Tag Archive for: raw milk

Whole Wheat Pancakes or Waffles

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I love making these whole wheat pancakes or waffles when we need a quick meal and I don’t have the time to wait for my Sourdough Waffle and Pancake Recipe or my Sort of Sourdough Pancake Recipe. I like this recipe because it has the most eggs and least amount of flour of any of my waffle or pancake recipes. Yes, it will have phytic acid, but as long as it’s just sometimes and not all the time. The kids love helping me with this recipe.

Ingredients

  • 2. c. Milk (Raw is best.)
  • 3 ½ c. Flour (I get my wheat berries here, but you can find some similar here too. I use this grinder. You could also just buy some organic sprouted grain flour here.)
  • 4 Eggs (Preferably pastured)
  • 2 T. Cinnamon (Buy some here.)
  • 2 T. Vanilla Extract (This vanilla would be best, but on our budget, I buy this.)
  • ½ t. Real Salt (I buy my Real Salt in bulk here, you can buy a shaker here, or a refill pouch here.)
  • 1 t. Baking Soda  (or Aluminum Free Baking Powder)
  • 2 T. Coconut Oil (This coconut oil would be best, but on our budget, I buy this.)

Directions

  1. Preheat your cast iron skillet (make sure it’s cured properly) by setting it to a 2 or 3 for about five minutes.
  2. Add a dollop of coconut oil to your cast iron skillet (or whatever cooking pan you choose).
  3. Mix the eggs. It definitely is a good idea to have some help with this! Ruby knows how to puncture each egg yolk and stir them up.

    child cracking eggs into a bowl

    Ruby is Really Good at Cracking Eggs

  4. Add the cinnamon, vanilla, salt, and baking soda. Stir well.
  5. Add the flour and mix together. (Add a little at a time and mix well to avoid lumps. To make a thinner mixture, use 3 cups of flour, and to make a thicker mixture use 4 cups of flour.)
  6. Turn the heat dial to 4 and pour a ladle’s worth of batter into the skillet. (The oil should be bubbling around the pancake.) *If you’re making waffles, go ahead and add the batter to the waffle iron. I like to grease mine with coconut oil.

    whole wheat pancake batter just starting to cook on a cast iron skillet

    Whole Wheat Pancake Batter Starting to Cook

  7. Cover and let cook for about 2-4 minutes. (By the time I get a few pancakes in, the heat is sometimes too high and needs to be turned down temporarily. You’ll know if the heat is too high if you get hit with splattering coconut oil!)
  8. When the edges are slightly browned and the top is bubbly, you’ll know it’s time to flip. (Stand back as you do this so you don’t get hit with splattering coconut oil.)

    whole wheat pancake cooking in a cast iron skillet

    Whole Wheat Pancake Cooking

  9. Cover and cook for about 1 minute on the other side.

    whole wheat pancake cooking in a cast iron skillet

    Whole Wheat Pancake Cooking

  10. Cook the rest of pancakes and add more coconut oil as needed. When you rock the pan back and forth, there should be enough oil to generously coat the bottom. This batter should make about 5-6 pancakes.
  11. Serve with butter and maple syrup. (I like to smear the butter all over the top, then cut it up, and finally add a very modest amount of syrup.)
    whole wheat pancake topped with butter and syrup ready to eat on a plate

    Whole Wheat Pancake Topped with Butter and Syrup

    child eating whole wheat pancakes for breakfast with a glass of milk

    Elliot Loves these Whole Wheat Pancakes!

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Raw Milk Farm Cheese

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We get raw milk every week from a wonderful little Amish farm where we own a cow share, and by the week’s end we sometimes have milk left over. So I started looking for some easy ways to use it up, and I ended up with this great recipe for making a simple farm cheese. The flavor is similar to a mozzarella cheese and the kids love it! I was completely surprised by how easy this was to make.

