It’s a wonderful new year, with a blank slate, lots to learn, and lots of new cooking and food to try. I’m excited! Thanks for joining me on the Family Food for Moms podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about simple health tips for your kitchen. These are some unusual health ideas, ones that I find important, and that I like to do in our family. I thought that you might enjoy hearing them.
So, one of these things is about expectations. Often we think: “I ate healthy, I had supplements, I did something or other, but then why is it not helping?” But, in reality, we need to be really patient. I really find that what we do today affects us next week, next month, or even next year. There’s a delayed response. If we eat some really good, healthy meals with good nutrition, or we take some good supplements, like kudu liver or something, then I find it affects me in the following week. I feel so good, but not necessarily that day, or even the next day, because I’m still dealing with the other meals I’ve had recently.
Be patient, trust the process, and don’t expect changes immediately, but know that the good habits that you’re developing, the good things you’re doing, the healthy meals, and the good protein; it will have an effect. It will give you more energy, more good muscle, and more of all the good stuff, but maybe only next week or next month.
Point number two, a simple one, is choose meat on the bone for your crock pot or your instant pot meals. It’s so much better than boneless meat, such as a boneless leg of lamb, or you even get chicken roasts that have been deboned. It’s so much better for you if you get it on the bone. It cooks in a way that makes the meat more tender, and you get more minerals, more vitamins and collagen, and all the good stuff when you cook your meat on the bone. So, whether you’re having a leg of lamb, a roast chicken, or a piece of beef, always try to get it on the bone if possible, and then cook it in your crock pot or your instant pot.
Sometimes pieces of meat are rather large with the bone, especially something like a leg of lamb, so you do need to check that it will actually fit in your crock pot before you buy it. Perhaps you can ask the butcher to cut off a bit of the bone if necessary.
Number three is add some bone broth to the crockpot. Sometimes I’m organized enough to make our own bone broth, but usually I buy a glass jar of lamb bone broth. I like the ones that are nice and gelatinous. Then, when I cook either a lamb stew or a leg of lamb in the crock pot, I’ll add some lamb broth. When you’re making a roast chicken, you can add some chicken broth to the pot, so that when you make the gravy from the leftover juices in your crock pot or your instant pot, then you get the good nutrition from the bone broth.
Bone broth is great for you to have on its own, but I’ve never been crazy about the taste. It’s wonderful, though, if you have a healthy gravy and you add some of that, because then you’re getting a lot of bone broth with your meat. It keeps your meat moist, and it’s got all that good stuff; the antioxidants and the nutrients.
Add the broth to your crockpot, and then once it’s cooked, you can make the gravy simply by adding a little bit of potato starch like we use, or you can use cornstarch – look for non GMO. You can even use flour; spelt flour, just a little tiny bit. Then add some salt, and then you just boil it down a little bit, and that makes a lovely healthy gravy.
Number four: replace your plastic storage containers with glass containers. You can get lovely glass containers with plastic lids, and these are great for meal prep, and for putting into the fridge or the freezer. We often put our leftover food from a meal in one of these as a future meal for my husband or my son at work. Or, if I am not eating what the kids are eating; maybe they’re eating a pie with lots of puff pastry, then I prefer to have a leftover container of beef stroganoff or something from the freezer. Just about anything you want to store in the kitchen works well in a glass container, and it’s so much better for you than the plastic containers.
We don’t use a microwave because of the bad effects of what it does to the food. But if you do use a microwave, never heat food in a plastic container, but rather heat it in a glass container, because then the food will be a lot less contaminated.
Number five is an obvious one that you probably know, but I’ll mention it anyway: replace bad oils with coconut oil, olive oil, beef tallow, and lamb tallow. These are so much better for you than canola oil, and really any of those so-called seed or vegetable oils. Those are really incredibly processed and very, very bad for you.
Coconut oil is my favorite. Butter can be used in some circumstances, as well as olive oil, if it’s not going to be heated too much. I like to use olive oil on vegetables in the oven. I was recently reading a study about how they found that olive oil really releases a lot of polyphenols when food is cooked in it. I was always unsure about using olive oil in the oven, but apparently it doesn’t get that hot. When I cook potatoes or vegetables in the oven, I put olive oil and salt on them and it tastes amazing, and those polyphenols are so good for so many things. including getting rid of COVID.
Tallow is great as well, although it does burn, and that smoke is not a healthy smoke. It’s important to heat your pan or your pot till it’s hot, and only then add the tallow so that it’s not in there for too long. It’s great for ground beef or chicken in a pan.
Avocado oil is sometimes good – I know it’s also a good one for cooking, and good for making mayonnaise, because it’s got a neutral flavor, but so often avocado oil is fake or has been diluted. You should really check your sources, but I think avocado can be a great one to use as well.
