I promise to update my blog!

I have been a little busy with a few projects (one of them pictured below)! But rest assured, we are still eating whole foods, cooking at home and I am still taking notes and pictures! So look for an update soon!

I am Baaaaaaacccckkkk!

Hello All! I am back after a week long trip that took me to Idaho to visit my lovely Mother in Law and then on to Seattle, WA to visit my Sister in Law and her husband and boys. It was a great trip and I am pleased to report that I only ate out 4 (four) times!! That was once in the airport between Denver and Boise, twice in Boise and once in Seattle. Not tooo bad!
I visited an awesome Co-Op in Boise! http://www.boisecoop.com/ I loved it! If we had a super nice Co-Op like that close to us - it would be on! Yes, we do have Whole Foods in Nashville, but there is so much to be said about clever Co-Op. In Seattle - well you couldn't swing a cat without hitting a natural foods, whole foods, co-op or organic store! It was awesome! I shopped at a PCC Natural Market and it was a great experience too! http://www.pccnaturalmarkets.com/ The folks at these stores are super nice and so are the customers!
I have been reading more in Nina Planck's Book - Real Food http://www.ninaplanck.com/books.html I am learning so much about why margarine is so bad (trans fat) and why real fats (beef, coconut, olive oil) are so good for you! I am truly enjoying our Whole Foods Journey thus far! Hopefully this week, I can get back into the kitchen and try some new recipes and get back to my yogurt and bread making. I did cook for my MIL and SIL this past week (which seemed to work for everyone) and I felt so much better than what I do when I normally travel! Hooray for home cooking!!

Local Meat Rocks!!

Have you ever taken a loooonnnngggg road trip and felt awful at the end? Imagine how much traveling your food does just to make it to your dinner table? How many folks have handle your chicken, vegetables, steaks, or fruits? Granted most of us wash our meats and veggies before we eat them - but they likely are kind of tired by the time they end up on fork!
I am not going to go into the horrors of chicken, beef or pork factory farms - you can look that up yourself. It really depends on who you want to believe and many folks end up vegetarians once they start really researching everything. But that's not my point - being a vegetarian or vegan has it's own issues and I am not a subject matter expert. I do know that meat is good for you though - it has tons of amino acids, fatty acids, and the good vitamins that our bodies and brains need. However, I really don't want to eat meat that has not been treated well, fed animal by products, hormones, antibiotics, and trucked thousands of miles. So, I have started buying my meat, eggs, milks, butter and chicken locally! It is more expensive? Yes, but so is eating out!
I purchased some sirloins from a vendor at the Clarksville Farmers Market one Saturday and they were awesome! More than what I would pay at the grocery store, but much better cooked on our grill! We loved Persimmon Creek Farms beef sooo much, that we ordered the family pack (pic above is of two NY strips from family pack) and have placed a deposit for a 1/4 of a steer cut in bulk! This should be enough beef to holds us for a year! Oh and did I mention that it was delicious?? Check them out at http://www.persimmoncreekfarms.com/

Red Fish, Blue Fish, Good Fish!

Are you a fish eater?? I never was growing up unless you want to count the square fish I ate in the cafeteria in elementary school, but even then I avoided it like the plague! But what if my parents would have fed this really picky eater wholesome, delicious fish - primarily salmon? Would my eyes be better? Would I be smarter? Would I have better overall health?
Research suggest the consumption of salmon, which contains omega-3 fatty acids, is an important part of our diet that we have strayed from in our evolution as homosapiens. So what are the benefits of omega-3's? It can decrease platelet aggregation, preventing excessive blood clotting. Reduce inflammation throughout your body. Lower the amount of lipids (fats such as "bad" cholesterol and triglycerides) circulating in the bloodstream. Reduce the risk of becoming obese and improve the body's ability to respond to insulin by stimulating the secretion of leptin, a hormone that helps regulate food intake, body weight and metabolism, and is expressed primarily by adipocytes (fat cells). So overall, omega-3's help reduce depression, help prevent heart disease, obesity, and type 2 diabetes!
So, why is this super food not flying onto our dinner tables and helping everyone's overall health? Because fish takes work! It's not cheap for a good piece of wild salmon (the kind that is best for us), it's not simple to cook (ie: the good stuff is not microwaved), and most Americans that do not eat fish are spoiled and picky. However, even I am learning to really love fish! I have purchased some frozen marinated salmon from Sam's Club before and while it's delicious, I am trying to lean towards whole un-preprocessed foods . So I purchased some salmon yesterday from the commissary that was caught from the wild, then I marinated it myself and pan grilled it. It was delicious! Matthew liked it and he is pretty picky himself about fish and fishy kind of dinners. Aidan loved it - she is a good eater and eats pretty much whatever I put on the table. And of course Thalia will benefit from it in so many ways! I think as apart of our whole foods lifestyle change, we are def going to be putting more fish into diets and other foods that are high in omega-3's. I sprinkle flax seed meal on our breakfast every morning and I do try to take a fish oil supplement - but it's also pretty cool to eat it at its source! It's a feel good brain food and I need all of that I can get!
So - give good delicious fish a try! It's how our ancestors grew such lovely, healthy, large functioning brains! Plus our brain is a large percent of fat and it needs good for you fats to continue to grow and work properly! So outsmart your body and enjoy some salmon!

