"That's Hot" Sweet Potato Casserole

The real name of this dish is “Madeira Sweet Potato Casserole”. But ever since a friend’s husband, inadvertently renamed it a few Thanksgiving dinners ago, this name, said with a few winks and grins, has stuck.

Invited to their home for Thanksgiving, I was asked to bring my “famous” braided Challah, a sweet potato side dish of my choosing, and a “non-pumpkin” desert because my friend informed me that, “No one can match my pumpkin pie.” I decided to make a chocolate pecan tart, which I figured was as far from pumpkin as possible.

She’d spent weeks planning her menu, pouring through Food & Wine, Epicurious, Sunset and Cooking Light magazines and cookbooks. Her table was beautifully appointed, a work of art that could easily have been photographed for any fine-food magazine. Beautiful linen tablecloths, sparkling crystal, and flickering candlelight set the stage for a formal five course dinner, the first three courses deserving and equal to the ambiance and setting. Subtle background chamber music intermingled with genteel, polite conversation, when suddenly – as loud and shocking as if someone popped a huge balloon – her husband exclaimed, “That’s Hot!”

Don't Be Ignorant About Flu Vaccines

alk about convenient. No matter where your errands take you – grocery, hardware, or your favorite warehouse store – you can also roll up your sleeves, getting jabbed with a very unnecessary flu vaccine. Of course, industrialized “medicine” would have us believe they care, and are looking out for our best interests, thus, the reason they make it so convenient. I’m way over being gullible. The collective “we” didn’t make enough clinic appointments to satisfy the bottom-line needs of the vaccine industry’s investors and stockholders. They’ve got billions to be made and we were not cooperating.

Flu vaccines are one of the biggest marketing scams that exist. They’re not based on good science, but instead, greed and profit at the potential expense of not only our health, but potentially, our lives.

For most people, the flu shot does not prevent illness, but actually does the polar opposite—it weakens your immune system and makes you more predisposed to the illness. The people who actually die after contracting the flu do so because they are already sick and have compromised immune systems, and that certainly doesn’t have to include you. Why Flu Vaccines Don’t Work

Turning back time...

The living history demonstrations, which tug the most at my heartstrings, involve food – butter-making, hearth-roasted meats, wild-yeast bread “sponges”, or cheese making. Each 1830’s costumed-interpreter’s passion and love for their craft leaves no doubt, that while they exchange their 1830’s garb for 21st Century garments when returning to their “real” lives, they take their timeless cooking techniques with them to their world.

Having been raised on Velveeta cheese, canned vegetables, and boxed deserts, I developed an aversion to the narrow range of processed-food “flavor” – salt and sugar – preferring to make my own meals from “scratch”.

Even though I had very few processed foods to cull from my cabinets when we followed the Nourishing Traditions way of eating, I’ve still managed to make substantial changes over the past half-dozen years, buying and eating only locally-raised organic foods, including meat that has been raised using traditional methods.

The way we now eat has much more in common with an Old Sturbridge Village 1830’s way of life, than it does with our modern culture.

The last time I shopped in a 2008 grocery store was last April, purchasing several packages of organic strawberries. Walking the aisles of a modern grocery store is like walking through a graveyard of nutritionally dead food.

Pickled Green Cherry Tomatoes

It’s that time of year – frost! It’s been such a lovely, bounty-filled summer of organic vegetables, that I don’t want to see it come to an end. While there are still cherry tomatoes on the vine, most of them won’t have the opportunity to ripen in the waning sun. I need to save the remaining green ones, but what to do?

I could cut off the branches, still loaded with fruit, tying them upside-down to the garage or basement rafters, allowing the fruit to ripen. Problem is, I’ve never liked the taste or texture using that technique. I love fried green tomatoes, but given the size of cherry tomatoes, they’d have to be battered and deep-fried whole – still only a one-meal solution. Remembering back to the lovely jars of pickled green relish, cooling on my grandmother’s counters, I almost reached for the sugar and pickling spices…..

Power of Fermented Foods

We’ve been following “Nourishing Traditions” for quite a few years, and have seen amazing changes in our Autistic son’s overall health. He’s achieving beyond all expectations this year, reading at a 6th grade level, and more important to me, has a real heart’s desire to please the Lord. That’s going to serve him well throughout life.

If I could point to any one thing that has helped him with his typical Autism digestive issues, it would fermented foods – not only a valuable part of our diet but a NECESSARY one.

