Life is Happening.

It's funny how life happens.  Stuff just comes up.  My *plan* to do this blog for three months was thwarted by a pretty nasty health upset.

Life is happening.  This blog really isn't.

Sure, we ate local tonight.  We had our carrots and kale from Oxbow Farms, and we had lamb from Olsen Farms, cooked in a bone broth from Stokesberry Sustainable Farms.... but really, who needs a picture of that.  And all I had was the bone broth and the lamb, anyways.

I am currently eating:

Bone Broth (3 times per day)
Meat/Fish/Poultry
Eggs
Butter
Heavy Cream
Avocado
Coconut Oil
Full Fat Plain Yogurt

... and a totally ripe banana every few days.

That's it.  Nothing else until I get to see the specialist and we figure this out.

But nothing is figured out yet.  Quite a lot was ruled out today, when I got all of my blood work results back.   I'm apparently extremely robust and healthy, according to my labs.  I'm not angry about this.  I'm thankful.  But part of me wishes there was an answer to this.  Why did a peach or some honey make me double over in pain?  I'm still going to get tested for more things, like fructose malabsorption, etc.  But no answers thus far.

And I've decided that since I'm drinking bone broth every night for dinner, this is no longer a worthwhile experiment for me.  So I'm going on a hiatus until I have some more answers and until I can start putting other foods back into my diet.

Hopefully I'll be back soon!  :-)

Chicken & Blood Draws

There's no picture tonight.  Will cooked dinner (that I prepared ahead of time) while I was at the doctor, and I told him not to worry about the pictures tonight.  Two fussy kids and making dinner is a lot for him.  :-)

Dinner Menu:

Roasted Chicken Legs & Thighs (Stokesberry Sustainable Farm)
Roasted Dino Kale (Oxbow Farms)
Steamed Broccoli (Oxbow Farms)
Leftover Yukon Gold Potatoes (farmer's market)

Today I went to the doctor.

Overall, it went really well.  I had typed out two pages of my medical history, neurological problems, intestinal issues and current issues and all of my food restrictions/allowances for her.  She ordered a LOT of tests and referred me to the research GI that our friend recommended.  Most importantly for me, she believed me and didn't just assume I needed a psychiatrist because I was stressed out and making things up like the lovely Boston neurologists said back in 2008.

Medicine has finally caught up with some of the paleo principles I found years ago: namely, that gut inflammation due to diet problems/autoimmune issues can lead to neurological issues.  It's actually part of a diagnosis now, in 2013.  Back in 2008, it wasn't.  This was such a relief for me.  I was so upset, thinking that I would go to a doctor again and I would just get told to go to counseling.

So I'm feeling fine, mostly because I'm only eating like, seven or eight kinds of foods right now.  Today I had eggs, butter, full fat yogurt, avocado, bone broth and chicken.  That's it.  I had a LOT of bone broth.  I'm actually making another batch (with chicken feet and chicken carcass) right now because my beef bone broth will run out tomorrow at the rate I'm drinking it.  It's really helping me right now.

As for dinner, the children scarfed down all of their kale and broccoli and ate some chicken.

I was a happy mommy tonight.  :-)

Breakfast for Dinner!

Dinner Menu:

Pork Breakfast Sausage (Sea Breeze Farms)
Frittata with Aged Cheese (Anthem Farms, Glendale Shepherd)
Roasted Yukon Gold Potatoes (farmer's market)
Rainier Cherries, Peaches (Oxbow Farms)

Who doesn't love breakfast for dinner?  I love making extra on these nights so I can sleep in a bit longer the next morning and already have *actual* breakfast taken care of.  Perhaps I'll sleep until 6:30 AM tomorrow morning.  It would be for the first time in..... months?!?!

I only had the eggs tonight with my bone broth (made from Skagit River Ranch bones, of course!)  I'm avoiding all potential triggers until I get to the doctor tomorrow and figure out a game plan.  It's been not so bad actually.  Bone broth is freaking amazing.  I know so many people do those juice fasts for "cleansing" fasts, but really, bone broth would work so much better.  All that sugar in all that fruit is so inflammatory.

Good bone broth, when made properly, is just gelatin in the fridge.  Warm it up on the stove and add a bit of sea salt... and you have a warm mug of absolutely nourishing liquid gold.  Who needs coffee now?  :-)

Pork Chops & Blueberry Mango Chutney

This is a terrible picture, I know.  My children were both melting down after a day at the zoo and the wading pool, and I was just trying to slap food on plates as fast as possible and get it on the table.  I didn't even set it down to take a picture of it.  And it's alone on the plate because nothing was done at the same time tonight.  Oops.

