I love cooking from scratch and yesterday I made lard.  Watch this quick video on how easy it is to make it.

Lard is a very healthy oil to cook with and makes food taste fantastic. It is my secret ingredient in a lot of my meals! I had a dinner party last week and the guests were just raving about my roasted potatoes and wanted my recipe (unfortunately I only had a very small piece). The recipe was absolutely delicious – thanks to the LARD! Sure you can substitute butter, but lard gives a very light and crisp texture to food that makes it so wonderful. This is why pastries are made with lard.

Lard is very healthy! It is a traditional fat that many grandmothers used to make and cook with. It is very heat stable, does not burn and does not oxidize easily. This is the reason lard will NOT give you heart disease.  Lard also contains vitamins D and E (Alpha Tocopherol).  Eating foods with healthy fats like lard will also help the body absorb fat soluble vitamins. And since Lard is fat, eating it will suppress hunger and appetite.

Making it at home is far superior to buying it in the store.  You can choose your source of fat and make sure that it is organic and raised in the fresh air and pasture.  Store bought lard is most likely hydrogenated so make sure to read the list of ingredients. It will probably not contain Vitamin D if the pigs have been deprived of sunshine.

Making organic lard is cheaper than butter. I can’t tell you how much I paid for this fat because it came with the half a pig that I purchased but I know that organic butter costs 9.50 per pound.  Using this lard is a great way to make my butter stretch a bit further as I substitute it in my recipes.

Comment and share your thoughts!

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I purchase some yummy organic organ meats from a local farmer very close to my house. Unfortunately when the poor animals went to the abattoir they did not individually wrap the organs to sell separately. Instead they just dumped random parts in a plastic bag. I knew I could be getting a wonderful surprise when I purchased them.

I am asking for some help in what to do with this. I desperately do not want to cook it up and feed it to the dogs.

I am currently also making a homemade chicken stock. I am apprehensive of adding this to my crock pot of chicken bones. The ears have hairs on them and I do not want them to fall out in my broth while cooking. I am wondering if this can happen because when they pluck chickens they put the chicken in hot water to loosen the feathers.

Any thoughts?

This post is part of Fight Back Fridays hosted by Food Renegade

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In an attempt to get my children to eat (and like) liver I have been experimenting different ways to make it. I think I have come close. Although this recipe was not a hit with the kids at dinner time last night, it has great potential. I enjoyed and loved it very much and would not mind eating liver like this weekly. My children do not enjoy the texture of fried onions so I gave it to them without them.The onions contribute a lot of  the flavour. Next time I will add the fried onions into the food processor while making the liver mix.

I tried to make liver meatballs but had to much liquid and they went flat, turning into patties. This is a Low Carb Recipe using almonds instead of white flour or bread crumbs.

Yummy Liver Patties

1 lb of organic liver (I used pork)

1 organic pastured egg

1 cup of almonds (preferably soaked overnight and oven dried)

1/2 cup of milk

2 cloves of garlic

3/4 tsp cumin

1 large onion

Salt and Pepper to taste

Butter for frying

Chop onion and fry in butter until golden brown. Place liver, egg, almonds, milk, garlic, cumin in a food processor and blend mixture until smooth. Spoon out liver mixture into the frying pan and cook for a few minutes until golden brown. Flip the patties and cook for a few minutes. Top the patties with onions, salt and pepper.

My question to you:

What else could you add to make these kid friendly? I was also thinking about adding a can of tomato paste.

This post is part of Real Food Wednesday, hosted by Kelly The Kitchen Kop.

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I am extremely excited to share with you a great link to a book I have just discovered (it is a scanned “ancient cookbook” published in 1869). Sometimes in life we may need some grandmotherly guidance and wisdom. It seems since the invention of televisions and just over scheduled lives, the art of housekeeping and cooking have been lost. We don`t spend time in the kitchens with our mothers or grandmothers anymore.

A lot of us just don’t have any  kind of motherly resource and just end up lacking. We may learn the hard way with trial and error or never learn these necessary skills at all. I don’t know about you, but I was thrust into marriage and parenthood without knowing how to cook and sew and once my girls arrived I needed some major help!

