Category Archives: nutrition

King Corn – a review

nutrition

A big part of why my kids are happy to eat healthfully is that they buy into the concept of food quality mattering when it comes to building up the body.  (It doesn’t hurt that our food is delicious!)  I regularly share with them things I learn about health and nutrition, and when I heard about this dvd titled King Corn, I thought it would be interesting to watch with the kids and reserved a copy from the library.  Yes, my kids really find this stuff fascinating – even ds2 and ds3 sat through it!

King Korn is an entertaining documentary of the journey of two young men who set off to learn about the growing and processing of corn.  It begins when they have their hair analyzed and find out that the carbon is their body is mostly made up of corn!   So they temporarily move to Iowa to grow an acre of their own corn and follow the ‘journey’ of their corn.

After finding a farmer who agrees to let them rent an acre of land from him, we watch them follow typical farming guidelines.  They begin by preparing the soil with chemical fertilizers, and soon after plant the acre (it takes just 18  minutes to sow the entire area).  When they spray for weeds, we learn that all corn would be killed by this pesticide called Liberty, except for this particular kind of corn (Liberty Link) that was developed to withstand Liberty.  It’s one thing to know your food is liberally sprayed with pesticides, it’s another to watch it!

Nowadays, the average is 180 bushels of corn to an acre, and 200 bushels isn’t uncommon.  That’s an incredible thing.  This is possible not because each plant produces more, but because they’ve been bred to be able to live much closer together. As I heard the discussion about current crop yields , a scene from the Little House on the Prairie books came to mind, when Pa was exultant that he was expecting an incredible yield of forty bushels of grain to an acre.  There was an explanation about current farm subsidy practices, and it becomes clear how crucial this is to farmers, since without it they’d literally be losing money even when getting record yields.  Farm subsidies explain the seemingly wasteful overproduction of corn.

Once the corn was ready to be harvested they tasted their crop, only to be taken aback by how unappetizing it was.   No surprise there, though- after all, it was bred to be able to grow in crowded conditions and withstand powerful herbicides, not for flavor or nutritional value.

What happens to corn once its harvested?  Ten percent is used for ethanol, and the other ninety percent is split 50/40 towards the corn sweetener industry and for cattle feed. It becomes clear that with the mega production of corn that exists in the US today, industries have developed which find ways to use it all.

One of these is the industrialized beef market, so they went into the cattle industry to see how corn is used there.  I thought this was a particularly important part of the film, since most people have no idea that corn is an unnatural and unhealthy food for cows that causes them to become disease ridden.  (I only learned about this a few years ago when I researched raw milk – what cows eat affects the quality of their milk.  Corn sounds like a healthy food for cows, doesn’t it?)  Once cows are brought into a feedlot, they are fed a diet that is almost exclusively corn, which is effective in fattening them quickly for market.  It also makes them very sick.  Don’t you think it’s obvious that just like the milk quality is affected by how a cow is fed, the quality of their meat would be affected?

Cows and calves of a local cattle rancher who sells her young calves to the feedlots are shown, and the difference between the young cows with their mothers allowed to graze and roam in grassy pastures is very stark when contrasted with the reality of feedlot cattle.  Enough said.

They then attempt to visit a factory that produces corn syrup but when they were denied permission, they got a hugely technical explanation, then found a recipe, and made it themselves.   I’m a do it yourself kind of woman, but corn syrup wouldn’t be on my list of projects!  Corn syrup is ubiquitous to our food supply since it ends up in just about every processed food on the shelf.  (Oh, by the way, here’s a couple of spoofs that the makers of King Corn did on the ads the corn refiner’s association recently put out to try to spin that their product is a healthy one.  Very humorous.)

Something I liked about this presentation is that though the producers clearly had an aim in mind when producing this, they let those they interviewed do the talking.  We see a corn farmer emphatically saying that the corn they’re all growing is low quality and he wouldn’t eat it.  We see the head of the feedlot explaining that what Americans value most is cheap food, and that’s what they’re given, that if they were clamoring for grass fed beef, that’s what the industry would produce (and I believe he was sincere and that this is true).  We see the pathetic explanations of the corn syrup representative as to why visitors aren’t allowed in the factory to view the process of how corn becomes corn syrup (we were laughing at how ridiculous the explanations sounded).  We see a farmer who can’t keep getting bigger and bigger forced to sell his home and farm after generations.