Dinner Menu:

Pastured Pork Chops with Blueberry Mango Chutney (Olsen Farms, Whitehorse Meadows Farm)

Steamed Green Beans (Oxbow Farms)

Sauteed Zucchini (farmer's market)

Rainier Cherries (Oxbow Farms)

I did not have the chutney tonight.  After my gut-wrenching episode with honey awhile back, I've sworn off honey and high fructose foods like mango.  Chutneys in general are troublesome.  

But they are delicious, or so my three year old and husband tell me.  

My plain pork chops, though, were still fantastic.  Pastured pork is just *so* much tastier than conventionally produced pork.

And let me make an addendum to yesterday's post about my health issues: I think I am incredibly blessed.  If you saw me on the street, you would NOT think I was sick in any way.  Sure, I have to avoid a LOT of different foods right now while we're waiting to figure out exactly what is going on, but I still get to have amazing days with my children and enjoy an amazing life we've been blessed with here in Seattle with great friends.  The kids and I got to have a great day at the zoo and at the wading pool.  I just made sure I didn't eat any of the peaches we got in our CSA today.  And we spent time with friends today.  I just made sure I had a big enough breakfast with eggs, cream and butter so I wasn't needing a snack and in a tough spot because apples are off limits right now.  I just have to avoid foods.  Really, isn't that so simple compared to health problems other people have?  I should be thankful!

Bottom line: I don't mind drinking two cups of bone broth per day if it means that I can live my life.  It's just food, after all.  (Ironic coming from a supposed "food blog", no?)

So I will keep posting our dinners.  (Or Will's dinners.  I'm eating a super plain boring version right now.)  And I'll keep you all posted on my appointments, the first of which will happen later this week.  But for now, we'll just keep on enjoying our lovely Seattle summer.  Bad pictures and all.  :-)

Lamb. Every. Single. Day.

 

Dinner Menu:

Slow Cooked Lamb Shanks (Olsen Farms)
Sauteed Bok Choy (farmer's market)
Olive Oil Roasted Yukon Gold Potatoes (farmer's market)

For real.  I could eat lamb every single day.  I also really like to go on nice hikes and kayak.

I think I should move to Auckland.

But for now, Seattle and Olsen Farms will have to do.  These guys are probably my favorite farmers at the market.  I don't think I ever miss stopping by their booth when we're there on Saturday mornings.

On a more slightly less awesome note, I'm headed to the doctor this week.  For too long I've been ignoring obvious stomach/intestine issues.  After I had my second baby about a year ago, my food sensitivities have gone through the roof.  Despite all the bone broth I drink and all the coconut oil I take, I can tell something is still askew.

Thankfully, a research GI MD happened to be in our Spring Community Group at church.  After he spent 40 minutes grilling me on every poop I had ever had, ever, he told me I should get tested for both fructose malabsorption and Crohn's Disease, as well as a few other intestinal/gut disorders.  I'll never officially get tested for Celiac Disease, because I've been gluten free for too long, and in order to get tested, the gluten antibodies have to be present in your system.  This means a four week "gluten challenge" where you eat gluten every day and then get tested.  Just to confirm or deny Celiac and then go back to a gluten free diet... either way.

No thanks.

Darn.

Couldn't say I was surprised, though.  I had read about fructose malabsorption awhile back and wondered if perhaps this was a possibility... but of course, didn't want to stop eating apples and pears, so tried to ignore it.  And it's not just tummy troubles, which means that Crohn's or UC, etc. is also possible.  It's major auto-immune type flare-ups, with neuropathy, nausea, vomiting, loss of motor skills, extreme exhaustion... we might be looking at something bigger here.

So here's hoping.  And here's praying.  Fructose malabsorption would be an easier fix, for sure.  (Though I would mourn the loss of peaches and nectarines for ever!)  But with the right diet, the right lifestyle and the right doctors, and with God's grace, we are hopeful that we can manage whatever this turns out to be. Don't get me wrong.  I still ran after the kids today, I still walked several miles to the playground and back with the double stroller, we still read books and had a normal day.  I don't look sick and I really don't feel *all* that sick.  But I know that my food restrictions aren't normal, and I know if I were to have soy, gluten, peaches, raisins or apples... I would be doubled over tonight and very sick for the next week.  That's just not normal.  And even if extreme food restriction are my reality for the rest of my life, I just need to have a working relationship with a GI doctor in the Seattle area.

