Real Food & Natural Living | Kitchen Stewardship

Raise Your Hand if You’ve Consumed Chemicals Today!

June 18th, 2013 · Uncategorized

Sorry, You Can't Have a Chemical Free Life

I’m over at Green Your Way today with a little exploration of chemicals and their role in our lives.

I can’t share too much or it will give away the main idea too much, but here’s a quick peek:

“I don’t eat vegetables with chemicals.”

“I choose to use personal products without chemicals.”

“I don’t like putting chemicals in my body.”

Read the rest HERE, and I can’t wait to hear your thoughts in the comments!

Big Thanks to my Sponsors!

It is such a joy to be able to offer so much free content here at Kitchen Stewardship (like the menu plans and printable recipes cards you can get for signing up for the KS monthly newsletter). I owe some of the thanks for the opportunity to work for free to my paid sponsors, and all three this month have been with me a long time:

Mighty Nest: My trustworthy source for only the best natural, safe products for the kitchen, cleaning, and kids.

Visit Mighty Nest for all your homemaking needs, especially lunch packing and traveling this summer.

Plan to Eat is a menu planning program that allows you to save and categorize recipes, then use your own favorites OR the 60,000+ real food recipes in the KS group to plan weekly menus. It’s a cinch to use and compatible with mobile phones, even generating a shopping list. Try a 30-day trial to see if it’s the right thing for you!

LPC Survival has wonderful Berkey filters like the one my family uses, and they also offer many preparedness tools and items, including Tattler reusable canning lids. Many readers love being able to reuse the lids and not buy new every year!

Thank you, sponsors! Please give them a visit of gratitude for everything you read here.

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Monday Mission: Enjoy Your Food

June 17th, 2013 · Monday Missions

Your mission, if you choose to accept, is to specifically focus on the deep enjoyment that food can bring this week.

That doesn’t mean you have to eat junk food and compromise eating well…because real food can be wholly enjoyable in the right company, with the right attitude, and with the right recipes or raw materials.

A fresh strawberry, for example. (Ours are finally in here in Michigan, and I keep wondering how the things from California that we can buy in stores can even share the same name as these juicy sweet morsels of summertime!)

A salad with feta cheese, chopped red onion and peppers, sunflower seeds, avocado, raw vegetables, and a garlicky homemade dressing on top. Score even more for local lettuce.

Homemade French fries, grassfed grilled burgers with lots of fixings, and fresh asparagus sauteed in bacon grease in a cast iron pan, especially made sweeter if you’re eating it as a request for a 5-year-old’s birthday dinner, accompanied by chocolate milk made with homemade syrup.

Do You Enjoy Your Food?

After the last few weeks of food exploration and common sense questioning, like talking about what kind of strawberries to eat, whole grains vs. white flour, and "how much is too much?" when it comes to things like eggs, almonds, and coconuts, a friend asked me this question:

"Do you enjoy food?"

All the information and counter-information was wearing her down and making her feel like nothing was safe (or fun) to eat anymore.

Oops.

It’s very much in my nature to overthink things – everything – but not everyone is cut out for the extent to which I continue to explore food.

And honestly, sometimes all that knowledge does make me hate food.

[Read more →]

→ 17 CommentsTags: enjoying your food·kids·Kids in the Kitchen·Monday Missions·real food·real food diet·stress

How Much is Too Much?

June 14th, 2013 · Food for Thought

If someone has scrambled eggs for breakfast, egg salad at lunch, and egg quiche for dinner, most folks would say or think, “Wow, that’s a lot of eggs. Is that okay to eat?”

If someone else has cereal and milk for breakfast, grilled cheese for lunch, and lasagna for dinner, I would note, “Wow, that’s a lot of wheat.” Five years ago, I wouldn’t have said a thing. Someone who is lactose intolerant would probably also notice that dairy was consumed in large quantity at each meal. I might not.

One of the theories about the rise in gluten sensitivity is that people quite simply overconsume it, in basic ways that we don’t even notice, like the example above, because wheat is such a part of our food culture.

However, this is not a post about gluten.

It’s about everything else.

I’ve been wondering a lot lately whether we’ll end up overconsuming some of the other things that end up replacing wheat in a gluten-free or grain-free diet. (Or perhaps we simply overconsume, period.)

