Update on Gluten-free Home Experiment and family pictures

Look at that juicy drool.

"We are makin' taxes, Mommy!  Taxes is fun!"

Tea with kale chips and dark chocolate.  She thanked God for tea, kale chips and chocolate that night when we prayed.  Soo cute.

So careful.  So little.

This isn't a great photo but I snapped it quickly to show some of the things I'm doing in the kitchen now.  Things like freezing that jar of wheat grass juice for future smoothies and juices.  We harvested the flat of wheat grass today and it was way more work than it was worth.  I guess it was a fun experiment.  We are also eating a lot more nuts and seeds.  I've been so excited to discover the value that nuts like walnuts, almonds, cashews and other nuts have.  Also, I've read in Nourishing Traditions, and numerous other credible sources, that calories, fat and all such so-called (in North America today) "unhealthy" components of food, if found in healthful sources are actually good (gasp!) and we shouldn't shy away from them.  Healthy fat from nuts like cashews have value and aren't going to hurt you like a burger from McDonald's.  In fact, we NEED those healthy fats for our bodies to function properly and not go into starvation mode from a lack of nutrients. There is a book called Eat To Live that I pinned in my pinterest book section, if you care to take a peek, that talks about eating healthy calories until your body stops craving the bad calories. The body is craving those empty calories because: 1... it needs them and 2...the foods we eat instead is addicting and empty of the nutrients we need (GMO side-effects, yeast build up in the gut, all things I'm going to blog about eventually) Eating good calories will rebuild the nutrients your body is lacking in until you STOP craving food and your body says "hey!  I'm full.  I don't need to eat as much anymore!" 

So little.  So snuggly.  She was feeling sad because her teeth hurt, so she buried her teeth in my collar bone.

This was my third trimester sweat-shirt. 

Taste-testing the new yogurt for a bedtime snack.

Sam was trying to explain why she couldn't get too close to the drop off here by the creek.

Soooo... here is my update on our gluten-free experiment.  It's been a few weeks and we're feeling more healthy (not jittery) energy, less cravings for wheat (*) and a renewed interest and appetite for vegetables (especially green leafy vegetables) and other "super" foods.  It's funny, we've been noticing that sometimes people call normal food a "super" food when really it's just a food.  Real food is good for you and heals the body.  Period.  Most foods you find in the inner isles (and outer, we're discovering) are really just food-type products.  They don't replenish the body.  All the nutrients have been cooked out, processed out, etc.  It's funny how much of the store becomes "off-limits" if you omit any option that contains GMOs, major processing, the dirty dozen (we don't completely follow this as we couldn't afford to), chemicals, processed sugar and altered "natural" foods (honey that isn't honey, but is labelled as honey and is really just the nectar from the honey with no actual nutrients!  Ah!  We are buying local honey from now on!)  So much of what is found in the grocery store is stripped of its nutrients, one way or the other.  We can't afford to buy all local so we are doing our best on a budget to eat as whole foods, organic and local as possible!  It's not easy.  It takes planning, patience, education (self-education for now) and lots of time. We've been able to, over the course of the last few weeks, bring our budget to a point where it matches our pre-gluten free grocery budget!  A big achievement when healthy food can be so expensive.  Yay!

*I say cravings because we are discovering that GMO wheat has properties that create dependance and other lovely side-effects...  The wheat industry is so unstable that it's difficult to find wheat that isn't genetically modified.  It's not like the wheat our grandparents ate, sadly.  So we figure we might as well try to avoid it.  Wheat is one thing... GMO wheat is another bird.  Watch Food Matters for more on this concept.

Here is a list of some of the things I'm making at home: (some are new to me, kefir for example)

Yogurt (with raw milk, when I can get it!)
Kefir (also with raw milk or with coconut milk)
Any dessert we eat in the house (there have to be occasional exceptions if we're out at someone's house, etc).  Any. (and it has to be gluten free... preferably raw so it isn't really dessert, more like a healthy snack)
Kale chips
Raw chocolate treats (apparently, if it is truly unprocessed chocolate (raw), chocolate has a HIGHER amount of vitamin C than any other food!  So cool.  If it isn't raw, it doesn't have vitamin C.)
Green smoothies
Juicing fruit and vegetables
Raw bacon (made with eggplant)
Oatmeal and banana based waffles
Flax and almond flour pancakes
Almond flour
Almond milk
Cashew nacho cheese dip
Avocado fries

These are just some of our favorite things so far.  I might be posting recipes soon. I want to post about kefir and the health benefits of fermented drinks and vegetables.  I'm learning about this right now.

-And we don't have agave in the house anymore because I learned that it is made with the root-basically as high on the glycemic index as eating corn syrup.  Oh well.  Honey and maple syrup it is.  If we were living where agave grows we could eat the syrup made from the plant instead of the root... but they don't export that sweetener to North America.  If they do, I don't know where to buy it. All the organic, raw and blue agave here is the high-glycemic kind.  Very deceiving.-