Make 'em Bigger

Children's car seat manufacturer's have been told to make children's car seats stronger and bigger to accommodate for climbing rates of obesity in children.

"The changes are driven partly by the trend of children getting bigger over the past two decades, Transport Canada said. Experts blame shifting lifestyles, including high-calorie food consumption, more time spent in front of the computer or television, and mothers switching earlier to feeding their babies formula rather than breast milk.  

According to Statistics Canada, 26 per cent of children between the ages of 6 and 11 were overweight or obese in 2004, up from 13 per cent in 1978. Among two- to five-year-olds, 21 per cent were overweight or obese in both those periods."

Source: The Globe and Mail 

Know Thy Farmer

I don't know about you, but I'd rather not have one of this guy's offspring on my dinner plate. A recent winner at an agricultural fair, this blue ribbon bull is one mutated looking beast. Aside from any gene selection, we've got a whole lot of help from steroids and growth hormones going on here. I would love to know how old this beast is. You can bet one thing, he's been bred to get really big, really fast, on really cheap food. This is what's being rewarded in "farming" nowadays. Go big or go home, folks.

Sweet Mercy. How can anyone look at that animal above and be proud of what we're doing to our food? It's one thing for consumers to be disconnected from what's happening with our land, but when farmers succumb to the pressure to 'go big' in order to make a living, it breaks my heart. We need to support our small local farmers so we have local farmers to support.

By the way, if you're buying meat at the grocery store, organic or not, how do you know this frankensteinian bull isn't part of the menu? Perhaps not this guy in particular, but you might want to find out who your steak's daddy was. I showed this picture to some of my farmers who scoffed at such an abomination. What would your farmers think of him?

For comparison's sake, I'm including some pictures of blue ribbon winning bulls at agricultural fairs from the earlier part of our century. I wonder what those old, hat-wearing, suspender-flaunting farmers would think of Mr. Roid up there.

Caveman Fanaticism

Stampede.

I've noticed a growing feeling of unease coming over me as of late. My consumption of paleo blogs and information sources has waned. My antennae have been perked in the general direction of overzealousness in this paleo world and I don't like what I'm seeing.

I've heard Robb Wolf talk about his discomfort with the direction of turning a paleo way of approaching nutrition into a card carrying, cult like movement where we all sit around discussing whether or not something is or is not paleo. He mentioned his desire for us to continue to challenge and question what we learn. I'm completely on board with his insights.

I was a vegetarian many moons ago, then, when I started to face the consequences of my nutritionally inadequate diet, I did what any sane vegetarian would do, I restricted my food even more and became a vegan. You can probably guess how that turned out. I was a sick, sick girl. When I started to consume animal products again, they had to be from sources that I knew so I could ensure that the meat I was eating was raised ethically and on healthy pastures. From there, I learned about the Weston A. Price Foundation and started swirling around in those circles, but the grains and legumes didn't sit well with me so I moved on. In everything I've experienced, I've walked away with knowledge and confidence in my decisions. By not getting entrenched in an ironclad position, I've been able to increase my family's health and understanding of what it means to eat and live well.

No matter how I was eating, I noticed a trend for people to become fanatical about they ate and what they thought other people should eat. I don't like this inclination we humans have of falling into groups that can be labelled. Call me a nonconformist, but as soon as I hear collective voices espousing rules as doctrine, my back goes up. I seem to be sniffing this out a lot lately. Whether it's the vegetarians, vegans, macrobiotic followers, the Weston A. Price clan, and now the paleo/primal group, people tend to fall in line behind the label and stop thinking for themselves.  We find our clan and then blindly follow along, closing off our minds and ignoring our intuition. I don't know if it's because I'm getting older or just that I have enough life experience to know that I'm simply not willing to go that route no matter how much I may dig the philosophy.

These native prairie grasses are some of the less than 5% left in the world. This is where my farmers raise their animals. What are your animals raised on?

I'm starting to resist calling the way I eat "paleo" or "primal" simply because I think it gives people the wrong idea. I don't care for a snappy label and I don't care to create soundbites that can explain how I eat in one minute or less. First, I don't think people really care how I eat. For the few that are genuinely interested, I want to get across the importance of them finding good farmers that are producing food that was nourished on healthy soils, farmers who are striving to still produce food, not just commodities. To me, that's more important than chiming off the 'good' and 'evil' list of foods. O.k., maybe I try and sneak in a quick sentence of two on the problem with grains and sugar as well, but there's a bigger picture here.

