more local finds

So my sister has been going to the farmer's market in Coppell (a bit of a drive for me, so I gave her money). My mom, sister and and I have started a mini cooperative by buying local meat, eggs and dairy. Shelley lives the closest to Coppell, so she has been driving out there every week to pick up a fresh supply of milk, eggs and meat for all of us. The great thing about these farms is that most of them are organic, free range, and grass fed, something that has been important to my whole family for as long as I can remember. Growing up, we raised goats for their milk. My mom thought I had a dairy allergy, so we decided to try out goats milk instead. I tolerated it pretty well, and the thought of having milk that fresh again was very intriguing. It's been so long for me, that I literally forgot what fresh milk looks like. I forgot that when you buy a gallon of milk in the grocery store, that it has been heated to nearly 280 degrees, homogenized and standardized...even organic milk (gasp!). Shelley couldn't say enough good things about the way this milk tastes so I had to give it a shot. One thing that amazed me was that she told me that this particular minimally processed cow's milk didn't seem to affect her asthma at all. She had gone off of dairy weeks prior thinking milk was the culprit of her constant asthma symptoms, and it helped, but she decided to branch out and try really fresh milk, and voila..no problems. If any of you haven't seen fresh milk, it looks like regular whole milk but with a layer of fat on the top. This is because fresh milk has not been homogenized; a process in which milk is separated from the fat and then put back in in uniform amounts to create store varieties like 2% and1% milk. Milk is then pasteurized by heating it to 280 degrees to destroy bacteria. This high heat also destroys many of the benefits of milk too, such as live cultures. This particular milk that we purchased was only mildly pasteurized to approximately 165 degrees, just to the point of killing the bacteria but preserving the nutrients, and is non-homogenized, leaving a silky layer of fat on the surface of the milk, which can be removed or shaken up into the rest of the milk for a creamy treat. I also purchased a dozen free range, cage free, antibiotic free eggs (I like to call them happy chickens), sliced smoked ham (made from organic pork) a whole chicken for roasting and a pound of ground beef from a grass fed cow. This morning I decided to sample some of my purchases, by making scrambled eggs mixed with a little milk. When I cracked the eggs open, it took me back to my childhood. We used to raise hens for meat and eggs as well. The difference in the yolks is amazing. Store bought eggs usually have light yellow yolks, but these fresh egg yolks were a deep rich orange color (which I can only imagine is a good thing based on the taste) and when combined with a little fresh milk created a taste that was not even comparable to anything else. All it needed was a little fresh ground pepper and a dash of sea salt and I had a truly local, organic meal. This week I will prepare the chicken and ground beef and will probably blog about that too!

Okay, so enough about food (can you tell I like food?) I began to feel the baby kick about a week and half ago. It was pretty neat. Mark was able to feel the kick this morning for the first time but said "it doesn't really feel like a kick, it feels like a pulse or something." I assured him that it was indeed a kick he was feeling, but the baby is still small so it won't be as intense as it will be later on. Right now we keep referring the baby as "it" this and "it" that, because we don't know the sex yet. We will be finding out a week from tomorrow though, so then we can refer to the baby as the correct gender. It's funny..depending on what I'm wearing depends alot on whether I even look pregnant. And as the day progresses, I look even more pregnant because you know, I've been eating all day. By night time, I look way more pregnant than I do in the morning. I really have no idea how much weight I've gained because I don't have scales, so I will be finding out in a week how much I have gained. I really don't think it's very much. It's not that I don't eat, cause I certainly do eat! I think I just haven't hit that mark in the pregnancy when you start to gain weight more rapidly. I'm still wearing my regular clothes with one exception..jeans. I just can't tolerate them anymore. It's not that they don't fit, because a lot of them still do, it's just that pressure of the denim seam that my belly doesn't like. So, I've been wearing a lot of roll down waist pants and long tops, as well as skirts and dresses( and I'm so not a dress person).

Well, that's all I got for today. I'll post again later...it may be next week after we find out the sex!