Ingredients/Materials

  • ½ Gallon of Room Temperature Cream from Raw Milk *You can use an entire gallon of milk if you don’t want to separate the cream and it will work just as well.
  • ¼ c. Apple Cider Vinegar *More or less depending on the curds.
  • 1 t. Real Salt (I buy my Real Salt in bulk here, you can buy a shaker here, or a refill pouch here.)
  • Cheese Cloth (I used a bird’s eye cloth diaper and it worked great.)
  • Colander
  • Cooking Pan

Directions

  1. Bring the cream to a boil on medium heat stirring very often.
  2. Once it boils, turn the heat down low and slowly add the vinegar until you see the curds start to separate from the whey. *You can continue to add more vinegar until it stops curding.
  3. Strain into a colander lined with the cloth. *You can put a bowl under the colander to save the whey to soak grains or use to boil stock.
  4. Salt to taste and lightly mix.
  5. Pick up the four corners and twist out as much of the whey as you can. (You may want to let it cool a bit.)
  6. Tie up the four corners and let it hang for an hour or two.
  7. Cut and serve!

I modified this recipe from The Nourished Kitchen and WikiHow.

*If this recipe has inspired you to try some more challenging and complex cheese recipes, I recommend checking out Cultures for Health and you will enter into an amazing world of cheese making possibilities.

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Sourdough Waffles and Pancakes

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These waffles are a BIG hit with my kids! I like to keep one fresh batch in the fridge and one spare batch in the freezer. In either case, I just pull one out, pop it in the toaster, and we’re in business! Then I like to slather it with a generous amount of butter, cut it into bite size pieces, top with some fresh maple syrup (or organic syrup when the budget is tight), and WALLA –breakfast is served! (*Note: Sometimes my kids suddenly turn on me and stop liking what they used to like. When that happens with this recipe, I switch to my Sort of Sourdough Pancake recipe or my Whole Wheat Pancake recipe.)

Ingredients

  • 1 c. Sourdough Starter
  • 2. c. Milk (Raw is best.)
  • 4 c. Flour (Freshly ground for optimal nutrition so that the phytase that will break down phytic acid. I get my wheat berries here, but you can find some similar here too.)
  • 2 Eggs (Preferably pastured)
  • 6 T. (¾ stick) Melted Butter (You can add room temperature butter and it should mix alright though.)
  • 2 T. Raw Honey  (You could add ¼ c. brown sugar, or just skip this ingredient – it just helps to counteract the flavor if you’re not used to sour. It’s best to buy local raw honey, but you can buy it here too.)
  • 1 t. Real Salt (I buy my Real Salt in bulk here, you can buy a shaker here, or a refill pouch here.)
  • 1 t. Baking Soda  (or Aluminum Free Baking Powder)
  • 2 T. Cinnamon (Buy some here.)
  • 2 T. Vanilla Extract (This vanilla would be best, but on our budget, I buy this.)
  • 2 T. Coconut Oil (This coconut oil would be best, but on our budget, I buy this.)

Directions

Part 1: The Sponge (Mix and Let Sit Overnight…or for 8 Hours)

  1. Dissolve the sourdough starter into the milk.
  2. Mix in the flour.
  3. Cover and let sit overnight or for 8 hours. (I like to do all of my food prep in the morning, so I make my overnight batter in the morning, then put it in the fridge during the day, and finally put it out on the counter before I go to bed so it’s ready the next morning.)
  4. Note: Now, if you’re like me and you unintentionally leave it out for way more than 8 hours, YOU might still like it, but your picky eaters may not. So watch the time.

Part 2: The Final Batter (The Next Morning…or 8 Hours Later)

  1. Start preheating your waffle iron.
  2. Add the eggs, butter, cinnamon, vanilla, salt, and baking soda to the overnight mixture. (You can mix all of these ingredients in a separate bowl first if you want.)
  3. I like to use beaters to mix everything together, but you could also use a spoon.
  4. Coat the waffle iron with coconut oil. I just bought this waffle iron, and I love it. (I like my waffles square so that I can pop them in the toaster.)
  5. Cook for about 6 minutes (or until the light turns green). You want them as lightly cooked as possible so that you can reheat them later in the toaster, and they won’t be too overdone.