And this was a rather dull and rather poorly written blog post.  I'm tired.  I'm hopeful that the doctors I will see won't just tell me "this is all in your head" or "here, just take these pills" or anything like that.  And through all of this, I just need to remember: food restrictions aren't the worst thing in the world to have.  Especially when you live in such a beautiful city with such amazing friends and an amazing little family to love.  :-)

Post-Camping Cooking Haze

Dinner Menu:

Lamb Liver Pâté, Red Curry Zucchini & Steamed Green Beans (Olsen Farms, farmer's market, Oxbow Farms)
Blueberries (Whitehorse Meadows Farm)
Chicken Bone Broth (Stokesberry Sustainable Farm)

We made it back!  We had a blast!  Camping was a lot of fun!

And now we are surrounded in a mass of laundry.  I wore the same pair of pants and the same shirt basically all weekend.  (I smelled great when we got home, by the way.)  How in the world do I have so much laundry?

In any case, camping was great.  It was a LOT of down time, and when you have small children, this means a lot of time spent moving rocks/dirt/seashells from point A to point B.... and then back to point A again.  Our 3 year old loved it.  The 11 month old spent the entire weekend sitting in dirt, getting progressively more and more filthy, and as a result... more and more happy.  I've never met a baby who loved to be dirty more than ours.  The kid would just splash in a mud puddle all day if we let him.  We just played with the kids, went to the rocky/seashell beach and went for a small hike.  We walked around a lot.  We ate lots of snacks.  We *sort of* slept, about as well as you do when you are camping at least.  We came back refreshed and recharged and really relaxed.

But we're back now and it's back to normal foods.  And I needed some normal.  In the span of 36 hours, I had hot dogs, sausages AND bacon.  And eggs scrambled in bacon grease.  Because we're novice campers, I didn't really pack complicated foods.  And because I'm paleo and don't eat much fruit anymore, that means I did some intermittent fasting and had some coconut oil here and there... and basically just ate meat.  Which was awesome.  But now I need some vegetation.

So tonight I had veggies and a bit of pâté for dinner tonight.  (It was frozen, made from some lamb from Olsen Farms that I had gotten a few weeks back, so it made for a quick and easy dinner.)  Your whole family eats pâté, you say?  Of course!  Will and the 3 year old prefer it on some Nut Thins, but the baby and I just eat it by the spoonful.  

I'm well aware that pâté and curried vegetables and green beans is an odd dinner.  I realized that when I sat down to take a picture of it.  I blame post-camping brain.  The kids and Will were getting really hungry by 4pm, and so I threw together what I had as fast as possible.  Let's call it fusion-style, perhaps?

We did manage to stop by a Sunday farmer's market today and pick up some blueberries, which were an excellent dessert.  And since I was tired from two nights of sleeping on the ground (no air mattresses for us, sadly!) I drank a big mug of nourishing chicken bone broth with my dinner as well, courtesy of a lovely chicken we purchased from Stokesberry Sustainable Farm a few weeks back.

Good to be home!

"Good Intentions" Cheeseburgers

Dinner Menu:

Jericho Romaine Salad with Hard Boiled Eggs & Aged Feta Cheese (Oxbow Farms, River Farms, Glendale Shepherd)
"Good Intentions" Cheeseburger, Pickles & Roasted Beets (Olsen Farms, Appel-Farms, Parker's Pickles, Oxbow Farms)

When our daughter was 14 months old, we went to England for a week as a family.  Will was *finally* doing his graduation ceremony at Oxford for his master's degree, and we had some friends in London we wanted to see.  So we packed up the family and hopped the pond from Boston.

We ate at Gourmet Burger Kitchen at least four times during this week.  This was before my diet got really strict due to health issues and I could still have restaurant food, provided I just asked for a burger without the bun.  (These days, since there's so much soy or vegetable oil or fillers in things, we just eat at home.  I hate restaurants; I hate it when other people make my food.  I'm just terrified they will use an ingredient that will make me sick for days on end.)  And the baby could just munch on pieces of our burger, color with crayons, and eat copious amounts of sweet potato fries and make as much noise as she wanted since it was a family-friendly chain.

We loved it there.

And our favorite burger there?  The kiwiburger, sans bun, of course!  Cheddar cheese, beets, beef, fried egg, pineapple?  Sounds gross?  We loved it.

So I thought for sure I could easily replicate these guys for dinner tonight.  I had the best of intentions.

And then our first family camping trip with a 3 year old and a 11 month old packing frenzy took up too much brain space, and I realized I had used up all of my eggs earlier in the week.  And you really need the egg for the kiwiburger.

So we had what I called my "Good Intentions" Cheeseburger.  It had lovely intentions to be something else, but in the end... it was just a plain and simple cheeseburger, with roasted beets and a salad on the side.  The sharp cheddar cheese, however, was what made the burger.  Will commented how amazing just good meat and good cheese can taste: you don't need anything fancy.  You just need good quality base ingredients for an amazing, simple, nourishing dinner.

