Healthy Bone Broth Hot Chocolate

I'm sure you've heard of all the nourishing and healing benefits of bone broth, but have you ever tried it as a hot chocolate?

I know, it sounds odd...

You may be thinking...wait...can bone broth and hot chocolate really go together?

Lets first review the benefits of drinking bone broth:

• It repairs the microvilli of your intestinal lining, possibly reversing a leaky gut.

• It fortifies and lubricates your joints because it is high in glucosamine and collagen.

• It's high in gelatin, a protein with amino acids that supports our digestion.

• It gives you glowing skin, stronger bones and healthier hair.

• It's rich in calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, sulfur and trace minerals making it a super food for supporting your nervous system.

• It's easy for your body to digest and absorb.

And somehow Grandmas have known for centuries that it's good for us. They maybe didn't know why exactly but they knew that if someone was sick with a common cold, simmering a big pot of bone broth would be the answer.

This hot chocolate recipe is perfect for a chilly fall day. I promise that there is zero taste of meat or bones, just a sweet, comforting, nourishing treat.

I used chicken necks and feet, but turkey necks and feet that we will be harvesting November 18th for the holidays would be perfect too!

BROTH RECIPE:

- 4 Nourished With Nature chicken or turkey feet, raw
- 4 Nourished With Nature chicken or turkey necks, raw
- 8 quarts cold water
- splash of apple cider vinegar

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Cover feet and necks with cold water, add a splash of apple cider vinegar and let sit for 30 minutes. This leeches the minerals out of the bones.

2. Next, fill Instant Pot with water to the max fill line.

3. Set Instant Pot to Soup/Broth and increase time to 120 minutes.

4. Once the time is up let the pressure naturally release then strain bones from liquid.

5. Store in glass jars in the fridge for up to a week or freeze for up to a year.

* You can also simmer your broth on the stovetop for 18-20 hours if you don't have an Instant Pot or prefer a more traditional way of making broth.

HOT CHOCOLATE RECIPE:

Ingredients:

• One quart unflavored bone broth

• 1 cup milk (cow, goat, almond, coconut, your choice)

• 1 cup cream (cow or coconut)

• 8 Tbsp Maple Syrup or Honey

• 2 Tbsp Organic Raw Cacao Powder

• 1 tsp Vanilla

• 2 drops Young Living Cinnamon or Peppermint Vitality Essential Oil (optional)

Mix all ingredients together in a small saucepan over medium heat, just until warm.

This treat is so delicious to sip on and you won't feel one bit guilty because we leave out the refined sugars and questionable ingredients.

Nutrient dense bone broth combined with healthy whole food ingredients. Yum!

The only way it can get better is if you top it with these Healthy Homemade Marshmallows!

Enjoy!

Julia

DIY How To Render Pork Lard

Pastured Pork Lard is a wonderfully healthy option for a cooking fat and it’s really easy to make too!

It has a mild neutral flavor, unlike bacon grease. You can saute veggies with it, grease a muffin tin, substitute part of the butter in pie crust recipe. I have also used it for greasing a pan before cooking pancakes.

Pastured Pork Lard contains healthy cholesterol, lots of Vitamin D, it’s minimally processed, it’s local, affordable and sustainable.

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If you want to dive deeper into how good it is for you check out this blog post:

7 Healthy Reasons to Eat Lard

It’s also a good time to mention the difference between leaf lard and backfat.

Both are great to render and use for cooking. Leaf lard comes from the fat around the organs of the pig. It tends to be softer and preferred by chefs for pastries.

Back fat comes from the fat on the exterior of the pig. The fat between the muscles of the back and the skin. This is what we are using in the video tutorial. It’s more abundant than the leaf lard and what I use most of the time.

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When you buy a half hog, included is the back fat and leaf lard so you might as well utilize it. I never like to waste food, so here we go!

If you are interested in buying a half a hog or buying pastured pork from our farm, please visit our pork page of our website or see what is in stock in our farm store and shop online today!

Tell me in the comments, what is your favorite way to use lard?

Or if you are new to this…

What questions do you have about rendering and cooking with lard?

Santa's Favorite Chocolate Chippers

A homemade chocolate chip cookie recipe that Santa will love!

This recipe includes Einkorn Flour, Coconut Sugar, Pastured Pork Lard and Pastured Eggs.

You can pick up the lard and eggs in our FARM STORE!

It’s delicious and good for you too!

