Healthy

Take a gander with me while I entertain a new romance.

Food. Sustainability. Homesteading.

I’ve been into these things for a while now. LOVED reading books like Little House On The Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder and These Is My Words by Nancy Turner and more recently Gap Creek by Robert Morgan.

I came from pioneers, both Mormon and not. My ancestors (another passion of mine, but we’ll talk about that some other time) but we all came from people who had to live off and with the land and make it work.

I’ve felt much peace doing things like keeping hens (and falling into a trance just watching them scratch and peck at the ground), saving seeds and preserving heirloom plants, hanging laundry out to dry on a line. In a way it makes me feel closer to my dead grandmothers who all led lives, raised children and fed them every day, washed and clothed them and make it work.

I was into it for a long time in bits and pieces. When my dad got sick with cancer five years ago we watched him battle it the traditional way – stopping at Sloane-Kettering and getting frequent radiation treatment. We watched him fight it the new way – going to Mexico for alternative treatments. We watched him fight it the wholistic way – eating stuff like seaweed and changing his lifestyle. Getting treatments from Kathy Oddenino a neighbor of his and Roxanne, my parent’s friend who used raw foods and energy healing. I don’t know. He died anyway. But what I do know is he felt better and lived better and even healed better when he was eating well and taking good care of himself during that time.

But like I said, he died and things went back to normal. Eating organically and locally was expensive and frankly, my husband wasn’t behind it that much and I didn’t have any steam behind me to show it was all that different.

Then David got excited about the whole Urban Homesteading thing starting with Jack Spirko’s Survival Podcast. He started talking to me about conserving energy and building raised beds and buying plants that were not only ornamental but also had a use – often edible.

So Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution came on a few weeks ago. And I was a bit skeptical when I saw it. I thought “yes already with the food – must we villianize the food?” And I watched it and it was astonishing. In the fact that I knew so little. He cooked and piled up all the bad food one family ate for a week just to show them what it looked like all in one place at once – so they could see what they were consuming. It made me think what my family’s meals would look like if I dumped them all on the table one day. There’d be lots of cereal. Lots. And probably lots of hot dogs and nuggets. Have they ever eaten an eggplant? Doubt it. Could they name one if they saw it? Probably not. And yet we’re a pretty standard middle class family with lots of education and a house we own. We grow gardens and we can our tomatoes. But it’s not enough. Not nearly.

At the same time I picked up “Animal Vegetable Miracle: A Year Of Food Life” Barbara Kingsolver on a discard book pile at the library. I started reading it (even though practical non fiction usually bores me – i like to escape) and was utterly enthralled. She takes her family and they have an experiment where they live off of what they can grow in their yard for a year).

And THEN at the same time, I was really blessed to begin doing a series of shoots for my sweet friend Melissa Chappell (also known as RawMelissa) a phenomenal chef and food maker and planner and raw food junkie with her sweet boyfriend Chris and her kids for their new blog (lucky ALL of us!) www.nicolasandcoraeat.com. I saw that a pantry CAN be relatively bare – it doesn’t need LOADS of stuff that is boxed and bagged and wrapped and the food you make CAN be delicious.

I’m still into it in bits and pieces but slowly those bits and pieces are coming together to form a more complete picture of what I love, what is peaceful and good to me.

So I’d like to invite you along as I meander around the web and Utah looking for good, local food and resources and helps. I have kids who will only eat PB&J and hot dogs. So I’m going to start with myself. I have horrible debilitating problems with light-headedness and fatigue. I want to see what happens to that as I change things around here.

Let’s start by this — SLOW FOOD is the opposite of “Fast Food” – I’d heard of slow food but it never really made sense what the big deal was and why I should care. “Slow food” is grown seasonally and locally. It involves varieties of plants that have not been genetically changed and patented to do specific things for us – it just feeds us the way it has for hundreds of years.

Slow Food Utah for those who live by me.

How to store all those veggies you’re supposed to be eating…..Storing Veg

And this year I’m going to be planting produce in the beds that I’ve been putting flowers in. Pretty in their own way and much more useful.