Say CHEESE!!

Cheese is delicious!! I have had the benefit of living and visiting a few different countries in which cheese was an art form. The French know their cheese, as do the Italians, Germans, and Austrians just to name a few! Some of the best cheese I have tasted lately is not of commercial, industrial or foreign origin, but straight out of Kentucky!!
When I went up to JD Country Dairy in Russeville, KY at the first of the week, I purchased some cheese they had in their store. It was by Kenny's Farmhouse Cheeses and it's delicious! Even my sweet husband whose pallet is by far the pickiest, loves the Asiago. And yes we have had some of the best Asiago cheese in Asiago, Italy! It's not the exact same, but it's pretty darn good. (The fresh Asiago cheeses we had truly melted in your mouth and were divine!) We have also tried the aged white cheddar, garden herb Havarti, and aged Gouda.
One of the best things about Kenny's Farmhouse Cheeses is that it is made with fresh raw milk! From their site: "Because the milk is so fresh, pasteurizing is not necessary. The heat and the cheese-making process preserve naturally beneficial enzymes in the milk, aiding digestion of lactose and absorption of calcium. Just as important, raw milk cheese has a much richer depth of flavor. " http://www.kennysfarmhousecheese.com/
Why is cheese so good for you? It is full of calcium, proteins, vitamins, minerals and good fat (the kind that helps your cholesterol). Plus if you eat full fat cheese - real cheese not the stuff that is a single in a plastic envelope, it helps keep your appetite at bay. Plus, it also helps with bone health, dental health and hypertension! Just don't fall for that low fat or fat free cheese - it tends to lack the good stuff that helps you feel fuller and better. I know low fat and fat free is the "in thing", I have even fallen into it in the past as well. But sometimes you need to eat fat to lose fat - but that's a totally different post! Until next time....

We ate out today....

First off - "Happy World Breastfeeding Week" (insert bells and whistles here)!!! Take a moment to celebrate the most perfect and nutritionally complete baby food in the world! It comes in pre-measured, pre-warmed, pre-sterilized form with lots of great antibodies, amino acids, vitamins, Love and much more!
We were in Nashville today during lunch, so we decided to eat out. Sometimes it's just not feasible to take an entire meal on the go. We are not anti-eating out, but we used to spend about $150 a week in addition to groceries! That's a significant and embarrassing amount of money to spend on fast, sub-standard and not so good food.So for us eating out once a week or every other week is a huge change!
We do try to to make good choices when we do eat out - we love Panera Bread! They make a lot of of their own breads and it's pretty tasty. I do try to stay away from their soups - granted they are delicious, but they come in a bag and I am sure filled with preservatives! So, for Matthew it was a Chicken Cesare and myself a Sierra Turkey. It was yummy and I love their chippies - potatoes, sea salt and sunflower oil - nice and simple.
We have decided to start buying our beef locally through Persimmon Creek Farms out of Cunningham. They were at the Clarksville Farmers Market one Saturday and I purchased two of their sirloins - they were delicious! I grilled them slowly and they came out soooo tender. Granted they are not the cheapest meats in the world - but at least they are not trucked 1,500 miles to our table. Plus they do not use hormones, antibiotics or animal by-products in feed. They are grass and hay feed and supplemented with natural grains. I placed a family order with them for delivery on Thursday - I can't wait to get some delicious local beef!
Later, when I finish the book I am reading (Real Food by Nina Planck http://www.ninaplanck.com/books.html), I will highlight a few of her points regarding industrial/factory meats to include beef, pork and poultry - it may change your mind on what is really in your cart! Until next time....

Success!!

