dinner

I added a new page to this space to act as a resource for others nearby who are looking for local food. There you will find our favourite farmers and shopkeepers.

And while I'm on the subject, we bought the most amazing chickens this fall (I mean dead ones -- you already know about the live ones, who are still living. Although every time I tell Eldest we're having chicken for dinner, his first response is often, "Not one of ours!"). They're huge -- some of them are nine pounds -- and the most delicious ever. I roast them whole and then we use the meat for lots of soup. I remain firmly convinced that homemade chicken soup really does fight colds.

Unfortunately, I'm not particularly good at roasting chickens just yet, and I often discover that despite the thermometer reading, they're underdone in the middle. If they were grocery store chickens I'd be very concerned, but because I know how they lived, I'm much less so. Of course we don't eat it undercooked, but it cooks up just fine simmering in broth for soup and I'm not afraid to get intimate with the carcass to strip it clean.

Anyways… the last one I roasted was so big, we ate the well-cooked outside bits for dinner Sunday, made broth overnight and made an enormous pot of soup on Monday -- enough to give me lunch the next day and to freeze half for another night's dinner, made another smaller bit of broth the next night, which is now frozen for something like pumpkin soup, and then my husband made the most amazing chicken curry on Tuesday, which went on to feed three of us for lunch the next day. Pastured chicken is not cheap but when it feeds you for four such nourishing dinners for four people, a few lunches and the basis for another cheap soup, it seems awfully economical. And delicious!

So have a look at my new local food page, which I hope to add to over the coming months and years.

apple season

I think this might be a good year for apples. Inspired by Not Far from the Tree, I plan to drop off a few notes like this tomorrow.

weird things

This morning our pasture-based farmer had fresh chicken feet. I need to get more bone broths into my guy and I think chicken stock has more versatility, flavour-wise than beef. So I picked up a couple bags for 50 cents each. I have a habit of doing things that scare me (not physically -- I have no interest in skydiving or bungee jumping -- but psychologically), and I've been thinking about trying to learning how to butcher a whole animal, just to see if I could. But anyways, the feet. I figured there's no time like the present since it was cold and gray today and due to be colder and grayer tomorrow. I don't know how people keep consuming bone broths through the summer because it adds so much heat and humidity to your house. My goal is to make and freeze as much broth as I can.

So anyways... these creepy chicken feet. They are seriously creepy. If I'd known I might need to peel them and would have to cut their toenails off, I would not have bought them. But I did it, and it really wasn't nearly as bad as I thought. They'd already been peeled, so I didn't blanch them. I just put them in the pot with cold water, a couple tablespoons of apple cider vinegar and let it sit for an hour before slowly bringing it to a simmer. It looked gross for a long time. If I stir it, it still looks gross when they come to the surface of the pot, but it smells quite delicious. It helps that I added some vegetable scraps and onion skins, bay leaves and peppercorns, I'm sure.

So that was weird.

The other weird thing was driving to the other side of town, to a near-deserted milk processing plant to buy an 11-litre jug of organic maple syrup. The deal was totally legit (not like I was buying raw milk or anything), but the producer doesn't sell his syrup at a market. He drives a milk truck part-time, so he just takes orders and delivers them on his way.

I'm not normally picky about organic production for maple syrup since nobody sprays maple trees, but they use slightly different detergents and defoamers than conventional maple syrup production and this bulk quantity was bigger and less expensive than any I've seen elsewhere. This is a very large jug of maple syrup we have now. When we open it, we'll pour some into a smaller bottle and put the big jug in our new (to us) deep freezer until we need to refill the smaller bottle.

Because of our dietary restrictions and also because I've been trying to shop seasonally and locally, we have like four different places we buy our groceries. If I got stuck in a weekly shop frame of mind, I'd pretty much have to shop every day, which I did in the early days of all these changes. I figure one solution is to buy as much in bulk as I can. So some time ago I bought 50 pounds of rolled oats (only to discover that Cure Tooth Decay says oatmeal is about the worst thing for children with tooth decay. Crap.) And now 11 litres of maple syrup. Next up could be a whole lamb or perhaps a side of pork?