If you have a close grandparent, I encourage you to find some of their old cookbooks. You will be shocked at how different the recipes are compared to today’s cookbooks. A lot of traditional ways have been lost in the modern age of convenience.

So here are some ancient recipes that you won’t find in a modern cookbook from Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers.

How to Boil A Calf’s Head

How to Brown a Calf’s head with the Skin On

How to Bake a Beef’s Heart

How To Cook Rabbits and Squirrels

How To Make Brain Cakes
(We are of Polish Heritage and my mother said that eating Brain was a delicacy in her youth!)

How To Make Giblet Pies and Soups

There are 5 pages dedicated on how to eat oysters (just keep hitting the *next* button at the top of the page)

How To Make Milk Yeast

Blackberry Cordial
“This is valuable medicine for children in summer”

How to Make Vinigar

And how to pickle, preserve, make catsup (just keep hitting the *next* button at the top of the page)

How to make liver sausage and head cheese

How to Render Lard and Tallow

The rest of the book deals with how to keep house, herbal and medicinal food remedies (butter oil was used for soothing the stomach for violent vomiting and dysentery)

Take note at all the simple and plain recipes there are in this book. Yet they are so extremely nutritious and loaded with fat, milk, eggs, gelatinous stocks, brains, liver and feet. I also saw tongue amongst the recipes but did not link. I remember having had cows tongue as a kid and it being extremely chewy but tasting good nevertheless.

There are recipes in there that are good for the “delicate persons”. These recipes are high in fats from “rich milk” and eggs, butter and highly gelatinous from boiled pig’s feet. Calf’s foot gelatin with cream is “nice for the sick person”. And note that this milk and cream would be raw and unpasteurized.

Spend some time exploring this book and hopefully try out some recipes and remedies.

Note what ingredients are not included in this book:

1. Canola oils, corn oils, soy oil and other “new” industrial vegetable oils.
2. Skinless, boneless chicken.
3. 1% and 2% milks.

Animal fats, bones and organs where used for medicine and good health. This is how our great grandparents and grandparents ate before heart disease, cancer, and obesity became epidemic.

Share your thoughts!

This post is part of Fight Back Fridays hosted by Food Renegade.

To your health,

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So it has seemed that in the last week that I have gotten some flak for posting this series. I will address some concerns. Like I have reiterated in my previous blog posts about the veggie diet is that this series is inspired by health problems I have seen in my own daughter and the same problems I see in other vegetarian children. These children have no choice in being vegetarian even though it is their health that is at stake.

The Low Carb Fibre issue

The Low Carb diet is not deficient in fibre. Actually fibre reduces net carb counts and you can get plenty of fibre from ground flax seeds, coconut, nuts, seeds and vegetables.

Saturated Fats And Cholesterol

The comments that I received about saturated fats and cholesterol were that they are not healthy, that the low carb movement is a fad and “plain out of style”. All of this is false. Saturated fats are very healthy and cholesterol may actually be an anti-oxidant.

As for the low carb diet being a fad, Gary Taubes writes in his book Good Calories, Bad Calories that the Low Carb diets can be traced all the way to the 1800’s and they are still around to this day in many different forms:

The Mercola Diet, Susan Sommers diet, The Paleo Diet, The South Beach Diet, Protein Power Diet, Dr. Atkins Diet, The Leptin Diet, Dr. Richard Bernstein Diabetes Solution, Dr. Al Sears the Author of “The Doctor’s Heart Cure” and many more… All of these except the Susan Sommers diet have medical doctors who stand behind them. I believe Susan Sommers referred to nutritionists and dieticians to help her outline the principles of Sommercising.

So if you still think that these diets are “fads” let me refer to this study that was performed for 12 months (which is one of the longest and largest studies performed) and found that the Atkins Diet was the healthiest.

The results of the study:

At the end of a year, the 77 women assigned to the Atkins group had lost an average of 10.4 pounds. Those assigned to LEARN lost 5.7 pounds, the Ornish followers lost 4.8 pounds and women on the Zone lost 3.5 pounds, on average. In all four groups, however, some participants lost up to 30 pounds.

