Give us this day our daily bread...

How about we talk bread today, does that sound good?  I know there are a lot of people on gluten free diets right now and if you're one of them please don't be offended.  I have a slightly educated opinion on that subject, but for now I'll keep that to myself.  I should educate myself a little more on the subject of gluten intolerance before I stick my foot in my mouth!  What I want to talk about today is the wonderful goodness contained inside that beautiful, tiny little thing we call the wheat berry.  Wheat has been around from the foundation of the world.  Jesus munched on it as he walked through fields.  It has been found in various pyramids, buried for centuries.  Bread is a part of nearly every meal.  So what's in a wheat berry?  May I enlighten you a bit?

So let's first look at the physical body of a wheat berry.  It is composed of 3 things... the bran, germ, and endosperm.  The bran is the hard outer layer of the berry. Bran is particularly rich in dietary fiber, essential fatty acids and it contains significant quantities of starch, protein, vitamins, dietary minerals and phytic acid.  It is not present in store bought flour.

The second part of the berry is the germ.  The germ is the embryo of the plant that will grow into a new stalk of wheat.  Wheat germ is a concentrated source of several essential nutrients including Vitamin E, folate (folic acid), phosphorus, thiamin, zinc and magnesium, as well as essential fatty acids and fatty alcohols. It is a good source of fiber and is rich in polyunsaturated fats, which have a tendency to oxidize and become rancid in storage, which is the reason why the germ is also removed from store bought flour.

The final part of the berry is the endosperm. It surrounds the germ and makes up about 83% of the berry. It is food for the embryo and consists mainly of starch but can contain some oils and proteins. This is what store bought white flour consists of. This is what you eat when you buy bread from the store.  While there are some vitamins and minerals added back to the flour, they are synthetic and not at all good for you! Encapsulated within that tiny little wheat berry you will find nearly every essential nutrient your body requires.  In fact, of the 44 known essential nutrients we need, only 4 are missing from wheat: Vitamin A, B12, and C, as well as the mineral iodine.

If a person were to decide they wanted to give up the store bought bread and start making their own they usually start with one question...where do I begin?  In my opinion you start with the right equipment.  If you try to avoid paying money on the front end, you will eventually pay it and sometimes even more.  The 2 major pieces of equipment I suggest a person invest in are the WonderMill or NutriMill, and a Bosch mixer.  The mills are the best on the market as far as I'm concerned.  The flour produced is perfect!  The Bosch is equally important as I have found that it is nearly impossible to make a bad loaf with that baby!  You can find them at Joyful Living.  That was the cheapest I could find for the combo plus free shipping.  There are several resources available to anyone willing to look for them.  I could list a million resources here.  One that I will definitely recommend is The Bread Beckers.  This is where I learned a lot in the very beginning.  She also has a free CD I highly recommend. On the CD you will learn about the reason the bran and the germ were removed from the flour and what happened to a test group of dogs that were fed the while flour without the germ and bran.  It's really scary stuff.  Just be warned...the more you hear and read about store bought bread, the less you will want to eat it!!

Now as for my bread recipe...I will share my recipe, but I will also tell you this...I have to tweak it every season.  With each new season brings a whole new climate...even inside my house.  My current method is as follows:

The MilkMaidMama's Whole Wheat Bread Recipe
3 cups warm water
2.5 Tablespoons yeast
1/2 cup coconut oil
1/3 cup honey
2 teaspoons sea salt
Several cups fresh ground wheat mixed with a few cups of Unbleached white flour  (I use the unbleached white flour to make my loaves a little lighter...you can totally leave it out if you want to!)

So I add the first 5 ingredients to the Bosch and turn it on speed 1.  While the mixer is running I add the flour 1 cup at a time until the dough is pulled from the edges and no longer sticks.  I add it this way to give it plenty of mixing/kneading time.  Then I turn off the machine and let it rise until doubled in size.  After it has risen, I turn the mixer on speed 2 for 10 minutes.  Once it has kneaded for 10 minutes I place in 2 generously buttered bread pans.  I have metal ones and I also have the pampered chef pans...I really like the pampered chef pans even though they are small!!  I let the dough rise in the pans until it is just above the top of the pan, then I put it into a preheated oven (350 degrees) and bake for about 30 minutes.  Time will vary with various ovens.

