Local, Grass Finished Lamb

I got the last two of the four grass finished lambs that I had ordered on Thursday from Touchstone Farms, now Rappahannock Farms, LLC. Today, we ate a rack of the lamb ribs. My husband and I easily polished off the entire rack. After he finished the last rib, Todd asked "can we make another rack?" I offered to thaw one for tomorrow to which he replied "I mean now." This is still hands down the best lamb we've ever tasted.

I've tried pastured, grass fed lamb from various farmers in the area and while I've had some very good lamb from other wonderful local farmers, I still have a certain loyalty to Touchstone Farms. Not only is the lamb super tender and delicious, Touchstone Farms is the farm that got me started on ordering whole animals and over the fear of using all the different cuts from one animal. Now I routinely order, in addition to whole lambs, a half cow, a half hog, a turkey or two, and between 6 to 12 whole chickens at a time. And if I ever can find a local farmer that will sell it, I would order a whole goat.

Todd and I are pretty fanatical about eating organic, grass fed, and local. Buying directly from the farmer allows me to choose farmers that grow and handle the food properly and sustainably, from what fertilizers go into the soil to whether an animal is humanely butchered. Buying local minimizes my carbon footprint and gives support to small local family farms that ensure the continuation of sustainable farming and biodiversity. And with my buying habits of whole animals and CSA shares, I've become much more diverse in my cooking, to the great benefit of our palates. Easily in the midst of growing season, we would eat in one week several types of meats and a dozen or two different vegetables.

A few tips on buying and using meats and vegetables in bulk:

• Keep a tab for at least a month on how much meat (in weight) and vegetables (in volume) you consume. Use your numbers to calculate how much meat you'll consume in a month, three months, six months, or a year. You should be able to determine from this whether your family will consume a quarter or half a cow, for example, in six months, or a year. For vegetables, calculate how much your family will consume on average in a week. You should be able to determine from this how large a CSA share to purchase.
• Invest in an upright freezer, at least 13 to 14 cu ft that can store food at sub zero.
• When you get a half or whole animal, sort the parts and stock different parts in different sections of the freezer.
• If the CSA offers different pick up days, pick a day when you know you can handle or process the vegetables that day or the day or two after. Since CSA produce are often picked that day or the day before and are picked ripe and ready, you want to make sure you take advantage of it and use the produce soon after you pick it up.
• Plan to make casseroles (like beef stew or braised meat dish) or soups towards the "end" of a CSA week. Often, we will throw the rest of what we haven't used up yet into a casserole or soup.
• Many vegetables can be successfully frozen. Leafy greens that are normally cooked can be washed, dried, and frozen, or blanched prior to freezing. Tomatoes can be frozen as is and tossed into sauces and stews later or cooked down or processed into a sauce prior to freezing. Fermenting is also a great way to preserve your vegetables. I have many a jar of delicious fermented spicy fermented radish in my fridge from all the daikons and jalapenos I got over the summer.
• Plan at least 2 to 4 days in advance for your meat dishes. Every night after dinner, I go "shopping" in my freezers (we have 2 separate upright freezers in addition to 2 fridges) and pull out something to thaw that we will eat in 2 to 4 days. I have the entire door of one of my fridges dedicated to defrosting. The meat goes into one or more of the bins in the door for defrosting, and the bin catches any leaks during defrosting and can easily be rinsed or washed. When I pull out something really big like a turkey, it goes into an empty veggy bin for defrosting.

Since we cook everything we eat and don't eat any pre-prepared or packaged foods, buying meat and produce in bulk really makes great economical sense. Once you get into a routine, you will find that you save not just in terms of the price of the food, but also in terms of time in sourcing and picking up the food.

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I'm Not a Carnivore

I talk about sourcing meats from local farms a lot and making liberal use of lard, ghee, and other animal fats in my cooking. So it's quite often that my friends or coworkers get the misconception that I eat a lot of meat. In reality, being on the GAPS diet, I would say that my diet from what I eat most to what I eat the least looks more like this: fats (lard, ghee, chicken fat, olive oil, coconut oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, sesame oil), vegetables, eggs, meats, nuts, fruits. When I take a look at the amount of meat I actually eat, the reality is somewhere between 2 to 6 ounces per meal, which I feel is about as much as most omnivores eat.