As they go through this process, the two young men become increasingly uncomfortable about their role in growing corn that will support these industries.  In the end, they buy the acre that they rented, and the final scene shows them playing baseball together in the acre covered with grass, with acres of corn all around them.  At first I didn’t comprehend the message of this, but then understood that the point was that they chose to leave it unfarmed, ie, not contributing to the corn industry.

Though very little of this was novel to me, for my family it was, and I felt King Corn was a valuable film to watch.   A short time before we watched this I said to my husband, “The more I know about food and the way it’s produced, the more frustrating I find it to shop and the less I want to eat any of it.”  He didn’t share that feeling and didn’t really get where I was coming from, until he watched this film.

Something all my kids wondered about was how the producers of the film continued eating fast food after learning all they did!  They also asked me if I thought that our family would be classified as consisting of corn carbon if our hair was analyzed.  I told them I wasn’t sure.  While we eat virtually no processed food, no corn oil, and no corn syrup, we do sometimes use cornmeal and eat frozen/fresh corn.  That, I think is probably less of a problem than the animal products we eat – corn fed beef, corn fed poultry (even organic chickens often display ‘grain fed’ or ‘corn fed’ on the labels), eggs from poultry that is corn fed (we try to get pastured eggs but often use regular eggs), dairy products from cows that are corn fed….

The unfortunate reality is that it takes a lot of education and effort nowadays to eat a decent diet.  Getting information like this helps with the education component!

Next on my list is Food Inc – I reserved it weeks ago and had 36 people in line ahead of me (that’s a record; I reserve books all the time and rarely have more than a couple of people waiting for something); I’m down to only about 22 people ahead of me now so hopefully I’ll get it in a few more weeks. 🙂

(This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays and Fight Back Fridays.)

Avivah

How to sprout beans

homemaking, nutrition

A friend asked me this morning about how to sprout beans, and I figured I’d post it today – it’s easiest to get the quick topics out of the way so I don’t have to keep them on my mind!

First of all, a quick reminder about why sprouting beans is beneficial.  Beans, like most grains, nuts, and seeds, have phytic acid and enzyme inhibitors in them.   That means that even though we think of beans as highly nutritious, we don’t utilize a good part of the nutrients in them unless they are properly prepared.  Beans are inexpensive and great budget stretchers, and it’s worthwhile to figure out how to use them to maximize their value.

Fortunately, it’s not hard! Simply put the dried beans in a bowl, and cover them with water that is room temperature.  Let them sit overnight, and in the morning, pour them into a strainer and rinse them off.  The beans will have absorbed all the water, and are ready to be used.  But if you really want to supercharge them, them you can sprout them!  This significantly increases the nutritional value.  That’s what I like to do.

Now that they’re soaked, put set them back in the original bowl and leave them on the counter.  At the end of the day, rinse them.  I rinse mine twice a day by pouring them into a strainer, running some water over them, and then putting them back into the bowl.  For simplicity, I rinse them once at night and once in the morning; it works well with my personal routine.  Twice a day seems to be a good frequency to rinse them, but I’ve often been lazy and just rinsed them once a day and they were fine. To clarify, after you rinse them, leave them in an empty bowl, not a bowl of water.

As they sit on the counter at room temperature, the soaked beans will begin to germinate.  Smaller legumes will sprout faster – within a day or two you’ll see little sprouts appearing at the end.  Larger beans take longer- generally 3 – 4 day, but it really depends on your household temperature.  In the summer, the beans sprout really fast!  How long you let them get depends on your personal preference.  If you want to use them as sprouts in salads, then you’ll want to wait a lot longer.  I use them in cooked dishes once I see the sprout emerging.