YAY! My second batch of yogurt came out pretty decent - not quite as thick as I would like, but awesome on muesli! I think I will leave it in for the full 10 hours instead of 9 and see if that thickens it up a little. Plus I know that I can strain it to make it thicker - but all of this will take more practice, trial and error. The above picture is my homemade yogurt on muesli and frozen blueberries - yum!!
My first batch of sprouted grain bread came out great! I didn't start it until later in the evening, so my sweet husband generously stayed up to get it out of the maker for me (while playing the xBox - LOL!) He brought up a piece with butter to me in bed and it was better than I thought it would be!! It's a heavier bread, more for eating with something not so much for sandwich, but delicious. I got the recipe from another blog http://cookeatthink.blogspot.com and here it is below:
ingredients::
1 cup sprouted grains (I used a mix which included organic wheat, rye, barley, triticale, oats, spelt, kamut, quinoa, sesame, millet and amaranth)
about 1 c milk (see note in directions*)
1/2 c + 3 Tbsp water (tweaked)
3 c whole wheat flour (I used 2 cups wheat and 1 cup oatmeal flour)
2 Tbsp organic brown sugar (can also use honey, agave, etc.)
2 Tbsp softened butter
1 Tbsp softened coconut oil (you could also just use more butter)
2 tsp salt
2 1/2 tsp yeast>>optional...2Tbsp vital wheat gluten
directions::
Blend sprouted grains in a food processor until they are a course meal. Measure 1 cup of the ground grains into a large cup measure. Leaving the grains in the cup, pour fresh room temp milk over the grains to the 1 cup mark* (This compensates for liquid present in fresh sprouted grains). Place this mix into the bread machine pan. Measure the 1/2 cup + 3 Tbsp room temp water and add that into the bread machine also. Add the rest of the ingredients into the machine pan in the order your bread machine recommends. Select the wheat cycle and light crust.
It turned out great!! I have another batch in the machine right now and I added the gluten and substituted 1 cup of whole wheat flour with buckwheat flour. I am hoping it will turn out nicely again. Last night's loaf "grew and popped" as Matthew said, so it's a little flat in the middle - see below (it is a half eaten loaf though). I am curious to see how this second loaf will turn out.
I used my dehydrated sprouted grains with this loaf and added some water to rehydrate them. Sounds a little redundant, but this way my sprouts will keep longer. One of us had to get up at 2 am to shut the dehydrator off since we were cheap and didn't order one with a shut off timer. So, we are going to get an appliance timer through Amazon for it. Having a dehydrator nice - it makes awesome beef jerky as well!
So - the bread was a WIN, the yogurt PASSED, the sprouts were a GO. Now, if I just had a bigger kitchen with even more storage I could get all kinds of things started - LOL! Until next time .....

First Time Yogurt Fail....

Well, I guess I didn't mix the starter grains correctly, because I am a first time yogurt making fail! No worries, when we went to the commissary today, I got some Greek Yogurt that I am using as a starter this time. If this one comes out good, I will share the recipe and process. I am not saying what I made was bad - but it wasn't as tasty as what I am used to.
You may be wondering what has brought me to start eating Whole/Real Foods at this stage in my life. I am tired of being physically tired and overweight because of my horrible diet. I am overweight - however, I gained a glorious amount of weight when I was pregnant with Thalia thinking I would drop all of it the day after I had her because I breastfeed. I think I lost 12 lbs and the rest has stayed on for a bit. I did go back to Weight Watchers for a couple of weeks - but I just can't really cope with the processed foods and low fat stuff that is recommended. But I knew our family was just not eating the best foods possible. So I started reading about whole/real foods eating. Thus far we feel so much better! We don't suffer from the indigestion as we did, we feel better, sleep better, have more energy and enjoy what we eat without feeling like crap afterward.
I am trying different things and I am enjoying the cooking! It does take a lot of time to cook/prepare three meals a day. I have a lovely sized kitchen, but right now, I wish I had a bigger one! The dishwasher is always running - that happens when you don't eat out and when you don't eat food from a box. Our grocery bill has doubled - but we are eating good foods and eating them all! I thought it would be boring eating the same stuff - but we don't really, we try to mix it up a bit and go from there. We feel more filled and satisfied and not always hungry and starving. There are so many benefits to changing what we eat and our lifestyle!
Well, I will add pics and more updates tomorrow. Right now I have a bread maker, yogurt maker and dehydrator going. I am dehydrating my sprouts (to make flour with later), making a loaf of sprouted grain bread, and giving my Greek yogurt another try. I have plenty of milk, so I can always try it again if this go is full of "fail sauce" again - LOL! Until next time!