When Spouses Come On Board

My husband got his blood work back from the doctor's office today. The first year they had him on the statins after a stent was installed in one of the arteries near his heart, his numbers were going upwards. They advised him to become even stricter with his diet and avoid all fats. They also advised him gently to quit smoking.

During the second year I went to the Weston A. Price Foundation Conference in Philadelphia and came home to start cooking with lard, pastured meats, real butter and whole, raw milk and pastured eggs. He worried. He said his doctor was going to have a fit. I told him he needed to quit smoking and it was the poisons he was eating and breathing that was causing the problems and if he would at least give real food a try, he might see some improvement.

He did try to quit smoking. In fact, he put them down for a couple of months. But this addiction is very difficult to overcome. I believe that as he gets healthier in other ways, and fewer and fewer of his friends smoke (or they die off), he will eventually find a way to quit.

In the meantime, I've been feeding him real food. It's a battle sometimes to get ferments into him. He has always liked sauerkraut, he just had never eaten it raw before. He doesn't flinch when I put fermented purple cabbage in his salads and he's come to love fermented turnip topping his mashed potatoes along with a dollop of butter and real sour cream.

Getting him to eat the pastured meat was a little tricky because I had to teach him how to cook it. He does the cooking Monday through Thursday at our house because I work and he is retired.

But we are now eating liver weekly and he's decided that liver pate is even better than liverwurst as a sandwich spread, so leftovers for him extend further into the week.

I've been cutting down on the carbs as I'm trying to lose weight. I'm sort of one of those folks who move into a new concept slowly, cut down, and cut down and will finally quit. I'm close to quitting carbs now but he still loves his potatoes and bread with his meat. We will get there.

In October he has been eating WAP food for year. Not with complete faith. But his consumption of junk food has gone almost to zero. He still cheats and eats a candybar a couple of times a month, but that's way down from all the crap he used to eat.

Guess what? He got his quarterly blood work back yesterday. His LDL is 66, his Triglycerides are 89 and his HDL is 85!. This is way better than a year ago. The doctor is impressed and told him to keep doing whatever he is doing.

I asked him if he told the doctor what we are doing and he confessed he did not. Poor doctor thinks he's following some highly restrictive, no fat, cardboard diet. At some point, he will have to tell him the truth.

In any case, I'm thinking his body is starting to heal. Now to get him off the statins.

If he could quit smoking, I think a lot of the inflammation that is causing the arterial blockages would eventually heal as well, but he's just not ready. 

He admits that he likes the "new" traditional food. Much of the food we eat reminds him of the food his grandmother in the UK used to make. He said it also reminds him of pub lunches. He talks up the real foods whenever we are with friends, so I think he is eventually going to become a real advocate.

I wonder when I will get him to drink Kombucha?

Soy Free Party Food

Tis the season for parties. And my husband and I have actually been invited to a small gathering at the home of one of my co-workers. It's a bit of a potluck with each guest bringing an hors d'oeuvre, dip or some other nibble. He has warned me that when they were purchasing their party foods, they forgot about The Soy Thing."You might want to bring something that you know is safe for you," he said, "I don't know what others are bringing."

Now, I'm not a completely unreasonable person most of the time. At least, I hope not. With family and very close friends, I do expect a modicum of respect and caring and thus my rant over the Thanksgiving meal; but I do understand that The Soy Thing can be overwhelming and downright annoying for regular people. Our office luncheon this year is being catered at $12 a plate. I did inquire as to what was being served and just told my boss and the co-worker coordinating it that while my husband (who is a volunteer at my office) will have no problem with this meal, I'll pack my own. I even offered to pay for my plate to make the budget come out right. I think they were surprised, but did not argue with me over much about it. And they did not accept my offer to pay for something I can't eat.

But here is a co-worker I actually like and who actually likes me, inviting my husband and I over for a cup of cheer and a few nibbles. He was concerned enough to warn me and that is good enough for me.

So, what shall I bring?

I'm inclined to keep it simple and go for a tray of peeled shrimp with a cocktail sauce made from fermented catsup (see page 104 in Nurturing Traditions). Note: I think she spells catsup incorrectly, but I could be the one incorrect on this.