Soaking and sprouting isn’t hard to do, but it does require advance planning.  I plan my weekly menu on Saturday nights, and then on Sunday I begin soaking my beans for the week.  If you’ve been reading here for a while, then you’ve noticed that when I post my weekly menu on Sundays, I usually post the preparatory work that I’m doing for the week, too, including soaking beans.  Since large beans take longer to sprout, I generally plan them for later in the week.

What is you’ve soaked your beans and let them sit out for a day but they aren’t yet sprouted – and you need to use them?  Even if you don’t see the germination taking place, it’s still in the process and you’ll enjoy the benefits, so go ahead and use them!

By the way, lots of jokes have been made about beans and their flatulatory (did I just make that word up? :)) effect on the body.  We’ve found that soaking and sprouting the beans takes away that issue!

(This post is part of Fight Back Fridays.)

Avivah

Kosher turkeys on sale

frugal strategies, nutrition

Yesterday I decided that this month I will try to buy organic chicken, at least in part.  I’ve only once bought organic chicken, as a splurge.  It’s generally at least $4 lb, which is a significant leap in price, considering that I generally pay .99 lb for chicken wings and 2.29 for quarters (those are sale prices).  With the amount of people I’m feeding in our home, that extra cost would add up quickly.

I’m not one to stand on the organic label – when I can get something organic at a comparable price, I do.  I’ve spent some time thinking about what really matters most to buy organic, and my personal conclusion is the animal products because the antibiotics and hormones are concentrated in the flesh of the poultry/meat we buy, making it more problematic than vegetables.   So I thought this would be a good experiment to try (I say experiment because I have to see how it works in my budget).

I called a couple of butchers to ask about their case prices, and I was thinking that I’d need to buy much less chicken than usual and have more broth to compensate if I go this route- I have a set amount that I’m prepared to spend on chicken, and when I hit that number, that’s it for the month.  However, to my delight when I stopped in at Trader Joes to get my monthly coconut milk (they were out – but I ordered 2 cases so then I won’t run low for a while), I saw that they have glatt kosher all natural turkeys for 2.29 lb (certified OU and another hechsher, too).  These turkeys were fed no animal by products (animals in the industrial food loop are often fed ground up diseased animals), and are hormone and antibiotic free.  I was totally thrilled, since the regular kosher turkey runs about 3.29 lb, and this was cheaper than I usually manage to find regular turkey on sale! (Though I did see it this week at Giant for 1.99 lb- a price to stock up if you’re not doing my kind of experimenting!)

I asked the cashier about it, and she said they have their own line of (*edit*) turkeys, and only for the Thanksgiving season, they do a kosher run.  That’s why they can sell it so inexpensively.  They’re going to have them through Nov. 28, unless they run out (which they did the last couple of years).  I bought three turkeys, and will see if I can swing any more for this month after I do my big shopping on Weds.

Since the turkeys are fresh, I’m hoping to roast all of them today (I’ll start as soon as I finish posting this :)).  I’ll put one in in the freezer for Thanksgiving and can the other two.  Then I’ll use all the bones for a huge pot of broth, and can that, too.  I haven’t done much canning recently, and the empty jars are building up  as I’ve been using up my home canned foods and not replacing it!  (I’ve been using the meat I canned last winter for cholent every week.)  Turkeys are too bulky to keep them in the freezer, particularly before my big stocking up trip.  So this is a great way to take advantage of this once a year price on good quality poultry.

I love seeing how H-shem (G-d) is constantly working in my life!  Isn’t it wonderful how I was sent this super priced turkey just when I wanted to upgrade our diets in this specific way?  If you have a Trader Joes near you, check it out!

Avivah

Phytic acid information

nutrition

Contrary to what some people believe about stay at home mothers having their intellectual brain capacity diminished by being around their children all day, being a mother provides so many opportunities for learning about all kind of things!

There have been a number of questions here about why I soak grains, what it does for them, why it makes a difference, what is beneficial about sourdough, etc.   What about nuts?  Seeds?  Legumes?  These are all good questions, and without how and why preparing them properly makes a difference, it can seem like a lot of time and effort that can better be spent in other areas.

