I discovered the “Real Food” movement a few weeks ago through a whole mess of link hopping. Of course, I’ve been interested in nutrition, healthy eating habits, and natural healing for a very long time, but always found it rather difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff – or in this case, the bran from the germ?

Anyway- I won’t go into a long detailed discussion of where I’ve been or where I think I’m going for now. If you have a desire for immediate information on real food, I suggest that you click that link and browse (clicking as many links on that site as possible is also encouraged).

Though I’ve been more or less good about cooking and eating real food, it’s not always easy when you have a full time job, a side business, lazy tendencies, and an addiction to Frontierville. Particularly if you also participate in any personal hygiene activities, and your job’s hours prevent easy shopping at farmer’s markets or even non-24 hour grocery stores. Even worse if you have a gas oven and the outside temperatures are topping the 90’s.

But this weekend, my husband was supposed to go away all day Saturday, and the temperature was to be under 80 degrees. I planned accordingly. Sadly, hubs got sick and stayed home, but due to the sudden drop in temperature, use of the oven was actually encouraged. Yay!

I made:

1 large loaf of yeast bread based on a medieval recipe (though using modern yeast instead of randomly collected yeast from the air or ale yeast) and I soaked the whole grains in whey over night to lower the phytic acid.

2 loaves of “beer bread” (in quotes because I used one bottle of natural ginger ale for one, and one bottle of natural apple cider soda for the other) of 100% whole grains (whole wheat, spelt, and rye).

1/2 batch of soaked blueberry, chocolate chip, whole grain pancakes (whole wheat and spelt)- again soaking the whole grains in water and whey to reduce phytic acid.

1 meal consisting of thin sliced organic steaks, green squash fried in coconut oil, a veggie mix (broccoli, carrots, water chestnuts) sauteed in coconut oil, and one box of breaded butterfly shrimp (purchased before my real food days, and decided to use up and give hubs a treat).

1 meal consisting of grass fed beef burgers with French fries fried in coconut oil, and sugar snap peas sauteed in coconut oil.

1 whole 4.25lb organic chicken (couldn’t bring myself to pay the price for pastured, though I desperately wanted to) cooked in a Crock Pot with the stock reserved and put into the freezer, and the meat shredded up for chicken salad, to go into the stock, and a little to go into my sprouted lentil tacos later this week. Bones are in the freezer to be boiled again with more chicken bones for more stock later.

1 small jar of lacto fermented salsa which is fermenting on my kitchen counter right now.

1 cup of lentils sprouted for tacos later this week.

1 quart of yogurt turned into yogurt cheese and whey (with the whey being used to soak whole grains and to lacto ferment the salsa, and the remainder being bottled into a pretty glass olive oil dispenser). The yogurt cheese was mixed with the remainder of the salsa that didn’t fit into the ferment jar, and combined with mayo and chicken became our chicken salad sandwiches for work Monday and Tuesday.

While the weekend wasn’t totally real food (for example, a local but not organic or sustainable company’s sausage to go with the pancakes- the chocolate chips in the pancakes were the remnants of an old Hershey’s chocolate chip bag), I also purchased some unusual heirloom tomatoes for the salsa and to slice up for the burgers, I drank a lot of raw milk, and I got oodles of compliments from my husband on the home baked bread. My favorite being “now this is REAL bread, not the stuff you get at the store!” (this being soon after his first taste of grass fed organic milk of which his response was “this is the best milk I’ve ever had!”).

I have yet to make the coconut oil chocolates that I’d intended to make, and I didn’t quite make it to cooking the beets before they developed mold. I’m currently cooking a 2lb meatloaf in the Crockpot using grass fed burger, and will have to boil and mash the organically grown potatoes tonight. But all in all, I’m very satisfied with my weekend’s efforts.

Will I bake yeast bread every weekend? I think not. It’s fun and satisfying, but there are way too many carbs which can’t be resisted (It’s sooo good), and it really does take a lot of time and effort. Will I be lacto fermenting everything I can get my hands on? Probably not- I have no where to store it in our tiny little town house. Will I keep on making things from scratch and make an effort at continuing to eat real food? Absolutely.

And just as a heads up- if you ever run out of real food recipe ideas, try doing a search for “medieval ‘fill in the blank’ recipe” or “SCA ‘fill in the blank’ recipe”. Recipes from before there were fake foods are automatically real food. Expand a bit and add in “Victorian ___ recipe” or “Civil War ___ recipe” and you’ll have real food recipes coming out of your ears!

P.S. I haven’t updated this site in about a year- if you scroll through my old posts, don’t get mad at any outdated information! I plan to go back and fix them with real food information!