But I promised Will I would make the kiwiburger for a burger night soon.  :-)

My Local Table will be taking a break for a few days for our camping hiatus!  See you next week!

Surprise! MORE SALAD!

Dinner Menu:

HUGE Red Butterhead Lettuce Salad with Sage Garlic Chicken, Hard Boiled Eggs & Roasted Beets (Oxbow Farms, Don & Laurel's, Seattle Youth Garden Works, Stokesberry Sustainable Farm, River Farm, Oxbow Farms, farmer's market)
Sauteed Shiitake and Lions Mane Mushrooms (Sno-Valley Mushrooms)

We set up the tents that we borrowed in the living room tonight.  Thankfully, Will is an Eagle Scout... so he's pretty quick to do all this stuff.  Me?  Not so much.  I'm on food and first aid kit duty.  I'm game to do this whole camping thing, but I didn't grow up backpacking or doing anything outdoorsey.  I'm relying on Will for this one.

Because we'll be gone for a few nights, I had to look through our produce and be sure to eat up everything that would be bad by the time we got back.  So, fellow CSA-ers..... you know what that means.

Lettuce.  And more lettuce.

So epic salad night!  It's also probably good for us to load up on the veggies, seeing as I'm planning hot dogs and gluten-free smores for our camping trip.

Sage Garlic Chicken, Napa Cabbage & Camping Planning

Dinner Menu:

Sage Garlic Slow Cooked Whole Chicken (Don & Laurel's, Seattle Youth Garden Works, Stokesberry Sustainable Farm)
Braised Napa Cabbage with Garlic (Oxbow Farms, Seattle Youth Garden Works)
Roasted Cauliflower, Broccoli Flowers and Garlic (Don and Laurel's, Seattle Youth Garden Works)

I just realized we ate kind of a lot of garlic tonight for dinner.  I suppose this is good, considering we're planning our first ever camping trip as a family of four for this weekend.  Or as a family, period.  We've never gone camping with little kids.  We might be crazy.  But apparently garlic helps ward of bugs and mosquitoes.  So we'll at least be garlic-smelling crazy people, camping with our small children.

I slow cooked my whole chicken with sage and garlic overnight, picked it clean today and the carcass is now simmering away in a crockpot full of water, brewing a beautiful broth.  This is what you do when you spend $24 on a single, pasture-raised organic chicken from a small scale farmer at the farmer's market.  You slow cook it, shred it, use the meat for 2-3 meals and make enough stock for 2 more.  You use the $24 chicken for 5-6 meals, which actually makes it financially reasonable.  And delicious.  And sustainable, local, ethically raised and ethically slaughtered.

The roasted cauliflower, broccoli flowers and garlic were absolutely delicious.  Don and Laurel gave me a beautiful head of cauliflower yesterday and roasting it, even though it was sort of warm today, just seemed like the only proper thing to do.  I can generally take or leave cauliflower from the store... but this was pretty amazing stuff.  See some cauliflower at the farmer's market?  You should totally buy it.

Leftovers, Lamb & Off The Grid

 Dinner Menu:

Mixed Salad Greens, Basil, Lamb and Flowered Broccoli Salad (farmer's market, Don & Laurel's house)
Leftover Curried Zucchini and Summer Squash Soup (Stokesberry Sustainable Farm, farmer's market)
Skeena Cherries (farmer's market)
Raw Whole Grass-Fed Milk (Sea Breeze Farm) -- only Will and I drink this in our house

The kids and I went to my Aunt and Uncle's place today out in Port Orchard, which is super fun because it involves a ferry ride, and ferries are fascinating to a three year old.  Don and Laurel live on an acreage, where they have epic gardens, bees, goats, chickens, apple and pear trees.... and so on.  It's the kind of place that's so off the grid that when you drive down their driveway, your GPS doesn't even show a road.  They do have neighbors, but everything there is so thick and overgrown that you wouldn't know it from inside their property.  And they grow more food than they need for themselves, so they are quite generous with their bounty when we come to visit.

They are awesome.

We love them.

I also love the fact that I can take the kids out there and we can show my 3 year old where broccoli comes from and where cauliflower comes from and what carrots look like when they are still in the ground.  And every time I go out there, I learn something new, too.

For instance, have you ever seen broccoli that looks like this?

I hadn't until today.  This is broccoli that's starting to flower and go to seed.  Don told me it's perfectly safe to eat and has a mild broccoli-like flavor.  But they don't transport well at all, which is why you never see them in stores or at the markets.

Lucky for us Don picked this for us at noon today and we ate it for dinner tonight.