I’ve read about these issues off and on for several years in different sources, and therefore I feel the small amount of additional preparation time for these foods is very worthwhile, as it makes the nutrients significantly more available for utilization by the body.  But when I saw this free e-course on phytic acid research several days ago, I took the chance to sign up and learn something more!

This is a free course, and broken down into short and easy pieces, and it occurred to me that some of you will probably be interested in learning more about these questions in depth.  Here is the link for the course.

I already learned something new in the second day’s ‘lesson’, and I’m looking forward to learning lots more!

Avivah

Food stamp challenge

frugal strategies, nutrition

Every so often I see various food stamp challenges – the idea is to see if you can eat healthily within the dollar guidelines that the food stamp allotment your family would receive.  Sometimes it’s for a week (which imo is a joke) and sometimes as long as a month.  I have yet to see a challenge like this that is encouraging and helpful (that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there, just that I haven’t seen it).  I think the point of a food stamp challenge should be to see how to eat healthily with limited dollars and then show people what you’ve done. 

Instead, the consensus of the 3 or 4 challenges I’ve noticed over the past couple of years has been basically the same: it’s impossible to eat well on such a small amount, food stamp participants are penalized with bad health because they are limited to low quality food, and the government needs to do more to make high quality food available to everyone.  Yada yada yada. 

Well, I don’t agree- at all – and that’s why I’m finally posting on a topic I’ve considered writing about for two years.  I think the US government food stamp amounts tend to be very adequate, even generous, particularly when people know how to budget or shop well.  The problem lies more in the lack of nutritional education and accountability than anything else.  And most people really don’t have much of a clue about how to effectively budget their food dollars well – teaching people how to make their dollars stretch in additional to nutritional education would end the supposed problem.  But that’s as political as I’m going to get about this topic, because this gets overtalked all the time and I think it’s a lot more valuable to focus on how to use food stamp dollars well than why it’s impossible to manage. 

I think that most of those doing these challenges are somewhat guilty of nutritional elitism.  And I think that it’s good that there are those who are looking at the larger political picture and trying to make improvements.  But as wonderful as it would be if  we all had affordable mainstream options for local organic produce, grass fed beef, etc, people aren’t doomed nutritionally if they can’t afford it.  How to manage well within less than the ideal options is something that seems to get glossed over.   Most of us have to face non optimal choices sometimes, and we do the best we can with the resources that we have.  

Over time I’ve shared a number of strategies I’ve used to keep our family well fed on a limited budget ($600 monthly for our family of 11).  Eating healthfully is important to me (we eat according to traditional foods guidelines – aka Weston Price/Nourishing Traditions), and I have the additional challenge of keeping kosher, which limits many of the bargains that a non kosher shopper could take advantage of.  The huge majority of the suggestions I make could be used by food stamp participants as well as everyone else.  So I’ll do a quick overview of some strategies that are applicable –  my apologies for being redundant for those of you who have been reading a while and know all of this already!

First of all is where to shop.  Since the first food stamp challenge I read about a couple of years ago, I’ve made mental notations about which stores I shop at take food stamps.  All the major supermarkets take food stamps, including Trader Joes and Whole Foods.  Hitting the loss leaders and stocking up when things go on sale is the way to go.  An obvious caveat is that like anyone else with a limited monthly food budget, even if something is on sale, a food stamp shopper would have to buy smaller amounts in the first month, gradually building up the amounts they can stock up on as their sale stocked pantry builds. 

I like to buy vegetables at a small ethnic grocery store (they also accept food stamps).  Their prices are better than the big supermarkets, the produce is fresher, and they often have vegetables that are marked down because of blemishes.  I’ve spoken to the manager there and a number of times bought cases of what I’ve wanted at an additional discount.  I rarely go to farmer’s markets, but I’ve heard that some of the larger stands are set up to accept food stamps.  The prices are best if you go at the end, since they often will lower the price so that they don’t have to pack up their veggies and take them home.   When buying any kind of produce, seasonal is usually cheaper than out of season produce.  You can load up on the inexpensive vegetables instead of the high cost ones.

