June 10th through 17th, there’s an awesome sale happening. It’s called The Natural Mothering ebook Bundle.
35+ books and FREE bonuses — a $525 value, for only $29.97!
See full sale details, and some of the books written by experts.
Only for imperfect mothers! Get help with infant care, teaching kids to clean, quick dinners, and more!
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Each month, we have one book that is featured. This means it only costs you $5! Take advantage of this great deal to add to your collection and try some delicious new recipes!
This month’s book is Simply Summer. This summer, enjoy delicious, fresh recipes, like our favorite Mexican Pork Roast, Bacon-Wrapped Chicken with Italian Salsa (yum!), and Peach Upside Down Cake. Treat your family and friends!
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Some of the most common things I hear just after the holidays are over are all the comments about how much weight everybody gained from all the good food. I’m not a proponent for obsessing over food. I don’t pig out and I don’t starve myself. If I want a piece of chocolate cheesecake, I eat it and I enjoy it. No guilt.
One of the ways I am able to thoroughly enjoy my food without worrying over my waistline is by trying to have an 80/20 or 90/10 rule. That means that 80-90% of what I eat is nutrient-dense and completely guilt-free. The other 10-20% is allowed to be more indulgent (still no guilt!!). If I know that most of my food is healthy, I am able to give myself a little grace with the rest.
The best way to have delicious and healthy holiday foods is to make them yourself from real food (as opposed to processed food)! If you don’t cook much, check out some real food blogs (like this one and mine!) for recipes. If you have favorite holiday foods that are less than healthy, check out these ideas for swapping out the bad ingredients for good ones!
So, what will this look like when it comes to your favorite recipes? Here are some examples of refined foods gone real!
Chocolate Chip Cookies: These are something that we make every year and I knew I needed to re-create. Turns out that we like them even more with the healthier ingredients! Try out these kinds of swaps in your favorite holiday cookie recipe.
Sour Cream Dips: I used to buy sour cream and seasoning packets to make sour cream dip. I’m not sure I could even eat that, now! Bleck! Now, we make our own sour cream and mix it with a variety of things to make delicious dips!
Turkey: Rather than buying turkeys injected with mixtures of refined salt and other stuff, we use a butter and herb mixture under the skin. Juicy and flavorful! This photo tutorial uses a chicken, but you can follow it for your Thanksgiving turkey!
Chocolate: I don’t know about you, but I just love all things chocolate during the holidays! Instead of buying pre-made candy and coffee shop coffee, I’ve learned that I can satisfy my chocolate cravings with much healthier treats! One that I like to keep on hand is our Chewy Chocolate Coconut Balls. The other is my all-natural homemade Mocha!
I hope that our healthy switches help to get your creative juices flowing! If you want to learn more about easy switches and baby steps to eating healthier food, check out this post.
For more recipes and ideas, check out Wholesome Comfort and Treat Yourself: Real Food Desserts! Enjoy your healthy holiday eating!
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One of my greatest passions the last several years has been learning how to heal common illnesses and injuries with herbs and other natural remedies. Avoiding unnecessary antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals is so vital to good health, so when a non-emergency health issue arises, I turn to remedies like these.
Did you know that most ear infections will heal on their own without any intervention? When antibiotics are given, it often leads to chronic ear infections, which I had as a baby. Instead of going down that road, how about trying some tried and true natural remedies? This post has our own story of treating my daughter’s ear infection at home!
If you have ever had mastitis, you know how absolutely miserable it can be! After searching my books and a few trusted internet resources in desperation, I found a wonderful collection of natural ways to beat mastitis. (I would like to mention here that mastitis can become a very serious infection, so consult with a midwife or naturopathic doctor if natural remedies don’t make a difference quickly!)
Everybody is exposed to colds and most people get several a year. Although there is no instant “cure for the common cold,” we have found many natural ways to speed healing and reduce symptoms. In fact, a few weeks ago my husband and I started on natural remedies when our girls came down with a cold. Neither of us got it, in spite of constant exposure! This post is the first of many dealing with colds. The next will be on my site (Creative Christian Mama) soon and will have a list of our favorite cold remedy teas!
I had horrible morning (all day and night) sickness with both my girls and was desperate enough to try anything! There are several natural remedies that helped to varying degrees and something new that I will be trying next time around!
Although this could become a medical emergency and I’d recommend getting in to see a holistic dentist as soon as possible, there are things you can do for an abscessed tooth.
Here on Modern Alternative Mama, I did this guest post on a few common summer issues. You’ll find basic natural remedies for sunburns, food poisoning, dehydration, bites/stings and minor injuries.
