March 5, 2013
Making Ghee {GAPS}
Ghee is the preferred oil to cook with and to add to food during the healing phase of the GAPS diet. We scramble eggs in it and add it to our bowls of soup or butternut squash “dessert” to get more healthy fat in our diet.
Josh loves ghee in everything AND he loves to make it! That’s a good thing because we sure go through a lot of it. He fills a crock pot with organic unsalted butter (preferably from pastured cows–thankfully we found some on sale at Sprouts a couple weeks ago).
After about 7 hours on low it all melts and a foam forms on top.
The solids on top are skimmed off (supposedly there are recipes using those so we’re saving them for later) and the ghee is ladled out into containers. In the bottom of the crock is another layer of some kind of white substance. After trying a few techniques of straining with strainers and coffee filters and making a huge mess, we just gave up and poured out the last of the ghee with the stuff in the bottom and put it in the fridge. After chilling, it was watery liquid at the bottom and hard ghee on top which was easily lifted out. Ghee doesn’t need to be refrigerated, has a creamy, soft texture when at room temperature, and is SO tasty…yet another thing we never would have discovered if it weren’t for this GAPS adventure!
February 26, 2013
Egg Yolks {GAPS}
Raw egg yolks provide wonderful nutrition and absorb quickly, almost without needing any digestion. We’re supposed to have one in each bowl of soup we eat, but our chickens are never able to keep up with the amount needed and we don’t trust any other source since we eat them raw!
It’s surprisingly appealing and makes the soup extra creamy and delicious!
We froze the egg whites for future recipes and are now adding them to whole eggs, making our scrambled eggs extra fluffy.
February 20, 2013
The perfect season for {GAPS}
Winter really is the best time to do GAPS intro diet. Learning to enjoy soup is hard when it’s hot out. The cool weather makes it easy to want a nice warm bowl of soup (yes even three times a day!). Especially today when we experienced the rare phenomenon of snow in the desert…
Don’t worry we gave him a better jacket 😉
Lettuce in our garden waiting to be juiced in the next stage!
By the time these turn to peaches we’ll be able to eat them!
February 15, 2013
Heart bowls {GAPS}
These heart-shaped bowls were a gift to the little boys from their grandma. They have proven to be surprisingly useful – the point is perfect for drinking soup from!
February 7, 2013
The end of the beginning {GAPS}
Well, our first week on the GAPS diet ends today. After having soup for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for seven days, everyone’s favorite is Creamy Cauliflower Meatball soup (well, actually, any kind of meatball soup)!
It’s so easy!
Ingredients:
1-2 heads cauliflower
garlic to taste
Stock (we like chicken)
1-2 lbs. ground meat (we like turkey)
To be GAPS legal, be sure to cut off all of the fibrous cauliflower stems. Put in pot with peeled garlic cloves and cover with stock. Boil until soft, then puree with an immersion blender.
Now for the meatballs. You can simply pinch off small pieces of ground meat (think bite size for children), or neatly roll them into balls. Bethany (age 13) makes the best, perfect meatballs! Â Drop them into the soup base, which should be kept at a gentle boil (med heat). The meat will be cooked through after about 15 minutes.
Obviously this can be made more interesting by seasoning the meat and soup base. Right now we’re just keeping it simple with the four legal ingredients. Meatballs can be added to just about any soup base, but we found that they blow apart in the crockpot on high – which still leaves you with a tasty ground meat crumble soup!
Related articles
- Soup’s on! {GAPS} (creativenourishment.wordpress.com)
- Mom’s turn to post! {GAPS} (creativenourishment.wordpress.com)
- And so it begins {GAPS} (creativenourishment.wordpress.com)
February 4, 2013
How to make sauerkraut, by Daniel (age 7) {GAPS}
Daniel helped make a batch of sauerkraut last night, and Moriah photographed him. He wrote these instructions specifically for other children his age – all his own words (so maybe you should take them with a grain of sea salt ;)).
While we can’t eat the fibrous solids of the sauerkraut until Stage 3, we’ve been enjoying small amounts of the juice in soups and broth. A food processor makes preparing sauerkraut so easy! We’re very grateful for ours, gifted to us by our buying club which Mom runs.
Step 1: Cut the cabbage in small chunks. Use a small dull knife so you don’t cut yourself.
