We apologize to the thousands of other blogs and websites that  linked to our blog posts and podcasts because all those links are now broken. All of our posts have been restored but they need to be [...]]]> On January 15 our web host had a major server failure which required that we completely rebuild our website.

We apologize to the thousands of other blogs and websites that  linked to our blog posts and podcasts because all those links are now broken. All of our posts have been restored but they need to be re-linked on your website.

We now have a more robust automatic backup system that will ensure that we don’t ever have to rebuild links again. A complete failure can be fully restored in a very short time.

//Jon

Thank you so much for listening to our Podcasts and reading our blogs in 2009. It has been an awesome year! Your kind words, suggestions, and support mean so much to both of us and we are truly grateful. We have plans for an even more exciting year in 2010. [...]]]>

Ornament Hand Made by Jon

Thank you so much for listening to our Podcasts and reading our blogs in 2009. It has been an awesome year! Your kind words, suggestions, and support mean so much to both of us and we are truly grateful. We have plans for an even more exciting year in 2010. We’ve been very busy during our fall hiatus but hope to touch base with you all soon to let you know what we’ve been up to. Remember to subscribe to both the blogs and Podcasts if you want to keep up with us best.

Merry Christmas Eve! When I was growing up, we always celebrated with a special dinner on Christmas Eve because that was my eldest and late brother Dave’s birthday. With my son Matt and his bride in New Zealand, we weren’t sure how our holiday would pan out this year. We just had 14 for dinner on Thanksgiving, and with all we’ve had going on I did not want to do another big spread. Imagine our surprise when Jon’s daughter decided to come down from Maryland with her spouse and daughter! We were so excited!

The menu needed to center around the Christmas goose we ordered from Natures Harmony Farm back on April 1. I’ve never cooked a goose before, but it sounded very interesting, especially since it is a British tradition and Jon is British by birth. How to cook it was the challenge. Of course, I went right to the master and consulted Julia Child. She instructed us to steam the goose on the stovetop in order to defat it, then steam/braise it in the oven with wine and vegetables, and finally brown in the oven. Sounds so easy!

We found ourselves making a last minute shopping trip on the day before Christmas when we realized we did not have an appropriate roaster for stovetop use. We checked out 4 stores before finding the one we needed at Bed, Bath, and Beyond (made by Oneida). There were long lines and full parking lots with last-minute shoppers, but we zoomed through at B, B, & B. Thank goodness! With only minutes to spare before our goose was due for it’s “hot” date.

Here is our goose with it’s wings trimmed and all trussed for steaming. Didn’t Jon do a great job with the “surgery” part of the preparation? The wishbone is already removed for easier carving at the table.

Next we added an inch of water into the bottom of our new roasting pan, set the goose on the rack, and set it on the stove top to simmer for 45 minutes. Julia Childs suggests steaming the goose first to release the fat, which is rendered nicely during the steaming process and can be saved for later use.

After the steaming was over, I transferred it to my pottery roaster along with onions, celery, carrots, and wine. I covered it with foil to keep it steaming in the oven. Periodically I basted it. Once the leg started to become tender, it was flipped to breast side up and uncovered to finish browning.

I can’t forget some of the other cast members to the meal. Here is Julia’s cranberry chutney, recommended as a goose side dish in The Way to Cook.

This is chocolate mousse (recipe from Julia Child’s Menu Cookbook) made with Natures Harmony Farm pastured egg yolks, cooked into a Sauce Englaise with heavy cream and folded into organic chocolate, dark rum, homemade vanilla extract and whipped egg whites. I wish you could smell how decadent it is!

For snacking before the meal we had Shoreline Chef Chicken Liver Pate served with slices of Granny Smith apples, red bell peppers and gluten-free crackers. I also had an ample supply of crispy almonds prepared Nourishing Traditions style.
Finally, our goose was cooked! Just in time for guests, giblet gravy, wine, and side dishes. The food was great and the company fantastic. Enjoy your holiday! Leave a comment with a request if you’d like any of the recipes.

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 [...]]]> 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.

This Podcast is a conversation with Zachary Adam Cohen, creator of the Farm to Table blog and television show and self-described “evangelist for the sustainable food movement”. Zachary talks with us about how his dream project started and addresses skeptics on the topic of social media. The link to our interview is found below.

I met [...]]]>

This Podcast is a conversation with Zachary Adam Cohen, creator of the Farm to Table blog and television show and self-described “evangelist for the sustainable food movement”. Zachary talks with us about how his dream project started and addresses skeptics on the topic of social media. The link to our interview is found below.

I met Zachary on Twitter and found that we had several followers in common. After several tweets and a couple emails, we eventually had a telephone conversation that led to this interview. This is one of the beauties of twitter, which Zachary describes as “global thought talk.” It is a place where one can have conversations 24 hours a day with like-minded individuals from around the world. In our interview and in a recent blog he discusses the use of social media as a medium for change.

Zachary recommends Chris Brogan’s book, Trust Agents as an aide to help individuals use the web to build influence, improve reputation, and earn trust. Cathy and Jon described their own goals to promote sustainable food and to lobby for the labeling of GMO foods. This is a topic Our Natural Life recently explored in interviews with both Jeffrey M. Smith and Robyn O’Brien. Zachary makes wide use of Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, and Stumbleupon to connect with the movers and shakers in sustainable food.

How do you use social media to promote your favorite causes?