The discount grocery stores and salvage stores I shop at are a mixed bag – the Amish owned stores don’t take food stamps, but the rest I’ve gone to do-  regardless of who owns them, they basically all have the same prices.  These stores are a nice bonus to the budget, but I wouldn’t say someone who doesn’t have access to these is doomed financially (many states don’t have them, including my own) – they allow me to buy some things I would otherwise would avoid for the most part.  Most of what they sell is processed food, which I avoid.

I buy in bulk through regular supermarkets and health food stores – as mentioned, these stores accept FS.   This is how I buy wheat berries and sucanat, for example, since we don’t use white flour or white sugar.  I also get coconut oil in this way.  I don’t recommend shopping at warehouse stores  because I don’t think they’re economical, but it seems that although most of them don’t take food stamps, one or two do.  I couldn’t check this out personally since I don’t shop at these stores. 

Buying directly from the source, as I do for my raw milk and pastured eggs, won’t be an option.  However, there are other options at health food stores that may not be ideal but are still much better than the mainstream – they tend to be pricier than the less healthy option but by shopping frugally it makes room for the items that are more expensive.  I’ve even found organic milk (and even grass fed, though all homogenized) from time to time at the discount stores.  And you know what?  If someone buys regular milk and eggs, then that’s okay, too.  That’s not the main thing destroying the health of this generation. 

Then there are other things that may be cheaper directly from the source but are available in the stores, like the raw cheese I recently discovered.  Someone using food stamps would be better off buying it in the store instead of buying at a cheaper price directly from the source so they don’t have to take money out of their pocket. (By the way, Trader Joes has raw cheese at a great price for non kosher consumers.)   Use these pricey foods as condiments instead of as a main dish, and a little can go a long way. 

Processed foods are always going to be more expensive than buying the ingredients yourself, and  buying the ingredients instead of a more ready to eat version is always going to be where you save the most money.  There are the obvious things like beans and grains which help a food budget go far, and especially when soaked and prepared properly, are very nourishing and good for you.

There are so many more possibilities to mention, but I think I hit the main ones.  So while the food stamp challenges continue, know that eating healthfully is within the reach of the vast majority of us, even when our budgets are very limited!

Avivah

Making vitamin capsules

home remedies, nutrition

My computer is still down so I’m sorry I can’t post more often – I miss being here daily!  We’re going to call another computer expert in since the first one can’t figure out what’s wrong. 

I got my most recent order of herbs, and I got something new this time (well, actually I always get something new :)) that we’re putting to use today – I ordered kosher capsules and a capsule ‘machine’ to make filling them easy.  These are already lending themselves to more uses than I expected!

I got the capsules to make using powdered herbs easy, basically the food herbs that are hard to take in large enough amounts when using as more than casual spicing.  But after getting it, I realized that we could use them for the powdered vitamin C (sodium ascorbate) that we use – until now we mixed it into juice but I use pretty massive doses when the kids are under the weather and they don’t  love taking it.  They don’t hate it, either, but finding a more pleasant way that works for everyone seemed to be a good idea.  And when dd14 started to fill them, she asked me if she should add some bioflavonoids to the mix.  (I bought the powdered bioflavonoids last year because it was the only form I found them kosher, but it is nasty tasting.  So none of us ever use it, even though you’re supposed to take the sodium ascorbate with it to maximize absorption.)  I thought that was a great idea, so now the kids have made over 300 capsules of this vitamin C mix – they used 4 parts sodium ascorbate to 1 part bioflavonoids.  Each capsule is about 500 mg and easy to take.

The next capsules they prepared today were: ginger, tumeric, and cinnamon.  Dd14 has an extra bone in her foot that is causing her pain when walking, and I’ve been taking her to the podiatrist every 3 weeks since she got back from camp this summer.  He has been trying low intervention ways to deal with the issue, but at the last visit he said the inflammation is interfering.  He prescribed a local anti-inflammatory patch, but my insurance wouldn’t cover it and I’m not so sure I want to use it anyway.  (It would be over $200 every couple of weeks, if I do choose to try it.)  Dh asked him why he doesn’t just tell dd to stay off her feet for a week, and the doc said that wasn’t realistic.  I couldn’t believe I didn’t think of anything so obvious!  Instead I started researching natural anti-inflammatories.  Some of those are tumeric and ginger, and she’ll start taking the capsules today.  I think that this will take longer than the medical patch, but I’m more comfortable with it and so is she.  And of course we’re encouraging her to stay off her foot as much as possible.  Hopefully this two pronged approach will be helpful.