    Cooking Waffles

    Cooking Waffles

  6. *This also makes great pancake batter, so if you don’t have a waffle iron, just make pancakes instead.
  7. Smother with butter and maple syrup then serve! (Find out why I like to smother everything with butter here.)

    Waffles Cut Up

    Waffles Cut Up

*I adapted this recipe from The Fresh Loaf, which is a great source for all bread making.

Why Eat Sourdough? To learn more about why sourdough is the best way to get rid of phytic acid, check out my blog: Phytic Acid: The Anti-Nutrient That’s Slowly Killing You.

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Why We Drink Raw Milk

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When I was juggling a full time job and raising a family, I never had the time to do much research about what we ate. We just spent a ridiculous amount of money trying to buy foods that were organic and called it good. But now that I am a stay at home mom, I have made it my JOB to feed my family and do it right. One of the first (and best) changes we made was switching to raw milk. Read on to find out why raw milk is clearly the better option, and why if you’re not going to drink raw milk, you really shouldn’t be drinking milk at all. 

Should Adults Even Be Drinking Milk?

I am a big fan of breastfeeding and its numerous health benefits. A mother’s milk is designed to give her baby all of the nutrients it needs to grow as it begins life. All other mammals do this as well, cows included. Does it strike you as a little odd that in drinking cow’s milk we are essentially drinking what was designed for a baby cow? Most adults (60-70%) don’t even produce the intestinal enzyme lactase (which all baby mammals produce) which is needed to properly digest milk! That coupled with the fact that many adults are allergic to the milk protein casein and I’m surprised that it is even so widely accepted that milk is part of our food pyramid (which is another post in and of itself!). So if you do in fact choose to drink milk, the pasteurized and homogenized milk you find on store shelves is hardly fit to even be called milk.

Factory Farms House Freaks of Nature

Every grocery store and gas station advertises the low price of their milk as an enticing factor to draw you in. In order to bring you milk for $1.89/gallon, the milk is obtained by treating these living, breathing, feeling creatures like pieces of machinery in an assembly line. The cows are crowded together in feed lots, fed corn and grain to fatten them up (rather than the grass that their bodies are naturally meant to digest), pumped full of bovine growth hormones in order to produce 3 or 4 times more milk than their bodies are designed, get mastitis, secrete pus, and hence need the routine antibiotics that these conditions create. Did you know that there’s an allowable pus content in store bought milk? That means they know that every cow will produce some pus and so they allow for a certain amount of that to be passed down to the consumer. As a breastfeeding mother, I am meticulous about what I eat because I know it passes directly to my baby. It’s the same with cows! When we drink their milk, we are essentially taking in whatever they did.  Now that I have children, I am mortified to think that these hormones could be passed through to them and actually cause them to hit puberty early.

Pasteurization Destroys Everything Good

When you think about the allowable pus content in store bought milk, does it make you feel a little bit better to know that it’s been heated to a high temperature at least? Heated pus…mmm-mm-mmm! The process of pasteurization is supposedly needed to protect us from infectious diseases, even though as Sally Fallon points out in her book, Nourishing Traditions, “ALL OUTBREAKS OF SALMONELLA FROM CONTAMINATED MILK IN RECENT DECADES – AND THERE HAVE BEEN MANY – HAVE OCCURRED IN PASTEURIZED MILK.” Raw milk has lactic-acid producing bacteria that will naturally protect your body from these and other harmful pathogens. Milk is alive! It is full of enzymes that help our bodies digest and assimilate all of the bodybuilding factors including calcium. Pasteurization kills these enzymes along with altering the amino acids and making the protein less available to us. It also reduces milk’s mineral components, losing at least 50% of vitamin C, destroys the essential vitamin B12, and has even been linked to diabetes because of the unnecessary strain on the pancreas. Are you crossing store bought milk off your grocery list yet? I haven’t even mentioned the unnatural process of homogenization and its link to heart disease because the suspended fat and cholesterol particles are more prone to rancidity and oxidization or the fact that skim milk has a bluish color until powdered milk is added to it, and powdered milk has oxidized cholesterol which can damage the arteries and lead to atherosclerosis! But on to greener pastures!