I just chopped it up and added it to our leftover salad greens from last night and Will raved about it, saying it was one of the top ten salads I've ever made for him, that it was such a great flavor combination.

This is no small compliment.  I make a lot of salads.

While at Don and Laurel's today, we had a simple picnic lunch with the kids and Laurel prepared some lamb with onion and rosemary, which was, of course, from a lamb they had raised themselves.  And she so generously sent home the rest of the lamb meat with me, and so we chopped it up and had it for dinner on our salads with a bit of fresh basil.  The kids tolerated their salads and broccoli, but they shoveled the lamb and cherries into their mouths.  The baby was a goopey red smeary mess by the end of the meal.  But a happy goopey red smeary mess!

We topped off the meal with the rest of the curried zucchini and summer squash soup from last week and the rest of the cherries from the farmer's market this past weekend, and called it a night.  We're always so thankful for the opportunity to visit Don and Laurel's place and spend time with family, and always thrilled when we get to bring home big bags of kale, sage, broccoli and cauliflower to eat for the week!

Sunday Sabbath: Simple Meals, Time with Friends & Family

Dinner Menu:

Mixed Greens Salad with Dehydrated Apriums (farmer's market, Tonnemaker)
Mushroom and Cheese Frittata (Stokesberry Sustainable Farm, Sno-Valley Mushrooms, Glendale Shepherd)
Leftover Keta Salmon Filet (Loki Fish Co.)
Skeena Cherries (farmer's market)

Sundays are our Sabbath days, and we try to take them seriously.  This means we only check email if really necessary, we try to spend some time with friends, we go to church and we have a low-key, stay-close-to-home relaxing family day.

(Also, this morning's sermon happened to be on taking God's commandment to "rest" seriously.  So it seemed fitting to really rest today.)

I took a nap.  And then we hung out with some friends and their small children for the bulk of the afternoon.

And then we came home and I threw together dinner in twenty minutes.  And this post will be short (as will most Sunday posts) because now it's time to spend time with my husband, since he isn't working tonight.

Happy Sabbath!

Salmon, Swiss Chard & Market Saturdays

Dinner Menu:

Baked Keta Salmon Filets (Loki Fish Co.)
Sauteed Swiss Chard with Hazelnuts (Oxbow Farms, Holmquist Hazelnuts)
Oyster Mushrooms (Sno-Valley Mushrooms)
Steamed Snap Peas (Oxbow Farms)
Raw Whole Grass-Fed Milk (Sea Breeze Farm) -- (only Will and I drink this in our house)
Apricots (Rock Island Red)
Cherries (farmer's market)

What a lovely Saturday.

It was sunny, cool and crisp this morning.  We ate a breakfast of bacon, eggs and raspberry-banana yogurt smoothies and loaded up the double bike trailer with our children and our empty canvas bags.  Five miles later, mostly along Lake Washington on trails thick with shady trees, we arrived at our final destination: the University District Farmer's Market.

This place has it all: fresh veggies of all sorts, fresh seasonal fruits, goat, lamb, beef, chicken, pork, seafood of all kinds, hazelnuts, dried fruits, eggs, wine, kombucha, ginger beer, raw milk, artisan ice cream, teas, pickles and fermented foods of all kinds, and if it's your kind of thing, lots of pastries, breads and all sorts of bread stuffs.

Yet another reason Seattle is awesome.

We had a simple and delicious dinner tonight, which tasted especially good after a ten mile bike ride, a lazy day playing at home with the kids and an afternoon nap.  Good food cooked simply is just so.... nourishing.  Life affirming.  My baby scarfed down the salmon for the first time EVER tonight, which was a huge win.  (Only took about a dozen times of offering it to him for it to finally stick.)  And the surprise break-out dish had to be the Swiss Chard with Hazelnuts, which I adapted from this recipe.  Our daughter was thrilled to have fresh apricots again, as these have become her new favorite food.  Since the fruit bruises easily, I always buy it last at the market, and she kept reminding me the entire time we were there that we still needed apricots.  She ate three of them before we even left the farmer's market.

What a wonderful day.  What a wonderful dinner.  We are so thankful and so blessed.

Figure It Out Fridays: Zucchini, Radishes and Eggs

Dinner Menu:

Curried Zucchini and Summer Squash Soup with Aged Feta Crumbles (farmer's market, Stokesberry Sustainable Farm, Glendale Shepherd)
Roasted Carrots and Radishes (Oxbow Farms)
Roasted Kale (farmer's market)
Hard Boiled Eggs (Stokesberry Sustainable Farm)
Raspberries (Oxbow Farms)

It's Friday night!  Which means my CSA pickup was three days ago, and I go to the farmer's market tomorrow morning.  So I'm kind of in scrounge-mode around here, which is why I've dubbed these evenings "Figure It Out Fridays."

