Progressive Pioneer

Raw Experience

I often have trouble with gift giving.  For one thing I just kind of stink at picking out the perfect thing.  And for a lot of my growing up years, money was tight, so if a gift was to be gotten, it had to be good, and it had to be EXACTLY what the person wanted and needed, and not just something to fill a gift bag.  Also, not to be a scrooge, but I just think there's a lot of stuff in this world already, and if you live in a first world country you're really not hurting for much, so gift giving sometimes seems a little, I don't know, silly?  So with all that overthinking of gift giving swirling around in my head, when it comes time to give birthday and Christmas presents, I often feel completely lost!

I love what our friend Greg got for his wife Megan, for her birthday.  Something absolutely perfect for her, that she loved, that wasn't more stuff, and that she could share with her friends!

Five Ways to Get Veggies into Your Little Ones

Sam was going through a brown food phase and I just didn't like the fact that he wasn't really getting the whole rainbow of foods into his system.  He would be thrilled to eat oatmeal, hummus, beans, bread and peanut butter etc. all day long.  I always feel weird saying, "Eat your fruit and then you can have your beans..."

So, I set out on a campaign to make his diet more colorful again.  We experienced one day where he didn't eat breakfast until about eleven because all I offered were brightly colored fruits and veggies and all he wanted was oatmeal.  I know, I know, oatmeal is perfectly healthy.  And he does eat a huge bowl of it every morning still.  But I felt like we were in a food rut and I wanted him to be eating other things throughout the day.  By that afternoon he was sampling the rainbow of foods I had placed on his tray and actually liking some of them.  Now I offer him only one or two things at a time, often doctoring them up in a way I know he likes (see below) and usually placing a piece of something new on the tray.  They say you often have to expose a kid to a new food around ten times before they like it, or sometimes before they'll even try it! 

Here are some of the ways that have been effective in getting Sam to eat a more varied, colorful diet:

• Green smoothies and veggie ice cream (basically a frozen fruit-heavy smoothie.  We just use less liquid and blend frozen fruit until it's like soft serve.  Sam is nuts about it).  A simple and surprisingly sweet and delicious combination is spinach and pineapple (we use frozen).  The spinach really doesn't alter the taste much and if they balk at the color just serve it in an opaque sippy cup!
• Grated or minutely chopped carrots, cabbage, red peppers, even spinach etc. (get the red peppers organic, cabbage though is surprisingly low in pesticides when grown conventionally).  I find that if I chop things really tiny he's more likely to eat them, especially with a liberal dousing of his favorite dressing, a homemade vinaigrette made with apple cider vinegar, olive oil, garlic, herbs etc.
• Place a piece of something new on their tray each meal without mentioning it or coercing.  9 times out of 10, they will try it eventually, even if it takes a few days.
• Have something for dipping (dressing, peanut sauce, homemade ketchup, fruit purees etc).  The trick is getting them to actually eat the thing dipped and not just the dip.  For this reason, I try to make sure the dip is healthy too, since often mass quantities get consumed.  Homemade sauces are much better because you can control what goes into it.
• And lastly, just don't offer the junk, keep only healthy snacks around.  Sam loves dates as a treat.  We also call his chewable vitamins "candy" and he thinks those are treats.  Fruit leathers and corn chips are about as junky as I try to let it get.  That way he feels some liberty in being able to choose snacks and I feel good knowing that any option chosen isn't too bad.  
  

LDS Holistic Living

I'm so excited about this conference coming up in June!  Remember the great Herbs 101 class I went to?  The woman who taught the class is the mastermind behind the conference and it promises to be amazing and inspiring.  The mission of the conference is "to help all people draw closer to Christ by discovering His hidden treasures of knowledge for the health and healing of the mind, body and spirit."  I absolutely love thinking about how our bodies are designed to be healthy, how we are built to be happy and how the paths to those things are often the simplest routes; so inspiring!

