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!

Busy Kitchen Sunday

Yesterday I was completely grateful to a client who brought me a nice big cup of Starbucks during a long Saturday working afternoon, but otherwise it's been 100% Radical Dining-In for a week. This is the longest I have gone I've gone in a long time without visiting so much as a coffee shop-- much less a restaurant or two.  It is always odd to remember that that participating in public life without spending money is really, really hard. Earlier this week I had four hours free between work ending a a class starting, and being unable to stop into a cafe for a warm drink on a cold day was downright unpleasant. After spending an hour in a book store, an hour walking around, and another hour hanging out reading on a rooftop garden, having "nowhere to go" for another hour started to provoke a little anxiety. It made me feel for people who literally have nowhere to go and who can't just stop their little blogging experiment at any time to go back to their normal consumer lifestyles.

So I feel good and my body feels well and today the kitchen buzzing with good things to eat later on in the week. Better than that, my family is eating gorgeous, organic, pastured, grass-fed, grass-finished and totally home-made for somewhere around $8 per person, per day. That is what a bit of planning will do for you. (I realize that that number would be high for a family on a tighter budget than ours, but these things are relative and $8 is relatively dirt cheap compared to our usual cash spending on food. Before we started Radical Dining In my husband and I spent a combined $12 a day on breakfast alone.)

Anyway here's what's cooking:

• a huge batch of almond flour blueberry pancakes for breakfasts
• a 10" x 12" almond flour-apple sauce "cake" with raisins
• a giant egg casserole with spiced ground beef from our Marin Sun Farms CSA and spinach and arugula from the farmers market
• two quarts of raw sauerkraut
• one quart of raw milk yogurt
• tons of vegetables prepped and stored for the week
• crockpot chicken casserole simmering away
• chicken livers soaking for my truly knock-out pâté*
• gelatin for snacks and my kid's lunchtime treats**

eating our almond-blueberry pancakes a few Sundays ago

* because do you know how amazing organ meats are for our health? Here's a bit about liver from the really fantastic Primal website, Mark's Daily Apple: Possibly the most common organ meat consumed in the U.S., liver was once regarded as a meal for the affluent and was even named one of the Eight Delicacies in The Li-Chi, a handbook of rituals published during China’s Han era. So why should you be eating it? According to those in the know, liver is an excellent source of high quality protein; contains an abundance of vitamin A and several B vitamins; is an excellent source of folic acid and iron; is the number one food source of copper; and contains CoQ10, which is important for cardiovascular function.

**GELATIN?!! Yes, Gelatin. Believe it or not, a properly-made jello-mold is actually a tremendously tasty health food. I'll write about why tomorrow, and include a little recipe. For now, it's time for a cup of broth and a cup of tea.