I have some thinly sliced Wild Alaskan Salmon in my freezer. I hope to try this recipe in the future to make my own lox. I'm going to pull out a package of that and let it thaw. Then I'll take some of my yogurt cream cheese (ironically, the stuff left over from making whey) (page 87 in Nurturing Traditions), mix it with some capers, minced organic green onion and a little garlic and cumin, salt and paper. This mix will be smeared over the salmon. The salmon gets rolled up and then sliced into "wafers" or "pin wheels" and served with a little chopped parsley from my garden sprinkled over it. Red, green and white: I can't get more into the holiday spirit than that!

If I can get a good deal when I go to the fish market for the shrimp, I may also pick up a pint of fresh, local oysters and then swing by the store and get some Smithfield Bacon. Now, I do know that Smithfield is generally associated with the very evil people of big ag, and bacon with nitrates is not something I normally consume. But bacon wrapped oysters baked and sprinkled with a tiny bit of Old Bay, is just a stunningly decadent treat once a year.

It's kind of like Christmas cookies. I'm still trying to get my brain wrapped about how I will handle that dietary disaster. The Chocolate Cherry Truffles I shared here, are one idea. And I like the Sugar Plum recipe I snagged from Nourished Kitchen. I'm pretty sure I can adapt Snickerdoodles to a sprouted wheat and real butter and use organic sugars. But what is the NT answer to the white flour, white sugar, rolled and cookie cutter with colored icing? I mean, these things are memory makers for our family and my boys still talk about decorating cookies with me every year. I want a couple of cookies that I will be able to make with my future grand children that will hold the same magic for them.

Any ideas?

The Tupperware Dilemma

When I attended the Weston A. Price Foundation Conference last year in Philadelphia, I was absolutely overwhelmed with information. I knew I could not change everything in my kitchen overnight. I didn't have the money. But over the last year, I've made quite a few changes as I learned more and figured out more.

Now, I'm thinking about food storage more and more. Most of the stuff I make in large batches is stored in glass jars. My husband is amazed at how many jars I've managed to accumulate. There are rows and rows of glass jars in my pantry and there are a bunch of them in my deep freezer as well. And many things are stored in glass in the refrigerator as well.

But, I've not yet gotten rid of all of my plastic ware.

I pack my own lunch each day before I head off to work. I've even started packing on days I have court (my job involves testifying in court once or twice a week). It was a treat for me to eat in a restaurant on a court day, but I noticed that two to three days later, my face would break out and my gut would become unhappy again. When I miraculously went a whole month without a court day (and thus, no restaurant food), I had a whole month with no skin breakouts or bowel issues. Hmmm.

But back to the plastic packaging. Putting liquids like raw milk or kombucha into pint jars makes sense. But what do I do about the meat, fermented veggies and fruit? Too many jars in a lunch box makes for a very heavy lunch box and one that makes loud clanking noises! So, I have been using small plastic ware containers to carry my food to work.

I'm not a scientist but I'm concerned that some of the acids in my food, even without heating, are causing some of the plastics to leach into my food. Not good. We do have a good set up at work now with a two burner electric stove top and a toaster oven, a full sized refrigerator. My co-workers use the microwave a lot but I avoid it. I brought in a stainless steel sauce pan and a small stainless steel tray for the toaster oven.

But now, I'm looking for a way to transport and store my lunch that is affordable and not overly heavy. I'm going to experiment with some waxed paper and keep an eye out for stainless steel containers.

If anyone can recommend something let me know.

Clutter, Chaos and Creativity

I live in an older home. It was built around 1910. I should say it was assembled because according to what we have been able to figure out since moving in over 20 years ago, the original structure had two rooms up and two rooms down. It has a front porch across the front of the house. It was a cute, tiny house. There was no indoor plumbing and the staircase was in the middle of the house. Not long after that, an additional two rooms were added at the back of the house. The rooms were stacked one above the over and a porch was added to the side. We think these rooms came along as this young farming family grew.

Then, a shed from another, older home, that had burned down, was loaded up on skids and dragged over. It was attached to the main house via the side porch. A third porch was added to the back of the house. It had a concrete floor like the other two porches. This shed was turned into the summer kitchen.

