Against All Grain

If you have spent any time with me the last year, you have heard me talk about my health journey and my love for Danielle Walker and her cookbooks! She was the one who got me started on this path. I resonated with so much of her own struggles with illness. Just knowing there are others who understand what I have gone through is so necessary when dealing with these sort of things and it gives me hope to keep working for what I know is best. I literally have tears in my eyes when I think about where I was a year ago, where I am now and the power I have to fight for my own health.

I use her two cookbooks(Against All Grain and Meals Made Simple) on a weekly basis. They are grain free, dairy free, refined sugar free and more importantly delicious! I constantly have a batch of her Real Deal Chocolate Chip Cookies in my freezer to pull out when I need something sweet. I was so happy when I found out she was coming out with a new cookbook, Celebrations, in September. I may have already requested the day off work to go to her book signing in October!

I am so excited that I get to be a part of a group of people who get to make and share her new recipes from Celebrations with you this month. And lets be honest, even if I wasn't apart of this launch team, I would still be making these recipes and sharing them.

Who wants to come over for dinner? I'm thinking Thanksgiving dinner in September.

Also, if you pre-order her book by September 6th, you can be entered to win a Kitchen Aid Blender, Whole Foods gift card or Danielle's favorite items from US Wellness Meats.

Julie, Julia, and a Cow

Liver. Heart. Tongue. Marrow bones. Four things that make me gag and also give me such delight at the same time.

I had 210 pounds of beef delivered to my house today. 210 pounds of steaks, roasts, ribs, ground beef and yes organ meat! As I was placing the packs of bones in my freezer, I may have squealed out of excitement.

A year ago I was sick. Really sick. As in just went to the ER. Scheduled a major surgery date. High dosages of medications not working sick.  While in the midst of using powerful medications and seeing specialist doctors, I couldn’t imagine it getting any worse. And yet it continued to do so.

I knew there had to be a better way than pumping my body full of drugs even though we (I) knew they weren’t working. I started to do some research online and came across a lady who had Ulcerative Colitis and healed her body using food (www.againstallgrain.com). Now food is something I could get on board with. I LOVE food! As I read her story and hundreds (literally) of others like it, I was convinced I needed to do what they were doing.

Food is a powerful. It connects us. When was the last time you got together with a friend and food wasn’t involved?!

It fills us. It satisfies our immediate need of hunger.

It brings us joy. I don’t know about you, but taking a bite of a delicious burger makes me smile.  

It nourishes us. Almost all the vitamins our bodies need come from food we eat.

It heals us. When we give our bodies the nutrients our bodies are lacking, it begins to function properly.

It also has the power to make us sick. So much of what we eat today is not “food”. It has been manufacture in a plant instead of growing on a plant.  Go open your pantry, take out what seems like a straight forward item and read the ingredient list. If it has an ingredient you can’t say with your mouth, it shouldn’t go in your mouth. I pulled out a jar of roasted sunflower seeds: Sugar. MSG. Gluten. Soy. Um, its sunflower seeds. Pretty sure if I went and picked a sunflower seed out of sunflower, then roasted it, non of those ingredients would be there!

When our bodies are sick, it means they don’t have what they need to fight for us and to function properly. When we stop putting things into our bodies that hurt us (did you know sugar causes inflammation? Don’t even get me started on GMOs)and our bodies have what they need, they can begin to heal. Whether you notice it or not, what you eat is affecting your body for good or bad.

What does this have to do with 210 pounds of meat you ask? Well, during the process of healing my body, I felt the need to switch to grass fed meat. Just as our bodies are affected by what we put in them, so is the meat we eat. Most cows are fed genetically modified corn and grains. So we found a farm that raises grass fed and grass finished cows and we bought half a cow.  

As I dove more into learning about food as medicine I learned some of the most nutritious and healing foods we can eat, come from things our culture throws away and wont touch.

FAT. Pork fat. Beef fat. Duck fat. Throw some of that on your roasted potatoes next time. Believe it or not, it’s actually healthy for you! (www.epicbars.com)! Its also very nourishing for your skin. Go rub some fat on them. (www.primallypure.com)

BONE BROTH. Don’t you dare throw those chicken bones way. Go make some broth. Not only does it taste a million times better than the canned crap. The gelatin (among other things) that is released when the bones break down, can fight inflammation, boost your immune system and begin to heal our intestinal wall. And its easy to make!

ORGAN MEAT. Until this last year, I never had any sort of organ meat. These meats are some of the most nutrient dense foods we can eat. High amounts of Iron, vitamin A, K, B are all found in liver.

Back to the 210 pounds. I am still learning to love organ meat. 

My goal is to Julie and Julia my way through the heart, tongue, liver, oxtail, and marrow bones.