* * *
Speaking of weird things, a huge change in our lives is coming soon. My old job was vacant, and with such short severance coverage from my husband's lost job, it just seemed like a no-brainer to see if they might be interested in rehiring me. So as of May 21, my husband will be the primary caregiver and I will win bread and bring home the bacon. This way, I can walk to work in 20 minutes or bike in 5, which means no second car (Hallelujah!) and a bit more family time every day. It means my husband won't have to take the first job that comes his way, even if it were far away. It means we can keep eating well. It means I can apply all the learning I've done about myself over the last year or so to my work life. Of course, it's slightly ironic that it came within months of my finally feeling like I was getting this at-home gig and doing ok at it, and literally within days of feeling like I just had the sweetest life ever. I can still feel that way though. And it will be my new project to feel that way while working.

But oh I will miss my kids. They will be great, I'm sure, and will love the chance to get closer to their dad, but I will miss them. Especially Youngest, who is still nursing on demand. Eldest had weaned by this age, but he was hale and hearty and he was drinking milk. Youngest can't tolerate any nutritious milk substitute, so breastmilk remains very important nutritionally. Especially when he gets sick. He's still pretty thin, so when he loses his appetite, he really suffers.

And of course there are my other interests, which will necessarily take a backseat. Whenever I get worried about this, which is with some frequency, I remind myself that to everything there is a season. We knew my husband worked in a volatile industry when I quit my job, and I accepted that leaving the workforce might mean I couldn't just jump back in whenever I wanted at the same level I was at. I would flip burgers if I needed to. I just didn't expect the situation to arise so soon, before I'd developed the practical skills of resilience I've been working on so slowly. But the fact that I'm literally able to return to where I left is so lucky, I can't help but wonder at the synchronicity, that maybe I still have some stuff to learn there.

Edited to add: I just realized I was missing a pretty important word in the first sentence: FEET. The farmer had chicken feet. I have corrected now.

not all dairy is created equal, or things I wish I had known

I first went off dairy in December 2011 at the advice of our (long-gone) paediatrician. She said Youngest's problems were likely a sudden, mild dairy intolerance. She didn't actually recommend I eliminate dairy because it was such a mild intolerance but I could see my baby wasn't doing well, so I gave it a try. It didn't make a whole lot of difference to Youngest, although his skin got a little better, but I noticed, after the first week of feeling like hell, that *I* felt MUCH better.

The following February, I connected with a naturopath, because it was clear that Youngest still wasn't doing well, and I wasn't sure what else to try eliminating. She guided me in eliminating pretty much everything. His symptoms all cleared up, and so we carefully tested a bunch of foods that had been eliminated. I was really looking forward to the dairy challenge and I planned a big dairy-stravaganza. I had oatmeal cooked with milk for breakfast and a yogurt-blueberry smoothie for a snack. Then homemade (gluten-free) macaroni and cheese for lunch and the plan was to have it for dinner too. But by the time dinner came around, I was feeling so horribly ill, I couldn't face any more dairy. Youngest also reacted to the dairy.

In the summer, when Youngest still wasn't thriving despite having eliminated all the seeming culprits, the naturopath suggested we try him on cheese and yogurt separately to try to get some more calorie-rich foods into him. We found he could tolerate yogurt but not cheese. Strangely, she didn't suggest giving him butter.

Since then, I have learned a few things about the potential allergens in dairy products, and they are not all created equal. People seem very quick to jump on the elimination bandwagon, but I'm not convinced it's the safest course of action. I know for myself, I tried eliminating everything before I'd given even a moment's thought to how I might replace those nutrients in my diet. I suspect, in as gentle and non-blaming a way as I can, that eliminating all those foods so suddenly contributed to Youngest's malnourishment. It certainly wreaked havoc with my milk supply. So I guess I'm saying I think it's worth considering adding in as much non-allergenic, protein-rich foods into your diet before you start taking away gluten and dairy.