When people first find out that I don't eat grains, sugars, or other complex carbohydrate foods, they wonder what I eat. After all, the majority of the standard American diet is comprised of grains and starchy foods. So how do I get full? Well, we eat lots and lots and LOTS of vegetables. I would say more than most vegetarians would eat, since vegetarians are able to subsidize their meals with grains, potatoes and yams, beans, and other starchy foods.

Out of curiosity, I made a list of all the vegetables we ate last week. As two adults, we consumed in the past week:
~ 1 lb baby bok choy
1 bunch bok choy
~1 lb mei qing choi
2 radishes
8 lbs carrots
8 lbs onions
3 bunches celery
1 bag spinach
couple bunches broccoli
2 heads cauliflower
6 tomatoes
1 cabbage
2 lbs delicata squash
10 sweet peppers
5 bulbs garlic
3 jalapeno peppers
2 bunches green onions
1 cucumber
1 bunch swiss chard
1 head butter lettuce
1 bunch red leaf lettuce

I may have missed some, but I would say that the bulk of my diet is definitely not made of meat!

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Plugging Away on GAPS

It's been a hard month. We've experienced die off on and off over the months, but this was a wave similar to what hit us at the beginning of GAPS intro and then again about 6 months after GAPS intro. Extreme fatigue, a general feeling of un-wellness and gloom and doom. We know something's happening for sure because just like the previous especially bad boughts of die off, we dropped weight drastically. Under a couple of weeks, Todd has dropped 6 lbs and myself, 4 lbs. On my 5'2" frame, it's significant.

Todd tells me this is something most girls would envy, but it's difficult for me. We've been terribly chemical sensitive, so other than Whole Foods, we've been purchasing everything online. Well actually, Whole Foods and the post office to drop off returns. I've been slowly replacing my wardrobe since purchasing clothes online can be a lot of trial and error, but discovered I've shrunk yet another pant size. I'm truly too tired to find more pants and run more return boxes to the post office. Some things will just have to fit loosely for awhile. And it's encouraging evidence of the revolution going on in our guts.

Die off is a bit exacerbated by the late fall/early winter weather. All the rain and short days mean less sun and no walks in the woods. Being outdoors and getting some sun always cheers me up. It gets easy to become mopey and self-pitying all cooped up.

Last week was the final week of our CSA. The final week was actually two weeks ago, but our CSA had extra produce so offered to extend for an extra week for those who were interested. I ordered a robust share for the extended week, glad to extend the season a bit longer before resigning to supermarket produce. I am so grateful to my CSA farmer for providing such quality produce that I now find the organic lettuce and squash at Whole Foods tasteless. I'm not putting down organic produce at Whole Foods as I am a loyal patron of the store. It's just that local produce grown with love just tastes so much better.

I have quite a bit of fermented and frozen produce stocked up in my fridge to help get through the winter:
5 gallon sized bags of frozen winter squash
4 gallon sized bags of frozen peeled, deseeded, halved tomatoes
3 jars lacto-fermented pickles
3 jars lacto-fermented eggplant
3 jars lacto-fermented radish
2 jars lacto-fermented baby bok choy
2 jars lacto-fermented stem medley (fibrous stems from chard and bok choy that I decided to ferment)
1/2 gallon sauerkraut

Although the sauerkraut is a ferment staple for us and I'm actually getting ready to make more. Okay, well, this blog was mostly a random ramble for me, but it feels good to get back to blogging. Hope to post again soon.

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Raw Food Diet and Apple Cider Vinegar for Cats

I feed my cats a BARF diet and have since the older cat, Keeley, got a urinary tract infection at 9 months, a few days after one of his vaccine boosters. At the time, we gave him the full 10-day course of antibiotics as recommended by our vet. Two days after we used up the antibiotics, Keeley's UTI came back in full force, worse than before. He was peeing droplets every three steps.

