DIY Yogurt

Speaking of making foods yourself, I made yogurt for the first time. We buy all of our milk raw from a local person with a few goats. It's really great goat's milk, miles better than what you can get in the store (very little of that goaty flavor, for one thing). And since the kids love yogurt, I thought I'd try my hand at making some from the goat's milk. I used the directions on this site: http://www.makeyourownyogurt.com/ and it worked out very well. I think I'll let the next batch go about half an hour longer though, just for a little more thickness.

The great thing is, my mom had this yogurt maker from sometime in the 1970s, and she brought it up to me and it works great! It's easier than leaving the yogurt on a hot pad or other warming methods, because it keeps it at a constant temperature that's just right. And since strawberry season it upon us, it's just the perfect time to get my yogurt-making underway.

Pancakes That Are Not Empty

After a recent triathlon, they served a pancake breakfast for athletes and families. My son came through the line with me and loaded up on a stack of traditional pancakes, hot off the griddle. After pouring maple syrup on (and commenting how it was soaked up like a sponge), he tucked in. Almost immediately, he looked at the pancakes strangely and then said "These pancakes are completely empty! There's nothing inside them." LOL, he's used to my nutrient-dense whole grain and nut pancakes, and these were just white flour, butter, and salt.

It reminded me of a story my mom tells about me when I was three or four years old. She had taken me over to a babysitter's house for the day and I refused to eat this lady's sandwiches because they were on strange white bread. I think it shows that what kids are raised with is what they get used to, and I've always said that there's a small window of a few years to help kids get used to what healthy food really is before they've got the rest of the universe to compare it with. In our case, my kids have grown up with my pancake recipe, and anything else tastes strange. If they'd grown up with balloon pancakes (the other word my son used for the white flour kind), that's what they'd think of as normal. In extreme cases, some kids eat such a narrow diet that what you feed them in the early years really matters. I've known two kids who really only ate a few foods by the age of five or so. One of them ate blueberries, cashews, a ginger-granola mix, red peppers, black beans, orange juice, and oatmeal. The other ate processed frozen waffles, french fries, white bread, american cheese food slices, crackers, and some kind of juice drink mix in little boxes. In both cases, the kids had settled on what they were used to by a couple years of age, so what they ate in those first couple of years hugely determined the nutrition that they would get overall growing up.

I'm lucky in that my kids both have a very broad range of foods that they eat, and it is pretty overwhelmingly nutritious. So I don't have a lot of food worries. I do think that when kids garden and pick fruits and vegetables and carry in the eggs from their own chickens, and pet the goats that are giving them milk, it really helps connect them to the food that they're eating and encourages healthy choices.

As for the pancakes, here's what's in them:

Robin's Non-Empty Pancakes

1 cup raw milk (ours is goat's)
1 cup yogurt
1 1/2 cup whole grain flour (sometimes I combine oat, spelt, wheat, coconut flour, whatever I have available)
1/4 Cup Ground Flax Meal
1/4 Cup Hemp Seeds

If I have time, mix everything above together and let it soak for 12 - 24 hours to ferment a little bit.

Then, the next morning, I mix in:
6 eggs
4 Tbs coconut oil or butter
1 tsp Vanilla
2 Tbs Raw Evaporated Cane Juice (Sucanat)
1 tsp sea salt

Sometimes I make them with bananas and pecans or blueberries or huckleberries in season. These also make great rollups with peanut butter and honey for a middle of the day snack. If I have the time, I'll mix up a double or triple batch and freeze a bunch so the kids can get pancakes any day of the week. It's both more nutritious and much more cost-effective than breakfast cereals.

Reconciling Discouragement With Hope

For some reason, it has been really hard for me to write about sustainability since we got back from Southern California a couple of weeks ago. I guess it was just so disheartening being in the land of 12-lane freeways and drive-thru everything, my little happy bubble got popped for awhile. It's easy, when you live where I do, to believe that most people are interested in and striving for sustainability, that people really do think about the consequences of their actions, that change is starting to happen. And perhaps it is, still. I know things have to start at the grassroots level, and I know that every little bit helps and as those little bits join together, real change can happen.

The irony, of course, is not lost on me. We went to Southern California to do the whole Disney thing. The kids love it, I love it, my mom has just retired and hasn't been to Disneyland since I was ten, so she has really been looking forward to going there with the kids. And we totally had a blast. It's almost blasphemy around here to admit that you like Disneyland, but despite the fact that it is a wholly commercialized mecca, I still check my sense of reality at the gate every single time and have a great time. So we were there to soak up the total commercial experience, I don't know why it would be so shocking to encounter everything that goes with that.

I guess it's strange to think how far outside the mainstream norm your everyday life is. We went by a McDonald's one day for lack of time and opportunity to find a different restaurant. Got a meal to go and went down to the beach to eat. I was just shocked when we were done by how much garbage there was left over. Big plastic clamshells from the salads and napkins and boxes and plastic forks and all. And of course not even any recycling to put it in to mitigate even a fraction of it. Taking that big bag of stuff and throwing it in a trashcan felt so awful. It was about as much garbage as our family generates in a week - seriously! And then thinking of that multiplied by all the fast food meals sold in an hour in this country, well, I felt like crying.

So right now I'm trying not to feel hopeless, trying to get back into that happy bubble and do what I know I need to do: change the things I can, work towards bringing change to the world around me, walk on the path I want to be walking on.