Fabulous Fats

The girls: "Mom, We're huuuuuuungry!"

Me: "Augh! Again?"

This is a conversation we frequently had at the beginning of our time on SCD/GAP and it has reared its ugly head again recently.  Maybe it's the spring weather.   Maybe someone is growing (oh please, Lord, let it be this).   Maybe, just maybe, it is because I have been so distracted lately as we get the house ready to sell.  My mind has been on decluttering rather than blogging, paid work, local politics, or cooking. I keep promising the kids I will make cauliflower pizza / jello / herb sausage "tomorrow" and I need to start delivering on that promise!

Anyway, a friend of mine, Elli Sparks, just posted a gorgeous bit of wisdom on the GAPSdiet Yahoo group and I thought it was worth reposting here for anyone googling "Fat, Fat, and more Fat." LOL!

Image from http://homesicktexan.blogspot.com/2008/05/how-to-render-lard.html

Elli is a local "wise woman" here in Richmond, Virginia and if you live or are visiting the area you should check out her website for a cooking class at What's Cooking Richmond.  So, if you are having a hard time feeling full or finding enough good nutrients for healing (or flavor for enjoying a good meal), this advice may be for you too!

Dear ______,

Fat, fat, fat, increase the fat. Fat is good for you. Here's how I do it:

1. Chop up tallow in penny sized chunks and store it in the freezer. I eat this like candy! Pop a few into my mouth just prior to eating a meal. Add a few at the end of a meal. Eat some before bed. Tallow is raw beef fat. Rendered beef fat is suet. Beef can be eaten raw, so can beef fat.
2. Render lard. Spread it on everything! Scoop out a dollop, add salt, and enjoy. Dip raw veggies into lard, sprinkle some sea salt, and enjoy.
3. Eat the cracklings left over from rendering lard. mmmmm... these taste good with, you guessed it! Sea Salt!!
4. Make duck fat using duck skin. Chop up the skin into small chunks, like you would with lard, plop it into a crock pot. Turn on to low. Render until skin is small and crackly. Eat the skin like you eat the lard crackings. Use the duck fat like you would use lard.
5. Fry two or three or four or five or six egg yolks (this is where the fat is in the egg). Fry 'em up in lard or ghee or duck fat. Serve with a dollop of fat.
6. Add raw egg yolks to soup or smoothies. Again, the yolk is where the fat is. Eat a lot of yolks!!
7. Always add fat to stews and roasts. Serve the sauce with the melted fat floating on top.
8. Always eat the fat attached to stews and roast. Big hint on eating chunks of beef or lamb fat: it taste better slowly cooked as in a pot roast in a crock pot on low all day. Fat on a quickly cooked steak is usually chewy and hard to eat. Slow cooked fat is much softer and really delicious, I think.
9. Make or get ghee, which doesn't have the milk solids in it as butter does. Smother everything with ghee. Enjoy!

Here's another tidbit of information. There was a time when people all over the world lived close to the land. They ate what nature/God intended people to eat. They knew what they were doing. If you had asked them what they eat and why, they would have told you what they eat and how they prepared it, and they would have said, "We eat this way to make healthy babies."

In those cultures, 30% - 80% of the calories eaten by these wise people were made up of animal fats from healthy pasture raised or wild animals. That's much more fat than us sickly Americans are used to with our Standard American Diet (and terrible modern "nutritional" advice).

So, guess what, you get to have fun with fat!!!

Fat helps us digest fat soluble vitamins - A, E, D, and K. Only way to assimilate those vitamins is to eat them with fat. Absolutely no point in eating a carrot if you don't eat it with butter or lard or duck fat or ghee. The vitamin K will pass right on through to your poop if you don't eat your carrots with fat!!

Fat also satiates us. It makes us feel full. This is a big reason you need to up your fat intake.

And, best of all, fat makes food taste good! Fat carries flavor!!!

So, enjoy and indulge in fabulous fat!! Make sure it comes from pasture raised animals!!!! No point in getting all those nasty chemicals and such from factory farmed feed lot sick animals!

Love,
Elli