Food

For those of you that know us, food has become quite the chore at our house. Thirteen years ago I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis. It became very severe as time went on and the drug therapies that I tried made it and my body worse. I turned to natural medicine. I tried EVERYTHING you can think of from acupuncture to NET (Neurological Emotional Treatments)treatments. What finally helped me was a natural path in Spokane, WA who does the Carroll food testing (here's there web site explaining what this is: http://www.windroseclinic.com/FIT.html) I found out, through this testing and a few other tests that they do, that I am potato, sea food and sugar intolerant. As you can imagine this makes eating and cooking hard to do. It's been about 5 years now since I went for the first time so I've gotten used to making lots of food from scratch and finding great goodies that I can have. As hard as this is, it's worth all the effort of being pain, swelling and symptom free. We had our children and Aaron tested as well, to help them with good health. Fortunately there are a few duplicates to make life a little easier. We find that vegan recipes work great as well as grass fed beef. We eat meat about twice a month with eggs often (Gwen gets dairy at egg times because she is egg intolerant). It's difficult because we don't get invited to eat at others very often and church is hard with the kids because of the amount of treats that are handed out. With time though our ward has become sensitive to us and has started working with us to help our kids eat healthy. Our dear friends the Nielsen's help us a ton in the beginning and Josef taught me how to cook from scratch (he has a Passion for cooking). He truly was an angel to me when it came to changing my diet. The first few months I would walk around the house crying because I was so hungry and did not know what to eat. When Josef would notice he would say "what would you like for dinner". My other great friend, Liz (who has a culinary arts degree), helped a lot by sending me two of my most favorite cook books, Laural's Kitchen and Real Food Daily, not to mention the little tips she gives me here and there.

Often times people ask "what DO you eat?" Well here's what we eat on a typical day:

Yummy Mexi Chop Salad!!

My homemade bread baking in the oven (don't mind the dirty oven...does anyone want to come clean it? ;) )

Every time we make bread we also make pan fried bread. We bring out different spreads like, hummus, peanut butter and honey mix, almond butter and our favorite agave, coconut and chocolate sauce!

Gwen enjoying her good eats

Aaron's favorite treat is this yummy Root Beer by Dr. Tima. It's made with honey and actually tastes like root beer.