Team Work

First I must say that egg whites are really, really, REALLY bad for me right now.  There seem to be some gray areas in the GAPS intro guidelines.  When you get to stage 3 it says you can start making 'pancakes'.  These pancakes are made of squash, nut butter, and eggs.  Egg yolks are a big part of the diet, and we were eating them in our soups.  But these eggs, in the pancakes, would be whole eggs (at least I am assuming).  You are supposed to start any new food with only a few small bites.  Well, lets just say everyone was absolutely besides themselves to have something other than soup, meat and veggies that we kind of devoured the eggs.  Oh.  My.  Goodness.  We were in heaven, however come that evening I would say that I was in another place altogether (much more in the southerly direction).  I stayed there for almost 3 days.  Three days of being non functional.  That was not fun.  My sister said to lay off the egg whites and try again in a week.  I think I might take a break from egg whites for a year, thank you very much!

Being out of commission for three days did a number on my kitchen and on our food prep.  I am ever so thankful that I had a bunch of stuff already made, and for Jeremiah filling in with the cooking!  But after those three days we were out of ready-to-eat food.  Seriously, on this diet, you must have food up on deck.  There isn't anything that is a quick cook (except for eggs now...if our chickens weren't hiding all of them!).  So last night I had quite a long list of food prep that needed to happen.  Some things were really easy and quick, others, not so much.  I was dreading having to do it all by myself.  Well, not only did I not have to do it by myself, but I had 5 helpers!  We were able to pull it all off in about two hours.  Saoirse took over watching the boys.  This is a big help as Jonah likes to be a helper, and with the amount of work needing to be done that just wouldn't be practical.  The oldest three worked on much of the food prep as Jeremiah and I tackled the dishes.  All of our plates, bowls, pots/pan (yes, we only have one pan), mixing bowls, spatulas/large spoons, and silverware were all dirty.  All of it.  The girls started off by deboning our left over chicken we had for dinner.  Jeremiah took the carcasses and put them in the crockpot to be made into stock.  Then the girls chopped up 5 green peppers from the garden, and some onions.  We put those in the freezer.  Isabella put the almonds in a bowl to soak over night.  Moira sauteed some onions for a batch of beef stew I needed to make up that night for breakfast the next morning.  I strained out a different batch of chicken broth to put in the fridge, and strained out the beef broth.  Half the beef broth went into the stew pot, the rest went into the fridge.  Isabella unwrapped the butter and put it into a glass dish to be made into ghee.  I want to say there was something else that we did, but I can't remember it right now.  I was able to put the stew together before bed, so it just needed to be heated up in the morning.  It was pretty neat how we worked as a team.