Since I know someone is going to ask, I got the capsules from Mountain Rose Herbs – a bag of 1000 was $23 (I got size 00), and the capsule filling machine was $13.  You  can buy less, but this size bag was a good idea – my dd9 (her birthday is today :)) told me that if each of us has 2 vitamin c capsules a day, all that they prepared will last us just a month.  🙂

Avivah

Herb recommendations

nutrition

At the end of last week a couple of the kids pulled up the tomato plants (at my request) and picked all the green tomatoes.  So because I didn’t want them to go to waste, last night I made six quarts of pickled green tomatoes and 2.5 quarts of green tomato salsa.  I bought a few large bags of organic red corn chips last week that will go nicely with the salsa for a yom tov snack.  And the kids tasted the pickled tomatoes tonight and gave them a thumbs up. 🙂

Then yesterday my wonderful children put the sukka together, and I asked them to plant some seeds for me – but they went on to plant a bunch more than that!  They planted swiss chard, spinach, mache, lettuces, turnips, beets, rutabagas, and snow peas.  Since we all got so much done yesterday, I decided to treat everyone to a trip to the science center this morning, where we spent several hours and had a great time!

>>Your blog is wonderful and so helpful. I was looking to place my first order at Mountain Rose Herbs (perhaps tomorrow) and I recall you wrote somewhere that your midwife had a special mixture of herbs she told you to take postpartum to avoid the discomfort (pain) after the birth. Is there any chance I could have the “recipe” and how it’s prepared/taken?<<

As far as the recipe for minimizing afterbirth cramping, it’s a brew of Chinese herbs that this herbalist created for her clients.  I’d also love to know the recipe, but it seems to be a trade secret! 

>>Besides elderberry, is there anything else you advise getting or having on hand for general purposes?<<

What kind of herbs will be most useful will depend on what you foresee needing them for.  I started off using herbs by taking a blend of several for pregnancy and then I added on as they appealed to me.  I can’t claim that I was incredibly systematic about it – I got the herbs that seemed to have properties I felt would be valuable.  But it’s worked out pretty well since I’ve had on hand the herbs I’ve needed for the most part.  I have a couple I haven’t really done much with yet, though.  Before making an order, it’s best to have some idea of what it does as well as how you plan to use it.

The easiest to include in your collection are the food herbs, like cinnamon, mustard, ginger, cayenne, garlic, tumeric – I get those in the grocery store in the largest containers I can fine.  I have several I’ve harvested from my garden or yard – burdock (blood purifier), plantain (skin issues), fennel (digestive aid), and sage (colds).   Then when I bought herbs, I got several that are natural antibiotics – echinacea, yarrow, and olive leaf.  Comfrey is for contact healing of cuts – I think it’s a must have.  I have pau d’arco for yeast issues (never used this but it seemed like a good thing!), spearmint for digestion, mullein and lobelia for upper respiratory infections.  Then there are herbs like chamomile for calming. 

So the question is, what do you see as being the issues you want to deal with?  If for example, I had restless sleepers or issues of depression, I’d need different herbs than what I have.  I decided this winter to prepare remedies to address the following: flu, colds, upper respiratory distress, ear pain, cough syrup, digestive issues, and a basic first aid salve.  So I’ve made  elderberry syrup (colds and flus) and tonight finished the , echinacea glycerite (colds).  I plan to make ginger syrup for sore stomachs or indigestion (in addition to having fennel and spearmint, as well as peppermint oil), mullein oil for ear pain (this is something we rarely experience – I’m not even sure why I’m preparing it except it seems to be worth having just in case) and am astragulus and wormwood for a couple of other remedies.  I have a first aid salve simmering on the stove right now, my own creation. 🙂  I’m also planning to make a muscle cream and got arnica flowers and St. John’s wort for that.

