Made with LOVE

Whew, this GAPS birthday party prep makes cooking from "grocery store scratch" seem like drive through fast food service!

So far, we are making 2 flavors of Ice Cream and some kind of cupcakes with icing. Eric has been experimenting with the ice cream for about 3 weeks. We have been enjoying the practice. Today I started working on the cup cakes...still have some work to do in that department, but we are getting closer!

Here we are the day before the big day.... so far we have some ingredients ready to go:

1. 10 cups of  home fermented cream (sour cream)- takes 24 hours and typically done in 4 cup increments
2. Soaked, Sprouted, Cooked and now dehydrating Beans to make into bean flour....I hope. This is about a 4-5 day process. 12 hours soaking, 2 days sprouting, half a day cooking, 24 hours dehydrating, THEN I can Grind it into flour for the recipe. But the good thing....only costs like $1.70 per pound, instead of $8 per pound for the nuts.
3. Soaked and Dehydrated 20 cups of Almonds which will be made into Almond butter for the cake batter (not all 20 cups thank goodness, that would make one very expensive, even for a GAPS recipe, cake.)
4. Cooked down 1 lb of strawberries into Jam
5. Made Butter

These are the steps to prep the Ingredients, so that tomorrow we can mix them up into the final recipes. Speaking of recipes...still working on the cake recipe. Looks like we might be having muffins for breakfast, lunch and dinner...again. (well not quite, but today we did have muffins for breakfast as well as for dinner tonight with leftover cold roast.)

This may seem like a lot of work, but I was just thinking....we source most of our ingredients, I don't have to go milk cows, or skim cream, or gather chicken eggs, or even pick strawberries (although I do have about 10 plants going and although I know the first year is supposed to be lousy, I still hope we get a few!)  I am really shocked how far removed Americans are from our food supply. I feel like I've come a heck of a long way when it comes to real food, but I'm seeing we are just at the tip of the iceburg  to reach self sufficiency!

Sourcing may be a bit of additional work, but there are still about 50% of our foods that either are mailed to our door, thanks to the awesome internet...or we are able to pick up at the local Whole Foods store, but I do hope there is a day that we don't have to count on them either....although I don't see myself mining salt and not even sure, what all that would even entail. 

Hubby took the plunge and as of today is a bee keeper. He built the hive this afternoon and a friend caught a swarm and brought the bees to us this evening! So cool, we might have our own honey someday!