Step 2: Fill up the food processor with chunks of cabbage. They should be about the size of a tennis ball. Read the rest of this entry »
February 3, 2013
Mom’s turn to post! {GAPS}
Here’s what we’re allowed to eat right now…basically boiled meat and soup, with ginger, mint, or chamomile tea between meals. So far we have just the youngest rejecting the food, and he’s vomited a few times, probably due to low blood sugar. Â Right now he’s chosen to just have chamomile tea with a little honey while his brother eats enough soup for the both of them! Hoping he’ll join our team soon and dig in to the good stuff that will nourish and heal him…
We get most of our food from azurestandard.com or the farmer’s markets, but I had to visit our local Sprouts grocery store because I ran out of the perishables so quickly. Everything we get is organic now (except wild caught fish and lamb bones from New Zealand, a place that’s GMO free and has millions of sheep feeding on lush green grass). I wish I’d have been brave enough to snap a picture of the check-out conveyer belt–so many veggies! There was lots of broccoli, celery for stocks (can’t eat that yet), garlic, 8 squashes, 3 cauliflowers, 12 bags of baby carrots (the organic were only .88 for some reason, and I probably should have gotten more since they’re a wonderful convenience item for snacks and soups! A good starch to keep their bodies going so we have them boiling on the stove each day, sometimes with pieces of ginger in the water.) Those are all the veggies we can have right now, plus lots of meat and stock from our extra freezer. (Onions too, but I got a 40# bag of those from Azure this week!)
This highly restricted diet has become a spiritual quest as well. I’ve been studying about fasting from both a Christian and nutritional perspective and have learned so much about how fasts (and partial fasts) can help us both spiritually and physically. I thought 40 days would be a good goal for our commitment to the GAPS diet intro since that was such a significant number in the Bible (ie Jesus fasted 40 days in the wilderness before starting His ministry) so that puts us at just about a week for each phase if all goes well. We also hope to make each Sabbath dinner special with candles, flowers, special dishes, place cards with encouraging Scripture verses, etc. (Sabbath goes from sundown Saturday through daylight hours on Sunday.)
Daniel’s ground beef and onion soup was a hit as was the aromatic centerpiece made of mint from the garden. We’ve been using it often to make mint tea–yum! The carrots are there to try to tempt Joshua to eat…no such luck; just tea for him again.
Sundays will be leftover/crock pot days to try to minimize work–there’s 2 kinds of soup, the 3 boiled veggies we’re allowed (to eat straight or add to soup), ginger for tea in between meals, and stock going from yesterday that will be strained later. I think there was squash going in another crock pot on another counter–we consider that “dessert”, not vegetable, even though we eat it with salt. Can’t wait for Ghee on Stage 2 to put on that!
Related articles
- Soup’s on! {GAPS} (creativenourishment.wordpress.com)
- And so it begins {GAPS} (creativenourishment.wordpress.com)
February 2, 2013
Soup’s on! {GAPS}
Day two on the GAPS diet, and Daniel’s still smiling about soup! It’s a good thing, because soup is just about the only thing we eat right now. Yep, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Involving children in food preparation really helps them to be willing to try new foods. Daniel (7) made our soup for dinner tonight.
At times, it was a tearful experience — but only because he was peeling onions! Tears were minimized by chopping the onion chunks in the food processor rather than out in the open on a cutting board (picture below). He worked bravely through the tears, and proudly presented a wonderful meal this evening.
February 1, 2013
Preparing the children {GAPS}
We have been talking about the GAPS diet for a while now, preparing the younger ones for what it will be like. Joshua (age 5) was not crazy about the idea of eating soup. So this morning, day 1, when he was greeted with soup for breakfast he declared that he simply wouldn’t eat. It didn’t take long for him to change his mind though, even telling his brother (age 7), “the soup’s really good Dan!”
Another way we prepared was to begin the project pictured above. It has provided a visual way to stay focused on what we can have rather than mourning what we can’t.
May 14, 2011
Fennel Soup
The original recipe (my version is as follows) can be found in the book Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon (check your local library!)
Half of the ingredients came from my garden (marked by *)
1 fennel bulb, with most of the greens*
4 small onions, with greens*
some Red Palm oil (enough to cover the bottom of the stock pot)
2-1/2 quarts beef stock
3 cloves of garlic*
6 medium red potatoes, cut in eighths
salt and pepper to taste
fennel fronds for garnish*
coconut cream (optional)
Cut the fennel into 1-2″ pieces and slice the onion. Cook them in the palm oil on medium heat. Add stock, bring to a boil and skim if there is substantial foam (I didn’t have any). Add potatoes and garlic. Simmer covered until the potatoes are soft, about 1/2 hour.
Puree soup in Vita-Mix (or hand-held blender). Season to taste and garnish with fennel fronds. Serve with cream.
Jordan
riahjoy
Creative Nourishment 