Anyone wanting an automatic reorder? Let us know. It can be easily changed for individual deliveries, or permanently. Just read the labels carefully and check your order when you are done, as we all should.

I use it. Then I never am without my milk, cheese, meat and eggs, and I can add or subtract easily.

It’s fun to make meals for others.

Salads are good, raw desserts that are vegan, or with whipped cream, cottage cheese or yogurt, all pretty safe to share.

Fish ceviche is probably confrontable, and maybe a bison or beef carpaccio. Use a few spices, try to use raw ones, but you can settle for non-irradiated on the label for some things. Just get ones that really are lively and taste good!
A raw salsa and sour cream are fantastic on ground bison, as are various recipes in the Recipes for Living Without Disease.

Chicken or Fish Ceviche

Juice one good sized lemon and put it in a mixing bowl or each cup of chicken.

Chop organically grown, (hopefully non-soy and crab meal free) chicken or fish into small bite-sized pieces, and either add vegetables to the meat, mixing well, or just put in the lemon juice. Stir so all the meat is coated with lemon.

If you are adding vegetables like chopped onions, finely chop the sweeter onions, like one green onion or 1/4 small Walla Walla sweet onion, or 1/4 red onion, and add it to the chicken or fish.

T  Fresh Basil, cilantro, rosemary, thyme, lemon balm, all go well with chicken or fish. Add one or more, but don’t go overboard! A tablespoon total for one cup meat.

Stir well and fill small jars (one cup), and refrigerate. One jar is a good meal for most of us.

Add avocado when eating it, sour cream, cottage cheese goes well on the side, or eat it on a salad of leafy greens.

Raw pizza.
A nut crust. Or soaked and ground flax. Nuts need dates or honey to stick together. Flax can do it on its own when soaked.

Raw cheese and rehydrated low heat dried tomatoes, olives, raw pesto, pine nuts, some chopped greens. . . even some flowers like pansies and nasturtiums are good to eat.

MARILYN’S MUSINGS
I’m revisiting Bacteria, since it is such a big deal. Also refrigeration,
Bacteria? When are they good?

Our Angelo’s eggs have not been refrigerated, and so are alive. In a nest, the eggs may have to wait for ten days before the chicken sets, and then they get to develop for the next three weeks. I have read that they are good on our counters for up to four weeks. In Europe, they never refrigerate their eggs. Those wire chicken-shaped baskets our grandmas had are for the eggs to be on the counter.

I have had no problems keeping mine for three weeks or even more. But I do start checking them by floating them in water (if they float, they have gas and bacteria) or breaking them in a separate dish after the third week, just in case that egg was not fertile and died for some reason.

When the temperature has been hot, bad eggs do seem more common. Smelly, discolored, falling apart. Indications of bacterial breakdown. In some circles they are still edible, or even better for you (pre-digested)(I ate one once with no bad effects) as the Chinese used to bury eggs and dig them later to eat. They were called 100-year-old- eggs.

I’m sure the health department would disagree. But our eggs are from hens who are outside on the ground, and eat a lot of organic produce, plus organic seeds. Big difference. It also depends on how clean your own body is, and how good your personal gut bacteria are, and if your body is used to handling outside bacteria.

Refrigeration affects how eggs behave in cooking, so that should tell you something. If you are eating eggs raw for the nutritional benefit, they lose some benefit if they are refrigerated. This is true of all food when things are frozen. Much more is lost from cooking. (Enzymes are destroyed, and proteins are changed. Hence the color and flavor change.)

The cultured and regular butter will last a long time refrigerated. It becomes more cheese-like over time. Rarely you will get a spot of blue cheese mold, generally from contamination when you take some out of the jar. It can just be removed.
It really depends on your taste. I’m not sure it ever really gets unhealthy for you. It could go rancid if not kept cold when it is hot weather.

When raw, things like eggs, the foods are alive, and keep themselves from being broken down by bacteria, until they experience cell damage or death. Meats are like this too, although they break down faster than eggs. Many of us have no bad effects from our raw meat no matter how long it sits. Of course, we have been eating raw for a while. Eskimos used to bury meat for 6 months and then dig it up and eat it to handle the depression from no sun. Dried meat lasts for a long time. Milk just gets colonized into kefir, then curdled and then cheese and if drained and made hard cheese, can last for years.

Things go bad when they are cooked or partially cooked. Refrigeration slows it down. Freezing slows it even more. But neither of them stop it. The cells and enzymes are dead or damaged and bacteria are supposed to break them down. One is supposed to replace frozen food. How often? I asked Bing: how long does frozen food last? And got really good data. Most of us don’t freeze, so I’m not going to put it here, but, butter and ice cream are the least changed, and aajonus said to eat the raw ice cream within 24 hrs. I admit we at home sometimes wait longer than that. Two months is the limit for regular ice cream. 3 to 6 months for meats. The thing is, freezing will stop bacteria, but the enzymes released when the cells die in the food when frozen, keep working, slowly. So the food will deteriorate.

Butter is not technically alive, it’s fat, but there will be some bacteria in it raw. When raw, the fats are not damaged, and while they tend to stay complete, they will be breaking down into other compounds over time.

Milk is a combination of live and raw fats, proteins and minerals and . . . bacteria! They are, in a healthy, pasture-fed cow, beneficial bacteria that actually make the milk inhospitable to the “bad” bacteria. Mark McAfee actually inoculated raw milk with “bad” bacteria and couldn’t find them four days later. He did this many times to prove a point. The current low bacterial count allowed in California raw milk is actually detrimental to the health of the milk, as it would naturally grow many more “good” bacteria after it entered a warm stomach, or milk pail. I really doubt if anyone ever got sick from milk until they were starving the cows or feeding them grains and newspaper and stuff, like they did when the big switch to pasteurized milk came about in the early 1900s.

And, these bacteria are vital to the health of the baby drinking it. Of course, it is best if a human gets those first bacteria from their human mother, but many of them are the same as those in cows, or close enough to give us a good start before our stomach acid gets going and makes implantation of bacteria in our gut more difficult. (That’s why people get fecal implants now, suppositories.) My children drank raw human milk for over two years each, and are healthy and strong. Paul’s two babies drank raw Jersey cow milk and still do, and are health and strong. It’s a good thing.

Yes, and bacteria are important to our health too! Bacteria are a huge part of our immune system. And we wonder why we have all these auto-immune disorders!
The War On Bacteria ends up being a war on us. You can help those bacteria by feeding them a Primal Diet, on what our bodies developed, and add some resistant starches. We don’t digest them, but the bacteria do, and they make chemicals that are good for our brain!

I just love the way that we keep finding out how much more complex the body is—the gut-brain connections and all. We keep finding out that the old ways, of cooking things that were otherwise indigestible or caused inflammation, eating, and healing, have reason. Only tens or hundreds of thousands of years of trial and error and intelligent deduction!

Listen to Aajonus, who was amazingly right about food. Listen to your intuition. Listen to your body. You’ll do fine.

Healthfully Yours,
Marilyn At Ra