Helpful Real Food Cooking Tips

In the past few months I have been reading more and more cookbooks and books about food in general. Some of these books have been duds (The Taste Thesaurus? Blah) but others have been gems. You might be wondering if I have become obsessed with food and you might be onto something. I do like food, A LOT, but cooking? Not so much. Being on the GAPS Diet, also known as the "no processed anything diet" requires me to spend a lot of time cooking. You might think that having been on this diet for 16 months! now I would have acquired a love of cooking given the many hours each day I spend in the kitchen but you would be sadly wrong. If nothing else I probably dislike it more. In my quest to make cooking less painful I have stumbled upon a few very fabulous tips that help me spend less time in the kitchen and help me save money to boot.

The first tip comes from a cookbook that I haven't even read yet and probably won't unless the price goes down:

The author of Well Fed offers a thirty-page teaser preview on her website which was so awesome that I was almost willing to pay $30 for the cookbook; almost. What is magical about this cookbook besides its delicious recipes which include, amongst others, chocolate chili? Melissa Joulwan comes from a family of restauranteurs which means she knows how to cook food FAST. Once a week Joulwan does the majority of her food prep for the week, usually within a day of her shopping trip. In two hours she browns ground beef, cooks chicken breasts and sausages,  roasts sweet potatoes and spaghetti squash, steams broccoli and cabbage, chops up raw veggies for snacks, boils a dozen eggs and much more.

As I read this idea it astounded me. In years past I had subscribed to a menu mailer that advocated such weekly prep as this but it didn't really work for me because I didn't like all the recipes included in each weeks mailers. Joulwan, however, doesn't worry about such things as "recipes". She only makes 2-3 real recipes every week. The rest of the time she makes what she calls "hot plates." Basically, she takes what prepared items she has an assembles them into a meal. She decides what flavor she wants (Mexican, Indian, Asian etc.) and then what protein and throws it all together into a skillet and voila! Dinner. The example she gave for a Mexican dinner was to throw together in a skillet a pound of the precooked ground beef, steamed chopped peppers and cabbage and while that was warming up make some "South Western Cumin Lime Dressing" and she had dinner ready in less than ten minutes. This way you get lots of variety and you aren't stuck with the Chicken curry you had planned to make when what you really crave is Mexican.

I have done this a few times and it has worked famously. I wish I was better at doing it but as with every new skill learned, it takes time to change habits and fit something new into the routine. The chopping and steaming vegetables has been genius. I wash and cut up lettuce as soon as I get it so that I can make an easy salad, grate and steam cauliflower rice, and slice a head of cabbage for "noodles." It is so easy just to steam the already wet from washing sliced vegetables until just soft and put in a container in the fridge until I need it. I also like to make up the week's salad dressing so I have no excuse not to eat my greens.

As for working on those flavor combinations to mix together those hot plates? The Flavor Bible is essential! I cannot say enough about how great this book is. The way it is organized is so perfectly aligned with how my brains works. The only thing that I didn't like about this book is its omission of Sherry for cooking.

An Everlasting Meal: Cooking With Economy and Grace had such a lovely little gem of a not-quite-cookbook title that I bought it, not even waiting for it to come to the library. I don't exactly regret my purchase but I since I am not eating grains currently, her grain heavy and Italian influenced cooking tips really did not quite hit home with me. She also has a mysterious "thing" with beets which I cannot comprehend. It wasn't that this was a useless books, on the contrary, her tips for stretching your culinary budget are sound and tasty, but Adler definitely needed to endear herself to me with her unflinching praise of fat to keep me reading until the end. The most useful tip that I found in her book was to use EVERY part of the vegetable. The core and leaves of that head of cauliflower? Edible. Yup. Not every part of plant is edible (carrot tops?) but when you are paying for those throwaway bits it is nice to be able to put them to use. I now use the extra leaves and cores of cabbage and cauliflower to make blended French-style potage soups.

Another trick that Adler taught is to use the cooking liquid from cooking vegetables as a base for soups. Yes! Duh, I don't know why it took me this long to figure that one out. For a while now I have always saved the drippings from roasts to use for soups and they really amp up the flavor; using the veggie "drippings" is much same. 

