Chinese Beef with Broccoli

GAPS, Paleo, GFCFSF, and LOD Friendly!  

I'll admit it, I've been excessively spoiled by homemade Chinese Food.  My husband's family is half Chinese, as in born in China and immigrated to the US, and his grandmother Nancy and late grandfather Alex loved to cook for us while Alex was still with us.  At one point, we lived around the corner from them, and it was amazing!  We were given recipes so we could make some of it at home, especially Chicken with Broccoli, which is my favorite.  We did make it, oh how we did!  That, however, was before we knew our son needed GAPS and the Low Oxalate Diet.  We wanted to make Chinese food that was GAPS legal, but GAPS has us soy-free and bottle from the Asian Market-free, and the LOD limits our spices, so I was stumped on how to do it for quite some time - until now!  I present you the closest thing I can make to my beloved Chicken with Broccoli, Chinese husband approved.  This recipe calls for beef and broccoli, but you can substitute any meat and vegetable you'd like.  I'm actually am making it with chicken tonight, and I've been told that it works great with turkey and turkey broth as well by my guinea pigs on the GAPSdiet Forum fellow GAPSters who tried it out to let me know if they felt it could be improved.  

I adapted this from a free online website with a Chinese brown sauce recipe, but I can't for the life of me find the recipe now.  If this seems like it is adapted from your recipe, then please let me know so that I can give you credit.

This recipe serves 4 and takes about 45 minutes to an hour to complete.  You can add more meat to the recipe if your family eats more meat than we do.

Ingredients

1 lb beef, preferably steak, sliced thinly (If you can't get organic, grass-fed, then choose a lean cut and trim off the fat.)
1 TBSP Organic, Raw Apple Cider Vinegar
1 TBSP White Wine or Broth (I've used both, and both work wonderfully)
1/4 tsp white Pepper
Salt, 1/2 tsp for marinade, and more to taste
2 cups beef or chicken broth, homemade (I usually use bone broth, but you can use a meat stock)
2 TBSP Coconut Aminos (Or Additive-Free Soy Sauce if you are not on GAPS, the LOD, or Soy-free)
1 TBSP honey
1 garlic clove, pressed (If not LOD, 1 tsp of garlic powder would probably provide a better flavor)
1/8 tsp ground red pepper
2 tsp grated ginger (Again, if not LOD, then I'd use powdered for better flavor)
1 TBSP Butter, Beef Tallow, Lard, or other saturated fat COLD
1 TBSP Fat to cook beef in, preferably organic, virgin, cold-pressed coconut oil or tallow
2 cups broccoli, steamed (boiled 10 minutes if LOD) or other vegetable of your choice

Method

Before cutting up all your vegetables and doing the rest of your prep, put your cut up beef in a bowl and add the wine (or broth), apple cider vinegar, and white pepper, and 1/2 tsp salt.  Mix well to coat. It should marinate about 30 minutes before you start cooking.

Start cooking by getting the fat you are using to cook the beef very hot and close to smoking, preferably in a wok. Cook the beef until it is brown on high heat. Remove to a plate and keep warm. If there are juices from the beef in the wok, leave them.  Get your vegetables cooking if you haven't already.

Stir together broth, coconut aminos (or soy sauce), honey, garlic, red pepper, salt to taste and ginger and dump it in the wok, scraping up brown bits. Boil and reduce the sauce by half, stirring and scraping down brown bits occasionally. This takes awhile. It's a great time to make a side dish while you're waiting, like cauliflower rice.

When the sauce is reduced, add in the cold fat and mix. This should help thicken it. Taste it to make sure it is salty enough and add more salt if necessary. Add the beef and the cooked vegetables, but not the juices from the beef unless if your sauce is too thick.  If your sauce is too thick, add 1/2 tsp of beef juice from the plate at a time until desired consistency is reached. Serve over cauliflower rice if you are grain-free, or over soaked brown rice. (A great recipe is available in Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon Morell, or you can find one on a Google search if you need to!)


I hope you enjoy it!  There is no need to be deprived, no matter what the needs of your family are!

Happy Belated Mother's Day

Another apology from me, a non-professional blogger, with a post-holiday post!


I missed Mother's Day.  Actually, I didn't miss it since I was busy reveling in my sleeping in, card/gift opening, and generally accomplishing nothing day.  But I didn't post anything on that day, the day of celebrating all Mamas and for that I am sorry.  So now that I've had some time to think about it, here is what I would have said if I were a professional blogger posting on the actual day!!!

Happy Mother's Day, Mamas!  For you, on this amazing day, I have a beautiful quote from David Orr:

The plain fact is that the planet does not need more “successful people”.

