Saturday, August 18, 2007

If you are what you eat...

Then I wish I were more of this, more often.



I took this picture in July right before turning all of the above into Gazpacho. It was delicious.

Though we ate only local, farm friend raised meat and many vegetables from our farm all summer, we also reverted to eating lots of Kettle brand potato chips, Julie's organic ice cream, "healthy" root beer from the small health food aisle in our local grocery store and other processed quick fixes. Our nearest local organic dairy guy stopped delivering his raw milk near enough for me to get it regularly and back in June, our oven broke. And my third excuse is that I stopped driving into Atlanta regularly to shop at the natural grocery stores. We stayed closer to home this summer, using less gas and less energy. Thus began my downward slide (well, let's call it a vacation) away from weekly grain-grinding, Kefir fermenting, coconut oil infused smoothie making, sour dough pancake and bread making and many more chores that were once all part of my Weston-Price based traditional food preparation, done in the service of my family's health.

I keep waiting for my passion about cooking well to make itself known again. While writing this post the UPS guy arrived at the door with a big box of the high quality coconut oil that I ordered this week. It made me consider driving a ways to get the good milk to make that old smoothie. When the weather cools off, I'll be really hungry again. That will help.

In the meantime, it's been good to be less fanatical about food. We may have swung too far in the other direction, on this lazy food vacation, but I gained some perspective. I feel a lot better when I take the time to prepare our food from scratch. So that will help to inspire me to grind the grain and ferment the vegetables. At the same time, it isn't the end of the world when Gillen has blue Gatorade at a soccer game and goes a bit crazy, and it will forever be true that sometimes drinking a rootbeer float is worth the sugar reaction I have the next day.

4 comments:

kelli said...

That's too funny. I was taking pictures of produce that day too! hee hee

Tamar Orvell said...

please tell me about coconut oil. this is the second post i read here today that mentions it. i heard it was a major artery clogger. you say?

Madeline Rains said...

I'm glad you asked! There is agreat explanation of its benefits on the weston price site that I linked in this post. You can go there and search for coconut oil. But to list a few of its benefits : it is antiviral - when we were eating it every day last wiinter no one in our family got sick, not even a cold; it gives good sustaining energy (read about good fats on the site) and it keeps your metabolism running quickly - not an issue for you or I, but I know some friends who have lost weight using coconut oil. It also fight my chronic fatigue symptoms which come from a virus. It's great for the skin too. Read a new take on cholesteral and artery clogging at the site. This way of eating is starting to catch on.

Tamar Orvell said...

Thanks for the coconut oil answer. I'm off and running to devour the weston price site info you posted. Me to self: Will I also meet the man of my dreams by following the site info? hmmm. Stay tuned;-)