Here’s to continue healing through food. New adventures in the kitchen. And maybe a new found love for organ meat!

Grain Free Focaccia Bread

My journey to find health and healing through food has actually been fun!
I love to cook, but more than that I love eat. When I found AIP (autoimmune protocol) and read story after story of people finding healing by changing their diet, I was convinced. Starting this meant I had to give lots of delicious foods. However, it also meant that I now had to experiment and try new foods and new ways of cooking!

My husband is my gauge as to how good things actually are. If it passes his test, its a keeper. This has been much harder in the baking department. No wheat flour. No refined sugars. And for a period of time I couldn't do eggs or nuts either. Finding a muffin that had no grains or refined sugars that tasted like it did is hard. I have yet to figure that one out!

BUT.

I found a recipe for grain free focaccia bread yesterday.  I had all of the ingredients at home already. I thought I'd give it a try for dinner. Expecting it to taste ok, I gave husband a bite. And he LOVED it!

From Savory Lotus 
I read through the comment to find out what works and doesnt work and based on that changed the first two ingredients

INGREDIENTS

• 1 cup tapioca flour (I used 3/4 cup)
• ¼ cup coconut flour, sifted (I used 1/2 cup Almond flour)
• 1 TBS nutritional yeast
• 1 tsp unrefined salt
• ½ tsp baking soda
• 3 eggs
• ¼ cup full fat coconut milk
• ¼ cup ghee, melted
• 2 TBS finely chopped fresh herbs (rosemary, thyme, oregano, basil, etc.)
• 1 TBS ghee for skillet
• olive oil and salt for garnish

DIRECTIONS

1. Directions:
2. Place 10" cast iron skillet in to oven and preheat to 400' F.
3. Combine tapioca flour, coconut flour, nutritional yeast, salt, and baking soda in a large bowl. Set aside.
4. Whisk together eggs, coconut milk, and melted ghee. Add chopped herbs and mix again. Pour wet into dry and mix until well incorporated.
5. CAREFULLY remove skillet from oven and drop 1 TBS of ghee into hot bottom of pan and swirl to cover. Pour bread mixture into pan and give pan a little shake to level it out.
6. Bake 11-13 minutes, until top of bread is golden and bread is pulling away from sides of skillet.
7. Drizzle liberally with olive oil and unrefined salt before serving. Enjoy!

My people.

This weekend we were able to attend the wedding of friend. The great thing about this wedding, besides the fact that two great people got married, was that it brought together all of ‘my people’. You know those people, the ones that know you, like really know you. The ones that have walked through seasons of life with you. They are the ones you can have pointless conversations with and the next minute it has turned into a deep theological conversation. The ones that are for you.

We have all entered new seasons of life lately, the kind that takes weddings and big events to get everyone together. Not because we don’t want to. But because there is distance, jobs, or family, our lives are busy.

As we gathered Sunday evening at our old hangout spot we all realized we are in different places in our lives that we’d rather not be. I love what my dear friend Julie wrote:

Puppies, coffee, and these humans: some of my favorite things. Our Sunday evenings were almost always spent here with each other laughing, pondering, eating - beautifully ordinary stuff. As they always do, Time and Change have done their thing to us: new marriages, new states, new dogs, new churches, new friends, no friends, disease, sadness, exhaustion, loneliness, weariness, apathy - and we're all a little worse for the wear at the moment. To sit down with your people and to be "not okay" together matters. I desperately miss the ordinary, but this matters too.

No matter the time or distances or life changes. These are still my people. And we still walk together. 

worn

My husband has this favorite pair of pants. Because he has had them for so long, they had become worn in the knees. Soon there was a hole. Then a really big hole.  So we went shopping for a new pair. As we walked in the store, off to the right, was a rack full of jeans. He walks over, and with a big grin on his face, he holds up a pair of jean with holes all over them. “What about these?!” I smiled and kept on walking.

We want our jeans to look already worn when we purchase them. We love giving our furniture the antique look. We purposefully break, rip, chip things in the name of fashion and design. 

A few weeks ago someone asked me how life was going. She followed it up with, according to facebook it looks like it is going well.  I smiled and said yes not wanting to get into the nitty gritty of it all.

This last year has left us a little worn. A bit broken. A little worse for the wear in some ways. There have been some good things, but it has been tough.

As much as we love our things looking worn, we don’t dare let the world know that our lives look the same way.  But we all need people who are willing walk with us in the mess.

If you are feeling worn today, there is light at the end of the tunnel. (I know, I know, worst thing to say to someone who is in the midst of it. But it’s there, I promise.) And besides, if you find a few more holes and another rip in your life, join the cool kids club! You're not alone. It's just adding more detail to masterpiece.