So for me at this stage (remember, I’m relatively new herbal healing), the most important herbs would be: echinacea root and leaves, elderberries, mullein, lobelia, comfrey, yarrow, plantain, and licorice root.  For anything else I think I could manage with whatever is in my spice cabinet, garlic, apple cider vinegar, and good nutrition!  

Avivah

How to make elderberry syrup

frugal strategies, home remedies, nutrition, , ,

Last night I made my first batch of elderberry syrup.  It is filled with antioxidants and is good for preventing colds or treating them, depending when you take it.  I bought dried elderberries online, but if you are able to pick them fresh locally, all the better!  Here’s how simple it is to make:

Elderberry syrup

  • 1/2 c. dried elderberries (or 1 c. fresh)
  • 1 cinnamon stick (optional)
  • 3 c. water
  • 1 c. honey

Put the berries in a pot and cover with water.  Bring to a boil, reduce heat and cover.  Let simmer for 30 – 45 minutes.  Mash the berries with a potato masher, and strain through a fine strainer.  Add honey while liquid is hot, stir, and bottle.  Keep in the fridge – should last 2 – 3 months when refrigerated.

I made four times this recipe and I ended up with three full quarts plus one 16 oz honey jar. I forgot to mash the berries, but since they were dried to start with, I think this was probably less important than when using fresh berries.  I added the cinnamon sticks because they taste good, but also because cinnamon kills bacteria and is great for fighting infections.   I used crystallized honey that was sitting around not being used because the kids said it doesn’t taste as good when it’s crystallized.

Here’s a breakdown of the cost to make it: I bought the dried elderberries for 7.95 lb, and used 2/3 of that (wanted to save some to tincture), so the berries were $5.30.  I used three cups of honey, and if I figured the cost correctly, each cup was $3.33 cup.  That seems high to me (I thought I paid about 2.50 per cup, less when I recently bought small 16 oz containers for 1.99 each), but I based it on googling how many cups of honey are in a gallon (supposedly nine); I buy a gallon/twelve pound container for $30.  So the honey was $10.  I’ll add in .14 for the cinnamon sticks, since I got a container that had thirteen sticks in it for .88 so each stick rounds up to .07.  The total for 12.5 cups of elderberry syrup came out to 15.44.

When you consider 4 fl. oz of Sambucol costs around $12.99, or to use their cheaper price for a larger bottle, 7.8 oz is $21.99, that’s a real bargain! Elderberry syrup from Mountain Rose Herbs is similarly priced with a 4 oz bottle being $13.25.  To put it further into perspective, 4 oz is about a quarter of a cup and 8 oz is half a cup – so I’m getting about thirty five times as much for the same price (my price for 1/4 c. is .31; 1/2 c. is .62).

Because this has a limited shelf life and I don’t want to use up my fridge space hosting three quart sized jars for months, for immediate use I kept one quart plus the little honey jar, and canned the other two quarts so I can keep them on a shelf out of the fridge.

This can be given when a child is showing signs of the cold or a flu, a tablespoon every hour or two, or you can give them a teaspoon each morning as a general immune strengthener.  This could easily be added to tea or (if you let the water boil down more so the final result is thicker) poured on top of pancakes or waffles.  Getting kids to have some of this isn’t hard at all.  This morning we gave the younger kids a teaspoon each, and a minute after ds3 got his spoonful, he came back holding out a cup and asked for a cupful!

Avivah

Preparing for flu season

frugal strategies, nutrition

Last week a couple of people asked me what I’m doing to prepare for the upcoming flu season, particularly regarding swine flu.  The first thing I told them is, I’m absolutely not getting a shot for it!

I try to operate from a proactive and holistic perspective, so while shots (particularly these for the swine flu, which are highly experimental and untested – and in the last wave of swine flu, more people died from the shot than the flu) aren’t anything I would recommend for anyone, there are a few things that I’m planning to do.  Most of these are things to prepare for any kind of winter sickness, not just the flu.

