Back to my own bed and the smell of my own home. Back to Maggie, our sweet boxer pooch, a very green and slightly overgrown back yard, our 3 backyard chicken pets, the sounds of urbania...sirens and trains and such, (and wondering why they are so much more frequent here than in a huge place like San Fran??), grandchildren and adult children...and back to my freezer of pasture-grazed meats.
And you're thinking I'm relieved, right? Well, indeed, there's no place like home...
But no, there is no need for relief as far as meats go, because in every area we visited...and that covers much...there was, as a matter of course, pasture-grazed, sustainably-farmed food. It was not the 'pearl-of-great-price' experience we find in our neck of the nation...oh, no. Not by far. One need not hunt down Whole Foods, privately owned health food stores, or a specialty section of a high-end grocer to locate organics, either...(Although, we did make the trek and found the selection was better in such locations.)
Still, the abundance, the awareness of the need for an abundance of better food choices for the public...It was refreshing to say the least. Maybe part of the reason Californians are more laid back than we tight-lipped Easterners is the fact that they don't have to work as hard to locate food that's good for their bodies. Cashiers don't get that 'deer-in-the-headlights' look when a customer states they're looking for 100% grass-fed beef...The store may not carry it, but every cashier at least knows what it is, and most can readily tell where it can be found.
Was it coincidence that the first little Mexican restaurant we happened upon once at our Hamilton, CA location, offered ALL grass-fed meats...(and no, it was not Chipotle)? Okay, maybe so. We weren't looking for it, we were just starving and looking for a relatively inexpensive food source. But how about the next day at the tiny little Sausalito outdoor restaurant and all the meat there was grass-fed? Again, we were just hungry tourists. And this, my friends, was a common occurrence. I mean, when you ask, "Where's the beef?" I have to say, I have no beef with California's offerings of grass-fed beef...OR chicken, for that matter. I am more than a little impressed.
Not so with raw milk. Not that it's not there. We just couldn't find it in the local Safeway, which is what I was expecting. We had very limited access to the Internet while in CA because our apartment, which was lovely in every other way, didn't have it...which really, was a very good thing. Still, that meant sitting in the McDonald's parking lot to gain access each morning and then, we mostly caught up on e-mail, wrote a quick status on Face Book, and got directions for the day's upcoming adventures. So, even though we did get a list of raw milk resources, we never did take enough time to get addresses. Thus, everywhere we went, we took quick trips into the dairy section of the local grocers, but to no avail. I SO wanted to snap a picture of myself buying raw milk directly from the grocery store...It would have been such a novelty for someone who has to jump through all the hoops of cow sharing!
But the best we could do was the gently pasteurized milk found at the Whole Foods in Novato. Oh, well. Not worthy of a photo opp, but we bought it anyway, since we were really missing our home milk and have become a little bit food-snobbish regarding milk...It really isn't worth drinking with all it's health boiled right out of it.
So, with traveling about 2,500 miles from home, spending hours on planes in close quarters with people harboring Heaven knows what in their very breath, with being in already worn-down mode when we left, and having been exposed within our own family to some pretty virulent viruses a week before our departure...HOW is it that we stayed well?
Read the other posts to this blog site and learn.
But in short, we hydrated like crazy with home-made probiotic beverages...kombucha, beet kvass, tibicos and dairy kefir smoothies daily for a full two weeks before our trip. Not that we don't always consume these beverages, but not as 'religiously' as we did in preparation for this trip. And speaking of religion, yeah, you betcha...we prayed.
When we arrived at our destination, we shopped for more kefir and drank it with organic, cultured yogurt, mixed with organic pineapple-coconut juice every morning...along with a healthy apartment-cooked breakfast. We also started taking "Airborne" the day before we left and took it every other day while on our trip. The days in-between, I supplemented with 1000 mgs. of Vitamin C...Maybe not necessary, but I wasn't in for taking chances. Breakfast with prayer was a great way to start the day and the entire regime seems to have worked for both of us!
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| Those famous sourdough bread bowls you've heard about? Not bad. Not bad at all...But you may want to share! |
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