Since the conventional method didn't work, I went the alternative route. I switched him to a raw diet, and syringe fed him vitamin C, cranberry pills, and lots of water. Three days later, Keeley's UTI symptoms were gone. I tossed all of the kibble and canned cat food and went raw with Keeley for good.

When Mango came along a few months later, I was going to wait and switch him over slowly. However, he was very lethargic when we first got him, and I attributed it to the fact that the breeder had just taken him for his first booster shot a few days before. My gut told me to start him off on raw food right away.

Keeley and Mango are both Siberians, and Siberians take up to 3 years to reach full size. They are now respectively 4 and 3 years of age and as they grew, it became apparent the benefit that starting on a raw food diet at a younger age had on Mango. Keeley is much longer and appears larger, but when you pick him up, he's not as densely built. Mango looks much more round and short, but he is just as heavy and is very solidly built. Although Keeley's UTI went away, he tends to relapse when he is stressed. When I board the cats, I usually leave ester C with the boarding facility along with a supply of individually packaged raw food per day. Mango has never been sick a day in his life.

With Keeley's tendency for UTI's, he often had accidents outside of the litter box. If he happened to not drink enough or not eat enough and get enough liquids, I'd find a present next to the litter pan. I've tried everything over the years -- litter attractant, odor removers, Feliway, etc. I also scoop litter once or twice a day, making sure the pans are absolutely clean. Getting tired of cleaning up cat pee every few days, over the last year, I've tried many herbs and natural therapies -- saw palmetto, cat probiotics, D-mannose, cranberry exract, thuja, goldenseal, crouch grass, to name a few. Well, I finally found a solution that works: apple cider vinegar. I was browsing forums and alternative recommendations online for cat UTI one night after cleaning up the cat room floor, and found the recommendation to try raw apple cider vinegar. I know it's effect well for humans -- it's a fermented food, good for balancing the bodys PH, and helps with digestion. It certainly couldn't hurt.

It took three days after starting the cats on the ACV before Keeley's pee went from a small golf ball size in the litterpan to a grapefruit size. Keeley is now peeing in the litter pan like a champ. To think, all that time, effort, frustration, and money and the answer was sitting in my pantry all along.

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Growing Watercress in an EarthBox

The green beans I planted in May were so good, I started more plants in early August after I cleared out the old strawberry plants from my self watering planters. I have one self watering planter from gardeners.com and an EarthBox. However, the green beans in the EarthBox all died of rot. It didn't look like disease, so I felt the soil and realized that it was way too waterlogged. I don't remember what kind of soil mixture I used but I do remember that it was something I mixed myself the year before. Somehow, within a year's time, the soil had degraded to become heavy and waterlogged.

Rather than dumping out the soil into a landfill and buying more, I decided not to fight the wet conditions and plant some watercress. It wasn't until mid to late August that I got around to ordering watercress seeds, so the seeds went into the EarthBox some time at the end of August or beginning of September. I had no expectations since watercress is known to like specific conditions -- good sun but not too hot, cool roots and non-stagnant, running water. Nothing happened for a while. After about a full week, tiny little watercress sprouts started appearing all over the top of the soil. Watercress seeds are tiny and are supposed to be just pressed into the soil. I had scattered half of the seed packet all over the surface of the EarthBox soil so there were many sprouts very close together.

I went out every couple of days for the next week to thin out the sprouts. By the time they were two weeks old, they were about 1 inch to 1 1/2 inches high and i had done the last thinning, leaving little baby plants about 4 inches apart. For the past week, they have been growing steadily. I expect that in another couple of weeks, I should have my first harvest. Hopefully I can have a couple of harvests before this year's first frost.

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Fermented Eggplant (YUM!)

We tasted the fermented eggplant yesterday and it was surprisingly delicious. I first got the idea to ferment eggplant from my coworker. He is originally from the Middle East, and remembers fondly how his grandmother used to make pickled vegetables. He mentioned one day to me that his grandmother used to make pickled eggplant and that it is very very good. I was very curious and I asked what his grandmother put in it. He couldn't tell me much other than that she put hot peppers in it.

