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Who doesn’t love bacon?  Everything is better with butter, but the same is true with bacon, right?  Breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, and even dessert (mmmm, chocolate covered bacon!). Bacon can be eaten at any meal, any time!  And of course there’s turkey bacon, chicken bacon, beef bacon and pork bacon — but will the real bacon please stand up?  Well, to me the real bacon comes from pigs of course.  When I first started learning more about nutrition, over ten years ago, I stopped eating pork products.  Pigs eat anything and everything, are supposedly full of parasites, biblically unclean, and oh, gasp! lets not even talk about the saturated fat content!  While this may be true of factory farmed pork, I have since discovered that pork that has been organically and humanely raised, on pasture by small local farms is quite different.

Happy New Year real food lovers!  I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and New Year celebration, and that some where in there you had a chance to enjoy time with family and friends and perhaps some quiet time to relax.  If you are a mother like myself with young children, you probably spent a lot of your time cooking, baking, shopping, wrapping, entertaining and generally working harder than you were able to enjoy!

With a little more than a week left before Christmas, I don’t know about you, but I know I am still scrambling to finish up my gift buying and baking.  Ok, I’ll admit, I just started this week! As I figure out my last minute preparations I have come across some really great gift ideas and recipes that I’d like to try this holiday season and share with you all.

Christmas Treats & Baking:

How does this fudge from Cheeseslave look?  Made with all real food ingredients, I know my family is going to love it and so will yours!

A couple of years ago, one of my most very favorite bloggers, Ann Marie of Cheeseslave started a weekly menu plan by email.  I was so excited and was probably one of the first ones to sign up.  Ann Marie has been posting her tried and true recipes on her blog for several years and it is no secret to her readers that she is an experienced and well travelled cook and taster!  She ran her menu mailer for close to a year when it first launched and I looked forward to that menu reaching my inbox each week!  Her recipes were always delicious and nourishing, with many familiar and simple to do, and some more unique, challenging your cooking skills.

Light and flakey goodness!

The Christmas season is upon us once again.  Most everyone has a twinkle in their eye and the excitement of the season is hard to contain — unless you are Scrooge!  Getting together with family and friends, having parties, making crafts, decorating and celebrating the birth of Christ are all ways we love to celebrate.  But I believe that one of the most significant ways in which we celebrate this special occasion is with food!  This has been demonstrated world wide, whether you celebrate Christmas, Hannuka, Kwanza or anything in between!  It is one of the few times each year where we invest a lot of time and effort into making elaborate and rich dishes to indulge in with friends and family.

There are few things in life that can get me more excited than Christmas.  The Weston A. Price Foundation yearly Wise Traditions conference is right up there though.  Just like Christmas, there is so much preparation and excitement, then before you know it, it’s over for another year. It’s always a rush, and goes by too fast.  It is an event that can be looked back upon with many happy memories. And, with food like this, how could you not get excited?

Saturday evening awards banquet entree ~ Grass-fed pot roast with reduction sauce, roasted parsnips, carrots and mashed squash. Yum!

The GAPS diet is nothing without fermented foods and probiotics (alongside bone broth, of course).  The fact of the matter is that our digestive tracts should contain about 2 to 5 pounds (yup, pounds!) of live bacteria living inside, so these guys do some important work!   We all know that without these bacteria we would die, but tell that to makers of all of the anti-biotic products that bombard our every move! Personally, I have made it my goal to expose myself to as much and as many different types of good bacteria I possibly can (this also includes yeast and viruses — the good kind). Since starting the GAPS diet several months ago, I have really increased the amount of probiotic foods I eat and the amount of probiotic supplements I take. I make it a point to eat something fermented at least once per day (if not at every meal) and I now take 6 capsules of Bio-Kult per day. Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride has indicated that the goal in ultimate healing for adults is 8-10 capsules of supplemental probiotics (preferably Bio-Kult or another good, therapeutic strength brand) per day, and for children, like my 5 year old daughter, she recommends 4-6 per day. Jasmine is now taking 4 per day. Keep in mind that this is a goal, and you must go slowly, because for some, die-off (detox) can be intense. For us, I am no longer noticing die-off, other than through the skin on our face. I started breaking out with a small, itchy rash on my lower right chin, and under both of my eyes. Jasmine has developed a rash (not bad) on her chin as well. It is lingering (a couple months now), but I think that is good. It is a sign that toxins and heavy metals are coming out, and this is the result of the probiotics doing their job in the gut.

Well, I almost don’t believe it myself, but we’ve been grain and potato free for 8 weeks!  I doubted that we could even do it as my daughter and I were definitely carb-a-holics. If this was a weight loss diet, I would have quit!  But, I am committed to the healing that I know this diet will bring.  The last 8 weeks around here has been slow and quiet. This diet is a lot of work, and I have been absorbed in it. I have felt some changes occur and I am looking forward to more in the months ahead. I experienced some major die-off and detoxification during the first week of intro and intermittently through the first 4 weeks. For those that don’t know, the GAPS diet is composed of 3 stages. The first stage is the intro diet, second stage is the full GAPS diet, and the third and final stage is coming off the GAPS diet.

Photo credit: By snowpea&bokchoi on Flickr

Bones.  I love them.  Years ago, I used to throw them out.  For shame!  I didn’t know any better. But now I save every last one. I even buy them on their own, big bags of them.  Soup bones, oxtail, and marrow bones.  So full of goodness. Before I adopted a real foods diet, I used powdered broth and those MSG-laden boullion cubes. I cringe just thinking about it.  It was the easy and naive way out. I thought, who has time to make broth from scratch?  Little did I know the immense health benefits, the flavour difference (there is simply NO comparison) and just how little work making bone broth from scratch really was.