I was reading a blog the other day discussing why coconut oil is a better choice over home rendered lard for cooking. "Coconut oil has more saturated fat", was the reason given for its nutritional superiority. But there's so much missing from this picture. That coconut oil has to be shipped from thousands of miles away. That coconut oil varies wildly in quality. That coconut oil can never, ever, be produced by me or my farmers. Don't get me wrong, I like coconut oil, but there seems to be something missing from this equation.

When I buy a whole, heritage breed pig, raised on tubers, roots, and grass, from my local farmer, I am using that whole animal. There is no waste. That fat is rendered down and used to create lard. Are there not nutrients and energy and things unmeasurable in the consumption of such food? Science is a useful tool when making decisions, but we can't lose site of the power of our intuition and our common sense. We've evolved as a species to rely on multi-sensory information. We devalue ourselves when we limit our choices based on only a mechanistic, scientific viewpoint.

The bison in our freezer? I rendered down the tallow from that animal who spent its life in the sun, eating grass.  Those jars of deep yellow fat come from that animal's ability to harness the energy and nutrition from the prairies it roamed on. How do I measure that? How do I quantify the nutrition in that jar? We could talk about vitamins A, D, and K. We could talk about CLA and omega 3s. What else can we measure? More importantly, what about the all the stuff we can't measure at all?

Isn't this reductionist thinking, the oversimplification of macro and micro nutrients, determining the worth of something by measuring it against a standard of compliance to a certain diet doctrine, what we're trying to get away from?

I'm not willing to carry the paleo placard in lieu of common sense. No, we don't eat grains, legumes, or sugar. Yes, we eat plenty of grass fed meats, saturated fats, and fermented foods. But, so what? I'm not going to Trader Joes, picking up a pack of "free range" eggs and a jar of coconut oil and smugly walking out, feeling like I'm doing my part for the paleo party. We need to be connected to our food, to our farmers, to our land, and to ourselves in order to really understand how our ancestors walked this earth. That's the only way we can make a difference of significance.

There's wisdom in those pages

Chinese Looed Beef Tongue (I'm going to try this with our venison tongues and let you know how it goes)

I love thrift stores. Like, really love. It was bordering on a wee bit of a problem there for a while. Luckily, I've recovered (or I just live in a small house that couldn't hold anymore of my "treasures" - one or the other, can't remember). Some of my favourite things to check out at thrift stores are the vintage kitchen gadgets. There's all sorts of weird and wonderful hand crank, cast iron things in there. But, it's the cookbooks, the old cookbooks, that I find most fascinating.

Look at that roast! You just wouldn't see that kind of abundant, deep yellow fat in the pages of most recipe books today. Our ancestors understood the importance of such fat, rich in vitamins A&D, to keep them healthy and properly nourished.

I have a few cookbooks written in the last decade that I think are worthy of my kitchen, but by far, the cookbooks produced today usually reflect the sad state of our nutritional degeneration. They're replete with vegetable oils, sugars, and gluten. My old cookbooks are different. There's page upon page of meats and soups and stews, busting with home rendered fats and butter. These cookbooks put emphasis on using the whole animal and on teaching proper preparation skills. There's nary a grilled meat or cookie recipe to be found.

How to cook a fish.

Details on how to cook all parts of your piggy.

Of course, if you find cookbooks around the time when food was become industrialized, you're going to be stuck with marshmallows floating around in jello molds. But, before that time, the cookbooks reflect a very different quality. In these cookbooks, the attributes of the products are discussed. There is a keen awareness in the value of using organs and bones. When you need soup stock, the books tell you to make soup stock. There is none of this "prepared stock" stuff. That would be silly. Why would anyone need to pay money for an inferior stock when you have the drippings and the bones from the animal you just ate?