This seems to have been spreading like wild fire and the doctors can’t do a thing for it. When a friend of mine asked for some natural ideas, I hunted through all my herbal books and got some ideas compiled. In this post you’ll also find the link to my easy and crazy-popular recipe for a salve, which is fabulous for any skin irritation!
**This post has been entered in Frugal Days and Sustainable Ways.**
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Daniel Catt via Compfight
Whether you have an entire room devoted to homeschooling or your kitchen table doubles as school space, you can make learning more fun with a little decorating creativity!
If your school space doubles as another room, you’re in good company. Most families don’t have an entire extra room to devote to school, but we can still make some fun changes that will add festivity and fun to learning at home! True, we don’t really want a diagram of a human eyeball staring at us while we eat meatballs, but there are still plenty of fun things we can do. The idea is to decorate what you already have and either try to make things pretty (while helping the school supplies blend into the background a bit) or decorate with an educational theme to make your school supplies stand out. Which one you choose just depends on your personal preference.
It helps tremendously in a dual-purpose room to have a special bookshelf devoted to school supplies and books. If you’re going with the educational theme, just choose colors that you like. To help things blend, use the colors you have already decorated with. Do you have red and white checked curtains? Buy your school supplies in red and white, then buy craft supplies to decorate containers in red and white, as well! Most of these ideas can be homemade, which gives you a great opportunity to include the kids for their “art class”! 
Lucky you! If you have a room devoted to homeschooling, you can implement all of the above ideas, plus these other ones…
There you have it! I hope these ideas have sparked some creativity of your own!
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We jumped into real food in January of last year. Rather than changing things gradually, we decided to just get it over with and do it all at once. It was quite a learning curve, but it was worth it. After well over two years of trying to get pregnant, I got a positive test just two months after cutting out all processed foods! At that time, we soaked all grains and severely limited our sugar intake (only occasional raw honey, rapadura or grade B maple syrup). I made absolutely everything from scratch for those two months, but when the morning sickness hit, I couldn’t do any cooking for months. We took advantage of a wonderful local grocery store that makes fresh soaked grain bread, along with made-from-scratch foods in their deli area. Boiling water even smelled bad enough to make me gag, so there wasn’t much cooking being done. Once the morning sickness began to eased (after the fifth month), I slowly got back to making real food, again.
There are some ways that we have eased up (more natural sugars) and there are some things we have changed (we don’t soak grains — not because I’m lazy, but I’m truly convinced that soaking to reduce phytic acid isn’t worth the trouble. Soaking if you aren’t able to digest grains well is necessary for some people, though. 
). We have an 80/20 (sometimes 90/10) way of eating, now. That means that that 80% to 90% of our food is “real” and 10% to 20% isn’t. Much as we love real food, we allow for grace in times of stress or for celebrations.
As far as what I make from scratch, everything I make is from scratch. I don’t buy any ingredients that aren’t real food (such as cream of chicken soup or corn syrup), so it just isn’t an issue. I make yogurt, broth/stock, bread, kefir, buttermilk… whatever we need. I don’t buy processed meals, so all our meals are from scratch, unless we eat out or order in (see below).
Chewy brownies. I can make fudgy, I can make cakey, but not chewy. I learned that the vegetable oil is what makes brownies chewy, and vegetable oil is a big no-no. I’ve been experimenting with coconut oil and am getting closer, but it’s still not quite right.
Every few weeks we’ll either eat out or order in, but we try to stick with places that use mostly fresh, real ingredients. I do buy a few convenience foods, like crackers, but I do my best to get the healthiest version possible. About 80% to 90% is *really* homemade.
We still eat store-bought crackers regularly, though I’m planning to start making our own, soon. On special occasions, we’ll do something like s’mores.
The other day we ordered some pizza and had soda. I drink soda about twice a year and our kids never have it, so that’s a pretty big deal. There is absolutely no redeeming value in soda and there are a lot of bad things (HFCS, artificial sweeteners, flavors and colors), so we avoid it. By the way, I used to drink Diet Coke at least once a day and now I can’t even bring myself to have a sip of it! Once you’ve avoided soda for a few months, most of it won’t even taste good anymore. Bleck!
Hydrogenated oils. They cause so much damage to a person’s body. Years before I learned about real food, my hubby was drinking coffee with powdered “creamer” every day. He actually started having chest pain at the age of 22. When he quit using the “creamer” (it’s almost completely hydrogenated oil), the chest pain quit immediately and never came back.