But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of every kind.

It needs people who live well in their places.

It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and human, and these qualities have little to do with success as our culture has defined it.

YOU are the one David Orr is talking about in this quote.  You live with the moral courage it takes to buck the system and you are living well in your place.  Even if it doesn't always feel like living well, what better description than eating the healthiest, healing foods could there be than "living well?"

YOU are the healer who did not shy away from the initial symptom(s) and instead started to dig in and figure out what was wrong with your baby.  Your gift of love is half of the healing this planet needs in the first place and your actions to heal your child are above and beyond the call of duty but speak volumes about the Mama you are inside!

YOU are the lover, who loves so deeply nothing else matters beyond the health of your child.  How many Mamas have cut back on work, quit jobs, taken unpaid leave, or reinvented a life so the child will have what (s)he needs?  Plenty!

So keep up all your hard work.  You are the truly successful one, or you will be soon when all the hard work pays off.  You know, all that work that will make you crazy but will improve the health of those around you.  Only the Mama who loves SO deeply can give this depth of herself in an act as simple as cooking for her family.  It is a truth we have lost along the way and it is a valuable activity that goes largely devalued in our modern society.

What you do matters.
Who you do it for matters.
The fact that it will get results is just the bonus.

In this lifetime, seek that which you are to learn and make sure to share that which you have to teach.  

Happy Mother's Day, Mamas!

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

Allergies

It is pollen season here in Richmond, Virginia. And seriously. I. Mean. Pollen.

Image from http://www.fast-growing-trees.com/RedFloweringDogwood.htm

At an old home we had a screened porch off the back and every year I *dreaded* this season because it meant the weather was gorgeous but you couldn't go out on the porch and enjoy it until you spent nearly a full day scrubbing / hosing down the furniture, walls, screens, and floor. Being the lazy, I mean time management expert, woman that I am I would always wait until pollen season was over and then do the deep clean. I learned this one the hard way the first year we were married when I cleaned for a neighborhood party on our porch before the end of pollen season. After that I swore to only do it once a year from that day forward. Note: We will never again have a screened porch. LOL!

Anyway... all of that is just to say that pollen is a part of life here during our gorgeous Virginia spring.

This time of year is particularly difficult for my older daughter who has "Oral Allergy Syndrome" and reacts to the birch family of foods + birch pollen. If you feel the SCD/GAPS diets are restrictive, go look at the list for the birch family and layer that onto the diet (this child had various degrees of IgE allergies to about 78 of the 92 foods we tested). LOL! Anyway, her allergies in the spring are brutal and many days her eyes are so swollen it looks like she spent time in the ring with a prize fighter. Not to mention her panic of waking up unable to open her eyes in the morning because they have a nice layer of goo gluing them shut.

So imagine my sheer delight this spring in finding a few little extras that would help her out!!! I started working on her spring allergies last fall because we had been on SCD/GAPS for over a year and I felt like something was still missing for her.

My younger daughter seemed to be thriving on the diet but my older daughter was just treading water. It seemed as though she had stopped growing and her allergies were still present and I suspected a few new allergies could possibly be playing a role (asparagus happened to catch my eye). So I did what every good mother who is freaking out does... I started trolling online forums looking for tidbits I missed and I reread my GAPS book looking for any hints about her health issues since previously I had always focused so heavily on the needs of my younger daughter.

I did my usual SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) with the ideas I had written down and decided to try two new things: camel milk and NAET. If you have not read about NAET previously I have two words for you: voodoo works. Just kidding. Kind of.

When I was traipsing around the internet looking up data points this was my favorite camel milk article, written by Julie Matthews of Nourishing Hope. I am a big fan of hers and if I was in California I would at least try and take her out for coffee to thank her for writing this article. We have found that the camel milk has been very helpful from the perspective of helping with bacteria in the girls' bellies - they both *finally* have flat bellies more often than not. Finally. We've been doing SCD/GAPS for just over 20 months and the flat bellies had been hard to keep consistent. The camel milk has also been good for extra calories and nutrition. My mother-in-law even tried it for awhile as she recovered from chemo and felt she had an energy pick-up from drinking it versus the days she didn't. I will write more about camel milk another time. The thing I really want to talk about is NAET and homeopathy...

If you have not already considered NAET, I cannot recommend it enough although I will throw out the caveat that I think the practitioner is very, very important. It is energy work and you can read more about it on the NAET website. On that site there is a great report (quite a few, actually) about data/stats related to NAET treatments for various medical conditions. When considering NAET I first had to clear the hubby hurdle. So we agreed I would experiment on my own body before taking the girls.