There are six hour-long sessions throughout the day where you can choose from a whole range of lectures and classes to attend.  There's also time for a lunch break and time to peruse all the vendors that will be there.  Here's what I think I'll be taking (it's so hard to choose, though!):

Pain Relief without Medication

Pain is almost always a sign of inflammation, which is the body’s primary response to tissue damage.  In this class, I’ll cover what happens when tissues get injured and how inflammation can be rapidly reversed.  I’ll demonstrate basic techniques for completely relieving pain in minor injuries in 5 to 20 minutes.  I’ll also talk about how to apply these same principles to ease chronic aches and pains.  

Sweet is the Work: Peaceful Mothering in a Chaotic World. 

Sharing the triumphs and errors in mothering that have taught valuable lessons.  Simple ideas to incorporate into our lives to strengthen ourselves and our families and bring more harmony to our hearts and homes.

The Miracle of Birth

God has designed families. A mother’s purpose is divinely given. Inspiration is available to guide us. Pregnancy and labor are natural, normal processes with both physical and spiritual benefits. You can have a natural birth—I’ll share tips on how to prepare. 

The Top 10 Essential Oils and How to Use Them:
Learn easy ways to incorporate oils into your daily routine and heal your family.  Jonelle will be sharing her favorite top 10 oils, their uses, how to use them and make simple blends.  Jonelle likes to call the oils her “friends”. They are always there to help and make things better. How oils affect the body and emotions simultaneously, and make a difference daily. Bring your nose for smelling and sampling!

Pass the Sugar, Please!

On average each American eats 30lbs of sugar per year. Come learn how to eat sweet healthily. Discover alternative sweeteners found in nature. Learn the facts about High Fructose Corn Syrup and processed sugars. Balance your palate to make naturally sweet foods sweeter. Over 100 recipes have been gathered and will be shared, including Green Drinks and naturally sweetened treats!  GREAT class for diabetics.

You can read about the various speakers and what they'll be teaching here (scroll down) and more details on the conference blog.  If you'll be in Utah this coming June I hope to see you there!!

Home Brewed Vinegar

With all those apple peels left over from the apple grunt, I decided to finally try my hand at making vinegar.  I've been itching to do this for awhile and finally emptied the enormous bottle of rice wine vinegar we had, so I had the perfect container for it.

I combined the instructions from Wild Fermentation and The Herbal Home Remedy Book.  This meant that I put the peels, water and evaporated cane juice in the jar and added a bit of Bragg's apple cider vinegar (with "the mother") to get things started right.  And that was really all there was to it!  Now we wait...

It's been about a week and there's some definite bubbly action going on.  It also smelled initially like sweet cider, but is now smelling more like a sweet wine with some acidic notes.  I'm exactly sure how I'll know it's done, I suppose when it smells like vinegar and not like wine.  At some point I'll strain out the juice and removed the peels, then let the liquid continue to vinegar-ize until it's nice and zippy.  I can't wait to have our own home-brewed vinegar.  We've also got a fresh pineapple sitting on the counter that may be destined for a batch of pineapple vinegar!

Ice Cream for Breakfast

I haven't had much success getting Sam to drink green smoothies.  But last week we ran out of spinach and so I started making a plain fruit smoothie, something I've tried to tempt him with before, but with little success.  However, this time, as I was halfway through blending up all the frozen fruit, I noticed I had made ice cream!  When I offered this to Sam, it was met with wholehearted enthusiasm!  And now we've been having ice cream for breakfast every morning. The basic recipe is frozen fruit and almond milk; you can feel positively virtuous feeding it to your kids (or having it yourself!).  You could use any kind of milk though, we've done hemp milk, and I think coconut milk would be delicious.  These pictures are of a mango one I made with some coconut mixed in.  It was pretty yummy, but our favorite is still mango-blueberry-strawberry. 
We use a Vitamix, which is amazing; I think you can even make nut butter with it.  A less powerful blender will probably work too, but maybe not give you quite as creamy results at the end.  So, just toss in the fruit and plenty of milk and whiz it up.  Keep adding milk and pressing the mixture down into the blades until it's a nice sorbet-like consistency.  Then eat it up right away as it melts quickly!  Another fun option would be making popsicles.  I've been daydreaming of summer and popsicles on a hot day sounds so perfect.