Our family can easily go through 2 loaves a day!  We love the bread!!!  It is extremely filling and I feel good about serving it to my family.  This recipe is versatile and can be the base for anything from cinnamon raisin bread to cinnamon rolls to donuts!

If you decide to take the plunge and begin making your own bread, remember it is a process.  You are working with living things here...you will have good loaves and bad loaves.  Don't be discouraged if your first loaf is as hard as a brick!  I still turn out a bad one every now and then!!  The best thing to do is to keep trying... keep perfecting it.  You will be so glad you did!!!  And your family and friends will love to eat your bread!!

If you have any questions or anything to share or add please leave a comment!  I would love to hear from you!!!  Until then...happy baking!!!

Hello. My name is Debbie and I'm a smell-a-holic...

In light of the previous post you may get the wrong idea. Let me clarify.

I love smells... the good ones! Every place I go, naturally one of the first things I do is sniff it up.  If your faculties are in place and in good working order you can't help but to smell. You can tell a lot about places, people and things by how they smell, right?  You smell your food to make sure it isn't spoiled. You smell your baby's tooshie to make sure there's no prize for you. You smell your vehicle to make sure there's no funky sippy cups or dirty diapers accidentally left in there... well, maybe the last one is just me, but you get my point!

Living on a farm affords my sniffer lots of practice. I sometimes gets sensory overload from all the smells. Working with cows always ends up in some bit of poop to deal with. Your either in it or avoiding it, but most certainly at some point you will be smelling it. It honestly isn't that bad compared to the smell of their urine.  It must be the nitrogen in it that gets me but I really can't stand the smell of their urine. I will tell you, though, the absolute, most horrible, most disgusting smell on the farm is, to me, chicken poop. I can't even describe it to you! Just thinking about it makes me gag!

So knowing the variety of not so pleasant smells experienced on a farm and keeping in mind my addiction to sniffing places, you can understand my paranoia when it comes to the way my house smells. I remember watching an episode of wife swap where a dairy farm wife swapped places with a city girl-diva type. The diva went on and on and ON about how horrible the farm house smelled. My paranoia meter went through the roof!

Now enter in the wonderful aroma of essential oils. I absolutely love, love, love using essential oils. There is literally an oil for everything! I use oils every single day.  Sometimes I am fighting a sickness or sometimes preventing a sickness and sometimes I just want to fill the air with the healing aroma of an essential oil.  I clean with oils.  We use oils as deodorant.  We brush our teeth with the oils. As you can see the essential oils are very versatile.  Except for some of the citrus oils, essential oils never go bad.  They are safe for the very old to the very young.

I use oils from Young Living.  I've spent many years using oils and Young Living is the best. They are the only oils you can actually know where they come from. Young Living has their own farms all over the world, literally! Equador, France, America, Oman.... just to name a few places.  All those other oil sellers are just brokers.. DoTerra, Now, Aura Cacia, Mountain Rose... they all buy their oils from different places and then resell them to the consumer.  Young Living also has nutritional supplements and other products based on their oils.

The other day we were running errands in town and 2 different people commented on how good we smelled.  You know for an old farm girl like me that's a great thing!  The paranoia has faded into a memory now that we have our oils. I love walking into our house and rather than smell the slightest hint of dirty kids or animals I am greeted with a wonderful, welcoming, and healthy aroma.  My sniffer is happy!
  

I sniff my baby's diapers...

I don't think there's any sweeter time with babies than to be cuddled up nursing.  I love that time.  What makes it so precious is that it lasts for such a short time; so I soak it all in.  I nurse my babies on demand.  I don't schedule it for every 3 or 4 hours.  I also nurse them to sleep.  Some people don't think that's a good idea and that's fine for them.  But I want to spend as much time nursing as possible.

Some mamas nurse for only 6 weeks. Some for 3 years and even more.   We all must go our own way in this.  Babies aren't a "one size fits all" kind of thing. All babies are different, with different wants and needs.  However... there is one thing that every baby does need (besides a loving family) and that is good and safe nutrition.  What does all this have to do with sniffing diapers?  I'll get to that later! 

Ok... so nutrition...

We all know that breastfeeding is absolutely the best for infants.   Even the science proves it.  Even in the animal world mama's milk is best for the babies.  Did you know that if a newborn calf doesn't get the colostrum within 24 hours that calf will surely die?  I know that as long as I am feeding myself correctly my body can sustain my life and my baby's. 