There's a 'given' in these pages that creates a sense of ease. When I use recipes from these books I feel like a bit of an excavator, digging up these presents from the past. There's a great deal of gratitude in preparing food my farmers raised and grew with such love and then coming home and finding advice in these pages. Whispers from ghosts of wonderful cooks from the past. This is the knowledge we need to guard against losing. We need to remember that a fish comes with a head on it, not just a square wrapped in plastic. We need to know why we need to eat the organ meat and how to prepare it. If we don't work at keeping this knowledge alive in our own kitchens, these skills will be gone forever. I want my kids to know that we render fat to cook things in, not that they go to the grocery store and pick up a jug of refined, toxic vegetable oil to splash in their nonstick pan. That's not cooking. This stuff, here in these books, this is cooking.

Merci Beaucoup "This Week in Paleo"

Big, giant, tabata thanks to Angelo over at the wickedly awesome "This Week in Paleo" for voting Tribe of Five "Blog of the Week"! Sound the trumpets, open the gates, release the hooounds! Check out This Week in Paleo's fantastic blog and information packed podcast. You can listen to episode 10, where we're made famous, right here.

It's a celebration! Grass-fed bison steaks for everyone!

Abundance: My Table Runneth Over

Who says that November in Canada is desolate and sparse? Look at all the good stuff I picked up at the farm this week! I had another delightful chat with Ann, Farmer Extraordinaire, while I was there. She told me that she likes to slice up her squash into wedges, skin and all, and roast it in a 400 degree oven with some fat drizzled on top.

Of course, I came home and cut up my little 'sugar baby' pumpkins into thick wedges, drizzled them with some ghee, thyme, and sea salt and roasted them for about 15 minutes or so. It was divine!  I talked my hubby into eating them with the skins on too. I wasn't convinced that there wouldn't be any 'tummy retaliation' from that maneuver, so I needed a partner in crime just in case something awful was going to happen. Better to go down together, I say. It turns out that it was pretty darn tasty and we made it through with nary a gurgle. The kids wouldn't do it though. They were convinced that eating the skins was just a little too weird to pass as acceptable in their too cool for school worlds.

Just Watch the Animals

Look at that glorious deep yellow of that bison suet (the fat around the kidneys). That fat is loaded with vitamins A&D and makes a delicious rendered fat to cook with.

I try to pay attention to my diet and look at areas that I may have let slip or ruts I may have inadvertently fallen into. I'm noticing that my attempts at including more organ meat into my diet have been pretty lame lately. I used to make pate a lot, now... meh, not so much.  We eat heart, but that's more of a protein than an organ isn't it? I mean, it's so similar to muscle meat that I don't count it. Tongue meat is yummalicious, but I want more variety. I'm looking for all of those other amazing nutrients found in the bits our ancestors would have coveted. The livers, yes, but also brain, kidneys, and marrow. Give me a slow roasted marrow bone over chocolate any day.

Chimo eating the eye from a bison while we skin and gut it outside, in the sunshine.

Last fall we herded ourselves up some bull calves to castrate them. It wasn't pretty, but we got the job done quickly. My little farming partner, Chimo the Wonderdog, sat by us patiently, waiting for us to throw him a testicle or two. He swallowed them with gusto. We kept a bowl for ourselves to fry up with dinner. There's a big difference between what we cooked up with raw butter and some fresh garlic and the monstrous testicles you see hanging from a mature bull. These testicles were tender and delicious.

Such concentration. Chimo wants those prairie oysters.

Chimo had it right. Anytime we would butcher an animal, we would watch as Chimo went straight for the eyes. With meat, blood and guts lying everywhere, it was the eyes that Chimo wanted. Obviously, there were nutrients in the eyes that Chimo inherently knew he needed. The pigs wanted the gut pile, full of an incredible amount of beneficial bacteria and microbes. What would be a mountain during the day would disappear into a blood stain on the grass by morning. The tissues, fat, and sinew, of one animal transformed into that of another that we would then eat. The turkeys delighted in trimmed fat and gristle from bison. The chickens lost their minds for lamb's fat and heads. A functional farm where everything is recycled the way nature intended.

Guts of a pastured bison. Healthy and quite miraculous really. The pigs loved it.

Back to the organs. We need to treat our bodies a little more like we treat a functional farm, where function trumps aesthetics. That means that liver beats t-bone steaks in my nutritional arsenal. Rendered tallow wins out over ghee every time regardless of how much I love that buttery goodness. I love good food, but I want to start incorporating more foods that address how our ancestors ate a little more closely. Surely there are nutritional benefits that we haven't even discovered yet that are attributable to all parts of the animals, not just the stuff we can grill to medium rare or that a commercial meat inspector deems worthy of our consumption. Yet another good reason to hunt or find a farmer that has a small abattoir on their farm.

