It Pays to Know Your Farmer!

Another Saturday and another trip to the Wake Forest Farmer's Market.  Here's the loot:

1 head Black-Seeded Simpson
1 head Boston Butter Crunch
1 bunch of the sweetest, most delicious radishes ever
Total: $6.00

We used some of the black-seeded simpson and the radishes for lunch today on this:

Yumm! We'll use the rest of the lettuce all week for lunches.  The left over radishes will go nicely with some roasted chicken tomorrow!

Normally we'd come away with some pastured eggs at the Farmer's Market too, but we took an extra farm trip this morning to our friends at Ray Family Farms. They raise heritage breed pigs, pastured chickens, grass-fed Beltie beef, horses, vegetables, and flowers; and I'm telling you, you'll never have a finer shopping experience than purchasing meat and produce straight from the farm.

When we arrived Chad and Jody met us at their Old Thyme Market barn, a lovely little one stop shop where you can pick up your meats from their freezers as well as pick up some of the local preserves, honeys, and soaps they have available for sale.  Chad and his wife Jody run the farm, and the first thing they asked us was if we wanted to check out how big their piglets are getting.  Of course we do! We saw those little babies just after they were born in April, and now they're huge.  The papa pigs were buried up to their snouts in mud holes to keep cool in the hot sun.  We walked right up to mama pig and her babies just as they were getting up from their nap to nurse.

We walked back to the barn and Chad already had our order ready: 2 whole pastured chickens, 1 pack of drumsticks, and a dozen pastured chicken eggs.  After looking around we added some ground chicken, a pound of chicken feet, and some ground beef to our order.  The total was $68.00.  I know that may sound like a lot, but it really doesn't get much better than that folks.  Their ground beef is $5.16 a pound, and while that's more than the grocery store, I know this meat not treated with ammonia, nor is it full of "pink slime." Instead  it is filled with healthy fat not chock full of antibiotics.  This meat comes from truly happy cows.  The chickens were $3.95 a pound (for a total of less than $20.00 each).  We checked at Whole Foods and you can get a free-range chicken for $2.69 a pound.  These are antibiotic free and vegetarian fed.  But here's the thing: chickens AREN'T vegetarians.  They eat bugs, and when they do they are healthier, and their meat is much more nutritious.  While WF chickens advertise cage free, what we know is that most of the time, this phrase means the birds get to move around, but they are not running around outside.   They're lacking nutrition because they don't enjoy vitamin D infusions from the sun and all the lovely vitamins and minerals that come from digging around in the dirt.  The happy chickens at Ray Family Farms get to enjoy the outdoors all day, and so they just taste better!

After picking up our loot, Chad offered to show us his wonderful crop of cabbage and potatoes.  These things were massive thanks to the piles of organic cow manure they had been dumping on the plot of land all winter.  Chad walked over to one of the cabbage plants, picked up the head, and handed it to Reid.  He grabbed some heads of broccoli too and handed them to me.  Since when does your grocery store give you free produce!? Total cost of our produce: $0.00!!

We've so loved getting to know this family! They care about stewarding the land and providing quality food for the nourishment of our bodies.  Unlike the big industrial feedlots who would never allow the general public access to their facilities, Ray Family Farms loves to give tours and show you around.  Check out their website and send Chad an email.  He'll meet you at the farm whenever and show you around.  We'll be heading back soon to stock up again. I've yet to try any pork products, and I can't wait to get my hand on some!

Real Food and Rabbit Poo...

For some time now Reid and I have been researching and learning about the real food movement.  With knowledge comes responsibility, and we just couldn't ignore the things we were learning. Thus far we have eliminated 98% of processed foods from our diet (most especially anything with MSG, high fructose corn syrup, and partially hydrogenated fats).  We've upped our intake of good and nutritious fats including coconut oil, grass-fed butter, and even pastured bacon fat (bacon makes everything better!). We are also experimenting with eating more liver (so far every dish I've made with this ingredient has been a big thumbs down, but I'll keep trying), fermented foods (yes, I'm brewing things on Seminary property ;)), and grass-fed meat (thanks to some generous contributions of beef and chicken from my sweet mom!).