Bittersweet

“Bittersweet is the idea that in all things there is both something broken and something beautiful, that there is a sliver of lightness on even the darkest nights, a shadow of hope in every heartbreak, and that rejoicing is no less rich when it contains a splinter of sadness.

Bittersweet is the practice of believing that we really do need both the bitter and the sweet, and that a life of nothing but sweetness rots both your teeth and your soul. Bitter is what makes us strong, what forces us to push through, what helps us earn the lines on our faces and the calluses on our hands. Sweet is nice enough, but bittersweet is beautiful, nuanced, full of depth and complexity. Bittersweet is courageous, gutsy, earthy.” –Shauna Niequist, Savour

I have tried for the last three months to put words down to process what we went thru this last year and I just couldn’t find the words until I read the paragraph above. 2015 was bittersweet for us.

Almost a year ago(!) Chet and I were standing under that giant oak tree as we promised one another “…for better or for worse, in sickness and in health…”.  We celebrated with our close friends and family on a truly perfect day. As I replay that day in my head and look at pictures, my heart wants to burst.

We have been given lots of practice in living out the words we said to each other. More than either of us ever anticipated. My health threw us a curve ball I wasn’t ready for. There were many dark nights where I couldn’t see past the tears because the pain and heaviness of my disease seemed like too much to bear. From holding me in the middle of the night because the pain woke me up, to spending each night in the hospital because I didn’t want to be alone, Chet has been my rock. He has seen my at my worst and loved me through it. He understood when many around us didn’t.

Chet and I have had several conversations about how our expectations for this year were quickly dashed as life happened. As I have grieved the loss of those things, we both can see ways this time has caused us to grow deeper together. The bitterness of pain and disease brought the sweetness of growing together with Chet.

It is a new year. And with that, I hope a new chapter in our story. I am learning to give myself and my body grace. We are still in the healing process.

I often think about that giant oak tree. It has worn and scraggly branches. It has seen decades of seasons. It has weathered freezing temperatures and unbearable heat. But each spring it pushes out new leaves. And its roots continue to go deeper. I pray the same for our marriage.

Celebration Day

This last Friday, June 5^th, Chet surprised me for our (almost) 3 month anniversary. We already had other plans on the exact day. All I knew was that I had to “be ready to go by 5:20.  A dress would be nice”.

I rushed home to get ready. I even brushed and curled my hair! Makeup. Dress. Heels. I love dressing up, but rarely do it. I have multiple pairs of the cutest heels but never wear them because in my book, heels are not practical and I am a practical girl!

Waiting on the table was a dozen beautiful roses along with a bottle of wine with a card from Chet. The roses and wine were my clues as to where we were going. After trying over and over to help me figure it out, he finally just told me we were going to Napa Rose at the California Adventure Hotel!

We talked while eating our fancy sounding and tasting dishes. We talked about the highs of our 3 months of marriage. Chet said he loves our evenings together. Making dinner. Eating together. Hanging out. What that means is he loves our day to day life. The simple aspects of living. We don’t need to do crazy things or go to fancy places to enjoy each other.

Several months ago I read a blog post by Shauna Niequist called “Burn the Candle”.

This year, brew the good coffee, wear the sparkly jewelry, crack open that fresh journal. Gifts are to be loved, to be burned, to be eaten and used up completely, reminders that someone loves us, that someone thought of us.

What would it look like for you, this year, to burn your candles, to allow yourself to be as loved and worthy as the people around you believe you are? What are you hoarding away for another day, for someone else, someone more deserving or special or fancy? What have you been given that you won’t allow yourself to enjoy?

I loved this post so much because I realize how much I do it…or don’t do it. I notice myself not wanted to use something because I don’t want it to run out. I’ll use the old item because I don’t want to ruin the new one.

We have several bottles of really nice wine that have been saved for quite a while because we have to save them for a special occasion. After reading this post, we bought some nice steaks and invited some dear friends over and opened the bottle. It was a wonderful night with some honest conversation between friends.

As we were finishing dinner at Napa Rose, I told Chet we needed to pick a Celebration day. A day that we will celebrate each year. Celebrate anything. Celebrate 3 months of marriage. Celebrate the end of a hard week. Celebrate national doughnut day (Friday was national doughnut day so we ate beignet after dinner. Those are doughnuts right?). Celebrate because I want to wear my new dress. Celebrate life changes. 

We will open that bottle of wine, wear the impractical shoes even if we are staying at home and find something to celebrate because it’s easy to lose sight of all of the good when things are hard. We will celebrate each other and remember why we chose one another. We will celebrate the simple and mundane because it is all worth celebrating.

June 5 is now our celebration day.