So, what is whole food anyway? It is simply food in its whole state, the way God created it. It is when man starts messing with it that it loses its nutritional value. With this in mind, you might be wondering what there is to snack on. I don’t reach for a bag of chips because the oil used is highly processed, and that will be detailed in next week’s article. Neither do I reach for granola bars, pretzels, or snack mixes, these are all far from whole foods (see the Ladder of Healthy Eating). We just can’t trust packages that tell us their contents are “All Natural”. See last week’s article for more information.
Just because you’re avoiding packaged food doesn’t mean meals and snacks have to be complicated. I cook dinner most nights, but I grab “fast food” for lunch. By this I mean things like nuts and raisins, apple, peanut butter and a glass of raw milk, veggies and dip (homemade, see below), tomato slices sprinkled with salt and pepper, homemade pickles or sauerkraut (the store variety are processed), pumpkin seeds, and most days some cheese (I like the raw Cheddar I get from my local dairy).
Pumpkin Seeds
Jonny Bowden put pumpkin seeds on his list of The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth. This book is not only beautiful, but also full of reliable information. Jonny Bowden is one to look past flawed studies and bring us the truth about nutrition.
I used the recipe out of Nourishing Traditions that calls for soaking the pumpkin seeds (hulled, also called raw pepitas) in salt water for at least 7 hours, I did mine probably 24 on accident, but that’s okay.
2 cups pumpkin seeds
1 tablespoon sea salt, dissolved in filtered water
Then you dehydrate them in a low oven (150°F) for 12 hours. You’re aim is not to roast the seeds; you need the temperature to be low enough not to kill the enzymes. I would imagine that a dehydrator would work great for this. I put mine in the oven and after a few hours decided I would rather roast them since it was 105°F outside! So I turned the temp up for about 30 minutes, until they were browned. I obviously killed the enzymes, but they taste great! I will try the traditional method when it’s nice and cool outside. These are easy to get hooked on!
I will add a disclaimer for those that have any sort of digestive issues (such as colitis). You will want to stay away from seeds and grains because they aggravate the condition. Instead you need healthy fats and probiotics (in the form of supplements and food, like yogurt, homemade sauerkraut, pickles, and more) to heal the gut. After the gut is healed, foods like grain and seeds can be added back into the diet. Also, please check out Gut & Psychology Syndrome by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride.
Veggie Dip
Don’t buy dip at the store that has all sorts of additives and thickening agents. This dip is so easy to make, so delicious, and good for you. My kids eat more veggies now that I let them have unlimited dip. This is great with all kinds of raw veggies.
I have measurements here for one serving, because I usually just make that much for lunch, but it could easily be doubled or tripled for a larger amount. The key is to taste and adjust the seasonings to your liking. I don’t have exact measurements for the seasonings; I just shake and taste.
¼ cup sour cream (look at the ingredient listing and only buy the kind that lists cream and nothing else) (I like to culture my own from my raw cream)
dill weed (not seeds), to taste
garlic powder, to taste (I’ve tried raw garlic, but it was so overpowering it burns the mouthL)
salt, to taste – key ingredient, will be bland without
pepper, to taste (I like to use coarse ground)
Guacamole Dip
I like to dip celery sticks in this instead of chips.
1 avocado
ground cumin, to taste (1/4 to ½ tsp is what I use)
salt, to taste
couple squirts of lime juice
2 tablespoons sour cream, optional
I think our society thinks that being healthy is a balancing act, that there are a tiny set of scales in the body. They think that you keep these scales balanced by doing and eating healthy things, even though you eat unhealthy things also. Hey, I know none of us eat a perfect diet! If you eat something unhealthy, you just have to do a bit more exercise to burn it off. If you want that dessert, you better have a salad with your meal. If you drink some soda, you should have some water to balance it out. This thinking is wrong and if you stay with me, I will tell you why.
I have to think that this originated, in part, from our parents and grandparents saying, “You have to eat all your dinner if you want dessert!” Also, the exercise era has given people a little latitude with what they can afford to eat and stay trim (and staying trim, in our society, carries the appearance of health; not always true, folks).
The thing that we need to get into our heads is that it’s not all about fat, good or bad, or calories. I said it before and I will say it again, the food we eat affects us on a cellular level. I will show two prime examples here, although there are more. First let’s talk about trans fat, it’s not just a bad fat that will clog your arteries and cause heart problems (if that isn’t bad enough), it will actually become a part of your very cells! Every cell in your body has a cell wall, made primarily of fat. When you ingest trans fatty acids, they become part of that cell wall. For nursing mothers, trans fat replaces some of the healthy, vital fat that your baby needs, so the baby’s cell walls are also being made up of trans fat!