After 12 months, women following the Atkins diet, relative to at least one of the other groups, had larger decreases in body mass index, triglycerides and blood pressure; their high-density lipoprotein, the good kind of cholesterol, increased more than the women on the other diets.

The Atkin’s Diet is a High Fat, medium protein, low carb

The Ornish Diet is a Low Fat, vegetarian diet, high carb

This study is comparing the Low Carb Atkins diet and the High Carb Vegetarian diet together. And as you can see it is the Atkins diet that turned out to be healthier. This study was published in the March 7, 2007 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Saturated Fats are traditional fats and have been used since the times of Jacob, Issac and Moses.

In previous generations we have never had so much heart disease. But now we have introduced a lot of vegetable oils into our diets and guess what?? Heart disease has skyrocketed! Why? Because saturated fats are stable fats, they don’t oxidize and vegetable fats are easily oxidized.

Polyunsaturated vegetable fats are one of the greatest contributors of heart disease. Not only that but they also greatly contribute to increased cancer, immune system dysfunction, damage to the liver, reproductive organs and lungs, digestive disorders, depressed learning ability, impaired growth and weight gain. Source: Nourishing Traditions, Pg 10

I did call this article Low Carb Diet Vs. The Vegetarian Diet so I will give you another example…

Many people would say that Dr. Atkins died from eating a low carb diet which caused heart disease. But actually he died because he slipped and fell on some ice and hit his head.

There is even an online copy of his death certificate which states his death as a “blunt impact injury of head with epidural hematoma.”

As many people have vilified Dr. Atkins as having heart failure, I do have to mention the death of Jay Dinshah who was the founder of the American Vegan Society in 1960. He was born to a vegetarian family and had become vegan. His parents had congenital heart problems and he died of a heart attack at the age of 66.

It makes me question if these heart problems in the family could have been caused by oxidized polyunsaturated vegetable fats???

There is a lot of disagreement and just pure lies about what is healthy and what is not healthy. It is your choice what you feed your family. But our children need the best nutrition to thrive.

My daughter was not thriving on a vegetarian/vegan diet. We were able to heal her cavities, uncontrollable crying, and failure to thrive by following the dietary principles founded by Weston A. Price and written in Nourishing Traditions.

To your health and wellness,

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My daughter was only 1.5 years old when she started to get cavities in her two front teeth. We were vegetarian/vegan at the time. The cavities resulted from a high carb diet rich in soy and refined
grain products. I was pretty devastated at time because all my effort was going towards raising her in a healthy way. However she was definitely not thriving. Her weight was low, she was pale, her teeth had big gaps in them and now her teeth were starting to rot. She was high needs as well and cried all the time. I was wondering how a child could be so miserable when there was nothing to be miserable about.

Childhood Dental Caries Can Be Healed!

I started looking into the dental caries and discovered traditional foods. Traditional foods are a foods prepared the way our ancestors have prepared foods in just recent history before the commercialization and industrialization that we know so well today. Traditional foods are prepared in such a manner as to get the most nutrition out of a particular food.

For example:

• Grains, nuts and seeds are sprouted or soaked to make them more digestible and to release and neutralize phytates that inhibits mineral absorption.
• Foods are preserved by fermenting which aids in the healing of the digestive system (sauerkraut, pickles, fermented salsa).
• Organ meats are a prized food and cherished for the nutritional value.
• Animals are fed food that they thrive on and allowed to pasture and eat insects which allow for their meat to have more nutritional value.
• Eating of raw animal products (meat, milk, egg etc.) Pasteurization and cooking of our food has killed many beneficial enzymes and denaturing proteins.
• Also the removal of fats has drastically decreased our absorption of fat soluble vitamins such as Vitamins A, D, E and K which are essential for immune, brain, bone and eye health. Low fat diets are dangerous because of this very fact.

Traditional fats are saturated fats. They are heat stable and don’t go rancid very easily and therefore they are the preferred fats to use for cooking. They also make food taste delicious and more nutritious!

So we took the soy and refined grains out of our diet and replaced them with traditional foods. This is what
healed the cavities!

