Your mission, if you choose to accept, is to make the change you’ve been meaning to make.

Impact Ratings: ??? (It’s up to you, but it better make an impact!)

Level of Commitment: Leap of Faith!

I’m going grain-free for Lent, how about you? Whether you’re a religious person or not, I challenge you to tackle a big step in your real food or natural living transformation this week/month. (photo source)

You might have been meaning to get around to finding a good source of grassfed meat in your area, or trying fermented cod liver oil, or reconsidering your milk source. Maybe you’re wanting to try something like homemade deodorant, no ‘poo shampoo, or making homemade cleaners. Perhaps you just desire to bake your own bread, make homemade yogurt, or start soaking grains.

I’m willing to bet most of you have something that you’d like to do but keep putting off, either because you’re afraid of it, don’t think you have enough time, or simply haven’t “gotten around to it” yet. Now is the time!

Grain Free?

I won’t make you go grain-free with me – aren’t you lucky? – but I will be posting some recipes and ideas over the next few weeks as we learn again how to play this game.

If you or someone you know is considering going grain-free or gluten-free, it’s a big change all at once, let me tell you! Here are some resources from my archives and others to help out; feel free to pass them along to others you know:

• Cara’s Grain-Free Menu Planner: I am just starting to poke around here, but already I’ve found some recipes I love in the March menu plan, including crepes with 12 eggs and just a bit of coconut flour – I can make wraps with leftover chicken now! Sesame seed candy, almond flour crackers (my daughter misses crackers already!), and some spicy chicken pepper poppers that my husband will LOVE.If you’re ready to try grain-free but just don’t know where to start, or you’re looking for new inspiration, Cara literally does everything for you, from shopping lists to the “to-prepare” lists that traditional foodies require. You will need coconut flour, it seems, to really follow Cara’s plan, but that kind of becomes a must if you want to go grain-free and still mimic some grains dishes, anyway. Tropical Traditions sells the coconut flour I’ve been using. (Thinking I need to order another bag for Lent! Luckily many recipes only call for 1/4 cup or so, so it really does last a long time.)

  Find out more information and figure out if the menu plan is right for you HERE.

  If you don’t need recipes but just some help menu planning in general – perhaps that’s the big step you need to take before you can do anything else, and that’s okay! I recommend Plan to Eat as an online system to keep you organized. Although I prefer pen and paper for my own menu plans, many have great success keeping recipes organized on the computer, especially if you use a lot of web recipes anyway. Plan to Eat has the most powerful and intuitive software I’ve come across.

• Take the grain-free challenge with Wellness Mama for even more tips than I’ll be giving over the next 40 days. It’s in progress right now!
• My initial grain-free menu ideas from last fall
• More on going grain-free, including grain-free snacks and ideas for how to feed kids without crackers and bread, right here
• My spaghetti squash story (although without the farmer’s market, spaghetti squash is almost unbearably priced! Arg! One was over $5 last week at the store – we won’t waste a spoonful!)
• In case you’re curious about some of the specific diets that call for a grain-free lifestyle, see The Comparison: The Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD), the GAPS Diet (Gut and Psychology Syndrome), and the Maker’s Diet
• A quick fix: if you’ve got some favorite creamy recipes, like a cream of potato soup or gravy, for example, that start with a roux (mixture of fat, flour, and milk), I found that arrowroot starch works just great. In fact, I overthickened my potato soup big time last week because I didn’t trust the thickening power! It’s strong stuff – use slightly less than you would wheat flour, perhaps by half or a third.
• And Why is Gluten Such a Problem, anyway?

Tomorrow I’ll share two different grain-free pancakes that make breakfast more tolerable since I can offer something other than “eggs or yogurt?” 7 days a week, as well as links to a few new grain-free granola recipes from good blogger friends that I tried this weekend. Nummy!

Here they are: Banana Grain-Free Pancakes and Almond Apple

Don’t forget the Radiant Life giveaway for $80 worth of desiccated liver, coconut oil, and krill oil – five winners! Click here to enter.

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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: I am an affiliate of Amazon.com, which means that anything you purchase there after starting here will kick back a smidge to me – but it won’t cost you any more! If you shop there anyway, thank you very much for starting with KS. I also work with Health, Home and Happiness and the grain-free menu planner on commission. Plan to Eat is a March sponsor of KS, and this is their complementary mention. See my full disclosure statement here.