Now I'm getting ready to get pretty opinionated here so please be advised.  I may even resort to some strong language and you'll just have to bear with me.  I don't seek to offend by any means, but sometimes truth offends until it sinks in.  Then it liberates.

Let's travel back in time to an age where Similac was not a part of our vocabulary. When a mama couldn't breastfeed her baby she resorted to goats milk or cows milk.  Even today in less "civilized" societies they use goats, cows, yaks, sheep, emus, reindeer... you get the picture.  There was no man made swish with which to feed their young.  Now fast forward back to today where there are just as many kinds of formulas as there are ice cream flavors. Formula wasn't created for mamas who can't breastfeed.  There is plenty of cow and goat milk for that. Formula was made to make someone money.  You see, they can't patent anything natural so they swish a bunch of chemicals together, call it formula, and target those poor mamas desperate to feed their babies.... and then they line their pockets with all the money rolling in.  Never mind the fact that some formulas have been linked to cancer and other degenerative diseases.  Oh but I digress.

So I nurse my babies exclusively for the first 6 months at least... then come the solids.  I fix them a nice warm bowl of rice cereal to fill their tummies. ..NOT!!!! Grains are very difficult for little ones to digest.  Why doctors recommend that as first foods I'll never know!  My baby's first food has been bananas.  He loves them!  I also mix in some liquid acidophilus to help with the transition from liquid to solid.  So the next food I'll be giving him is avocado.  It's a perfect first food for baby's digestive system. Not too starchy or sugary and loaded with good ole fat! 

There are several websites and blogs that support my philosophy.  You can agree or disagree... that's totally up to you. There are all kinds of ideas and theories that you must wade through, but definitely wade through them. Arm yourself with information.  It could literally change or even save your baby's life.

So do your research. There are all kinds of mamas out there. Which kind are you? Are you a crunchy mama or a silky mama? Are you the kind of mama who sniffs her baby's diaper or do you stick your finger in to find the prize? I've chosen my path... Have you chosen yours?

Introducing myself

It's been a long time since I've blogged.  I had my own blog several years ago but life got busy and blogging got in the way.  Life is still busy, but I'm getting a little better at managing it...just a little...ok...maybe not so much!  So why am I getting back into blogging now that we've got 7 kids (one is waiting in heaven), 11 cows, 5 goats, 2 geese, 2 dogs, and a whole bunch of chickens?  Well honestly, it's because of this driving passion I have to show people a different way of life... the "simple life" which is by no means simple...AT ALL!  Yes, we raise our own grass fed beef.  Yes, we milk goats and cows.  Yes, we keep chickens.  We also home-school and we treat our family with natural medicine...herbs, vitamins, and essential oils....Young Living essential oils to be exact.

So what started this journey through life?  Well, I'm so glad you asked!  It started with a calling.  A very soft, simple calling from a familiar voice.  It was the voice of our Father calling us to come out of Egypt.  To place ourselves under His wings.  We've trusted Him with our eternity for several years and He wanted us to take another little baby step...to trust Him with our health.  This was a big deal for us because of what we went through with our first child.  That is a whole other story, but let's just say we depended on conventional medicine for his very life.  It was very hard for us to walk away from the only "medicine" we'd ever known, but the Lord was opening our eyes to the fact that the medicine we were depending on was poisoning us.  We learned that if we were going to walk away from that security then we had to make changes...and learn...A LOT! 

We began by changing our diet.  We added healthier foods and automatically the junk faded away.  Now that was waaaay back when we only had 3 little girls.  Three more babies came along and it got complicated...at least it seemed that way to me.  I allowed myself to slack quite a bit.  But now I hear that same voice calling me back onto the path we started years ago.   This time He's shown us a little more.   We now know about Young Living essential oils.  I've actually known about and used essential oils for a while but I have just now been introduced to Young Living oils... but again, that's another blog post!

So for now I am climbing back up onto the path we started years ago.   Will it be easy?  Probably not.   Will it be worth it?  Oh most definitely!   Because when Abba calls, He has a plan much greater than our human eyes can see.  And what's great is that we won't be doing it alone this time.  I plan on dragging you all along with me,  kicking and screaming if I have to! So welcome aboard and let's do this journey together!

"Teach me Thy way, Oh Jehovah; and lead me in a plain path."  Psalm 27:11