When I moved here in August of 1989, there was no front door. A pieced of plywood covered the entrance. There were pieces of an wood cook stove scattered about the summer kitchen, but there was not enough left of it to re-assemble it and make something that worked. At some point in the 1960s someone had installed a bathroom under the stairs which had been moved to one side of the house. The two back porches had been enclosed and the supporting wall had been removed. The roof had started to sag at that point and other than putting in front door, we immediately re-enforced the foundation and put in a pole to get the ceiling back into place.

Over the course of the last 20 years, we have ripped out cloth wiring, installed new plumbing, torn out rotten plaster, repaired termite damage, rebuilt part of the foundation, replaced all 42 windows and put on vinyl siding, enclosed half of the front porch and repaired the rest. We repaired the 75 year tin roof as best we could because we could not afford to replace it. The back porch became our laundry room. We have one room left to paint and that is the master bedroom. The whole house needs to be repainted and some of the floors we laid down need to be replaced (we used the cheap linoleum at the time and it's now wearing out).

This house has been a lot of work. I love that we can now open all the windows and let the prevailing breeze through and, except when temperatures exceed 90 with high humidity, the house stays pretty cool.

I also love my kitchen. Nothing is built in. All of the cabinets and counters and tables and appliances can be removed. The only fixture is the sink and I kept the giant ceramic sink that came with the house. I have my eye on a new kitchen faucet, but that is on my wish list. The water heater is in the kitchen. It was there when I moved in. Anticipating that it would probably die not long after we moved in, as it is probably older than I am (50+), we installed pipe to the laundry room and put a cap on the end. It's still doing a nice job of heating our water and as a result, I still do laundry with cold water. But eventually, it will die and we will install a new, energy efficient model in the laundry room and run the hot water from there to the rest of the house.

But back to the kitchen. Here is my kitchen table. When the boys were home, it sat squarely in the middle of the room and we all sat around it for meals. After the boys moved out on their own, I re-oriented the thing and now use it as extra counter space. 

So what is all that stuff? Under the table is my stock pot and 60 pound bucket of honey. On top is a batch of sour dough starter, some butter, kefir, a bowl of mixed crispy nuts with organic raisins, a bunch of parsley from my garden, some local honey with the comb in, the large glass jar has a little bit of sprouted and freshly ground rye flour. The paper bag contains a partly eaten loaf of sourdough rye bread. On that table is also a jar of Kumbucha and a jar of some fermenting veggies.

My husband thinks my kitchen is in constant chaos. I prefer to think of it as a catalyst for creativity.

Feasting with Non-Believers

I'm not talking about the religious issues that sometimes happen in large, extended families like mine, but the food issues. We are a family of five kids with six grandkids. Four of us were in town for the holiday. Mom and Dad were not up to traveling and opted not to join us this year.

Let me give you a rundown of the various challenges we face as a small clan eating together.:

I'm allergic to soy. I'm also very overweight unlike the rest of my family, most of whom are rather thin. I also battle depression from time to time. One son is allergic to lemons. Another son of mine is allergic to nuts (all nuts both peanut and tree nut). For a while I blamed myself for their problems, but I've come to realize that when they were little, all I knew was the craziness spouted by the government. We ate low fat everything and super processed everything. I got fat, and we all developed allergies and gut problems. The boys have moved away from home and as young men who work at Pizza Hut for a living, their diets, quite frankly, are a little frightening. I send them real food from time to time. I'm giving them both a two pound block of butter for Christmas along with pastured pork, beef, and eggs and maybe a couple of pastured chickens. My husband developed several blockages in his heart veins years before we met. Just after we were married, a stent was installed and he was put on statins. I will talk about his medical adventures following his start on WAP in future entries.

My baby sister's daughter is on the GAPS diet to help address her autism (she was adopted at 6 months old from the former Soviet Union and arrived with digestive problems) and to help her daughter along, she has put her whole family on a modified Gaps diet. This is sister is very thin, as is her son. Her husband and daughter were struggling with weight until they went on GAPS and they each lost a lot of weight and her daughter grew several inches.Her husband has also struggled with depression.

My sister-in-law, the Food Nazi, has a lifelong allergy to corn and is a longtime follower of Weight Watchers so most of her food is soy based. She also works in the food industry and will not eat anything that is preserved in cans at home or fermented unless it was done in commercial building. She is thin. Her daughters are all thin. My brother battles his weight constantly but she claims it is because he "cheats" and eats junk when he is working. He was very thin when he was younger. We call her the Food Nazi, because she cleans everything, including her hands and some foods with bleach water. She's freaky about it.

