“The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison.”
-Ann Wigmore
There is so much processed food out there and it can be hard to avoid those unnecessary ingredients because they are hidden in so many convenient tasty foods. Reading labels can be time consuming and almost feels like you need a chemistry degree to pronounce a majority of the ingredients.
It is difficult to make everything from scratch with how busy life gets. It can feel overwhelming to try to make things that are quick to buy. Take bread for example, something that we eat almost everyday and used to buy from the store. Since 2019 we started making all of our own bread, is there really anything better than a slice of fresh warm bread? We have now said goodbye to having to mentally prepare for the stomach ache to follow from certain breads that we used to eat. For us, taking control of how we felt and our energy level started with decreasing the amount of unnecessary, processed ingredients.
I count myself as being very lucky for growing up in a home where processed food was not a part of my day to day life. But growing up I didn’t have the same appreciation as I do now. I remember going to my friends houses and being so excited to get a fruit roll up, or have sugary cereal, or my favorite, oreos.
As a child my lunches looked much different then my friends who all had lunchables, I got sandwiches on homemade bread with veggies and maybe a homemade cookie. At the time it was hard to appreciate this because I wanted to be like all the other kids but now I understand why my mom thought it was important.
I remember the first time that I realized that most people just went and bought salad dressings. I had gone to a friend’s house for dinner and they had a display of all the different salad dressings for us to choose from. I remember thinking it was really cool that you could just go buy salad dressing, but also remember thinking that the salad dressing was gross. If you’ve ever grown up on homemade ranch and then had store bought ranch, you will understand.
I am fortunate to have grown up with parents who have a deep love and appreciation for gardening. My parents have a large garden that we would spend most of the spring, summer and into the fall eating mostly out of the garden. As a child my understanding of the why behind having a garden was mostly because it saved us money. While that might be true, I now realize that there are so many other reasons to have a garden apart from just saving money.
Gardening has always been something that I have been exposed to so it seemed normal for that to be something for me to pursue having. Growing your own food is a lot of work, but very rewarding. Not to mention all the amazing benefits from the food, and even from getting dirty!
At a young age I loved to cook. Well, I also loved to eat so maybe it was influenced by that love. Or maybe I love to cook because my older sisters would always convince me to make them cookies. But I think the biggest reason I love to cook and bake is because it makes people happy. Food is community, family heritage, memories, and joy all wrapped up together. I think for most people some of our favorite memories are events surrounding food.
I think a lot of us have lost interest in cooking, because picking up dinner is easier and more convenient. But I think there is a price to pay for always eating out that far surpasses the time and energy it takes to make it yourself. My dream is to inspire and encourage people to start cooking again.
Back in spring of 2019 I made a funny decision, I decided I wasn’t going to buy any bread products ever again. Previously to this decision, I had struggled with some health problems and had thought that bread (wheat) was the cause. I cut out all the wheat and started to feel better but just couldn’t shake this feeling that wheat was the cause, or maybe it was because I love bread.
Either way, I started to do some research and came across the whole idea that sourdough is easier to digest. So I started making sourdough bread and it didn’t seem to bother me. This led me to believe that sourdough was doing the trick, it was “eating” all the gluten that I thought was making me sick. So I stuck with sourdough for years, felt better, and assumed it was all about sourdough.
Over the last few years of making all of my own wheat products, I have learned that wheat is not the true issue. It all has to do with the microbiome. Check out my blog page (coming soon) to learn more about the microbiome and how to better heal your body.