Sorry, I couldn't resist. The. Best. Dog. Ever.

Kraft Dinner: The Perfect Post Workout Meal

This morning, as I strolled into my local university gym, I was greeted with a giant tower of Kraft Dinner boxes. Right. So, I thought that this must have been some sort of public service announcement. You know, something like 'KD is better used as a building block in box construction than a building block for your health'. Something like that anyway. But no, that's not what was going on. It was a promotion. Workout, wear maroon and we'll give you a free box of Kraft Dinner! Yahoooooooooo!

Sorry for the poor quality, but I had to go all black ops to even get this picture. Some dedicated students erected this monument to the glory of zero nutrient food.

It's great marketing. KD and universities are almost synonymous. Make something a norm and people adopt the practice with little thought. It becomes part of the culture and the experience of a time and a place. University = 'starving student' = mac n' cheese. It's widely accepted that cheap, nutritionally void foods are what's needed to help you financially endure life as a university student. Everyone knows that.

When I saw that tower of Kraft Dinner boxes I stopped dead in my tracks and looked over at the gym attendant at the counter in shock. She was perplexed by my reaction. So I commented on there being boxes of Kraft Dinner in a gym.

Is there a Kraft Dinner Fairy that's going to be walking around the gym, handing this stuff out? Oh, only one box per person per day, my friends! Shucks, I was going to go back in tonight for an extra meal, er I mean, workout.

Gym Attendant: "Uh, well, it's so people work out so we give them a free box."

Me: "Why is a gym, a place that is supposed to encourage health, handing out boxes of junk food?"

Gym Attendant: "Oh yah, I don't know. I never thought about it like that."

How could you not think about it? There is a tower of crappy food at the entrance of the gym and your university is endorsing it! There are Kraft Dinner boxes scattered around the entire fitness facility! Let's just call it for what it is: corporate universities selling out to large food manufacturers, working in a symbiotic union to make pretend-food the norm so we can all munch away in cooperative bliss, down the path to obesity and diabetes.

We Heart Sausage

A beautiful bison heart from an animal that spent its days roaming the prairie grasslands with its compadres. I sneak organ meat into our sausage with absolutely no noticeable difference in taste or texture. 

Sausage is one of those expensive, nice to have foods as a little treat every now and then. That is, it should be expensive. If you're sausage is cheap, you are buying the wrong type of sausage, my friend. What you want is sausage from pastured animals, free of gluten, binders, preservatives, or any flavor enhancers (MSG). It is possible to find such sausage, but they can be pretty pricey.

I like to make my own sausage. I think they taste better, they're inexpensive to make, and I have complete control over what goes into them. I make a whack of them all at once and freeze them in containers of about 10 or so (that would be a serving around these parts). I was privy to some fine sausage making on one of my farming internships. I wouldn't dare think that my sausages are anywhere near as good, but they're pretty darn tasty (and healthy) for a home kitchen creation.

Grinding the heart with cubed round. Both meats are quite lean so the fat ratio has to be adjusted accordingly. 

Start with pastured meat, whatever you have. The extent to how lean your meat is will determine the percentage of the fat you add. On this day, I was making two types of sausage. I had some ground pork that I had the farmer add enough fat to so that I could just mix it with spices and make sausage. If you purchase your meat directly from the farmer, request that trim and ground be mixed with fat in the ratio the butcher/farmer would use to make sausage. It may vary depending on the breed, genetics, diet of your animal. Having the meat already ground up makes sausage making as easy as adding in some spices and vegetables (or whatever you like). The other sausage I made was bison sausage. I decided to sneak a heart into the meat. I used bison tallow as my fat source for the bison sausage at a 20% ratio.

Weigh your meat and add 20% fat to start with. You can adjust this to your taste. Just fry up a little patty and see if you feel the sausage is too dry or needs the seasonings adjusted.