Number six: have an “unhealthy” dessert once a week. This may sound counterintuitive if we’re talking about health tips, but if you’re looking forward to that unhealthy dessert, or should I rather say a dessert that you really enjoy, once a week, then you’re able to say, okay, we’re not going to have dessert during the week, but just on the weekend. If there’s something you really enjoy like chocolate mousse, crème brûlée, crème caramel, tiramisu, or something like that, you can choose one night a week when you have your special dessert. You just have a small amount, and you really enjoy it. Then the rest of the week, you don’t have dessert and you can be working on your health in general with that one exception.
If you like to add to your meal during the week, sometimes what I find for dinners is that it’s very satisfying to have different courses, with different kinds of food. You’ve heard me talk about that before. So, you could end your meal with some peaches and some raw cream poured over them – that’s delicious – or a tiny square of dark chocolate, or even some cheese. Those are all really great endings to meals, and they don’t add to the unhealthiness too much.
Number seven is to do with vitamins or supplements. Obviously, we want to choose very good quality supplements, not just generic ones from the supermarket which don’t really do anything. Our main supplement as a family is desiccated liver capsules. We’re not so good at eating regular liver, but liver is very high in many nutrients, so we have kudu liver capsules. There may be other things that you have – there certainly are a few other things we have, but we want to be careful how we have our supplements.
Firstly, desiccated liver is more of a food than a supplement, so it’s slightly different. You can just eat it with your food as you go. Supplements, especially herbal supplements; things like CoQ10 or resveratrol, or some kind of-anti inflammatory supplement, are more of a food than a supplement. We want to be careful. These things are all good in a certain context. Some of them say you should drink them on an empty stomach. Some of them you take with food or specifically with fat. It’s very important not to eat them all in one handful. I’ve seen some people just grab their vitamins for the day and gulp them down, but when you’re having vitamins, you need to think about absorption. Absorption is the key, otherwise there’s really no point, and you’re just wasting your money. Each supplement you need to look at carefully and see when it recommends that you have it.
Another thing that you can add into this category would be tea. When you’re having green tea, if you have it very close to your meal, it can limit the absorption of iron, so you want to have something like green tea right in the middle between breakfast and lunch.
So, back to the supplements; if you’re having, let’s say, four supplements in your day, then the best thing if most of them need to be taken with food, is when you start your meal, then you have one. You can put them all next to your plate so you don’t forget them. Then a little bit later in your meal, you have another one, and then another break before the third one and the fourth one, so that they spread out through your meal. They’re being taken in with food, so your body is more likely to absorb them. and they can break down well in your system. And that way you’re having them with the fat and with the food that they need to be able to be absorbed.
We must just be mindful of how we have our vitamins in the same way as we’re mindful of what we eat. I think this will help us to get the maximum benefit and absorb the most from those vitamins.
Number eight is to have some snacks that you enjoy ready for you and your family, things that are easy to grab when you’re busy. On episode four of this podcast we talk about some good snacks for moms specifically, because we’re the ones usually so busy taking care of everyone else that we forget to have some good nourishing snacks available for us. That episode mentions things like a healthy cheesecake, gummies, yogurts, et cetera.
So, try to have something that you enjoy, something that’s good to grab. We have beef sticks – we call them droëwors, and then things like carrot sticks and celery sticks. You can put these in water in the fridge in a jar, because those are nice and easy to grab, and it keeps them moist. I must mention frozen grapes. These are amazing for a snack because they taste so good. It tastes like candy, and they last. Grapes can get old. They can attract fruit flies, but if you wash your grapes and then freeze them, they’re a lovely thing to grab from the freezer for a quick snack.
Number nine: don’t be influenced by fad diets. Just keep it simple. Fresh and whole foods are good. You need your protein, you need your fiber, you need your fat, and you need your carbs. Keep it balanced with fresh whole food.
It’s also a good idea to add something fermented to at least one meal a day – kimchi or sauerkraut, or something that’s been pickled. Pickles are great, but they should be lacto-fermented, and not just have vinegar added to them. All of those things are very beneficial to our health.
And then lastly, number ten is to eat mindfully or in a way that you’re very aware of having your meal. So, as I’ve spoken about before, this refers to sitting down together at the dinner table, and eating slowly with a few courses. Maybe you can have a course of vegetables or a soup to start with, a course of your meat with a side, and then a cheese course. It really helps you to digest, and to be present with your meal. Besides the good fellowship that you have with your family, your body is really given the best chance to absorb the nutrients. Sometimes we just think of what we eat, but we don’t always think of what we absorb. In the same way as with the vitamins, we want to make sure that we absorb the food we eat. When we’re sitting down and being mindful about the fact that this is now meal time, we’re not going to be distracted and trying to do 10 other things at the same time. We’re not going to work on our computers. We’re going to sit and eat.
Chewing our food carefully is important, and eating in a way that we really admire the food, smell it, enjoy it, and eat slowly. That will really help so much with our body’s ability to absorb and use the nutrition from the food.
So, enjoy cooking and eating this year. Choose some things that you want to improve on, and don’t try to do a whole lot of changes at once, but maybe one change every week or month and just enjoy. There’s a huge variety of wonderful food out there.
Thanks for listening. I’ll see you next time.
