Navigating your way thru the toxic food maze to wholesome food.

The Best Fruits and Vegetables You Can Afford

When you think of healthy eating what does your mind visualize? If you’re like most people it is a pile of fresh fruits and vegetables in glorious variety! And, wow does this ever make for a gorgeous picture. Who doesn’t feel inspired to eat well after imagining that? Most likely your mind moves on to imagining beautiful salads along with a few lightly steamed sides with lush sauces. These kinds of dishes are very popular on cookings shows and that makes sense. TV is a visual medium and these dishes look so good you just want to jump thru the screen and grab them . So these technicolor dishes made from bold, fresh vegetables and fruits tend to make up the lions share of recipes we see both on tv and in print.

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Grassfed Beef is Best

Practically everyone eats beef, except vegetarians . Most of us have very little idea of how that beef was raised. What I’ve found researching this post is that there is even more confusion than I expected. Keep clearly in mind though that cows are fed and brought to slaughter very differently now than they were in Grandma’s day. Since World War II cattle are generally grain finished, a very unhealthy diet for the cow. And that’s only part of the story.

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Eat More Eggs – Easy to Make Affordable Nutrition

There is nothing more down-home delicious than a breakfast of eggs. Just picture it: Think of Granny’s house in the fifties. Imagine it’s early in the morning and the kids are not up yet. But Granny is and she’s getting breakfast ready. Is it cold cereal? Is it granola? Is it even yogurt or a smoothie? Nope, it’s eggs, always eggs! Now don’t get me wrong there may have been some yogurt, cereal or a grapefruit on the table. But these were side-dishes to the main event, eggs! And bacon, sausage or even steak.

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A Little Something about Beans

Over the past few weeks I’ve been talking a lot about how to save money on your real food bill. There can hardly be a better place to start when considering ways to fit real food nutrition into your budget than the humble bean.

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Choosing Flour – Are Whole Grain Flours Traditional?

When we think of Grandma in the kitchen cookin’ up something good, that something good probably involves flour. Yet, people know very little about flour. How it’s made, how long it keeps or how to care for it. There are many shades of difference for the sake of flavor or cooking characteristics but for today’s post we’ll stick with learning more about the differences that affect health. The common understanding about health and flour goes something like this: whole grain is good, white flour is bad. This is overly simplistic. I thought a post going over the finer details would be helpful . I’m certainly no expert, though over the years I’ve learned a little to help make my use of flours more healthful and tasty!

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Buttermilk – A Staple in Grandma’s Kitchen

Did you have buttermilk in your home when you were growing up? I think we did only on special occasions and holidays. Mom had a few recipes she made during these times that my Grandmother had also made. So buttermilk didn’t feature prominently in our families diet when I was a kid. But it did feature prominently in Grandma’s cooking. I had often wondered why the popularity but not looked into it very much until I started learning more about real food cookery. With that I’ve come to understand why it’s popular.

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Why Choose Beef Tallow?

Before entering into the world of real food you most likely never heard the words beef tallow before. Lard yes, beef tallow no. That is unless you’re: Really interested in history. Went to cooking school. Getting on in years . So I thought we’d talk a little about beef tallow, what it is and how to use it.

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Grandma Used Cod Liver Oil – Why You Should Too

What do you think of when you think of cod liver oil? Images of kids scurrying and hiding in all parts of the house? Mother with a stern look on her face holding out a spoon to a kid with a screwed-up disgusted expression? Most of us have no personal experience with cod liver oil prior to beginning a real foods diet. Our knowledge of cod liver oil comes from cartoons and old movies and, if we are older, stories from our parents childhoods. But cod liver oil was a part of daily life prior to the fifties. It is another part of our food heritage that is disappearing down the memory hole. My parents were given cod liver oil daily by my grandmothers until they were teenagers. Most families with the money to afford it gave cod liver oil to the children of the house. It was a universally

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Simple Summer Side Dishes – Raw Sliced Tomatoes

Simple sliced tomatoes, does it get any better? The earliest tomatoes are starting to show up here in central Texas! This is my personal favorite local food event … The arrival of the first tomatoes!I generally only by tomatoes when they are in season in Texas which is about early April thru to the beginning of the August heat. They are so delicious as is it seems a shame to put them in a dish! Side dishes don’t need to be fancy to be nutritious.

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Local Honey is the Best Honey

We, all of us have a sweet tooth, don’t we? Nature has fitted us with a strong drive to find the sweet in our food. In nature, sweet flavors are a bit rare and hard to come by. But in our foodscape sweet taste is abundant and cheap. Not only the inexpensive granular sugar which has been available in the west since the 18th century is widely available, but also aspartame, saccharine, and now sucralose or splenda. These sweeteners are all found in a wide variety of processed foods. And so our drive for sweetness is a major source of illness in our culture. We eat far, far too much sugar. Most of us are aware of this and seek to avoid sweeteners only to find ourselves in the candy aisle, again

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How to Make Butter at Home

First, let me say that butter is super simple to make. Ridiculously simple and foolproof. Everyone has seen pictures of great grandma slaving away at the butter churn, sweating buckets. From that we’ve all picked up the idea that butter is hard. Making butter manually is a bit tiring, though not exhausting. But making butter using a mixer, blender or food processor is easy peasy and not the least bit tiring. If Granny was making all her own butter without the help of modern tools we can make all our own butter too if we choose. At minimum all you need is a supply of cream. If you don’t have any of these tools you can still make butter with just a jar and some vigorous shaking.

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