I love making sauerkraut with kids. They enjoy every part of it and get interested in fermented foods at a young age, which kickstarts taste buds geared for a healthy adulthood. It’s incredibly easy to do! Fermented foods are packed with probiotics, vitamins and minerals. They restore your gut health, which is the center of all health. Please drop your favorite fermented food recipe in the comments. Here’s how we make sauerkraut.
🥬 One large head of cabbage, remove outer leaves.
🥬 Rinse under cold water.
🥬 Cut out the core and slice into thin pieces.
🥬 Put in a bowl and pour 1-3 tablespoons of sea salt on it.
🥬 Mash the cabbage in the bowl, use your hands, a muddler or a wooden spoon. (This is the fun part for kids!)
🥬 Once cabbage pieces are almost half the size they were, and you have a good amount of liquid in the bowl, transfer to your fermentation container.
🥬 Add water to cover the cabbage and use weights to keep it below the water level.
🥬 Add dill or anything else tasty, then seal.
🥬 Our lids have a tiny hole in them that we can seal and unseal to burp the jar - make sure you do that daily to release gasses. Fermentation time may vary based on temperature of your home.
🥬 Enjoy!
Remember when herding animals required manual labor? Actually we were shooting video but the animals thought it was the end of the world and ran straight for the barn. It was the fastest feeding time on record, maybe we use the drone more often?!
Don’t forget to keep your shepherd energy supply high with good nutrition. We take the fermented cod liver/concentrated butter oil from @greenpastureproducts everyday because it is packed with vitamins A, D & K along with anti-inflammatory omega 3s. It’s fermented instead of high heat processed like most fish oils. Grab some with promo code “ALISON” and you get 10% off. https://greenpasture.org/
I wasn’t a committed homeschool mom from the second my first child was born. I did quite a bit of research because I wanted to learn more about how kids learn - and truly what kind of environments are not just best for learning ABCs but for overall health and development. I wasn’t even sure I would be a good teacher. After reading many books written by education “experts”, we landed on homeschool.
I really had to unravel quite a bit of what I thought was “school” before I could even begin. I went to the same private school K-12 and equated learning with perfect exam scores. As a student, I forgot a lot of what I crammed into my head because I wasn’t learning for the joy of it - I was learning to survive.
I have come to see how much a child learns through simply living - and being bored! They are innately attuned to art, nature, science, nutrition, play, language - if only we give them a chance. I have truly loved homeschooling my kids, especially all the time we get to spend...
I lived for many years with the idea that I would be a career woman first and someday get to kids.
Biologically, this makes little sense as it gets harder to have kids as a woman ages. But even more mind boggling, I didn’t really even think much of it, like the way one considers what he or she is having for dinner. Actually I probably put more thought into dinner. Being a mom was a complete afterthought. One day a friend and I were eating lunch in downtown Seattle and she smacked some truth into my noggin. I decided, ok what the heck. What do I have to lose? We had our first when I was 38 - I found out I was pregnant the week I resigned from my TV news job. Our second came when I was 41.
If I could talk to younger me, I’d tell her that no career is worth delaying or sacrificing motherhood. It has been the most incredibly humbling, soul-stretching, heart-throbbing, belly laughing adventure I’ve ever had.
And don’t forget to grab the fermented cod liver/concentrated butter oil from...