When I asked people, “What do you think of when I say ‘fermented foods’”, I get answers that vary from “never heard of it” to “doesn’t sound very good”. I certainly didn’t understand, back when we began this journey, that I’d enjoyed fermented foods throughout my life – soy sauce, yogurt, old-fashioned barrel-aged pickles, traditional French bread, and cheese, just to name a few. The term describes the process of how a variety of breads, grains, vegetables and even meats are converted into healthy products that put more nutrition and energy back into the body, than what they take out. Instead of putting stress on the digestive tract, like highly-processed dead-nutrition foods (boxed, canned, single-yeast bread), fermented foods are naturally easier to digest, their starches, fats, proteins and sugars converted into forms more easily assimilated into the human body and utilized by the digestive tract.

Healthy Pickles

Who knew there were healthy pickles and unhealthy pickles! I didn’t until we discovered Wild Fermentation, a way to make pickles just like your grandmother…..well…..your great-grandmother……no, maybe your great-great-grandmother! Somewhere back in your genealogy, whichever grandmother it was who made pickles from a salt and water brine, not using vinegar or “processing” them using modern-day canning techniques, is the grandmother you want to copy. All others bought into the lies of the modern age which turned perfectly nutritious food into dead matter, unfit for human or animal consumption.

Where canning kills enzymes, heat liable vitamins and other nutrition, pickling by fermentation creates a nutrient rich solution that not only offers a wide range of vitamins and minerals, but also serves as a natural pro-biotic, aiding in digestion.

Lemon Souffle Pancakes

Every once in awhile, my thoughts wander, contemplating owning a B&B or little country inn. I’m enough of a realist, that the first “B” part of the fantasy, as in “bed”, means mountains of linen laundry and endless changing of sheets, not my idea of a good time. It’s the second “B”, the breakfast part, that keeps me dreaming. Whenever one of my latest experiments is approved by happy, contented faces gathered around my breakfast table, I find myself contemplating, “what if” and “if only”.

The irony is, I’d never have expected any of my dreams to have included the word “breakfast”, unless it had something to do with travel, Paris and croissants. For most of my life, breakfast was something to be avoided, having an aversion to boxed cereals and pancake mixes, frozen waffles, and grocery-store eggs, all of which left me feeling queasy and light-headed. A simple piece of dry toast, accompanied by a cup of hot tea, satisfied me for decades. It was when my husband and I stayed at a quaint and historic Maine B&B, that I was inspired to expand my breakfast horizon.

Wild Blueberry Hunting

Fruit trees of all kinds will grow on both banks of the river. Their leaves will not wither, nor will their fruit fail. Every month they will bear, because the water from the sanctuary flows to them. Their fruit will serve for food and their leaves for healing. Ezekiel 47:12

This summer’s wild berry crop has blessed us with abundant black raspberries and blackberries, their seeds deposited by creatures a few summers ago in our yard, along our rock retaining walls, and in a once-hoped-for garden stolen from me by a persistent and destructive woodchuck. When the last blackberry thorn extracted its blood price from my arm, its bounty tucked away in the freezer, my mind turned towards the next harvest – blueberries.

Unlike past summers, we won’t be journeying to northern Maine, exploring Bar Harbor and Acadia coastal beaches, enjoying whale-watch excursions, sailboat rides, lobster dinners around the campfire – a black tie and white linen affair back in Minnesota where I grew up – and my favorite activity, wild blueberry picking. It’s the blueberry picking I’ll miss the most, the daily ritual of rising first-light-of-dawn, heading out into fog-enshrouded seaside fields, steaming mug of coffee in one hand, berry bucket in the other, in search of fresh berries.

This 'n That

An alternate title for this section might be, “Forgive us, Lord, we know not what we do……”………

Toxic Food Borne Illness

These include the usual culprits – mushrooms picked with little studying or knowledge, touching poison plants like poison ivy or poison oak; or eating poisoned or spoiled shellfish. Those don’t bother me, as much as the “heavy metal such as antimony, zinc, lead and copper can find their way into the food chain from the way in which we store food items. Foods, especially high acid foods e.g. fruit juices, can react with metal containers such as cans, after they are opened. The metal from the containers then enters the food and can be consumed.” Or worse…

Brined & Roasted or Grilled Whole Turkey

It’s mid-July and already, my mind is planning Thanksgiving, looking forward to eating juicy, succulent turkey, adjectives rarely used to describe turkeys of most holiday meals. No matter the techniques – roasting bags, butter rubs, tenting with foil, or using roasters – the meat was the least favorite part of the meal. Then we discovered organic pastured turkeys – turkeys raised the way turkeys were meant to be raised. Unlike factory-farmed counterparts, pastured turkeys have a good life – running free in fields filled with sunshine, plenty of juicy insects and nutrient-dense grass from which they can forage. There’s no doubt part of their great flavor is psychological. It’s a relief to know we’re eating meat that isn’t loaded with chemicals, preservatives, antibiotics, and growth
stimulants like arsenic.