ONL056 Chef Rachel Matesz

Today’s Thanksgiving Podcast focuses on something we’re the most thankful for – nutritious, healthy, unprocessed food!

We are so blessed to eat great food provided by our local farmers and are always grateful to share a good meal with family and friends. Chef Rachel Matesz has written two great books to help you prepare meals for your family. These are The Garden of Eating: A Produce-Dominated Diet and Cookbook, and The Ice Dream Cookbook . In this interview, she shares some great tips from her books on healthy meal preparation.

The Garden of Eating is so much more than a cookbook – Chef Rachel and Don Matesz have written a comprehensive guide to natural eating based on “ancient, time-tested food ways of pre-agricultural people free of modern degenerative diseases. This plan is vegetable rich but not vegetarian.” (Foreward) Some of the recommendations in the book, similar to that of native people, include:

1) Make fresh locally grown vegetables and fruits 65-75% of the weight and volume of your meals.

2) Make clean, grass-fed animal products 20-35% of the weight and volume of your meals/diet.

3) Use “friendly fats” from grass fed animals such as butter, lard, tallow, egg yolks, and friendly plant fats such as coconut oil, nuts, and flax seed.

4) Use only unrefined sea salt.

5) Eliminate refined grain products, pasteurized and homogenized dairy products, mass-market meats, refined sugars, vegetable oils, alcohol, and processed or synthetic foods.

The Garden of Eating is reviewed and recommended by Food Renegade Kristen M. She also shared a photo essay of Chef Rachel’s chile recipe here. You can follow ChefRachelM on Twitter and read her blog here.

This summer I plan to spend more time exploring Rachel’s frozen dessert recipes from The Ice Dream Book. For those of you working on your holiday shopping lists, I highly recommend adding either of both of these books for anyone interested in cooking or healthy eating. These books and many others are available at our Amazon Store from our “Go Shopping” page.

Jon and Cathy’s Big News!

After 33 years of teaching in public elementary schools, I’m planning to retire on June 1, 2010. Jon and I are actively hunting for a mini farm in Georgia where we can become more self-sufficient. We plan to have dairy and meat goats, sheep, poultry, and some miniature horses and donkeys (the latter for grass control, labor, and entertainment, not food). We will also grow vegetables for ourselves. It’s a very exciting time for us but we won’t be able to continue our interviews as regularly until we get our house sold, relocate, and set up shop again. If you do not subscribe to our newsletter, this is a good time to do so. I’ll also try to keep you posted on Facebook and Twitter. We can’t wait to tell you all about our move from the suburbs to the country.

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