Unless the meat is ground for you with the required amount of fat already added, you will have to add some fat. The fat is important. You absolutely need fat from a pastured, organically raised animal. Toxins in an animal are stored in their fat. Animal fat from a conventionally raised animal is a concentrated source of hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, and various other chemicals. Just don't eat it. I try to stick with using fat and flesh sources from the same animal in my sausages, but there are times when that doesn't work out so well. With chicken sausage, I've found adding rendered pork fat compliments the poultry very well. You'll have to do a hunt for piggies raised without soy or grain (or at the least, very little), but it is possible.

Weighing out 20% bison tallow to add to the ground heart/round. 

Sausage is our fast food around here. If we have to take off somewhere quickly, I throw a few sausages, still frozen, in a pan for 5 or 10 minutes, grab a jar of fermented veggies and we have a decent, quick meal. It's also a sneaky way to get some more organ meat into your family's diet. Organ meat is the highest natural source of vitamins A and D, and is loaded with many other vitamins and essential fatty acids. Pair good nutrition with delicious sausage and you just can't go wrong.

Regrind the meat with the fat. Add your spices and minced veggies if you're so inclined.

After you've ground the meat with the fat and added your spices, you have a few options. You can either use the sausage making attachment on your meat grinder to feed the mixture into casings or you can just keep it simple. I forego the casings and just flatten the sausage mixture on a parchment lined cookie sheet. I then put the cookie sheet in the freezer for half an hour. After that time, take out the cookie sheet and cut the sausage meat into sticks. Put the tray back in the freezer to solidly freeze the sticks. After an hour or so remove the cookie sheet and place the sausage sticks in containers for storage in the freezer. Freezing in this way prevents the meat from sticking together in a giant mound. 

I like to use different recipes every time I make sausage. There are some great books available for spice ideas or just giving Google a quick peek turns up bazillions of suggestions. If all else fails, minced bacon with some fresh herbs, smoked salt and white pepper is a guaranteed sausage win.

We Feast

This, my friends, is what meat should look like. Here we have a pastured prime rib roast. This animal didn't even know what grain was. See all that glorious, deep yellow fat? That animal spent its life roaming grasslands and soaking in the sun's rays. Not only is the meat loaded with omega-3s and CLA, but it's also replete with vitamins A&D. And the taste... oh mercy. It makes a lazy cook like me look like a genius when I put something this tasty on the table, but the credit goes to the farmers, the land, and of course, with deepest gratitude, the animal.

Our lovely roast served with, what is likely the last of this season's, zucchini and vidalia onions that have been roasted in the oven with some unrefined, organic red palm oil. We're really digging the palm oil lately. It's delicious.

Scrambled Eggs

I know, I know, I'm sounding like a broken record, but if you visit the farm and buy directly from the farmer, you will know what you're actually paying for. If you can't do that, at least check out the report on Cornucopia's site so you know if your chickens are actually humanely raised. That won't negate the soy feed those chickens are eating or the lack of bugs, forage, and sunshine in their lives, but it's better than the alternative.

The Cauliflower Conundrum

Last week was an odd one, to be sure. Part of the problem was with our vehicle which meant I didn't get to the farm for my weekly produce pickup. No produce pickup = slim pickings for the rest of the week. So, in desperation, I trundled off to our local grocery store.

I wanted a cauliflower. That's it, just a cauliflower. It's still in season, there's plenty of them locally (I know, I see them at the farmer's markets all the time). There's nothing rare or exotic in my request. I was just looking for a plain ole' white cauliflower. Organic, please. Oh, and make it local so it's not dripping in petrochemicals. That would be nice.

Yah, like that.

I had two choices. I could pick the nice, jumbo cauliflower that was grown locally or I could buy the organic cauliflower that came from 'industrialized organic' in California. What's a girl to do? Of course, I want to buy local, but if it's not organic and I don't know the farmer, or even what farm it came from, how can I know how that cauliflower was grown?  Pesticides, fungicides, GMOs, sewage sludge application, chemical fertilizers?  What secrets does that cauliflower house in its pretty white florets? And the other? That organic cauliflower didn't have human waste or chemical fertilizers spread on its soil, but how was it produced? What are 'big organics' principles when it comes to preserving our soil? Do they even care about being true caretakers of the land, of ensuring that those fields are still viable when our kids inherit them to grow their food on?

Cauliflower bones for as far as the eye can see.

