Stop and Smell the Lichen: October 2013

In the last couple of years I have slowly been trying to make our diets more healthy. And yes it's pretty much me making changes and dragging my husband along with me! In a village in the Alaskan boonies with extremely limited access to what normal America sees as a requirement to having a healthy diet (like veggies and fruit) it's been a learning and seemingly endless experience. What we have found that works for us is by making a few small changes every few months, pretty much addition and subtraction of one or two things. The months in between the changes give us time to adjust our taste buds and give us a chance to see of the change works for us or not. For instance the first change I made was to purchase a 50 pound bag of whole wheat flour. It pretty much began our adventure into cooking our own foods and creating our own healthy recipes....like dutch oven no-knead bread, and healthy breakfast muffins, and whole wheat pizza.... the list goes on! And it only cost me about $50 for the initial flour and shipping and another $20.00 for the food safe buckets and lids to store the extra. I lost ten pounds just from the single change.

Amongst the long list of changes we have made (including adding chickens to our household for the eggs/meat/compost for veggies!) I do often experiment with other means of making our diet more and more healthy and natural. Our diet is pretty meat heavy sometimes...low inventory of veggies and fruit at the store...or we already burned through our own stores of canned and frozen veggies and fruit. Our ancient subsistence diet is actually supposed to be 45% non-meat, which is really the hardest part! .....so I began looking at ways to help our poor abused guts from these lapses. literally.

So we tried kefir. Kefir is a 'fermented' (I really don't like that term for some reason!) food....you add a few grains of kefir to some milk and a day later you get a thickened version of milk that tastes like unsweetened yogurt. You strain the grains from the thickened milk and start the process over again. I was extremely hesitant about the stuff but gave it a try anyways....and I loved it! My yogurt loving husband did NOT. Which I thought was hilarious. I loved the tart and yogurty taste and enjoy it as part of my breakfast (and I save a bit for my chickens a couple times a week) I throw it into a cup with some honey that I get from Honeyrun Farm to sweeten it, a few pieces of frozen banana or strawberries, and eagerly drink it down every morning. I found that to get my husband to drink it a couple times a week I have to water it down with soy milk (he is lactose intolerant of course) and add more sweetener and some vanilla. But this little gem has really completed our changing healthy diet!

One if the things that I have found has been a barrier in having kefir here in the boonies is having a steady supply of milk. What I have found that has worked is that I keep the batches small...only keeping enough grains to produce a little more than a cup of kefir a day....and by mixing my milk sources. Our house relies on the super shelf stable Ultra pasteurized milk that you can literally keep on the shelf for a year or more, but this milk doesn't really lend itself to a thick healthy kefir...so what I do is mix a tablespoon of powdered whole milk ( LINK) into it to give it a bit more lactose and thickness. When the store does have 'normal' milk, I buy a small amount of it to 'freshen' our grains. So far so good!

The caribou have finally arrived in the mountains and everyone is scrambling to harvest and store enough meat for the winter. Our weather has been chaotic...going from normal low temperautres to spring time temperatures with rain...and back down again. Confusing all the animals...humans included!

Hope this finds you all healthy and happy!.....and now some pics!