The first couple of appointments shocked me. How one earth did she *know* some of that stuff about me? The emotional releases were great and I would have plenty to think about after an appointment. My body was also changing, particularly how grounded my feet felt. I was able to hold a standing yoga pose longer as a result. Weird yardstick, I know. But it was objective data indicating that *something* was happening. I felt the results were worth a bit of time/money to see if it would help the girls and they have been going almost weekly since February.

In the past month we have seen tremendous gains for ZiZi. They seem to be related to a few specific treatments and the improvement is noticeable enough that her teacher commented on it. Also, ZiZi has not lost her balance in a very long time and after a particular treatment (it was for some sort of bacteria if I remember it correctly) she told me that she didn't feel dizzy anymore and she hasn't felt dizzy since. Howzabout that??? Voodoo? I'll take it!

But Ani... my dear, sweet Ani. Possibly my tougher case to manage. Because she didn't have something big like ataxia and neurological symptoms of a communication issue her progress on NAET has been a little tougher to quantify. Until now.

Last week I took her for her usual appointment and the pollen had just come out. Our practitioner already had the pollen jar out when we arrived as I am certain many of her clients have needed it lately! Anyway, Ani was treated for Richmond pollens and the official pollen mix. The next day we went to a picnic on our Capitol steps and by the end of the picnic her eyes were swollen in a way I had not seen since the day she was born. Poor kiddo.

Luckily her sister had an appointment that afternoon so our NAET practitioner gave her a boost on her pollen treatment while we were there. Her allergies calmed down a bit and I dropped her off for art class. When I picked her up 2 hours later I could hardly believe how bad it was. Her eyes were back to being awful!

Fast forward to the next day. Things were better but her eyes were still swollen. So, inspired by this awesome blog post I filled a jar with filtered water, went outside and swiped my finger along my car and stirred it in well. I then diluted it ten times as described in the blog post.

I put some drops on the outside of her eyelids and a few drops under her tongue every 15 minutes for about an hour and a half or so. By the end of it her eyes were back to normal. My parents were shocked and the quote of the day goes to my dad, "I have no idea what your mother is doing but it is working."

Since homeopathy and NAET work off the same premise of frequency / vibrations / energy I guess it is no big surprise that the combo of the two was really effective. The funny thing with NAET is it seems to take a few weeks for a treatment to get up to 100% effectiveness. So until her pollen treatments are totally effective (and we still have to do a treatment specific to birch pollen) the homeopathic remedy is my backup plan and my kiddo is finally more comfortable. Our NAET practitioner tells me next allergy season Ani may need another boost but that her body should be okay after that. Here's hoping!!!

Proud Mamas

Today is International Women's Day and today I choose to honor Leymah Gbowee and all the amazing Mamas from Liberia. I honor her in thought, word, and deed. I am proud to be a Mama and I am deeply grateful for the strength and courage of the Mamas around the world.


You too are a strong, proud, beautiful Mama and make sure to take a moment today to honor yourself and to teach your children to honor the powerful being called a Mama. It is by the blood, sweat, and tears of your hard work that your family is healing. You are doing a beautiful thing and you are a beautiful creature.

I can...

• Make a potroast that will knock your socks off!
• Advocate for the needs of my children.
• Love my husband more deeply and soulfully than I ever thought possible, even when I am sometimes annoyed with him.
• Express my public opinion publicly.
• Teach my children anything they wish to learn.

Happy International Women's Day. You have it better than some, worse than others, and a profound responsibility to honor yourself.

xoxo

- Kati

Hot Potato!

Sometimes when you go down the path of the GAPS / SCD list of allowed/disallowed (legal/illegal) foods you will come across someone who thinks you are *crazy* for omitting certain healthy foods. For people with a compromised gut there are steps to be taken before returning to the foods, particularly sugars and starches, we once enjoyed.

My friend, Elli, has been healing her rheumatoid arthritis for years with the Nourishing Traditions diet and has recently begun her GAPS journey. She has found a more complete healing with GAPS than she had been experiencing previously and has become a big believer in the GAPS solution. Her kids will soon be going on intro and hopefully I'll get her to write up a few posts sometime soon!

In the meantime, she has become a local cheerleader for GAPS. She is our local Weston A Price chapter leader and teaches cooking classes in her home so you could say she has somewhat of a "following" already. The other day she sent out a rah-rah-GAPS notice to her e-mail list and I guess someone responded with doubts. In particular, doubts about the need to eliminate potatoes. I particularly enjoyed the storytelling nature of Elli's response (to the full listserv) and thought I'd share it here.

Although you may not be eating potatoes today you may want to add them back in later and this will give you some things to think about when that time comes!!!

