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.

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!

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.

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, the holidays are officially behind us and a new year has begun. I wanted to share with you all some of the holiday treats we made and what we ate at our Christmas dinner. I tried a few new things and I’m glad I did, because I have a new favorite! I’d like to share with you a recipe for a fabulous green bean casserole. I had heard of people making this dish over Thanksgiving or Christmas, but I had never made it or even tried it myself, until this year. I don’t think I would have made this yummy side dish if I hadn’t taken A Happy & Healthy Holidays, from The Nourished Kitchen. This series was great by the way, and I now have a whole repertoire of wholesome holiday recipes.  Some of the other recipes I tried included the chocolate fudge, sprouted flour gingerbread cookies, roasted chestnuts, and cinnamon-molasses cookies.  From the Cheeseslave blog, I also made her recipes for raw eggnog, sprouted flour shortbread, and bacon-wrapped dates.  On Christmas day we went over to my moms house.   For dinner she made a traditional roast turkey, stuffing with giblets, mashed yams and squash, mashed potatoes with gravy, green bean casserole and caesar salad.  For dessert we had eggnog cheesecake and Christmas cookies.  Ok, I’m getting hungry now!

Well, it’s that time of year again!  The time when giant monster zucchini’s and summer squash are overflowing out of the garden.  I don’t know about you, but I love zucchini.  Luckily, there a ton of recipes for this beloved summer vegetable.  Both savory and sweet.  My children don’t love zucchini as much as I do, but put into a yummy chocolate zucchini cake like this one that I made a couple weeks ago, or in this sprouted cookie recipe, and they magically eat their zucchini!

My kids love pumpkin muffins, well, any muffin really.  I make them often because of all the frozen pumpkin and squash that I have in my freezer from the fall.  I receive such a great assortment of pumpkins and squashes from my CSA share and I guess I just don’t know what else to do with it all other than to roast, puree, and freeze it for muffins and pie!

Since I started preparing all my grains the “Nourishing Traditions” way, I have had to experiment a little with soaking recipes for muffins and such.  There are several recipes floating about, but with a few adjustments, I think I have devised a pretty good soaked muffin recipe.

In October 2009, I had the pleasure of hosting a special guest speaker at my first WAPF local chapter meeting.  I was very excited to have him speak and very ready to hear his message. The speakers name was Kevin Brown.  He also happened to be a WAPF chapter leader from New Jersey who had just released his new book called The Liberation Diet, which he co-authored with Annette Presley.  At the time of this meeting, my 3rd baby was 7 months old. And yes, I was still carrying around some pregnancy weight (and then some).  I knew I needed to lose weight, but I was not willing to go back to low-calorie, low-fat, fake, diet foods with obsessive amounts of exercise in order to achieve it.  Been there, done that!