The Benefits of Raw Milk

  • If you had to, you could live off from raw milk alone. It is a perfectly balanced food.
  • It is an excellent source of saturated fat and cholesterol. Both of these necessary dietary components have been unjustly demonized by mainstream media. Read my blog: The Truth About Fats to learn about how wrong we’ve all been about fats.
  • It is rich in fat soluble vitamins A and D.
  • It is an excellent source of protein with all twenty of the standard amino acids.
  • It has immunoglobulin proteins that provide resistance to many viruses and bacteria.
  • It has a perfect balance of minerals such as phosphorus and magnesium that allows the absorption of calcium.
  • It has sixty functional enzymes that aid in its own digestion giving our pancreas a break.
  • It contains lactobacilli bacteria that digests lactose and may allow people who lack the enzyme lactase to digest it.
  • It is abundant in Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA) which is an extremely beneficial polyunsaturated Omega-6 fatty acid that can raise the metabolic rate, help remove abdominal fat, boosts muscle growth, reduces resistance to insulin, strengthens the immune system, and lowers food allergy reactions. Grass fed cows are known to have three to five times more CLA than cows that are grain fed.
  • Drinking raw milk is an excellent way to reverse insulin resistance. There was a recent study done that compared two groups of people. One group consumed four servings of dairy a day and the other group consumed two servings of dairy per day. The group that consumed four servings of dairy per day improved their insulin resistance by 11% over a six month period.

The Raw Milk Experience

We get our milk from a little Amish farm in west Michigan. We drive 40 minutes one way to get it fresh every week. The kids get out to stretch their legs and play with the Amish children as my husband pours the milk fresh out of the cooling vat that has been collected within the last few days. We can see the cows grazing in the fields surrounding the farm. Sometimes they are so far away we can’t even see them!  They milk three or four cows at a time using a hand operated electric pump (run off from a generator) and actually bring in the baby cows to feed, which costs them but is better for the baby cows. Their milk is tested regularly and always passes with flying colors. But the best part of all is the taste! The fresh, rich, creamy, ice cold glass of frothy milk is so delicious, filling, and decadent that I almost feel guilty! This is an amazing experience for our kids. They get to see where their milk is coming from and not just assume that everything comes off from the shelves at a store.

How Much Does It Cost?

Purchasing raw milk is illegal, so we actually own a cow share and pay boarding fees. We own 6 shares, which costs us a refundable deposit of $300 and we pay $120/month in boarding fees which is $5/gallon. This may seem like a lot of money and a lot of milk for one family, but it is an amazing source of nutrient dense food that doesn’t take any time to prepare that we can have with meals, as a snack, or even as a meal substitute when we’re on the run. Our kids can be picky eaters at times, but they LOVE raw milk and drink it all the time. We keep their sippy cups constantly full and they open the refrigerator often to grab their cups and take a drink whenever they choose.

Being on a budget, we have to prioritize many things, but our raw milk is the one thing that we will maintain no matter what happens. If this was the ONLY thing I could do for the health and well being of my family, it would be enough to make a difference.

For More Information…

  • To find a raw milk source near you, check out Real Milk Finder. Their website also has a ton of great information if you would like to learn more about raw milk.
  • To find the latest news about raw milk and lots of other good information, check out the Weston Price Foundation.
  • If you want a really great informative read, check out Sally Fallon’s book Nourishing Traditions.
  • I also got some great information for this post about raw milk in Natural News.
  • Check out this 11 minute video if you want to see a great summary of the benefits of raw milk or this video if you want to see a 2 minute video on Sally Fallon’s perspective.
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