Eggs

One example in our family is those eggs – although I don’t usually serve three egg-centric main dishes in a day, it’s nothing to have scrambled eggs for breakfast, grain-free coconut muffins (from Healthy Snacks to Go) for a snack, clocking in at half an egg per muffin and easy to eat two, and then grain-free cheesy biscuits (from Better Than a Box) with soup for dinner, with 8 eggs in that recipe.

I do believe eggs are healthy, so I’m not going to by swayed by the egg-white lovers or the saturated fat demonizers, but I wonder about quantity. Particularly in the dark days of winter, when chickens usually wouldn’t lay, or would at least seriously slow down production without artificial light, is four dozen eggs a week really what God intended for our bodies?

[Read more →]

→ 55 CommentsTags: almond flour·almonds·coconut·coconut flour·common sense·eggs·grain-free lifestyle·omega-3s·omega-6s·oxalates·oxalic acid·pasteurization·phytates·phytic acid·polyunsaturated oils·real food·traditional foods

Balancing Sun Exposure with Sun-o-phobia

June 13th, 2013 · Food for Thought

Don’t you feel horrible when your kids get a little pink from the sun?

It’s a difficult balance to strike, wanting them to get Vitamin D from the sun and also be protected from the harmful effects of the same darn sun.

Sometimes I forget that I’m not afraid of sunscreen itself anymore, and I should slather it on a little more liberally. My ~~4yo~~ (whoops, 5yo! Happy Birthday, little girl!) wore a borrowed bathing suit this week and had more back skin exposed than usual, and although I thought I had gotten it well, it wasn’t quite good enough for the very liberal dose of noonday sun we got.

Her sunburn didn’t hurt her, but it made me feel awful – because I know it might hurt her later.

It also made me think more about common sense and sun exposure. Even with last week’s sunscreen safety post, we still have a few issues to explore.

Here’s a conversation I was drawn into at Jo-Lynne’s post about sun safety:

Hmmm, I have mixed feelings on this post. I have worked in Dermatology Research at the VA Medical Center with the Chief of Dermatology for more than 15 years and preach regularly about sunscreen use. I am not aware of any true clinical research to support the whole “chemical sunscreens cause cancer” theory. Also, by stating that sunscreens may cause cancer could lead to people not using it all which puts you at a much higher risk of skin cancer. Also, a base tan is NOT protection from the sun. A base tan is sun damage. That fact is indisputable. I respect everyone’s opinion and to each his/her own.

Kim

My response:

Kim,
I’m the gal who tested out the 28 (now 43 actually) sunscreens that Jo-Lynne linked to in this post, and I’ve written quite a bit on sunscreen. I hope you don’t mind me jumping in too.

I think you make a really good point about people ending up feeling almost afraid of sunscreen and then not putting it on enough and getting burned. Finding the balance between getting some sun exposure for the Vitamin D benefits and getting the sunscreen on is tricky, so I can even see that result in our own family sometimes. I hate that feeling of, "Arg, I waited too long to put on sunscreen and they’re looking pink!!" when I look at my kids (happened today in fact, sigh). I give myself the "bad mom award."

I’m surprised to hear that you’ve never come across any research that sunscreen causes cancer. I feel like oxybenzone in particular is pretty well established as toxic. Heather Dessinger does even better research than I do generally – do you see anything substantiated over here: www.mommypotamus.com/many-healthy-sunscreens-accelerate-skin-aging/ or here: http://www.mommypotamus.com/wait-what-sunlight-prevents-cancer/ ?

I was just reading somewhere about how the production of melanin offers protection for the skin from the sun, i.e. the base tan theory. I wish I could remember exactly where.

Ultimately, I have a lot of questions about the theories that (a) sunlight causes cancer and (b) sunscreen prevents cancer. My neighbor and I were talking, and just common sense wise, why is it that so many people get their skin cancer in areas that aren’t really exposed to the sun (buttocks, for example) and plenty of people DON’T get skin cancer on places like their nose, even if, like my neighbor, they never wore sunscreen as a kid and got burned and peeling every summer, all summer long? I know that’s just anecdotal, but I’d love to hear the dermatology response, because I’m sure there’s information I just don’t understand about that.

[Read more →]

→ 53 CommentsTags: sunblock·sunburn·sunscreen·Vitamin D

That Whole Grains Question: Is it Time for "To Soak or Not to Soak?"