Indoor Winter Greens

We've had this sneaky plan to garden even in the dead of winter and have finally gotten around to setting it up.  The shelving we use to start seedlings on is now set up on the kitchen counter by a sunny window.  Trays filled with nutritious dirt and sprinkled with seeds will hopefully yield tender baby greens in a few weeks!  We'll see how they do with just the natural light, I have a feeling they might need a boost, in which case we'll hang up the fluorescents.Santa left these seeds in my stocking and I've been so excited to use them!  What a delightful mid-winter project, to start spring a little early with something lush and growing.  My mouth is already watering thinking about sweet, fresh greens.  There really is nothing like greens straight from the soil. The basic drill was; fill up the trays with soil, press in mini-furrows (cute!), spinkle in the seeds (one tray of spinach, half of Swiss chard and half of roquette; my favorite!), water, and wait.  It was probably done in less than half an hour.  That was the quick part, now we just have to wait for them to grow.  We'll probably cover them while they germinate and then set up the lights once they sprout.  I'll let you know if our little experiment yields tasty salads in a few weeks!

Raw Sunday

Some day I’m going to have Clay write a post about his “conversion” to raw food.  Neither of us eat exclusively raw food, but we’ve both done extended periods of all raw and consume a large portion of our food raw.  We definitely notice a difference and love the way we feel when we eat a lot of raw foods.  Last Sunday Clay decided to do an all raw day.  He made the most amazing tomato pesto with basil and tomatoes from our garden.  And for noodles he ran some zucchini and summer squash over the mandolin.  I was eating regular noodles, and when I tasted his raw version mine paled in comparison.

He also ground up some pecans and mixed them with dates for a little treat.  And I made some raw fudge, the most delicious thing you’ll ever taste, healthy or not.  Since there are no refined sugars in it (just maple syrup or agave) it was an allowable treat within our month of no refined sugars.  And what a treat it was!  The basic recipe is coconut oil, raw cacao, ground almonds, vanilla and salt.  It sets up in the fridge, and I’m telling you, it’s amazing!  Really.  When I have this around I have no desire for “real” treats.  And the amazing thing is that it’s actually good for you.  While agave and maple syrup aren’t health tonics, they certainly don’t have the deleterious effects of processed sugar, and the rest of the ingredients are extremely beneficial.  You can feel virtuous while chowing down on fudge!

Saurbeets (Like Saurkraut, but with Beets)

I've gotten all excited about healthy microorganisms.  First I read this book, and most of what he said made a lot of sense, but the ideas about how our modern diet is so lacking in beneficial bacteria really stuck with me.  So then I got this book out of the library and it's RAD.  It inspired a trip to the thrift store in search of old crocks.  I then embarked on my first adventure in using fermentation to preserve foods with the help of beneficial bacteria and fungi.

First we gathered up a bunch of beets from the garden, Early Wonders and Chioggias. 

We washed and peeled them, saving all the scraps for the grateful chickens. 

I buzzed them through the Cuisinart into shreds, and added salt and anise seeds that I had roughly ground up.

Then the shredded beets, salt and seeds were pressed into this crock that we thrifted for about a dollar, and I set a plate with a jar of water on top of the beets to keep them pressed down.  Over the next day or two the brine was expressed from the beets and I added a little bit of extra salty water to keep the level above the plate.  It should take between 1 and 4 weeks for the flavor to fully develop.  You can snack from it as it's "brewing," and then once the full flavor is developed you pop it in the fridge to slow the fermentation and it stays in there quite a long time.  I snuck a little taste after about a week and it mostly just tasted like salty beets, not too much "saur" going on in there yet, but I'm excited to see what happens in the next few weeks!  Stay tuned for more adventures in fermentation; I've got plans for pickles, yogurt, and maybe fruit kimchi!

