That Wiggle in Your Walk

Yesterday I wrote that gelatin doesn't have to be the junk food it was when my grandma (bless her cotton socks) was molding that day-glo stuff in a box into wiggly, jiggly shape for every holiday of the year. (This reminds me- every year she made a delicious and no doubt highly traditional green St. Patrick's Day cake out of boxed yellow cake, boxed pistachio pudding and green food coloring. It sure wasn't anything approaching real food, but the memory of it makes me smile this week as I'm preparing for a healthy St. Paddy's feast with my mom and family.)

Last year I read and loved Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food by Catherine Shanahan MD and Luke Shanahan.


Known on her web site as Dr. Cate, Shanahan writes with her partner, a chef, about the healing benefits of real, traditional foods. I’m a real food research junkie so the information presented in the book wasn’t very new. In fact, I was put off by the otherwise very enjoyable text because the writers clearly drew so heavily from the work of the amazing Weston A. Price Foundation but they say that their inspiration came from reading Dr. Andrew Weil - a lovely person, I’m sure, but his nutritional advices are usually far too soy-heavy and low-fat to be truly healthy. In any case, I won’t be offended if the WAPF isn’t, and Deep Nutrition is engaging and easy to read so I recommend it to my skincare clients all the time.

What makes Deep Nutrition particularly interesting is its focus on beauty as a manifestation of health. Dr. Price did so too, in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. But Dr. Cate’s book is more of the how-to book to Dr. Price’s drier anthropological work. She has a lovely passage about skincare, inside and out, which I've written a little about over here. When I reread it recently, I was hot to go and rediscovered my love of making gelatin molds to add a sweetish and snacky alternative to my usual gallons of bone broth.

The incredible Cheeseslave has a terrific recipe here that includes freshly-juiced fruit to get a really nutritious gelatin. I'll bet it tastes divine but I'm not that committed. To reduce the sugar content, I use one part water to three parts organic unsweetened fruit juice and I follow a tootsed-up recipe I devised yonks ago off the back of the Knox box. I don't buy Knox, though. I boycott Kraft, its icky industrial food parent company, and I get Great Lakes brand gelatin online because it comes from healthy cows that are pasture-raised.

I like my gel-o really firm so my gelatin content is high. Here's how I do it:

Put one cup of cold filtered water in a bowl and sprinkle with 5-6 tablespoons of unflavored gelatin.

Stir gelatin into juice until it is dissolved.

Bowl 3 cups of juice.

Add boiling juice to the water-gelatin mixture.

Stir together and pour into a your mold or baking pan that has been laid with a shallow layer of the frozen organic fruit of your choice. (I use a silicone bundt cake mold that I got as a wedding gift and it is perfect for this recipe. Next week- ask me about Punch Bowl Kombucha!)

Let it set in your refrigerator overnight and by morning you will have a very firm, very delicious treat that is relatively low in sugar, very high in protein, and full of the collagen we need for healthy hair, skin and nails - or, as we say in our house: healthy claws and a shiny coat.

It's wee-beastie approved!

Day One

For my part, the goal of this month is to break sugar addiction and get back into a cooking rhythm that is grain-free and unprocessed.

Though a great number of my clients with persistent acne find that it clears up to some extent when they eliminate dairy, my jury is out about the effects of dairy on my own body. Other than our usual Sunday visit to the ice cream place, when our house eats dairy we eat organic and raw. I don't seem to have any negative effects from it, though I am carrying somewhere near 20 pounds more of me than I would like to be and if low-dairy or dairy-free helps the healthy weight cause then I will say good-bye to that too. (And of course, our weekly ice cream date will be on hold for this month of home cooking.)

This week is all about getting back in the swing. In preparation for a busy week, I've made a meal plan, shopped for the week, and gotten a jump on a few of the tasks that could be done ahead. So far I have:

• Boiled a dozen eggs


• Washed, chopped, and stored a metric ton of vegetables


• Baked a small sweetish pumpkin and raisin "bread" (made with molasses and coconut flour)


• Pre-baked enough nitrate- and nitrite-free organic bacon for adding a bit of flavor to our packed lunches


• Started a beautiful boeuf bourguignon (kind of like this one, but grain-free and in the slow cooker)


• Pre-made a delicious mashed cauliflower for dinner tonight and to serve as the boeuf's base


• Started a GIANT pot of bone broth to freeze and use throughout the week (because I have come to understand from years of research both personal and academic, that "good broth can resurrect the dead.") We use it as a base for soups and sauces, and if we were eating grains we would use it for cooking water for that too.

• Made all three of our lunches (salad with hard boiled egg, avocado, a bit of bacon, olive oil and balsamic vinegar for the adults, and leftover chicken and cauliflower plus olives, raw cheese, pepitas, yogurt and apple for the kiddo)

Wahoo, bring it on. I feel good. It's empowering to get a reign on things, even if I will miss my evening chocolate and glass (or two) of wine.

(Edit: Today was a day running around with my kiddo, with a lot of cooking for the week and a lot of eating. The menu was: Breakfast: 2 pastured eggs and 2 pieces of organic bacon; coffee with raw milk. Elevensies snack: a small piece of pumpkin "bread," an apple and a hard boiled egg. Lunch: tinned sardines in olive oil with broccoli. Late afternoon snack: a small cup of hot cocoa made with raw milk, molasses, a touch of cocoa powder and a touch of stevia. Dinner: Mary's chicken, dredged in almond flour and cooked with coconut oil. Served on a bed of cauliflower mash and wilted spinach. I didn't have enough water and I was too busy with projects and cooking to keep up with my usual supplements. I drank some herbal tea infusions for general health, and a cup of Irish Breakfast tea for a mild caffeine pick-me-up in the afternoon. Tomorrow will likely look very different from today.)