Eating Real Food | The Survival Gardener

Convenience is a killer and we have been making a deliberate choice to eat living, unprocessed, non-factory foods.

No vegetable oils, no high-fructose corn syrup, no processed meats, just good, old-fashioned stuff.

This is yesterday’s lunch:

That is organic homemade wheat bread with homemade butter, lentil and beef stew with homemade sour cream, salad greens with homemade cheese (it looks like couscous – in the middle) and fig vinegar (from Perdido Vineyards – they make great vinegar!), with pink homemade radish and cabbage kraut. In the glass is homemade hard cider.

We’re still stuck buying a lot of food right now since we just moved, but our dairy consumption is completely covered, with more butter, milk, cheese, yogurt and kefir than we need.

This is this morning’s breakfast:

Split pea porridge (made from split peas soaked in water with live vinegar) with some sauerkraut brine for salt, two farm eggs and a good dollop of nice, sour kefir cheese.

This is old-fashioned farm food which feels like luxury in today’s world of tater tots and frozen pizza. It takes longer to eat well but it is worth the time and effort.

We soak our grains and beans before cooking in order to reduce toxic plant compounds, like phytates and lectins.

On the left are wheat berries, which are being sprouted in order to malt them to make homemade wheat beer. On the right are split peas, soaking for a day in preparation for making the porridge we ate for breakfast.

We’re using these cool soaking lids I bought on Amazon:

They really work well, and are easier than using strainers.

When I soak beans or oats for cooking, I like to add a little whey, apple cider vinegar, kefir, yogurt or sauerkraut brine to the soaking water to help the process along and add some living cultures. This is a trick I learned from Sally Fallon Morell at the Weston A. Price Foundation, who is the author of Nourishing Traditions.

Part of the reason I have been off YouTube lately is because I have been experimenting with various ferments. the other part is because I am working on a new book. Today I hope to record the end of my Grocery Row install video and post it.

If I can stop messing around with bacterial cultures long enough to edit it together, that is.

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