Best. Breakfast. Ever.

Clay was so cute the other day.  We were up at his mom's house in Idaho (she's into raw food) and he had made himself a bowl of fresh fruit with freshly made almond milk and was absolutely swooning over it.  "I have a post for you," he said, "I already took a picture.  You can just title it, Best. Breakfast. Ever."  And so I did.  Because it really was that delicious. 

Raw Baby Granola Bars

I got a Pro Bar at Whole Foods the other day and Sam was quite interested in sharing it.  So, I decided to make him his own baby Pro Bars.  I can't remember the exact proportions of what went into them, but they turned out quite yummy.  Basically it was some sticky stuff and some crunchy stuff all whizzed up in the Cuisinart and then pressed into a saran-lined cookie sheet and firmed up in the fridge.  The sticky stuff was dates, coconut oil, peanut butter, honey.  The crunchy was oats, ground flax, sunflower seeds and walnuts.  All raw, no sugar and really satisfying.  Yum!  Sam hasn't been as interested as I'd hoped, but they've made the perfect snack for Clay and I. 

Almond Milk

My mother-in-law, who eats nearly a 100% raw diet, showed me how to make almond milk when they were visiting us in Maine.  It turns out to be quite a simple process.  I make it once or twice a week now.  It's so much richer and creamier than the stuff you buy at the store, and of course, still has all it's good enzymes because it's raw.  And somehow, things you make yourself just taste that much more delicious!

Here's how it goes:

Soak 1 cup almonds for 8hrs or overnight.

Rinse well.

Add 4 cups water, 1/4tsp salt, 1/2tsp vanilla and a spoonful of honey.

Blend really well.

Strain through nut milk bag (you can make one out of organza).

Squeeze out the last drops (you can use the leftover almond pulp in bread).

Yum!

Let Food Be Your Medicine

Jonell Francis and Hippocrates would get along just fine, I think.  She spoke at last weekend's conference about her amazing journey of healing through food.  For the last five or so years I've been off and on with raw food.  But when I'm on I feel so fabulous!  While I have trouble sticking to any one way of eating 100%, there are certain constants.  I know that eliminating some things (meat, sugar, dairy) and replacing them with others (nuts, fruit smoothies, natural sweeteners etc.) always improves the way I feel. Lately I've been feeling sort of sluggish; we ran out of fresh spinach and I'm missing my morning boost.  I think tomorrow will find me in the produce aisle, stocking up on goodies for green smoothies (check out my post at DesignMom) and fresh juice.  It doesn't take much to get back on track and this sunny, summer weather has me feeling optimistic!
image via

Raw Valentine's Treat

For Valentines' Day I made Clay some truffles from a recipe in this fancy raw food cook book. I've never actually used the cookbook, the recipes just seemed too fancy and time-consuming.  But if you can't be extravagant with your time and go all out on Valentine's Day, when can you?  The flavors are really uncommon, but ended up going together well.  There were four kinds:
   

Almond coconut filling with lemon zest on the outside, tahini and orange zest filling rolled in five spice powder, and walnut honey filling with Indian spice mix on the outside.  For some reason the recipes made way more than I expected, so we also have a bit of extravagance tucked away in the freezer for a drab day in need of some chocolate and spice.

Glass of Sunrise

Pretty colors in my juice this morning.  There's something about starting the day simply, with raw, fresh juice that makes me feel so good.  I've gotten to the point where I am about my juice the way some people are about their coffee, though hopefully less grouchy.  My latest morning crave is fresh grapefruit and strawberry juice. I don't even use the juicer, just put them straight into the Vita-mix and let it go for a few minutes.  It's so good I can hardly drink it fast enough!