Hey! I’m Brittany. I’m a wife, mom of 3 and a Libra. I enjoy hiking and gardening with my family, painting everything in my house green, and eating cookies for breakfast.
Like a lot of parents, we decided our diet needed a huge overall when we found out we were expecting our first child. Still freshly out of college and relying heavily on fast food, pizza, and highly processed boxed dinners, it was overwhelming to say the least. We figured we had until our son was beginning to eat table food to figure out what in the world to feed him.
After months spent reading about the pros and cons of every single diet type out there, we settled on a “diet” that made so much logical sense to us, still allowed us to eat food we loved, and that we knew we would be able to stick with as our family grew. Basically, it was a Real Food diet. This means eating food made from scratch, with real, healthy ingredients. We avoid processed foods, refined sugar, hydrogenated vegetable oils, synthetic additives and food colorings. Instead focusing on nutrient dense, nourishing foods that our ancestors thrived on for thousands of years. We take most of our guidelines from the Weston A. Price Foundation, which is a wonderful resource for learning about nutrient dense, ancestral foods. This means:
-Fermented foods (homemade yogurt, kombucha, and lacto fermented pickles)
-Free range and grass-fed meats and dairy products (these products are becoming much easier to find in grocery stores, although we still prefer to get ours from a wonderful local farm. We also have a small flock of backyard chickens, and love having fresh eggs!)
-Soaked or sprouted grains, nuts, and seeds (this minimizes enzyme-inhibitors making the nutrients more available)
-Healthy fats ( like grass-fed butter, ghee, avocado oil, chicken and pork grease, and coconut oil)
-Homemade stocks and broths (I use a free-range chicken from our local farm to make a super simple stock, plus a few cups of delicious shredded chickens)
In theory all of this sounds wonderful. Eating the foods our ancestors ate before the invention of fast food and boxed meals sounded perfect. We had visions of healthy, thriving little children happily eating fermented cod liver oil, plates full of vegetables sauteed in grass-fed butter, and large roasts of free range beef. But the reality was, I had absolutely zero cooking skills.
Eventually, a few years and another baby later, I found myself not only enjoying cooking meals from scratch for my family, but being relatively confident in the kitchen. Then in 2016, we realized we needed to try cutting gluten out of our diet temporarily to heal some long standing health issues. A few medical tests and amazing health turnaround later, we realized this was going to be a permanent lifestyle for us. We had already done a complete overturn of our diet when we embraced real food, so we took this in stride and began reworking our old recipes to cut out all gluten. Five years later, we can honestly say that we don’t miss gluten at all. Besides, GMO refined and bleached white flour isn’t something that should be part of anyone's diet. (If you can eat gluten, then sprouted, whole-wheat organic flour or a traditional fermented sourdough is the way to go!)
Nowadays, you can find gluten-free replacement for nearly any food imaginable even at the most basic grocery store. Even name brands are starting to make gluten-free versions of their products. And while this is great in a pinch or for a special treat, these products are still processed foods full of fillers and ingredients void of any real nutrition. They are made mostly with flour mixes of non-organic rice flour, and then sweetened with tons of sugar since rice flour has very little flavor on its own. We had already stopped eating processed foods years ago, so we certainly did not want to start now that we couldn't eat gluten. So this started the long experimental process of making really healthy, really tasty foods that naturally were free of gluten.
It seemed like every time I would try to find a gluten-free replacement recipe online, it would start off with “gluten-free all purpose flour”. So I tried dozens of them. Sometimes the texture was off. Sometimes the flavor was off. Oftentimes both were off. And these flours were rarely organic, and usually had lots of ingredients I didn’t recognize (various chemical fillers and binders trying to make rice and potatoes behave like wheat.) They certainly didn't fit into our “real food” lifestyle so I decided to skip the gluten-free all purpose flours for good and stick with single ingredient flours like almond flour, sprouted oat flour, and simple starches like tapioca or potato.
The aim of this blog is to share the recipes we have spent years perfecting using healthy, real ingredients. These recipes taste good. And not just “good for being gluten free”, but actually, really good. I’m confident you could make these recipes for friends and family and they would never guess they were gluten-free. And even people who can typically tolerate gluten can certainly benefit from less refined, bleached,GMO wheat flour in their diet. Replacing a white flour chocolate chip cookie with an almond flour one adds more protein and healthy fats to your kids snack.
Our diet is certainly far from perfect. Our kids consider chocolate a food group, and gluten-free pizza feels like a godsend on Friday nights after an insane week. But having an arsenal of healthy, gluten-free snacks, staples, and dinner recipes on hand makes life so much easier.
Our hope when putting this blog together is to share the recipes we have spent years perfecting with other families who are facing huge diet overhauls. It’s intimating, it's frustrating, but it’s one of the most important things you can do for your family. We hope you love these recipes as much as we have loved making and sharing them!