Anyways... here is what I wish I had known when I first started eliminating dairy. I suspect I have a lactose intolerance. Lactose is the sugar in milk. Our family doctor keeps talking about it being a fat, but it is not. I've also heard people talk about how their babies were lactose-intolerant and so they too had to cut out dairy, but that is highly unlikely, as breastmilk is full of lactose. Most babies react to the protein in cow's milk, of which there are two: casein and whey. Most babies who can't tolerate cow's milk, also can't tolerate sheep or goat's milk, but that is not something I have actually tested myself (yet).

Butter is the least allergenic dairy product. It has very little lactose in it and almost no protein. It does have some milk solids in it, which may contain traces of lactose and protein in it that can cause reactions in some people but not usually many. If you can't tolerate butter, unless you have an anaphylactic allergy, you will definitely be able to tolerate ghee or clarified butter (so says my dietician who has a PhD so I trust her on these matters). As I learned recently in Jennifer McLagan's book Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes, (a wonderful book that I highly recommend) clarified butter is not the same thing as ghee. I haven't actually made either (yet) as butter has been fine on its own for both me and Youngest.

And while I'm on the subject of butter, in case you didn't know, it is an amazing health food. Vegetable oils are devoid of vitamin and the oxidize easily, making dangerous free radicals that can hurt your cells. But butter is rich in fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K, especially if it's made from the milk of grass-fed cows. I have found a local source of butter and I believe the cows are grazed during the months of green grass. I buy Nutri-Springs butter from the Stone Store here in town, but one day I plan to go out to the farm to pick up more of their offerings. Here is an article from the Weston Price Foundation with more of butter's health benefits. The 'science' that generated the Lipid Hypothesis (the idea that animal fats are the cause of heart disease) was completely wrong. You can google it if you want and read until the cows come home.

Yogurt is probably the next least allergenic dairy product, but not all yogurts are created equal. Because it's fermented, both the lactose and the casein are much more digestible. Watch the ingredients though. Many times, especially in low-fat yogurts, milk solids are added back in after fermentation, which means you're getting a whack of lactose and casein without the benefit of fermentation. Low-fat yogurts also have a host of other ingredients, so I always go full-fat. My favourite yogurt, which is also relatively local and available at the Stone Store, is Saugeen Country yogurt. They use whole milk, unhomogenized but pasteurized, so you get little bits of cream that float to the top. Their website is really well-written and informative to boot, so they get bonus points from me.

All cheese has casein in it, I'm pretty sure. I admit I haven't done a ton of research in this area, but harder cheeses have very lactose in them, thanks to the fermentation. Unfortunately, my dear chevre has lots of lactose in it. I spoke to a goat farmer at our market recently, who himself is lactose-intolerant, and he can't tolerate his own chevre either. How sad! I also discovered this from personal experience. But he assured me his older, harder cheeses are tolerable. Which makes me think that all those jokes on Big Bang Theory about poor Leonard's lactose-intolerance are inaccurate. But what do I know? Everyone's different. I'm pretty sure cottage cheese is terrible for lactose but I haven't actually tested it myself or done much research, since I don't particularly miss it.

If I had to do it over again, I would have just eliminated milk and cheese to start, and left yogurt and butter in, since they are good sources of probiotics and vitamins, respectively. I think eliminating whole food groups from your diet should be done with great care and foresight. The dietician suspects that Youngest's intolerances are really secondary; his damaged gut is the primary problem, and gluten, soy and dairy proteins are the hardest for any gut to break down, especially once it's damaged. I think that gut problems are widespread, and perhaps that is the first thing to address, before eliminating foods wholesale. But that's just me.

I've heard a number of people say things like, "It's not rocket science," when talking about nutrition. Having a severely malnourished child, possibly due, at least in part, to my own lack of nourishment before and during pregnancy, gives me a different perspective. I think nutrition IS kind of rocket science. Especially since so much bad science, coupled with heavy lobbying from industry interests and strong marketing and advertising tactics, has pretty much destroyed any food culture we had. In my own family, I would have to go back to my great-grandmother's recipes, at least, to find real food.

So... I hope if you're considering eliminating dairy, or if you already have, this gives you some extra things to think about and some new ideas to try. I definitely think it's a good thing to try to figure out exactly what element of dairy causes you problems, so perhaps you can invite some other dairy products back into your life. I myself am in much happier with yogurt and butter back in my life.