June 12th, 2013 · Food for Thought

If I make my mom’s biscuit recipe with unbleached, unbromated wheat flour, home-rendered pastured lard, Real Salt, and organic, grassfed milk, but the flour happens to have all the bran and all the germ sifted out of it, is my resulting biscuit – which will be so fluffy and melt-in-your-mouth smeared with pastured butter that you’ll think you died and gone to Heaven – is it junk food? Is it real food? Or would some even say, "It’s not even food at all!" just because of the refined grains?

I posed a basic question last week on Facebook: White flour…food, non-food, junk food, or somewhere in between?

It generated quite the conversation, and I thought that many of the comments and opinions deserved my own response.

The title of this post is partially a "whole grains" vs. refined grains question but really that whole "grains question," as in, I’m going to talk about grains through the lens of common sense. All grains: refined, soaked, sprouted, and none at all. (top photo source)

What’s the deal with grains?

What is "Food" Anyway?

I promise that’s not a trick question.

If I’m going to deem something "food" or "not food," I need to be able to articulate a definition for food.

I can reasonably say that if I can trace something from its origin either in the ground or on an animal, then be able to replicate every step of its processing in my home kitchen without a chemistry degree or any degree of heroics, then it’s actually food.

For example, let’s look at the white flour in question:

White flour begins on a wheat plant, as the seed. I could grow and harvest that myself if I so desired.
The seed is then ground into flour, which I could do in my Nutrimill, or, if I wanted a more "pure" definition of food without any fancy machinery, I could always grind flour by hand with a mortar and pestle. That sounds like fun…
Now I have whole wheat flour with the bran, germ and endosperm of the seed all ground up. Like I demonstrated in my Nutrimill videos, all that’s needed to separate the bran out is a fine sieve, and it doesn’t really even take that long. To separate the germ, I’d just need a finer sieve, but I am fairly certain I could do it in my own kitchen.
White flour: it may have the most nutritious part of the plant removed, but I don’t see any reason why the part that is left, the refined grain, should be relegated to "not food" any more than peeling a carrot or a cucumber should suddenly change its status to "not food."

Someone on the Facebook thread stated that the body does not recognize white flour, and I soundly disagree. We’re not talking trans fats here, which have been altered at the molecular level in a lab to create a "food" that is totally new and different from any naturally occurring fats. The body does not recognize that and doesn’t know what to do with it, true, but white flour is just food that’s missing some parts from its whole form.

The body can handle it.

[Read more →]

→ 63 CommentsTags: grains·real food·soaked grains·soaking grains·sprouted flour·sprouting·white flour·whole grains

Monday Mission: Cultivate Common Sense

June 10th, 2013 · Monday Missions

Your mission, if you choose to accept, is to think critically, question everything, use logical perspective, and above all, seek to cultivate common sense…for the rest of your life.

This is no one-week, learn-a-new-skill mission, folks.

As I mentioned yesterday on Facebook, this week is “common sense week” at Kitchen Stewardship.

There have been quite a number of topics and thoughts brewing in my head recently, and one common theme is quite simply common sense.

Perhaps I’m naïve, but I’d like to think I have a healthy dose of common sense, whereas it seems like many around me are lacking.

The conversation on Facebook when I mentioned the phrase kind of confirms my suspicion: That common sense isn’t common anymore. It’s practically become something that needs to be taught (not to you, of course). Winking smile

Choose Your Own Side

Swallowing something anyone tells you – even me, dear kitchen stewards! I’m just a (frightfully busy and multitasking) human being – is not a good idea without examining it on all sides first.

If you read an opinion, are given some research to back something up, stumble across a new diet, read warnings about something on the market, or generally are trying to figure out, “What do I eat? What do I buy?” then you need to make sure you can find and understand all the sides of the story.

For example, one of my former students, now a junior in high school, contacted me this spring as a source for a school project he was doing on organic meat. Although I know the choices I make for my family, I also know I’m still muddling through the issue and don’t know everything. I had a great time answering his questions, but I also wanted him to be well-rounded in his research and not just seek out a source that would support his opinion.

I sent him to my longtime challenger here at Kitchen Stewardship, “Tonya,” who always brings the voice of big agriculture (and little agriculture) to the conversation whenever I talk farming. I knew she would be overwhelming for him, but I felt it was important not to let him get away with one-sided research. In order to be your own person and choose your side, you have to know what they all look like. Once a teacher, always a teacher!

Asking the Questions

If this post is “Common Sense 101,” our curriculum goal is to learn to ask the right questions.

