GAPS Intro Diet - Day 25 (Stage 4)

This weekend was a busy weekend.  I felt like I spent a lot and I mean A LOT of time in the kitchen cooking and cleaning up (K I can only imagine!).  I was able to make some tomato soup, pepper and tomato soup, and some more zucchini soup. I cooked a chicken for the beginning of the week, got the kirby cucumbers in the jar to start fermenting and made magnesium oil.  Magnesium is a mineral that many people are deficient in due to conventional farming.  It is pretty easy to make with just a cup of magnesium flaks and a cup of boiling water.  Once it is cooled it goes in a spray bottle and you can spray it on yourself and absorb it transdermally so I started with it yesterday. It is suppose to have a calming/stress reducing effect as well.  I should spray some on Alex!

I also started making lard with my pork back fat.  It turns out that what I thought was going to be a two hour process in the oven has turned into a 7 hour process over two days and it is not done yet. It is pretty easy to do too - chop up the back fat into little pieces (in hindsight I would have used my food processor which probably would have saved me some oven time), put it in the oven at 200 degrees with a little water until the fat melts and the crispy bits separate from the fat. My fat hasn't even totally melted yet.... but hopefully tomorrow.

I also moved on to Stage 4 by adding in cold pressed olive oil - I made a fresh basil, garlic, olive oil 'pesto' and put that on the chicken which was pretty good.  Soon I get to make 'bread' made out of nut flour too - very exciting.

Stage 4 includes:
- Roasted/grilled meats with cooked or fermented vegetables
- Cold pressed olive oil
- Freshly pressed juices, starting with a few spoonfuls of carrot juice
- Bread made from nut flour, eggs, squash, fat, and salt.

I am not sure what I am going to do about the juices since I don't have a juicer... maybe I will break and buy the Vitamix.

I am still trying to eat soup for two meals per day and have been drinking more broth since this weekend. I cook it with some peas and onions and that makes it a little sweeter and easier to drink. Also just today my skin has totally broken out all over my chest and some on my face. Not sure if olive oil or the magnesium oil I sprayed yesterday could be the cause of that.  On the bright side it narrows down my choice of outfits for work tomorrow - something high necked and nunnish :)