These kind of meals really highlight what eating locally and seasonally and by the schedule of the markets REALLY looks like.  You don't get to ask yourself what you WANT to eat.  You get to ask yourself what you CAN eat.  What's in your fridge tonight?  And what can you do with it, given your time constraints?  Your dinner won't look polished, nor will it make any sort of cohesive sense.  But that's just a part of the system: you eat what you have, and you make it work.

The soup I made with my massive pile of zucchini and summer squash and my leftover chicken stock from a whole chicken I bought from Stokesberry Sustainable Farm was good, but it needs some tweaking before I can post the recipe to My Paleo Crockpot.  I'm sure I will have plenty of zucchini and chicken stock to experiment with this summer, though.  :-)

For serving pureed soups to my kids, I give my three year old a small bowl with an egg drop soup spoon I picked up at an Asian grocer.  Then I actually have these reusable food pouches I fill with (chilled) soup for my baby.  This recipe in particular was a bit too spicy for me, so I didn't actually make my kids eat it.  (I am a bit of a spice nut, so I know if it's too spicy for me, it's definitely going to be too much for them!)  They just had an extra hard boiled egg instead.  But normally that's how I would serve it to them.

And our lovely CSA, Oxbow Farms, hosted a U-Pick Raspberry Picking today!  So I loaded the kids up and drove out of the city this morning and we picked a pound of raspberries.  My toddler loved it, and even though most of the really ripe ones at her height were already picked, she enjoyed picking what she could.  I wore my baby in our hiking backpack and he was happy enough as long as I kept handing him a new raspberry to eat every few minutes.  So we had a local evening snack tonight!  (Although I didn't have any because I'm actually *this close* to fitting back in my super skinny pre-baby jeans I wore back when I was 22.  They technically fit right now, but they are *just* uncomfortable enough to warrant skipping sugar for a few more weeks.)  It was also lovely to travel out to the farm where we get our "farmer box" every week and see the magic behind the amazing food we are so privileged to eat.

Happy Fourth & Hangover Burgers

Dinner Menu:

Hangover Burgers: Grass-Fed Hamburgers, Sunny Side Up Eggs, Bacon Ends (Olsen Farms, Stokesberry Sustainable Farm, Olsen Farms)
Steamed Broccoli (Oxbow Farms)
Roasted Mixed Heirloom Potatoes with Olive Oil, Sea Salt and Paprika (Olsen Farms)

Happy Fourth of July!  I hope you had a lovely day.  We just stayed close to home, riding our bicycles (and pulling the kids in the double trailer) to a playground/beach just a few miles away.  I packed a simple picnic lunch and we ate by the water after about an hour of playing at the playground.

We didn't drive anywhere.  That is what we consider a holiday.  :-)

Burger nights require Will to be home right before dinner: there's a lot of moving parts happening and a lot of different elements that all need to come together at the same time, so I need him to take the kids for that crucial last 30 minutes.  Burger nights are great for the weekends and great for holidays.  And even though we're not hung over, nor will we be tomorrow, these hangover style burgers were amazing.

I didn't make the eggs for the kids (they prefer scrambled to the oooey-gooey sunny side up kind), but they did scarf down the bacon ends and the burgers quite happily.  Only bummer?  Avocado isn't local.  A huge slice of avocado would have really gone well with this burger!

And this is the second night with no local fruit in the house, so once again I went without any dessert or after dinner snack.  (The kids had some store bought fruit and avocado for snack; we don't make them abide by my "only local" rule for snack time if there's nothing left in the house to eat.)  Not that I have anything to complain about; my dinner was amazing!  But I won't be sad when we can load up on some fresh peaches and berries at the farmer's market again this weekend!

Will enjoying his Hangover Burger. 

Pork Roast & Kids and Salad

Dinner Menu:

Red Butterhead Lettuce, Aged Feta Cheese and Japanese Cucumber Salad (Oxbow Farms, Glendale Shepherd, Mair Farm-Taki)
Herb & Mustard Slow Cooked Pork Roast (Olsen Farms)
Sauteed Baby Bok Choy, Shiitake Mushrooms, Fresh Garlic and Sweet Onion (farmer's market, Sno-Valley Mushrooms, farmer's market)
Rose Petal Iced Tea (Harbor Herbalist)

You might have noticed there's no fruit in this meal.  It's Wednesday, which means we're all out of the fruit we bought at the farmer's market over the weekend.  Our CSA pickup was yesterday, and didn't include any fruit this week since it's still the beginning of the season.  So the kids had bananas and split a LaraBar for their bedtime snack tonight; I think Will is planning on having the last of the chocolate paleo cupckaes from the 3 year old's birthday celebration last night.  I had an iced tea I had brewed and cooled earlier in the day, and out of principle for this experiment, had no dessert tonight.