When evaluating any information, I like to step back and ask things like:

What is the source? Personal opinion, expert in the field, actual scientific research? If research, how big was the study? Was it peer-reviewed? The more sources, the better – always.
Who stands to gain from the information? Follow the money…
How does this line up with what people did a hundred or two or three hundred years ago? I believe in a just God who created the world for His beloved children; how does this information reconcile with a benevolent Creator? (Yes, some will say that any faith is in opposition to logic, that faith is the antithesis of common sense. My senior year high school term paper, for an atheist teacher, was on the subject, “God exists.” Logic can get you to God, but it does still take a leap of faith to get to religion. I choose to take that leap. Period.)
What are the long-term effects? Does anyone know the long-term effects?
How does my personal experience and the experiences of my family and friends reconcile with this information?
What are the risks of either side? The benefits?
Is there anything immoral involved?
Is the person giving me the information open to other ideas, or are they so attached to their belief that constructive discussion will never happen?
What do the naysayers say? Dig as deeply into the “other side” as you do into the side that seems right at first.
Can I sustain it, or will this new information suck all the joy out of life and have unintended repercussions?
Does it make sense? Does it fit into the big picture?

I’m quite looking forward to talking about things like white flour, sun exposure, traditional foods, new (fad?) diets, and American obesity with you this week, all through my hyper-critical lens of…common sense.

We’ll seek the balanced middle ground together (or the far end of the spectrum, if it’s sensible and correct!) and have fun – and good discussion, I imagine – doing it.

The Common Sense Posts

Here’s what we’re talking about:

That Whole Grains Question: Is it Time for “To Soak or Not to Soak?”
Balancing Sun Exposure with Sun-O-Phobia
How Much is Too Much? (if you eat eggs, almonds, coconut…you’re going to want to explore this post)
…more coming!

Sale on Common Sense

No, common sense can’t really be bought, but Common Sense Health can. This eBook by Laurie Neverman has captivated my eyes today (when I was supposed to be writing). She has the most concise, compelling, and dare I say, sensible arguments for lots of things, from organic gardening (I learned a ton of new tricks) to earthing to avoiding GMOs (a subject I may just have become truly scared of). I learned more in a few minutes about dry brushing and the benefits of cold showers than I would have imagined, and I have a few pages marked to show my husband when he gets home.

So.

If you’d like to buy common sense…it’s 25% off this week just for you guys, and Laurie also has a great giveaway going for 3 copies of the eBook plus some neat items to get your natural living journey kickstarted.

Click HERE to read more about the book and enter the giveaway.

If you bought the Extreme health Library bundle sale, you already have this title. Go ahead, time to open it up!

———————————————

I’d love to see more of you! Sign up for a free email subscription or grab my reader feed. You can also follow me on Twitter, get KS for Kindle, or see my Facebook Fan Page.

If you missed the last Monday Mission, click here.

Kitchen Stewardship is dedicated to balancing God’s gifts of time, health, earth and money. If you feel called to such a mission, read more at Mission, Method, and Mary and Martha Moments.

Disclosure: There are affiliate links in this post to the eBook from which I will earn some commission if you make a purchase. See my full disclosure statement here.

Common Sense Health 25% off

→ 37 CommentsTags: common sense·Monday Missions

Buying Food Online – Great Way to Find Traditional Goodies {GIVEAWAY – NOW CLOSED}

June 7th, 2013 · What to Buy

And the survey says…60% of you order food online.

That’s even more than the number who have ordered KS eBooks, by quite a bit.

Don’t worry, my feelings aren’t hurt – I’m glad you’re smart enough to prioritize food over information, because hey – you gotta eat. Plus, I give plenty of information and recipes away for free, and that can rarely be said about food (except maybe in this post). Winking smile

When I took a survey of readers here at Kitchen Stewardship in December 2012, 60% really did check the box for ordering food online. I feel pretty safe in assuming that the new order-your-delivery-pizza-online feature is not what these fine kitchen stewards are referring to.

Whether you live in a rural area without health food store options or simply find it easier or less expensive to shop via a screen than a trip to a store (moms of toddlers, raise your hands), it can’t be denied that people are increasingly ordering lots more online, including food. It’s no longer a fringe thing.

I hope you’re already familiar with Wise Choice Market, as I’ve mentioned them before, but in case you’re not – and especially if you’re in one of those groups who really needs to order online for whatever reason – I’d like to introduce you.

Wise Choice Market seems to be becoming a one-stop-shop for Weston A. Price foodies. They began by selling just one product: naturally fermented, raw, organic vegetables. They’ve now expanded into