Firstly, I’d like to can up a bunch of chicken broth so I can quickly pull some off the shelf and have a sniffly child eating it within a few minutes.

Next, I just noticed that I have almost no vitamin C powder left.  I can’t believe that it’s all finished since I bought four pounds less than a year ago.  But I’ll order another 2.2 pounds of sodium ascorbate from Bronson Lab.   (Edited to add that I switched to ordering from iherb.)

Next, I’m going to order some dried elderberries so I can make elderberry syrup.  Elderberry is the thing to have for the flu – it’s a key ingredient in preparations like Sambucol.  (The Latin name of elderberry is Sambucus nigra – you see where Sambucol gets its name, right?)  I tried to order some a few months ago but they were sold out at the place I get my herbs, so I’ll get some with my next order.

Next, I’m going to make an echinacea glycerite.  Echinacea is an infection fighter and a natural antibiotic.  I want to make a glycerite versus a tincture since a tincture uses alcohol, while a glycerite uses glycerine; the alcohol tincture isn’t as appealing for kids as the sweet glycerites.  (This isn’t for the flu, because of the cytokine storm issue.)

I also plan to buy kosher glycerin capsules and a capping tool so I can fill my own capsules.  There are several powdered spices that I buy in the food section in a large container, knowing that they are helpful medicinally, too.  Some of these include: ginger, cinnamon, tumeric, and garlic.  It’s not practical to eat a large amount of them, but if I can put them into capsules, it would be easy to give a child feeling queasy, for example, a ginger pill.

We already have a stock of vitamin D, which is effective in small amounts as a flu preventative, and in extremely high amounts, is a curative.  We aren’t taking it daily at this point.  We got this specifically with swine flu in mind.

There’s a homeopathic remedy called oscillococcinum for the flu – the local health food store didn’t have any when I checked in the spring, but it looks like I can order it online.  Another item I’d like to have on hand.

Something I did for my personal health today was to start a lobelia glycerite and a mullein glycerite brewing.  Last winter I shared how some doses of mullein and lobelia tea ended my asthma symptoms.  But since the camping trip a week ago, they suddenly resurfaced and I’m having a hard time breathing throughout the day and particularly at night.  Hopefully this will help.

Since most people who die of the flu actually die of dehydration, I have several recipes in my notebook for homemade rehydration formulas.  This came in handy a few weeks ago when dd8 was playing all Shabbos long but not drinking much, and suddenly began vomiting repeatedly.  She couldn’t keep any liquid down, but the rehydration formula was great and I was very glad I had it since it saved us a trip to the emergency room.

A suggestion in an entirely different direction is to stay out of public areas as much as possible.  Another suggestion along these lines is to have enough basic food supplies on hand so that if you get sick, you won’t need to run to the store.

As I wrote last year on the topic of boosting immune function for kids, try to keep white sugar and processed foods out of your diets as much as possible, since they bring down your immunity.  While eating a good diet doesn’t guarantee an absence of illness, the better your diet is, the healthier you’ll be.

Avivah

Kosher raw milk cheese

nutrition

A couple of days ago I was at the local kosher supermarket and was very pleasantly surprised to find that they have a new offering – grass fed raw cow’s milk cheddar cheese!  After looking at the price, I went back and forth with myself for a few minutes as to if I should buy some, because it was very expensive – 12.99 lb!

On one hand, it was waaaay more than I usually pay for cheese.  On the other hand, this is the kind of cheese I really would want my family to eat.  Additionally, I want to support products like these so the management realizes there’s a market for them and brings in more of them.  So though my budget doesn’t allow for me to totally start buying this in place of the regular cheese we use, I decided to buy a couple of small packages to show my support.

If you’re interested in finding out about it, the name of the company is 5 Spoke Creamery (www.5spokecreamery.com).  It’s really delicious!

(edited to add: for those who don’t keep kosher but are interested in raw milk cheeses, you can easily find them at Trader Joe’s for about $6 a pound.)

Avivah