Maybe my last pair of pre-pregnancy jeans will finally fit right tomorrow.  :-)

Anyways, onto the bulk of this post:

Kids and salad.  Or green vegetables in general.

That's a tough one.

We eat a lot of greens around here, especially during this time of the year when they are in full swing at the farmer's market and 90% of our CSA box is lettuce, hearty braising greens, bok choy, snap peas, etc.  And my children are no exception to this rule.  My 11 month old little guy inhales snap peas, stuffs handfuls of raw lettuce in his mouth, and will eat roasted veggies of all sorts: carrots, beets, sweet potatoes, squash, etc.

No, I don't have magical fairy children.  I do three things that I *think* have been instrumental in getting my kids to eat well.  (I say *think* because I am by no means an expert, and I'm sure I do plenty of dumb things as a parent.  But this is my best guess as to why my kids eat veggies.)

1) Most dinners, we have what we call "vegetable bowl" first.  It means if we're having a salad, we actually sit down and eat the entire salad.  Everyone.  Will and I model this behavior.  You cannot have the rest of your meal until your vegetable bowl/salad is finished.  On a night like tonight, my three year old knew that we were having slow cooked pork, and so she was happy to eat her little salad to get to the meat.  She also liked the salad, to be fair.  And I make her portion reasonable, as you can see:

Mommy Salad.  Toddler Salad.

 It makes more dishes, but it's totally worth it in my book.

**I always try to prep my vegetable bowls or salad during afternoon nap/quiet time.  It saves me come pre-dinner witching hour.

2) Our rule on dinner and snack/dessert is this: if you eat all of your dinner, you can have as much snack as you want.  If you don't finish your dinner, that is fine, but you only get one serving of snack at snack time right before bed.  We were having issues with our daughter picking at her dinner and then wanting an entire banana, two handfuls of cashews, a bowl of grapes AND an apple for "snack" that night.  Um, no.  That's a dinner.  Now if she finished her dinner that night and STILL wanted to eat all that for snack?  Fine!  That's a growth spurt!

3) I don't feed my children an afternoon snack.  Instead, we have dinner at 5 PM SHARP every night.  I know this won't work for every family, but since I stay at home and we only have young children without a million activities yet, it works for us.  It means some nights, like tonight, Will is a bit late to dinner.  (He usually can be home right at 5 PM since he's working on his PhD and he sets his own afternoon hours for the most part.)  But it also means that when the kids sit down to dinner, they are very hungry and happy to eat their vegetable bowl.  And we're eating earlier in the evening, before the total meltdowns before bedtime can happen, and everyone is in a much better mood and much more likely to eat their food without a major battle.

So that's what we do.  It seems to work, though not every time.  We have meltdowns, and we have days where someone is sick or we are exhausted and we slack on the rules.  Our kids still have preferences, and we allow them to express them within reason: one loves avocado, the other has never cared for them.  One loves salmon, the other will only eat it if really hungry.  They're still people who have likes and dislikes, and while I don't cater to it, I let them be who they are.

I'm definitely not saying this is the only way to do things, nor is it the right thing to do for everyone.  Everyone has their own unique family situation and their dinner time game plan should reflect that.  Parenting young kids is an adventure, and we're constantly evolving our approach to it as we learn more and experience more.  I'm sure we will figure it all out just in time for our youngest to graduate from high school.  :-)

A Three Year Old's Dream Birthday Dinner

Dinner Menu:

Grass-Fed Hot Dogs (Skagit River Ranch)
Garlic Dill Pickles (Parker's Pickles)
Steamed Snap Peas (farmer's market)
Leftover Steamed Cauliflower (farmer's market)
Chocolate Paleo Cupcakes with Paleo Chocolate Frosting (the eggs came from Stokesberry Sustainable Farm!)

My first baby turned three today.  It's amazing to think how the time has gone so fast, considering it has also simultaneously felt like some of the longest and most tiring days of my life.  It's like the years go by in a flash, but it's never bedtime yet.  Is it just me, parents?  But I digress.

We had a fantastic day celebrating our daughter.  She's turning into such a fun and spunky little kid.  She's extremely verbal and so observant, and she just says the funniest and sweetest things.

"Mommy, my belly is going to get bigger, and then Piglet is going to live in there."

(Yes, that was the gem she came up with this morning.)

"Daddy, today I turned three.  And on my next birthday I will be four.  And then I will go back to two."

