Our Week Eating "Traditionally"

So far we have tried three of the "diets" in our healthy eating series (and blogged about two) - and this was definitely our favourite!  To see what a "Traditional" diet involves, check out this post where we explained it.

We found that there were not a lot of changes we had to make from what we normally ate - we just altered the way we prepared it.  We soaked our oats overnight, made bone broth instead of using bouillon cubes, and ate sourdough bread instead of traditional yeast bread.

The Sourdough Starter Experiment

I was really keen on learning to make sourdough bread from a starter, but you couldn't buy starter at our local natural food store, and it was too late to order it online.  I had taken out The Bread Bible from the library, and found that in it she explained how to make your own sourdough starter - using only flour and water!  It seemed simple enough, so I bought the necessary flours (organic rye and bread flour) and followed the instructions!  It was supposed to take two weeks to get a usable starter, and things were going swimmingly by day four - my starter was rising and even had the `citrusy` smell it was meant to.  Then on day five I accidentally forgot to halve the starter before I fed it and, though I tried to remedy it, it never rose again and I had to call it a bust.  Really too bad because I was quite excited.  So instead we bought sourdough bread which had been traditionally made without yeast.  It tasted like normal bread!

Soaking the Oats

Another tenant of a traditional diet is sprouting, soaking or sourdoughing your grains.  We love to have oats in the morning, and so were happy to be able to continue doing this if we simply soaked them overnight!  The results were actually extraordinarily delicious! (Recipe below) Somehow the combination of yoghurt, water and oats overnight made a gooey (in a good way) texture to the oatmeal.  And the cinnamon and maple syrup gave it delicious flavour.  Plus it is so easy to prepare in the morning because all you have to do is warm it up!

Chicken for Three Meals

Another thing we really liked about the way Weed 'em and Reap used the traditional diet, was by cooking a whole piece of meat on Monday, and then using it for meals throughout the week.  Following the same principle, we had a roast chicken (organic and free range) on Monday.  On Tuesday I used the leftover meat to make chicken salad, and after that used the bones to make bone broth which we used for Chicken Noodle Soup on Friday!  It was a great use of a whole piece of meat, and it cut the cost/meal of buying higher quality meat.  I used a recipe to make the bone broth in the slow cooker (see below), and it turned out AMAZINGLY delicious - with no fuss.  We're doing it again this week!  I strongly encourage you to try it out.

No Raw Milk

Unfortunately, we had to continue to drink pasturized store-bought milk because in Ontario, it is illegal to sell raw milk.   Guess we'll have to get our own cow!

A Successful Effort!

So as you can see, we really had a good time with this week's healthy eating experiment.  We're sure that there is much we'll carry through out of this series and into our "regular" life from the Traditional way of eating!

Recipes

Soaked Maple Cinnamon Oatmeal

Slow Cooker Bone Broth - you really can use any vegetables.  I didn't have celery, carrots or onions on hand, so I used asparagus ends, kale stems and garlic scapes and it turned out delicious.

BBQ Comfort Meatballs - this is a recipe I've made before and we do love it.  For the sauce I use half ketchup and half bbq sauce, and I don't brown the meatballs before baking them.  This week we used organic ground beef.

Have you tried at all to prepare foods traditionally?  How did it go for you?