Updates from Our Natural Life

Jon has been away for a couple weeks, and Cathy neglected to post this blog October 19th due to responsibilities of daily living in his absence. Our fall garden survived the first freeze alerts with the help of generous mulching and a burlap blanket. The screening of FRESH: The Movie fundraiser for Georgia Chapters of Weston A. Price was a big success.

Yesterday Cathy attended another fundraiser and panel discussion. This time it was a Slow Food event for Wholesome Wave. She was so excited to learn about the opportunities in our community for helping low income families connect to fresh, sustainable, local food for half price! This is definitely a cause worthy of support.

Speaking of Slow Food, Georgia Organics is featuring founder Carlos Petrini as the keynote speaker for this year’s annual conference. Past keynote speakers included Joel Salatin and Michael Pollen. They keep raising the bar!

This Podcast includes our recent conversation with the activist mother of four, Robyn O’Brien. Robyn is the author of The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food is Making us Sick and What we can do About It. In her book and this show, Robyn shares her story of how she came to be an unlikely food [...]]]>

This Podcast includes our recent conversation with the activist mother of four, Robyn O’Brien. Robyn is the author of The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food is Making us Sick and What we can do About It. In her book and this show, Robyn shares her story of how she came to be an unlikely food crusader and began to educate others about food allergies, food additives, GM foods, and the dangers of soy. The interview can be downloaded from iTunes, Zune, or Stitcher. You can also listen from your computer using the embedded device below.

Robyn has not always been an advocate for clean food. She founded Allergy Kids in 2006 to spread the word after her youngest child suffered a sudden allergy to eggs. In her book she traces her journey from conservative mother to researcher and advocate. She now works tirelessly to create awareness of children’s issues regarding food safety.

During the interview, we discussed GM foods. Robyn mentioned a recent ruling against genetically modified sugar beets. You can read more about this here. The USDA’s approval of GM beets was found to be unlawful. This is not because food safety studies were not completed – food safety studies are not required of GM foods. However, environmental impact studies were not completed. It is encouraging that many companies have opposed the use of GM sugar, and I imagine that this is due to public pressure. It is my hope that parents like Robyn will continue to unite and lobby for clean, safe, and sustainable food.

Robyn encourages our listeners to believe in their ability to affect change, to move forward with baby steps, and to try to do one thing to move in the right direction.

Updates

Thanks for all the support out there! We truly appreciate our 103 fans on Facebook and our 2,050 fans on Twitter. We’d like to encourage you to subscribe to our newsletters and Podcasts and to review us on iTunes. We now have CDs for sale so you can take your favorite show with you in the car or pass it on to a friend or relative.

Atlanta fans, if you have not purchased your tickets for FRESH the movie, be sure to do that today! If you do not live in the Atlanta area, you can find a screening near you here.

Karen, a master food [...]]]> Karen K. Brees , Ph. D., author of The Complete Idiot’s Gude to Preserving Food is the subject of Cathy’s interview today. Her book is a great beginner’s reference on canning, freezing, pickling, and more. The Podcast interview can be played on the device below or downloaded from iTunes, Zune, or Stitcher.

Karen, a master food preserver, lives on a ranch in Idaho where she raises South African Boer goats (for meat) and vegetables. In spite of a small growing season, she manages to produce a large bounty of produce for her family. By preserving her harvest, she and her husband enjoy local, sustainable food year round. Food preservation techniques used to be handed down from mother to daughter, but many of these traditions have been lost over the last 40 years as modern, processed, convenient foods filled the supermarket shelves.

With the recent interest in eating local foods, eating seasonally, and home gardening, there is an increased need to learn these skills once taught at home. Karen’s book is a good beginner text that gives newbies the basics in a wide variety of skills including food safety, freezing, canning, pickling and fermenting, relishes, jams and jellies, drying, salting, smoking and root cellaring. Learning to preserve your sustainable, seasonal food can save you money, as well!

I’ve used a couple of recipes from the book and they were easy to do from her clear directions. I put up 7 pints of Wilma’s Bread and Butter Pickles using my own homegrown cucumbers. Karen describes these as “the best you will ever find,” and I have to agree. They include 3 ingredients I haven’t used in bread and butter pickles before. I’ve also put up a beef brisket from Natures Harmony Farm using her corned beef recipe. I’ve made this once before from a Julia Child recipe. I need to wait another three weeks to see how it stacks up, since the corning process takes 4 weeks.

If I’m ever successful in growing more cabbage than our cabbage worms can eat, I’d like to try her sauerkraut recipe. One reason I’ve been hesitant to attempt this is insecurity about what might go wrong at each step. Karen includes a thorough troubleshooting section to address these concerns, detailing what to expect when things are going right and how to know when it has gone wrong.

In the interview, Karen discusses some helpful tools and hints that are helpful to know. The supplies and gadgets she discusses can be found at our Amazon Store.

Chapter 6 is devoted to the freezing of meat, poultry, seafood and game. This includes tips for wrapping, identifying cuts of meat, definitions, and more.

We’d love to hear about your favorite techniques for preserving the harvest and your experiences with them. Leave comments below. Write in any questions you have for Karen.

New Products

Please check out our new products page to check out CDs from some of our popular interviews on sustainable food. We hope you will consider purchasing these for your self or as gifts to support our work for the sustainable food movement.

Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund

We recently issued a Call to Action to demand clean, sustainable real food sources in your products. Current laws and regulations to not reflect the growing respect for sustainable family farms, according to the Weston A. Price Foundation’s Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund. Check out their website to see all the hard work they are doing to help your local farmers. They need your support! Consider making a donation today. You’ll be glad you did.

Real Food Wednesday

This blog is participating in Real Food Wednesday.