Check out my blog 7 Healthy Reasons to eat Pastured Pork Lard if you are new to this superfood.

Amidst all the holiday food, I begin to feel like I’m headed down a slippery slope. I find myself eating crap because I’m at a party or because someone made is special for me and delivered it to my house.

My gut ends up unhappy, my moods are like a roller coaster, and it just leaves me craving MORE SUGAR!

Can you relate?

Why not help your kids help Santa too?

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Ingredients:

• 1/3 cup Nourished With Nature Pastured Pork Lard

• 1/2 cup Organic Coconut Sugar

• 1 cup Organic Cane Sugar

• 2 Nourished With Nature Pastured Eggs

• 2 tsp. vanilla

• 3 cups Young Living’s Einkorn Flour

• 1/2 tsp. salt

• 1 1/2 cups Organic Chocolate Chips

• 1 cup nuts (optional)

Directions:

1. Combine lard, sugars, eggs and vanilla. Mix well. Blend in remaining ingredients.

2. Drop by teaspoonfuls onto baking sheet.

3. Bake at 375 degrees for 8-10 minutes.

4. Enjoy! I mean tell Santa to ENJOY!

Swing by our FARM STORE to stock up on Pastured Pork Lard and Eggs!

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I hope you enjoy these cookies as much as I do!

Do you have a favorite Christmas Cookie? Please share the recipe in the comments below!

-Julia

The time a customer made me cry

It’s true.

Just a couple weeks ago one of my favorite customers was here at our house picking up his eighth beef and after he was loaded up and headed to his truck, he stopped in driveway and said:

“I’ve been meaning to tell you this-the reason I buy from you is because I can tell by looking at your hands you work hard. And I like to support people who are working hard.”

Boom. My eyes started to well up and I couldn’t talk for a minute.

The thoughts that were swirling around in my head were:

This guy is my kind of guy if he can read what my hands look like and infer our work ethic.
Our work ethic is our character and he is appreciating who we are.
And that is why he is buying from us-because he appreciates who we are as people.
Wow.

More thoughts in my mind:

I know that you have many choices for where to buy your meat and eggs.
I know that our products are priced higher than what you can buy in the grocery store.
I know that buying from us is not always convenient if we aren’t selling at your neighborhood market.
But you do it anyway because you appreciate our character.

And when I could talk again I said, “Thank you. Thank you for seeing that.”

We do work extra hard. Blake is up before the sun every day doing chores, he goes to his day job at the grass seed company 8-5 and then he comes home and does more farm chores until dark. Saturdays are spent at the farmer’s market, Sunday is a day of moving cows, moving fence, weaning sows, and hopefully a nap.

My role is caring for the kiddos, marketing and interacting with customers, filling orders, updating our inventory, managing the farm store here at our house and keeping the homefront running smoothly. Plus I have a health and wellness coaching business on the side, oh and we are property managers for 3 rental properties here in Lebanon…because obviously a farm isn’t enough, haha.

We work hard because we believe we can DO GREAT THINGS.

We work hard because there was a time we received a hand out and it made us feel like the scum of the earth.

We work hard because we never want to hand over our destiny by relying on someone else to take care of us.

Let me share that story with you.

We had just moved to Oregon to start our farm and follow our dream of making that our full time gig. It was June of 2017 and I was 9 months pregnant with our youngest son. So we were in a new place, with a new baby coming, a new business under foot and no income.

The birth center in Corvallis where I was planning on having the baby suggested we sign up for Oregon Health Plan (probably so they knew they would get paid). Without an income we definitely qualified, but then the Oregon Trail food money started coming too. I did not remember asking for that assistance.

It was the most icky feeling when I would buy groceries to whip out that Oregon Trail card. Or to stand in the line at the farmer’s market to trade plastic for wooden food tokens.

I can’t explain it any better than I felt icky using money I didn’t earn to buy my family food.

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I do need to pause here and give thanks for the assistance in a time when we truly did need it. It was a blessing, it served a purpose, and I pass no judgement on others who also utilize this assistance for a short time.

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So we had the baby, Blake got a temporary job driving forklift at a grass seed company and we started building our farm customer base.

We got rid of that food assistance ASAP. I planted a garden, we got chickens, we joined the Lebanon Chamber of Commerce. We invested in marketing courses, we built our website, we delivered free eggs to community businesses to let them know we were here.

Blake stayed with that temporary job and moved up to working at the research farm of the grass seed company. Four years later and he’s still there, as the farm manager.