We did not even use toothpaste on our daughters teeth for the first 3 years of her life. No fluoride either! Just pure nutrition.

To your health and wellness,

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Anyone who is trying to lose a few pounds knows that getting the munchies can ruin the best dieting efforts. I have been able to narrow certain foods that are able to stop cravings instantly. Being on a Low Carb Diet is a great benefit to curbing appetite, but there are times when I still would love to snack on some unhealthy foods. So instead of reaching for junk food, I go for these 5 healthy alternatives.

My Top 5 Craving Killer Foods are:

1. Avocado
2. Cheese made from cream
3. Home made bone broth soup
4. Cashew Butter
5. Coconut Oil.

The higher the fat content of the food the better it will be at satiating the hunger pangs.

Here is a great recipe on how to supplement with coconut oil so it tastes good.

Fiber does bulk up in the tummy but it does not satisfy the taste buds as well as fat does. After a fiber rich meal I can still want more food even though I am not hungry. Fats have the awesome ability to satisfy the palate and the hunger pangs.

To your health and wellness,

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Today was my very first attempt at cooking duck. I had tried it a few years ago and thought it was delicious. However it was not a low carb recipe as duck is usually made with a sweet sauce. Making a sweet sauce was out of the question so I had to think of another way of preparing this duck.

I looked around for a good recipe, asked for advice and came up with my own little yummy delight. The duck tasted awesome. However it was a very tough bird and my kids would not eat it. I had just roasted it like a chicken, but a bit longer and I had basted it a few times during its two hour of roasting in my oven.

Then I checked with the Nourishing Traditions cookbook and they recommend cutting the duck up in pieces and trimming the fat and skin off. The duck pieces are then marinated in the juice of 4 lemons.

So I cooked my duck wrong! Next time I will marinade it first.

Nevertheless, I will share my yummy spice combination.

Low Carb Roast Duck Spice Rub

Juice of 1 lemon
1 teaspoon of Garlic Powder
1 teaspoon of Thyme
2 teaspoon of Paprika
2 teaspoon of Salt
1 teaspoon of pepper
Cayenne to taste

1 whole duck

I combined the spices in a bowl and rubbed my duck with the mix. I then drizzled the lemon juice over the whole bird. My duck was almost 8lbs and I roasted it in the oven at 375 degrees for two hours. I basted twice and covered my duck when the skin looked like it was going to burn.

There are some better duck roasting cooking tips and instructions at e-how.

But the spice mix is great for duck and would be very yummy for chicken as well.

Enjoy!

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I was reading through my Nourishing Traditions book when I found this little story I thought that I would share. It is a great reason to eat low carb and sugar free.

Ann Arbor University researchers performed a dietary experiment on 18 rats. They were divided into three groups. One group was fed regular rat food, the second group was fed cornflakes, and the third group was fed the cardboard box that the cornflakes came in. All the rats were also given water.

The rats eating regular rat food remained healthy throughout the experiment.

The rats being fed the cardboard box eventually became lethargic and malnourished and died.

But the rats that were fed the cornflakes developed some interesting symptoms. They started showing signs of aggressive behaviour, schizophrenic behaviour, they began biting each other, throwing fits and going into convulsions.

Autopsy revealed dysfunction of the pancreas, liver and kidneys and degeneration of the nerves in the spine – all signs of “insulin shock” pg 469 Nourishing Traditions 2001

The rats being fed the cornflakes died *before* the rats that were fed the cardboard box!

The researchers concluded that there was more nutrition in the cardboard boxes that the cereals came in than in the actual cereals themselves.

This experiment was performed in 1960 but was never published in any journal. And there has been no other similar study like this.

To your health and wellness,

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I learned about coconut oil and its amazing benefits 5 years ago but have had trouble supplementing with it daily. I hate the taste of it. Previously I have tried taking it frozen, mixing it in foods, and in orange juice, smoothies and making low carb chocolate. Any way I tried it, I hated it.

But in this simple recipe the coconut oil tastes AWESOME!

Coconut Oil Milk

0.5 cup of warm milk or (cream and water)
2 heaping teaspoons of Coconut Oil
1 teaspoon of Vanilla

Stir and enjoy!

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