- Kati

My friend Sam responded to my email about GAPS in this way, "Those Peruvians have 3,000 different kinds of potatoes, and can outwork any white man. Explain that with GAPS."

What a fabulous question!!! I thought you might appreciate his question and my response below:

Sam,

You are awesome!!

Those Peruvians started out eating potatoes with dirt. They watched the llamas, who dug up potatoes with their hoofs, rolled the potatoes around in mud, and ate them. The dirt has enzymes that helps neutralize the toxins in the old breed of potatoes. When Peruvians started eating wild potatoes, they copied the llamas, serving potatoes in a mud sauce, taking advantage of the enzymes available in the dirt.

Once the Peruvians started growing potatoes, they breed them so there were less and less toxins over the years. Even though there were less toxins in the potatoes, the Peruvians continued to ferment potatoes prior to eating.

We find that all over the world in cultures where people live close to the Earth - complex carbs get fermented prior to eating. Sourdough bread, fermented oats, and yes, fermented potatoes. Fermenting breaks down the complex carbs into simple carbs so your gut doesn't have to try to do that incredibly complex job.

Because our standard American diet does NOT require fermenting carbs, we've got gut problems and health issues that the ancient cultures lacked.

GAPS gets all of the complex carbs out, until the gut is in much much better shape. This usually takes 2 years or longer. Once the gut is healed, a person on GAPS can, if they want to, try out fermented carbs - sourdough bread, fermented oats, fermented potatoes, etc. If those fermented complex carbs agree with the healed gut, then the person on GAPS can include them in their diet. If not, the gut may still be fragile and require more healing first.

Here's an article in the Smithonian Magazine about the history of potatoes. Read it with your Weston A. Price glasses on.

I've pulled the paragraphs out about the way the ancients prepared and ate potatoes. Here they are:

Wild potatoes are laced with solanine and tomatine, toxic compounds believed to defend the plants against attacks from dangerous organisms like fungi, bacteria and human beings. Cooking often breaks down such chemical defenses, but solanine and tomatine are unaffected by heat. In the mountains, guanaco and vicuña (wild relatives of the llama) lick clay before eating poisonous plants. The toxins stick—more technically, “adsorb”—to the fine clay particles in the animals’ stomachs, passing through the digestive system without affecting it. Mimicking this process, mountain peoples apparently learned to dunk wild potatoes in a “gravy” made of clay and water. Eventually they bred less-toxic potatoes, though some of the old, poisonous varieties remain, favored for their resistance to frost. Clay dust is still sold in Peruvian and Bolivian markets to accompany them.

Edible clay by no means exhausted the region’s culinary creativity. To be sure, Andean Indians ate potatoes boiled, baked and mashed, as Europeans do now. But potatoes were also boiled, peeled, chopped and dried to make papas secas; fermented in stagnant water to create sticky, odoriferous toqosh; and ground to pulp, soaked in a jug and filtered to produce almidón de papa(potato starch). Most ubiquitous was chuño, which is made by spreading potatoes outside to freeze on cold nights, then thawing them in the morning sun. Repeated freeze-thaw cycles transform the spuds into soft, juicy blobs. Farmers squeeze out the water to produce chuño: stiff, styrofoam-like nodules much smaller and lighter than the original tubers. Cooked into a spicy Andean stew, they resemble gnocchi, the potato-flour dumplings in central Italy. Chuño can be kept for years without refrigeration—insurance against bad harvests. It was the food that sustained Inca armies.

Even today, some Andean villagers celebrate the potato harvest much as their ancestors did in centuries past. Immediately after pulling potatoes from the ground, families in the fields pile soil into earthen, igloo-shaped ovens 18 inches tall. Into the ovens go the stalks, as well as straw, brush, scraps of wood and cow dung. When the ovens turn white with heat, cooks place fresh potatoes on the ashes for baking. Steam curls up from hot food into the clear, cold air. People dip their potatoes in coarse salt and edible clay. Night winds carry the smell of roasting potatoes for what seems like miles.

Love,

Elli

A Face for Radio

I figure since I'm writing this about myself, I can say that... Seriously, this healing diet stuff is TOUGH on a Mama and I don't know about you but the dark circles from lack of sleep and pale skin from lack of sunshine (it is, after all, February) has left me with a face for RADIO. I am pretty sure I would not have agreed to do this one if it were on TV/YouTube. LOL!

Anyway, if you have an hour and want to spend it with me blathering on in the background, here it is: BlogTalk Radio with Beth Wiles. It was actually pretty fun and if at least one parent gets at a nugget of information / wisdom they needed then it was well worth my time.