Our farm continues to grow, we continue to work three or four jobs between Blake and I to make ends meet.

We believe in this work, we feel good providing quality meats and eggs to our community.

We rest our heads at night with a peace that we are giving it our all and working our tails off in the process.

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We focus on keeping our mindset positive and progressive. We have hard days but we remind ourselves of where we have come from and where we are going and that ANYTHING is possible.

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We are super grateful for the good people like you that come into our lives who we get to raise food for.

These little interactions where a customer recognizes by the wrinkles on our hands and the dirt under our fingernails that we are working hard and putting our everything into it, makes our work so much sweeter.

So thank you for sharing your life with us.

Thank you for being our customers.

And thank you for taking the time to read this and let me pour out my heart to you.

I’d love to hear if you’ve ever had a time when someone appreciated your work and told you about it?

Yours Naturally,

Julia

Why Mental Health of our Hogs Matter

Today I felt impressed to share with you a little about HOW the mental health of our hogs affects your meat.

There is energy in everything around us. A ray of light, a flower, a field of green grass. A positive thought, a negative thought.

Energy is transferable.

When you read a disturbing headline or hear some bad news it will effect your energy and your mood.

Think for a minute if you watched a really inspirational movie and afterwards you are are on cloud 9, feeling inspired and moved.

You were energetically impacted by that movie.

Lets translate that to the food you consume.

It holds energy too.

A fresh green bean from the garden or farmer’s market has more life energy than a can of green beans off a shelf.

A pork chop from a hog raised indoors, under artificial lights, crowded with it’s siblings, all screeching and squealing at mealtime will have a different energy than a hog raised in an oak forest.

It only makes sense that if the animal you are eating lived a traumatic life that can transfer to you, either in taste or actual energy.

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The mental health of our hogs matter.

To you, to us, to them.

Both Blake and I come from careers in animal behavior and psychology. I studied natural horsemanship and taught my students to read their horses subtle body language. I taught them how to read the ears, eyes, tail, breathing, and sweat patterns of their horses.

Blake came from a career of Wildlife Biology. Also heavy in studying wildlife behavior and patterns. There is a certain savvy that comes from being a student of animals and studying their behavior, living amongst them, and working with them.

I'm sure you have that level of understanding in your area of expertise too.

Just the other day, as we were talking about how natural our pigs live, what a good life they have, and how contrary it is to how grocery store pork is raised, he told me this story:

When he was a young man he was volunteering at a zoo in Germany. His task for the day was to fill in a trench 12" wide in the bears pen. The bear had worn this ditch along the fenceline of his enclosure by pacing back and forth. He remembers that the bear would walk down to one end, stand up on its haunches and pivot the other direction and walk to the other end. Back and forth all day long until it wore a path. That bear was not in a good space mentally. The artificial environment, although humans thought it was pretty and clean, was not what the animal needed.

Pigs who live in confinement have similar displaced behaviors. Things like chewing on the tails of other pigs, excessive squealing, chewing on the bars, frothing at the mouth, climbing over pen walls.

So the solution in that world is clipping teeth, docking tails, building bars that go over the tops of pens and wearing protective ear muffs when they go into the pig barns.

Confinement hogs also live on metal or plastic slats so the manure can be washed through. Their sewage sits in a lagoon underneath them. The odor of any confinement farm is often a big complaint of neighbors, not to mention unpleasant for the hogs.

Blake remembers how noisy it was in the pig barn at feeding time growing up 30 years ago. His dad had 500 pigs at one point, raised conventionally indoors. It was an ear piercing squeal that put you on edge, and is probably part of the reason he is hard of hearing.

Not here on our farm.

Our pigs live in a 5 acre oak grove, in the fresh open air. They enjoy the natural rhythms of sunlight and darkness.

They have logs to turn over, grasses to munch, grubs to dig for, acorns to discover and lots of room to move about.

They live on the dirt, they may even eat the dirt to build their immunity. If they find a patch of clay or charcoal they might eat that too.

They don't need antibiotics, and to catch wind of their poo you have to basically be standing overtop a pile.

I know I'm preaching to the choir here, you already have found our farm, but your work is in telling others why you buy from us rather than the cheap meat at Costco or Safeway.

Your contribution can be in sharing the difference between conventional animal farming at the expense of the animal’s well being and what we do.

Please send this blog to a friend who wants to be tuned in energetically to their food.

I’m curious, had you ever thought about energy transferring to you through the food you eat?