According to Tom Valentine, author of Facts on Fats and Oils1, “When this man-made molecule of fatty acid, called trans fatty acid, gets into cell membrane construction our cells cannot function optimally – we cannot ward off viruses as well”, and, “this degeneration of the cell membrane is cumulative as we continue to eat these trans fats every day – it doesn’t improve over time, or simply vanish, it slowly gets worse and worse.”
My second example is sugar – it’s not just extra calories, it will rob your body of minerals, weaken your immune system, put you on the insulin roller coaster (which we talked about before), stress and fatigue your adrenal glands, and feed harmful yeast and bacteria in your digestive system (causing a host of problems that I will talk about later). These are not things you can jog off! This is why you won’t hear me talk about calories here. It is all about WHAT we are eating, not necessarily HOW MUCH.
I was talking to my husband about this the other night and he always comes up with the best analogies. He said, “How does your car do if you add some water in with the gasoline?” We all know, it’s won’t run well at all, even if there is just a LITTLE bit of water added. Our bodies are the same, a little bit of bad is still bad and our bodies won’t run optimally on food that man has adulterated. My point is not to convince you into changing eating habits by making you feel guilty, but rather, I don’t want you to be deceived. I want you to be well informed and make informed choices!
I’m asking you to renew your mind in this area, make a paradigm shift. Just because exercise doesn’t counteract these junk food woes, doesn’t mean we stop exercising. It means we work on cutting out the junk food. Your sole source of trans fats is packaged food. Don’t buy margarine or ANY butter substitute (if it’s not butter, it was made by man), don’t use shortening in your baking, don’t buy pre-made pie crust – make your own with butter. Practically every peanut butter on the store shelf2 contains trans fat; unfortunately you can’t trust the labels to give you full disclosure. Look for PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED OIL on the ingredient listing, if it is there, DON’T buy the item. This is listed on so many foods that most of us don’t realize. When I mention trans fats, most people say, “I don’t use margarine, I only use butter.” That is FANTASTIC, but trans fats are in peanut butter, chips, crackers, graham crackers, pre-made pie crusts, all canned dough, like crescent roll dough and pizza crust; cookies, snack cakes, candy, candy bars, some breads, frozen French fries, fish sticks, pizza, chicken nuggets, burritos, pot pies, cake mixes, Bisquick, canned frosting, and flour tortillas to name a few. This is one of the reasons why these items ended up on the bottom rung above fast food on my ladder.
I think I’ve hammered away at the trans fat issue, let’s get back to sugar. We can drastically limit our sugar intake by cutting out packaged food, also. Trans fat is an item you don’t ever want, but sugar is something I know we will all eat from time to time. A good friend of mine uses a word that fits well here – deliberate. We must be deliberate in everything, raising our children, spending money, even how we eat. I will deliberately eat a dessert now and then, but I try VERY hard NOT to allow sugar into my diet that I don’t deliberately want! The two ways we are deceived into unknowingly eating sugar are through deceptive marketing and ignorance. Many foods are marketed as healthy, but contain lots of sugar, such as breakfast cereals, sweetened yogurt, granola bars, fruit snacks (these are just candy, folks), fruit roll-ups, many juices, smoothies, and vitamin waters. This is where those imaginary tiny scales come in again. I think most people are aware that these foods contain sugar, but they believe the vitamins, whole grain fiber, or beneficial bacteria in that item balance it out. I will say it again – we must shift our thinking away from this balancing act. Remember the car running with water in the tank. Now for ignorance, there are a lot of items that contain sugar as a flavor enhancer, but are not dessert, so we don’t really think we are eating sugar. Things we all use, like ketchup, salad dressing, pickles, dip, Miracle Whip, salsa, and more. This is where label reading will help you out. Sugar is easy to pick out of ingredient listings, but also be aware of sugar’s other names – high fructose corn syrup and anything ending in –ose, dextrose, glucose, sucrose, etc.
So be informed, be deliberate, do what you can do and don’t fool yourself into thinking that you can somehow balance the junk food with something like veggies or exercise. Take you babysteps and move toward the whole food that God created that fuels your body the most effectively!
1 Quoted from Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon
2 You can find natural peanut butter. I buy Smucker’s; it only contains peanuts and salt.
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