Snapshot of a Traditional Kitchen - What To DO With Food

We've been hard at work in this crazy kitchen.  Tonight Mark asked me if, 4 1/2 years ago, I thought this is where we would be together at 9PM on a Monday, straining pork fat into jars and nourishing blobs of kombucha skoby.  Hmm...when I said I do I don't think I had this in mind.  It means so much to me that Mark has embraced this journey, too, and doesn't bat an eye...although I haven't told him I mixed beet kvas into our juice this morning.

It is a lot of work to keep this kitchen stocked with good food.  Luckily, the more we work at it, the easier it gets!  Here are a few snapshots into how we stock our kitchen with healthy food.

The two most important things when I cook are cast iron and lard.  A couple years ago we got rid of all our non-stick pans (except one egg pan for Mark - finally trashed that tonight!) and began our transition to non-toxic cookware.  We bought some stainless steel pans and thought, when we had the money, we would upgrade to cast iron.  Two years later, I decided it was time - we weren't ever actually going to make that a focus, were we?  So I found a couple, in need of love, cast iron pans at an antique store and  refurbished them myself.  And, let me tell you, once you season those babies with lard they really are non-stick!  Cast iron is super easy to restore.  I stripped the old layer by dipping a potato in baking soda and scrubbing really well.  Then I coated the entire thing in lard, wiped clean, and baked at 400 degrees for an hour.  The pan above, however, has been the bane of my existence.  It has so many nooks and crannies that I've had such a hard time getting it right.  The first time I got so tired from all the scrubbing I put it aside and came back five minutes later to find rust already forming on the stripped surface.  This is the third time I've re-seasoned it.  It somehow rusted after its first use, baking mini cakes for Rita's birthday, because we didn't clean it well.  Gah!  Hopefully this is the last time for awhile.  I really want to make some sweet potato flour biscuits (or pie crust - to be perfected).

Next is the all-important pork lard.  Man, is this good!  This is pork leaf fat (as opposed to back fat) and has a more neutral taste.  And it is really good for you - I mean it!  This cooking oil is super cheap (2+ weeks of oil costs us $5 as opposed to about $40 with coconut oil) and is a great high-heat cooking fat (only a few other oils can stand the heat without going rancid - animal fats and coconut oil are our go-to cooking fats).  It is really easy to make - we just stick it in a crock pot on high until the fat stops melting off the cracklings.  Then we sprinkle salt on the hot cracklings and eat them like crackers - so good!

Lard cooling in the jars, cracklings cooling on the right.

 

We've always loved nuts, but when I saw a nutritional therapy practitioner two years ago she advised soaking our nuts to decrease the phytic acid that binds to nutrients and makes nuts hard to digest.  Although the phytic acid article points out that nuts are meant to be eaten as a snack in small quantity which decreases the negative impact of phytic acid, I don't find this is how most people consume nuts.  Nut butters are all the rage and people use nut meals as flour replacements (we don't do this or cook nuts because heat causes them to go rancid).  Plus, why not increase the availability of nutrients and ease of digestion, especially in this gut-destroyed world?  We always soak our nuts overnight before use.  Thanks to our handy-dandy dehydrator we can dry them at a very low temperature to make them more palatable (I was NOT a fan of their post-soaked slimy texture).  These nuts are ready for the dryer before their spin in the food processor.

I love surprise bones!  We bought a pork roast from Whiffletree Farm and found this lovely bone inside.  Although I haven't perfected pork broth, we like to use it as a base for soup.  This one turned into a creamy mussel soup.  Because of my histamine issues, I try to keep my broth fresh (the longer food sits, the more histamines it has) and I try to drink stock that has been boiled from a whole chicken for just a couple hours because it is lower in histamines than bone broth.  Bone broth/stock is one of the best ways to heal your gut!  I drink it like coffee, especially in the winter.

We also re-stocked our probiotic-rich foods, but that is a post for another day!  Goodnight, all!