For me, eating sludge is a deal breaker. 80% of the sewage sludge in Ontario is now spread across agricultural land. If you think it's any different in your part of the world, a quick Google search may surprise you, especially if you live in North America. Sewage sludge, concentrated with heavy metals, volatile chemicals, and disease-causing pathogenic organisms has been used for years on most of our agricultural land. So, I'd say the odds are pretty good that the local, conventional cauliflower I'm looking at came from a toxic field.  I believe in organic food, but it has to be more than that. I don't want organic cauliflower from some massive monocrop of cauliflowers shipped into Canada all the way from California. Rocket fuel, anyone?

Anything that grows on soil (that would be everything that lives, including us) depends on the quality of that soil to deliver the nutrients and bacteria within for our very survival. We've become removed from our understanding of just how dependent we are on dirt. We assume we get our vitamins and minerals from plates of veggies and good meat. Here's the clincher, where do you think the vegetables, fruits, and meats get their nutrients from? Soil, of course. Anything that is grown or raised in depleted soil is degraded right from the get go. Add to that prolonged storage and shipping, refining, and processing. No wonder our bloated bodies are still crying out for more food. We are, as the great Raj Patel so eloquently expains in his book, "Stuffed and Starved".



What of that cauliflower that was grown in questionable soil, on land that is not diversified and respected? Land that is only asked to give more with no understanding or questioning of what it is that it actually needs. The cauliflower, already in a sate of nutrient deficiency, gets thrown on a truck and travels thousands of kilometres to my local store where it then sits some more. Now what's happened to the vitamins and minerals that were already lacking? Who wants a two week old cauliflower? There's no life force left in that lowly little plant. Sure, there's probably a few vitamins and minerals that your body could squeeze out of it, but that's not how our bodies thrive. No wonder we're all starving, our bodies are desperate for the ingredients they need to build these wondrous temples of ours.

I didn't get the cauliflower. We're eating kale (again) with our grass fed beef roast tonight. We need to change our food policies. Everyone of us should have the right to buy local food that is grown and raised in a manner that supports our environment and our health. Human poop cauliflowers be damned.

Get on it:

• People's Food Policy
• Sustain Ontario
• Food Secure Canada
• Beyond Factory Farming
• Bits&Bytes
• BC Food Systems Network
• Food Security Alberta
• Soil Association
• National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition
• Slow Food
• International Food Security Network
• La Via Campesina: International Peasant Movement
• Google 'food sustainability' and your region to get actively involved in your local food scene.

My Day of Unrest

Sunday is not exactly my 'rest' day. With work, three kids, a hubby in full time school, classes to attend, and all the other stuff that makes up life, I have to make sure that I'm well prepared for the week ahead. In case you haven't noticed, nutrition is pretty important to me. I'm loathe to get myself in a situation where I don't have a decent meal backing us up. So, with Saturday being hang out with my posse day, Sunday has been relegated to making sure we have good eats in the fridge so 'quick' doesn't become synonymous with 'crap'.

So, let's go on a pictorial journey shall we? Fun, huh? Join me in my kitchen to see what was up for some of this week's menu. Sorry, I didn't get pictures of my two slow cookers bubbling away some bison roasts that I later sliced up and put in the fridge.

So, here's where you see my dirty little secret. I make my fermented veggies in my giant, ceramic sink. I clean it first! For this veggie mixture I used some easter egg radishes, carrots, purple carrots, green and purple cabbage, green onion, some leek, ginger, and garlic. Oh, some green and red onion, too. I covered it in sea salt, pounded the snot out of it and then packed in jars. I'll give more details in another post.

O.k., this was a problem. Remember those boxes of organic plums I had? Well, aside from the jars of prunes I've made, I needed to come up with some other options. So, here's my plum butter cooking down. See the dirty wooden spoon on the side? I used my tongue to clean up that mess. So bloody good. I cooked those wonderful plums with cinnamon and cardamom. Aye yi yi. Can't wait to eat that with some pastured pork one day.

I'm not big on baking. That's not to say I don't like it, I just don't think there's much place for those sweet "neolithic paleolithic" treats around my waistline. To make matters worse, I hear Kurt Harris' torturous condemnation every time I pick up a spatula. 