We've been getting pastured eggs, produce and some meat from our local Farmers Market.  Here are the kinds of things I like to buy:

From Left to Right:
Top Shelf: farm fresh eggs; next to the eggs is a pack of grass fed beef
Middle Shelf: 2 lbs bag of chicken livers thawing in the bowl (I haven't given up trying to cook it yet!)
Bottom Shelf: Gabie's Black-seeded Simpson lettuce, Rainbow Swiss chard, and Red Romaine lettuce

[the other items we get from Whole Foods including: Bottom Shelf: grass-fed milk, avocados, parsley, apples, cilantro, celery and a leek; Middle Shelf: this is all stuff I've made- fermented beet kvass in the jar and some peanut butter oatmeal in the pyrex; Top Shelf: Spring water, a whole pastured chicken thawing in the back and some left overs]

Reid likes to go to the Farmers Market and browse around too.  Here's what he buys:

So he can take care of these:

And this:

This is our sharecropping plot at Tim and Amie Sexton's.  The plants are tiny, but with a little help from the rabbits they'll be standing tall soon.

This week Reid and I are undertaking similar pursuits on the road to real food eating.  I'll be attempting my first batch of kombucha tea, a healthful raw drink with lots of benefits for your body.  And what is Reid's next endeavor you ask? He'll be mixing up some manure tea, a beneficial drink for all his green friends to grow nice and big and make lots of veggies!

Wisdom Teeth are Gone!

This Friday, Reid had his wisdom teeth removed.  Dr. Lawley performed the surgery and my sister Jamie assisted.  Here is Reid before surgery:

He's ready to go (albeit a little hungry having been prohibited from eating since the night before).

Here he over an hour later following surgery, puffy-cheeked and totally out of it:

He couldn't smile because his mouth was still numb.  The surgery itself took all of 10 minutes, but Reid just wanted to keep sleeping apparently.  They finally had to reverse his anesthesia to wake him up.  He says he remembers them telling him to wake up and wishing they would leave him alone.  When I went back to see him, I was tearing up laughing at his antics.  Some of his funny one-liners while under the influence include: "I'm so out of it I could cheer for Louisville right now." And when the doctor told him he did well and should recover soon, Reid replied in slurred speech, "I coulda been a contender."  In his best David-Goes-To-The Dentist impression he said, "Why is this happening? Is this gonna be forever?" Later in the day I even yelled at him for sticking his finger in his mouth thinking he was gonna pull at his stitches (he was only getting some food out his teeth...phew!).

All in all he recovered very quickly and with minimal pain.  Pretty good for having these suckers pulled out of his head!

Blessings!

Thanks to some advice from friends, I've have discovered the wonder that is Craigslist.  This week (*meaning 3 weeks ago when I first wrote this post*) we drove all the way to Apex to pick a camera that we got for a really great price! My digital camera bit the dust over a year ago (I dropped it and cracked the lens. Oops!).  We figured it would be nice to have a way to keep the family up to date on our lives, so we searched the Craigslist items til we found a camera we liked.  I don't know much about cameras, but if it can even pick up the dust on my computer in the picture, I'd say it's good enough for me.

In bigger news, this week Reid said good bye to his good and faithful Ford Taurus.  He's had this car through most of Seminary, and it's treated him pretty well considering he couldn't take care of it as much as he wanted to on a student's budget.  Despite a brief (read: month-long) stint in the shop this August for some mysterious (and expensive) breakdown, this car has been just what we needed.  When we added it to our insurance, the combo package and the low price of the car actually made our premium go down!

On Thursday Reid said his goodbyes, and we sold the car to a nice woman who actually cried when she took the Taurus on a test drive earlier in the week.  She'd been burned by a previous Craiglist car purchase, but she told us that we were offering a really great price.  She said most cars priced in the same range were pieces-o'-junk.  We hope the the Ford will be a blessing to her!

My parents are blessing us with my dad's "old" car (if you want to call 2007 old).  It's a Toyota Camry which means it's great on miles! And to top it off, it's also a hybrid! Gas savings here we come! Not to mention, it's better for the earth.

Thanks Mom and Dad for this great gift! :)