What's Cooking in the Kitchen

So we had our big shopping day yesterday. It makes for a long day, be we get a lot done. I still have to make my way to the health food store to grab some soup bones. They told me they should have some in today. It was rather odd to look into my cart and see a lot of nothing…..Actually yesterday we had a LOT of school supplies in the cart, so we had something in there, but I am talking about food. I really didn’t think we purchased too many processed foods. But now I see we did! On our soon to be new diet the only processed food allowed would be some canned tomatoes (with only salt and nothing else).

Now her is an example of just how foggy my brain really is: (Tracy, no laughing allowed!) I have talking to my sister about this diet since she first told me about it. After reading and finding out I can do the Full GAPS diet I thought we would all start out on that, and work everyone backwards in stages. The funny thing, or not so funny, is that I kept thinking of the full gaps diet as being NT style eating. So here I was, talking with my sister the other day, and she was telling me that even on the full gaps diet you can’t have grains and milk. Oh, yes, I know I told her. Seriously it was not computing in my brain. For some reason I kept thinking she meant the intro gaps diet (never mind we were calling each stage of the diet by it’s proper name), and I kept telling her that I would be soaking all my grains and making sourdough. It actually hit me late last night…..WAIT A MINUTE!!!!!! We are NOT supposed to be eating any grains!!!! (Hey, I said don’t laugh!) Just another example that I definitely need to be on the GAPS diet! Soooooooo, that really got my head spinning! Now what!?! So far I came to this conclusion:

Normally I take an all or nothing approach to changes. None of this baby step stuff. But this time around for many reasons I think that will be the best approach. It is mostly for Jed’s sake than for the rest of us. As you may know we are hoping that his tube will be removed in a few weeks. But in the past Jed has had issues with food. He has really changed in this area, but I’m not sure how he will handle the changes that we need to make. Any food changes I had in the past he was still getting 90-95% of his food needs by tube. So our first phase will be to go NT style eating, with lots of bone broths. No processed foods. And adding a lot of probiotic foods. Jed is pretty much hooked on juices made from concentrate. He also loves store bought bread, and chicken nuggets. All of which do not fit in this diet. He does like fresh made juices (from juicing here at home), and will eat meat in general. The bread thing…..well he prefers store bought over homemade. So we’ll see how it goes. All my grains will be soaked. I did have oatmeal in our meal rotation, but it is a grain and I will try to pull it out, just keeping wheat the only grain in there. The big difference this diet has with a gluten free diet is that ALL grains are out of the question! So all those gluten free ‘flours’ out there are out for us. You can only use nuts, ground into a flour for baking. Um, nuts are really expensive!! So there will not be a lot of baking going on around here when we go grain free.

So stage one for us will be to go NT. Then stage two will be to get rid of all of our wheat baking. Stage three for the rest of the family will to go on the intro diet, which is limited to about 5 foods. Seriously it’s insanely limited! But hopefully because we are working backwards there will be some die off and healing taking place making the intro diet as short as it can be. But even the NT style diet is a lot of work! Here is what is “cooking” in my kitchen:

Here are two pots with items soaking.  The back on is soaking navy beans, which I plan on making into a fermented bean dip.  The other is a pot of almonds soaking.  I will dehydrate these when they are done soaking to be used as a snack or 'flour'.

This is some homemade yogurt in the white towel, hung up on my cupboard handle.  Beneath is a bowl catching the whey, which will be used in a bunch of fermented dishes.  Whey is what helps with the fermenting.

On the left is a crockpot of milk warming, to be made into yogurt.  This seems to be the only way I will make a yogurt that needs heating as my trials with the heating pad never worked out.  On the right is a pot of black tea steeping, to become kombucha later on.

And lastly are two jars of water kefir 'brewing'.  You can barely see the grains on the bottom of the jars along with an egg shell (it gives the kefir needed minerals to grow).

Must be off to cook some breakfast...pancakes, *unsoaked* (gasp!).  Hey, there are a LOT of changes that need to be made, and it will take me a couple of days to get everything up and running :-)