My other brother is married to a native of China. He suffered from terrible gut problems his whole life and was painfully thin. He married late in life but I believe she saved his life. She began feeding him fermented foods, took him off of all dairy products and they eat made-from-scratch soup every single day (sometimes a couple of times a day). She feeds him no bread at all. I'm thinking she has got him on something as close to GAPS as possible without a handbook. He reports he has no more problems with his guts except when he eats an occasional pizza, so they are avoiding that as much as possible (I'm thinking he has Celiac's Disease). She is an excellent cook and it's fun to look into her cupboards as everything is labeled in Chinese and she has lots of mysterious and wonderful mushrooms, dried vegetables and other goodies in there. Her refrigerator is filled with fresh vegetables and her table is decorated with a variety of fresh fruits like clementines, pineapples and bartlett pears. I was deeply impressed to find that she has a couple of little Buddha statues each of whom had a perfect, fresh apple and a pretty stone bead bracelet nearby.

Middle sister lives in Colorado and did not make it out this year.

This year, despite everyone knowing everyone's allergies, there was a lot of food that was not consumed. The Food Nazi put margarine in everything she cooked and even put lemon in the sweet potatoes. She prepared the gravy, sweet potatoes and the stuffing. She will not let us stuff the turkey itself because she is an FDA food freak and believes we will all die of salmonella poisoning if we eat a turkey with stuffing in it. He daughter prepared the pies and while they got rave reviews, I could not eat them due to the crust being prepared iwth margarine.

I fixed the green bean casserole using scratch mushroom gravy which started with a beef bone broth, organic green beans and onion rings fried in pastured pig leaf lard. It was completely gluten free as well because I used tapioca flour for the thickeners and the onion breading. I also made deviled eggs using mayonaise I made using a good quality olive oil and pastured eggs. I did use store bought capers as part of the stuffing. I also made a pickle tray with gluten free crackers, homemade yogurt cheese from raw milk, a variety of ferments and homemade pickles both sour and bread and butter pickles. I also made a liver pate.

My sister with the Gaps family, brought a lovely salad, a fruit salad with coconut and put the chopped pecan crispy nuts on the side (thank you!). She also brought gluten free rolls she made. They were good but contained nuts, so one son could not eat them.

The turkey was prepared by my brother and his wife. She is from China and so this whole Thanksgiving thing is quite amazing to her. They did a great job with this large bird and everyone enjoyed it. Food Nazi managed to make the carcass disappear into the trash before Gaps mom or I could get to it and so all that wonderful boney goodness was lost.

I suggested to Gaps mom that next year I will host and she and I will prepared everything. Food Nazi can bring her own food if she wants, but the rest of us need something to eat that is safe.

Shocking!

Just over a year ago, my dear friend, Angel talked me and another mutual friend into attending the Weston A. Price Conference in Philadelphia, PA. Angel is one of those people you never have time to visit with because she is constantly on the go and the opportunity to actually spend a few days with her, was more than tempting. She initially paid my way and so I really had nothing to lose. By the end of the four days, I had paid her back and we were laying plans to create some sort of scholarship fund for less financially able but deserving participants in our goal to recover our health from big agriculture, the government, and big business.

In the year since, I have to a much greater understanding of the difficulty of this undertaking but have noted significant improvements in various areas of my health. I also recognize I still have a long way to go before I actually reach my goals. But I am far more optimistic about getting there now.

One of the greatest challenges is rather ironic in that while I live in the country and should therefore have greater access to healthy food, finding it continues to be a challenge. But each goal reached is putting me in touch with opportunities to reach for the next goal.

I left Philly with several goals:

1. Find a local, affordable source for raw milk.
2. Find a local, affordable source of pastured beef.
3. Figure out a way to get pastured chickens, and lamb, and eggs.
4. Find a source for local, organic vegetables and fruit that were affordable.

I also wanted to find a way to raise my own milk cow, chickens and beef.

I have not met all of these goals. But I have reached some and am closing in on others. I have learned new ways of cooking and eating that seem to fly in the face of conventional medicine and mainstream opinion. And I've done it without a single sick day! Not one.

This blog is going to be about this adventure and the folks I've managed to drag along with me.