My favorite kitchen tip I have actually been doing for years: boil the bones but what I didn't know is that you can boil the snot, erm nutrients, right out of them for a week before throwing them out. Perpetual Broth has become my new best friend and the very best way to stretch that expensive pastured chicken carcass. It is so nice in the winter to be able to have broth for soup available for meals throughout the week and even with a 1/4 tsp. sea salt, a cup of broth is both nourishing, soothing and delicious after a long day. I very highly recommend doing this.

Those are my tips for now. Any that you are willing to share with me?

Changing The Way We Eat

A moment of Ravenna for those who read this blog only to see her

Now, for everyone else...

Everyone has their own ideas of what is "healthy" eating or on the other side of the spectrum don't really care what they eat; whatever is cheapest and easiest. Some people follow the fad diets, others are religiously low fat, or high protein. Over the years since my diagnosis with insulin resistance/pre-diabetes DrewCarrie tried many a different diet plan in an effort to stay healthy and feel great.

The first post-diagnosis diet was the diabetes recommended "low fat/sugar; high fiber/protein" diet which meant that I was basically allowed to eat beans and vegetables. I felt miserable and that diet lasted only about a month. When I got pregnant we went on the "fast food/cereal/ice cream diet. This was probably not the best food for a fetus, but I am sure many pregnant women will understand. After Ravenna was born and I found myself as a stay-at-home mom in the lonely state of Wyoming we began the "Mormon Mommy" diet which was based around low-cost meals and jello salads. This was a good learning time for me as I learned to plan menu's and make meals from scratch. I also developed the skill of making bread from a starter culture which was a precursor to my life-changing discovery, but more on that later.

After we moved to Pennsylvania I started experimenting a bit with vegetarian cooking, unfortunately for my Father-in-law. No offense to vegetarians, but most vegetarian meals lack a satisfying flavor and texture and my cooking self-esteem took a huge hit. Then at 15 months Ravenna developed some nasty digestive issues and so began the "elimination diet" saga. We went dairy-free, soy-free, and any other free you can think of until we found gluten-free. While I am not sure being gluten-free made a big difference for Ravenna, it sure did for me and that discovery is what led me to our final destination:  Traditional Foods.

Through the blogosphere I discovered that many gluten-free bloggers also followed a diet based around a cookbook called Nourishing Traditions which lays the foundation for a Traditional Foods diet. Most simply this book says that the way your ancestors ate is the way you should eat and that diet will enable our bodies to function best. That idea really struck a chord with me and given my recent readings of In Defense of Food and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I embraced the idea wholeheartedly. I felt that in all my culinary wanderings, I had finally found my home. With Andrew's blessing, DrewCarrie once again radically changed our diet.

 The "Fermentation Station"

Fermenting Sauerkraut and Water Kefir

To give you a basic idea,  this is what eating a Traditional Foods diet entails for us: 

• Sprouting, fermenting, and soaking foods to make them more nutrient dense and digestible.
• Very liberally using good, natural fats in our diets such as butter, EVOO, palm shortening, extra-virgin coconut oil and even lard (read this enjoyable article if you don't believe me).
• No processed or artificial ingredients especially MSG, high-fructose corn syrup and sugar substitutes
• Buy as many locally sourced, pasture-raised animal products as possible. I learned in my four years in the FFA that the way that you treat animals raised for meat/dairy/eggs does matter very much in the quality of the product. It makes sense to me that it is safer and more nutritious to eat products produced by animals that eat a natural diet and that are cared for in a humane fashion. Food safety is a HUGE problem in the US, mainly because of the way factory farms raise their animals/crops. Yes, I pay more for what we eat but I do so with the assurance that if I have a concern, I can go straight to the source.
• No refined sugar and using natural sugars sparingly. We use Sucanat/Rapadura, honey, maple and date sugars.

This is a very general picture of what we do. If you were to classify this diet into a group I would call this a "whole foods" diet. After gradually easing into this diet for a number of months I am finding my stride. There is a lot to learn (hello! Eating like a Pioneer, people!) but there have been so many rewards so far. I have found that eating a TF diet helps me to feel the best, Andrew loves it and Ravenna's digestive issues have gone away. This is the diet that works best for OUR family. While I believe that most, if not all, people could benefit from aspects of eating a traditional foods diet, I don't believe that it is right for everyone. This works for us and we are very happy!