And tonight when she said her prayers:

"Thank you Jesus, for our food and for our farmer box.  Amen."

(I call our CSA share our weekly "farmer box" and today just she and I went to pick it up together.)

She's such a fun kid to take to the farmer's market or the grocery store, too.  She's grown up around fresh foods and knowing the farmer's that raise our meat, veggies and fruits.  She gets excited because we let her pick out her own food at the farmer's market.  She is more than excited to help me pick out a "green vegetable" and a "purple fruit" at the grocery store, and then she is always very excited to eat what she's chosen when we get home!  Eating local and fresh, whole foods is truly a family affair.  The kids, even though they are very young, are already involved in the process of procuring and preparing food for our family.  It's wonderful family time.

So of course when we went to the farmer's market this past weekend, Will let her pick out whatever she wanted for her birthday dinner this week.  She chose some hot dogs (grass fed, from Skagit River Ranch) and some snap peas.  And then, because Grandma had gotten her a birthday shirt with a cupcake on it and a birthday hair bow with a cupcake on it, it only seemed fitting to make chocolate cupcakes for her special birthday dessert today, too.  

The cupcakes weren't really local.  I did my best, but since I wanted to use coconut nectar instead of honey so my baby could have one, most of the ingredients had to be store bought.  The eggs in it DID come from Stokesberry Sustainable Farm, and I suppose the baking soda was sort of local... since I had to get it from my neighbor because I ran out.  Oops.  And while I'm glad I made cupcakes for her birthday, I was reminded why I hardly ever bake: it's a lot of work to make something from scratch... and then you still have to cook your next meal, anyway!  Back to fruit for dessert tomorrow!  :-)

Lamb Ribs, Heatwaves and Getting Creative

Dinner Menu: (recipes and vendors linked or listed when possible)

Crockpot Curried Lamb Ribs with Fresh Garlic and Sweet Onions (Olsen Farms, Oxbow Farms CSA, farmer's market)

Mixed Braising Greens, Shiitake Mushrooms & Bacon Ends (farmer's market, Sno-Valley Mushrooms, Olsen Farms)

Steamed Cauliflower (farmer's market)

Sliced Apricots (Rama Farm)

Cherries (farmer's market)

It's here!  It's here!  The new blog I've been promising everyone!  Not that my old blog, My Paleo Crockpot, is all spiffy or *done* or polished by any means, but I decided to tackle a new endeavor for the next three-ish months: cooking our dinner, every night, with only local ingredients I can get from my CSA or the farmer's market.

Here we go!

So it's day one, and I already sort of had to cheat.  It's blazing ridiculously hot here in Seattle, and by that I mean it hit 90 degrees today.  You would think this wouldn't be a problem, considering I grew up in Nebraska and even thought it would be a good idea to live in Dallas for a summer once, but there's no A/C here.  And my small children need to nap in the afternoon.

So no cooking during the day.  Period.  If it's not made by 8 AM, and it's not going in the microwave to be re-heated, it's not happening that day.  So I made my lamb ribs last night in my crockpot, steamed my cauliflower before we went to sleep, and braised my greens while I made breakfast this morning.  Then it all went in Pyrex and straight into the fridge until dinnertime.

It counts, right?

It's also day one of my "eat local, be sustainable, yay!" blog, but I was anything but sustainable today.  We had to get out of the house in the morning once it started to heat up, and so I loaded up the kids (one of whom was battling a fever/some sort of crud) in the minivan and we drove the long way to one of those big box stores, in search of a stereotypical big box purchase: a toddler water play outdoor table for the kids.  And the first place didn't have it, so we went to a Target to see if they did.  Nope.

I did manage to buy a new swimsuit for myself since my old one was literally from high school and was too big from being worn too closely to having babies, and this was no small feat considering swimsuit shopping is horrid all by itself, and I had a toddler and a baby in the tiny fitting room with me, asking for snacks every two seconds or trying to pick up discarded tags and eat them, respectively.  It's admittedly kind of a "mom swimsuit" but whatever.  I'm kind of a mom now.

And then it was almost lunchtime and I was still trying to avoid our hot home, and since big box stores always have A/C cranking, we stopped and I bought my toddler a smoothie from Starbucks and fed my baby some snacks.  And then I blasted the A/C the whole way home in the minivan and even took the non-direct route back.  I put a whopping 30 miles on my car today, which is a TON of driving for me.

Oops.

We have a saying around here: Sustainability has to be sustainable.  And on a super hot day like today, what made eating local food sustainable was to cook it all last night or early this morning, and then microwave it before dinnertime.  What made the day reasonable and our home cool enough for afternoon naps was the fact that I didn't cook and we got out for the bulk of the morning.  We made it work.