Still, with three kids, I do like to whip up a little ditty every now and then and then freeze some for those birthday party moments when the rest of the class has a sugar-loaded cupcake and my little urchin sits there with her bowl of fermented vegetables. Yes, that really did happen. So, my kids are thrilled with a muffin. These are made with coconut flour, ghee, some dried fruit I made, bananas to sweeten, and a mother load of eggs. They are moist and they are divine. That's my ghee in the background. I make it from raw, pastured butter and I mix it with organic, extra virgin coconut oil. We eat it with everything. Everything.

Canned plums. I added some allspice, cloves, and cinnamon. See mom? You can have some at Christmas. I source out the old jars, with glass lids. Newer jars, with the metal lids are lined with BPA. I'm not down with the BPA.

My post workout fuel source. Love me some sweet potats.

A peek in my 110 degree oven. Plums becoming prunes. I store the prunes in glass jars. I avoid buying any fruit in the winter, having prepared some ourselves. I also just don't think we were meant to eat much fruit in the winter (or at anytime really). A little dab will do ya'.

Pummeled and packed into jars. Now I just have to wait about a week and we'll have fermented vegorama.

O.k., so he's not a fermented vegetable or a dried plum, but come on! How could I not show you Pablo the Great Overseer. He perches himself up on that chair and makes sure I'm doing my kitchen duties to his satisfaction. He's a tough one, that little ginger cat. He keeps me on my game.

Preparing For Winter Like the Good Bapka I Am

One of many, many boxes of fruit begging for my attention before the fruit flies devour them entirely.

My Bapka (Slovak grandma) was the best. And please, don't tell me your grandma was the best. She wasn't, mine was. Bapka could bake like nobody's business and she loved me. What more could you ask for? Oh, and strong, that woman was Strong. I remember her showing me how to make perogies, using her arms to scoop under the mound of crazy-heavy dough, trying to show me how to use my strength to stir. My puny arms weren't up to the task at the time. I think Bapka would be happier with my pipes nowadays.

So, my Bapka, she taught me a thing or two, but the most important thing, to me, was how she made us all feel loved by the food she prepared for us. I don't think that just because we eat a paleo diet, void of the gluten and sugar my grandma used, that the lesson is any less profound. Yes, food is fuel, but food is also a ritual, a time and event to enjoy with a sense of community and grateful gathering. I love without food and I love with food. There's many ways that we love. I'm happy that my family eats the meals I prepare and say, "we can feel the love in it". Mission accomplished. Because there really is love in there. That love comes both from the farmers, our friends, who cared for that animal and treated it humanely, with compassion and care and from me as I prepare it. By the way, you can pack love in a salad or slide it into a stew. Love doesn't only come wrapped in sugar. Never mind "only come wrapped in sugar", love shouldn't come wrapped in sugar at all.

Plums becoming prunes. Still about a days worth of drying to be done at this stage.

I'm finding, especially as I get older, that I am really starting to appreciate the old skills that have fallen out of favour in our crazy, give-it-to-me-now society. Hence, my love of fermenting, culturing, and drying food. I'm trying to dig up as many obscure, out of print books as possible in hopes of garnering further knowledge. The new books on food preservation are loaded with jam recipes using pounds of sugar. Not my thing.

Last winter, we successfully ate pretty locally. We didn't have any fruit at all. This year, we've been lucky to have found an amazing organic orchard that's kept us well stocked throughout the summer. I just got our last supply of fruit and I've decided to go on a drying rampage. My kitchen is lined with trays and fruits in various stages of drying. It smells divine

Speaking of drying, did you know that a raisin should actually taste like a grape!? Who knew? I've been drying organic Coronation grapes and the result is this plump raisin with a delicious mild sweetness and pungent grape taste. It's unlike any raisin I've ever tasted. 

Organic Coronation grapes transforming into grapes. These are the grapes that pop out of their skin like an eyeball in your mouth. I think their concentrated skins are what makes them such tasty raisins.

I've also been drying boxes and boxes of plums. We're not huge dried fruit fans here. I don't buy dried fruit except on rare occasion, but it's nice to think that we have some frozen, canned, and dried fruit as a little something to remind us of summer on the impending winter days ahead.

I've gone through dozens of dehydrators. The one I'm buying next is a giant mother of a thing so I'll be saving my pennies for a while. Until then, my oven works fine. I put it on 110 degrees, line my pans with parchment paper and that's it. All it needs is a little time and a few words of loving encouragement. 