Make big batches! I often double recipes and freeze a meal. When I make broth, I make a ton of it. When I bake bread, I bake at least three loaves and freeze one or two of them for later in the week. When I make yogurt, I make a ton. It really doesn’t take much effort to double or triple a recipe, but it takes double the work to make the same recipe twice in a week.
Also, don’t burn yourself out. Unless there a legitimate allergy or sensitivity, be willing to give yourself some grace when you need it. The stress of refusing to be flexible will cause you as much, or more, health problems as having the occasional compromise meal.
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As the weather heats up, my natural remedies shift from cold-weather issues, like ear infections, to things like sunburns and bug bites. Much as we love getting outside to enjoy God’s creation, there are quite a few uncomfortable things to deal with. Here are some natural and easy ways to get over the discomfort and get back to enjoying the great outdoors!
I think this tends to be the number one problem that people have to deal with in the summer. We seldom use any kind of sunscreen, since most of it is actually carcinogenic. There are many natural ways to help reduce sunburn risk, but if you do get burned, what can you do? Our favorite remedy is aloe juice with lavender essential oil.
What we love about this remedy is that it does more than just cool the skin. The lavender oil actually helps to numb the pain while speeding the healing! You can mix this up in a squirt bottle and keep it in the fridge to have on hand for burns. Not only is it amazing for sunburns, but it helps with mild burns from all that summertime grilling. Just apply a squirt or two, as needed. On young children, keep the lavender oil down to 15 drops.
Along with burns, the sun can lead to dehydration, if we aren’t careful. Instead of turning to “hydration drinks” that are full of nasty artificial flavors, colorings and preservatives, try the original: Coconut water! Coconut water is the liquid from inside young coconuts and it is full of electrolytes for re-hydrating. Supposedly, in World War II, medics used coconut water IVs to save soldiers, because the electrolyte balance is a match for human blood. Not only is it healthy, fresh coconut water is delicious! During my homebirth, my hubby opened up a couple of young coconuts and I sipped on the water to stay hydrated and keep up my energy. This summer, we plan to make home-made lemonade using coconut water in place of some of the liquid.
With all of the picnics, camping and just eating “al fresco”, food poisoning can happen. When you start feeling like something you ate was a bit “off,” reach for the bentonite clay. We like to take two capsules every three or four hours until we feel better. If you prefer, you can just mix a spoonful of the clay powder in a glass of water and drink it down. I’m not crazy about that method, but for small children or people who don’t like swallowing pills, it’s a good alternative. If you mix it into water, just be sure not to use metal. What makes the clay work is that it is “charged”. The charge attracts the nasty stuff that made you sick (bacteria) and then it binds to it and carries it out of your system. If it comes in contact with metal, the charge will be lost. Bentonite clay is a fabulous, non-toxic alternative to the pink stuff at the store.
From mosquitoes to wasps, the bugs can really put a damper on our outdoor fun. Plantain is our number one choice for treating bug troubles. Not only is it non-toxic, it grows almost everywhere! Once you learn to identify plantain, you can usually just look around and pick a leaf when you need it. You can buy dried plantain from a health-food store, but why do that if you can get it for free?? Our favorite way to use it is to pick a leaf and just start rolling it around over the bite/sting until the juices come out (be sure there isn’t a stinger still in the skin, first!). Repeat as often as needed. I can personally assure you that this does work for wasp stings, assuming you’re not allergic to wasps. I managed to upset an entire nest of wasps which then attacked my foot and ankle. Baking soda did absolutely nothing, but the plantain provided instant relief! As a side note, in that situation the long and thin plantain worked a lot better than the shorter and rounder leaves.
Summer fun can quickly lead to injuries. For scuffs, cuts, bruises and even broken bones, we use comfrey. Comfrey is an herb that “knits” the injury back together. My dad used it for a broken toe and it healed in record time. I have used it for a sprained hip and it worked when nothing else did. We use it all the time on everyday bumps, bruises and scrapes. The only caution is that if you have an open wound, don’t use it until you are certain that there is no infection and that you don’t have any debris left in the wound. It heals skin so quickly that it could trap dirt and germs in the wound, if you haven’t cleaned it well. We have dried comfrey for making poultices for serious wounds, but we also keep comfrey salve on hand for quick applications on minor injuries. You can buy the salve ready-made, or use dried comfrey to make your own!
Now that you have some natural remedies in your arsenal, get out there and have some fun in the sun!
**This post has been entered in Wildcrafting Wednesday, Frugal Days and Sustainable Ways.**
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