A few weeks ago, we got two eggplants from the CSA. I had let a couple from the CSA go bad and given another away in previous weeks. We are still very gingerly introducing things on full GAPS and while I have stopped peeling some vegetables, I am still removing the seeds from everything. I know I'm probably being obsessive, but since eggplant is full of many tiny little seeds, I just didn't feel right eating it. But when I got these two eggplants, I remembered what my coworker said and decided to let little probiotic critters predigest the eggplant before we eat it.

I looked around on the web for pickled eggplant recipes for inspiration. I ended up adding to the eggplant some parsley, celery, chile powder, and a bunch of garlic. I also added a few spoonfuls of brine from my homemade kim chi and a tbsp of salt to get it going. The full recipe is at:

http://www.wholetraditions.com/recipes/124-fermented-eggplant

The eggplant started bubbling and fizzing immediately when I mixed in the salt and brine. After a few minutes, the vegetables had released a lot of liquid, so I packed it into a quart sized jar. It filled up the jar with about a couple of inches head room, which was helpful since the vegetables kept trying to push its way up as it fermented over the next few days.

The fermented eggplant tastes eggplanty with that decisively tart fermented flavor. The chile powder and garlic gives it a nice kick and I really like eating it with soup. It reminds me of eating Chinese pickles with congee as a child. Definitely comfort food.

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Sauerkraut

Today I packed the sauerkraut from the gallon jar into smaller jars to place in the fridge. Being on GAPS, we eat a lot of sauerkraut around here. When we started GAPS, we did full GAPS willy nilly and didn't really implement a lot of the things that I've come to now feel are mandatory on GAPS. We only did broth and fermented vegetables occasionally. When went back to do GAPS intro nine months ago, we started on sauerkraut juice and worked our way up to eating the sauerkraut itself. Ever since then, we've been having sauerkraut with every solid meal. We eat about two small meals during the day and a larger meal for dinner, with about a tablespoon or two of sauerkraut per meal. This amounts to a lot of sauerkraut.

My sauerkraut making method is something I fell into all on my own. Most recipes call for pounding the cabbage. However, I am way too lazy for that, and I like my sauerkraut really crunchy. I found that if you use fresh cabbage, and mix and scrunch them up with the salt and fermenting cultures and then let them sit for a bit, they release plenty of liquid. I also like to cut up the cabbage by hand, much like someone would cut up lettuce for shredded lettuce salad. The pieces stay very crunchy, even though I usually let the sauerkraut ferment for over a week at room temperature.

Here's my sauerkraut recipe:
http://www.wholetraditions.com/recipes/117-sauerkraut

The jar and pyrex that I use for weighing down the cabbage are listed here:
http://www.wholetraditions.com/what-sara-uses/9-fermentation-supplies

The only thing I've been doing differently lately is to use one extra medium cabbage or use two large cabbages instead of three medium. This fills up my gallon jar about 2/3 to 3/4 full, leaving enough headroom for the weight and for the liquid to rise as the ferment gets going. It yields about three packed quarts of sauerkraut. I also like to throw extra juice from a previous batch of sauerkraut on the top. This ensures that my sauerkraut stays submerged even if anaerobic activity causes it to rise, and everything stays mold free and crunchy. If I haven't mentioned this already, the crunch is very important to me! I also often forget my ferment or am too lazy to pack it away, so my sauerkraut ends up going for more like 8 to 10 days at room temperature.

I find myself making sauerkraut about once a month. I usually use at least one red cabbage. Red cabbage is crunchier, and using a red cabbage makes it easier to tell when the sauerkraut is done. You can see from the pictures that when I start the sauerkraut (last photo), you can easily distinguish the green cabbage from the red, but as it ferments, it turns into one homogenous bright purple/red/hot pink color (shade depends on how many red cabbages I use). The end product (first photo) is really attractive and appealing and makes a lovely adornment on the dinner plate.

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