Skinless Gyoza and Yummy Leftovers for Lunch

The bright yellow colour on the zucching comes from the unrefined, organic red  palm oil they're drizzled with. 

So, I found a big bag of pastured pork at the bottom of my freezer (yes, I'm at the bottom, time to pick up my bulk meat orders). I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with it, but then I remembered my skinless gyoza idea. I used to love my gyozas, back in the day. Those little bundles of yumminess wrapped in white, tasteless dough. The dough contained the meat and was essential, or so I thought.

Turns out that you can make a pretty fine gyoza, or egg roll for that matter, without the crappy flour wrapping. You just flavour the meat with the right spices, give it a fry in some unrefined coconut oil, make a dipping sauce and you're done. As usual, I made more than enough so that we could make quick lunches for the next day.

I used this recipe (see video below) for my gyozas and his dipping sauce was really good, too. I put mine in some romaine lettuce with some cooked purple cabbage and mounds of cilantro. I wanted to use avocado, but somebody in our house thinks avocadoes are candy and keeps eating them faster than I can buy them (ahem, T, you know who you are).

I had to include the video, his little girl is just too darn cute.

I also cut some young zucchini into spears, drizzled them with organic, unrefined red palm oil (which is delicious if you haven't tried it), sprinkled on a bit of sea salt and thyme and roasted them in a 400 degree oven for a few minutes. I've had a bottle of palm oil for a while now, but didn't start using it until recently. We're really loving it. This particular type of palm oil is not refined in anyway, is rich in carotenoids and saturated fats and is, therefore, on par with coconut oil for it's ability to withstand heat. I wouldn't buy palm oil from a company that sells 'crude palm' which is a highly toxic, refined product. You can order sustainably produced palm oil directly from Wilderness Family Naturals if you're interested in giving it a try.

When we were done eating I got to making the kids' lunches. I just ripped up some of the romaine that was left, threw some olives, leftover cabbage and zucchini, fresh cilantro, and some gyoza patties into the mix. I drizzled it with some leftover sauce and gave them a lime to squeeze on before they ate it. It was really, really good. Oh, they got a nectarine, too. That was the last of our insanely delicious nectarines, straight from the organic orchard about an hour away. We're already looking forward to eating that amazing fruit again next summer.

Kids' lunches done in 5 minutes flat.

Foraging in the City

My sink full of crabapples compliments of an elderly neighbour, nature, and some determined pickers.

Hubby and I have become pretty keen on backyard foraging (ours or somebody else's will do just fine). We've raided the library shelves for books on edible plants, seeds, fruits, roots, and nuts. It's unbelievable to think that all of this food is around us and we just walk on by, wondering what we should go buy at the market.

Once we started learning about all the food, all the free food, at our disposal, our walks in the forest, or even just in our neighbourhood, took on a whole new meaning. We check out what stage the black walnuts are in, if the squirrels have annihilated the hickory tree or if there's one or two left for us, where the good oak trees are so we know where to go when the acorns start falling. The list goes on and on. It brings an awareness to the season, the weather, and the bounty that surrounds us.

This weekends foraging was pretty pedestrian, but wonderful nonetheless. Hubby and daughter numero tres were walking down to hockey registration when they came upon a tree dripping with over-ripe crabapples and another one with massive, golden pears on it. So, they came home, strapped on some bags, grabbed me and off we went.

The pear tree was literally bowing down, begging people to pluck the heavy pears off of it.

One of the nice things about homes with old fruit trees in them is that they often have old people living there that can no longer pick them. We asked the owner for permission to pick her trees and ended up chatting with her for a while. She didn't want any, but suggested that she'd love some of the preserves I was going to make with them. Reminder to self: bring Beverly some canned pears.

We came home with bags and bags of fruit. I froze some, dried some, and preserved some. Even sweet hubby, tough guy that he is, was in the kitchen canning pears. He actually even confessed to liking it.

Our next assignment is acorns. I'm eyeing up those trees every day, waiting for the moment when they're just right, but before the squirrels figure that out too. Native Americans used to use acorns as flour. That's what I plan on doing too. Why buy crappy almond flour when you can make your own acorn flour? I'll keep you posted in Foraging in the City Part Deux. In the meantime, look up you never know what's there for the munching.