Healthy Food – Naturally

(For 3 weeks, I did the milk cure, drinking 3 1/2 quarts to 1 gallon of raw milk each day. Except for water, all I had was milk. This is a series of posts (25) keeping track each day. For the entire series, start out on “Trying Something Old“). All links to the series is at the bottom of each article.)

Wow, two weeks have pretty much flown by.  This whole experience has been a lot easier than I thought. I’ve never been hungry or thirsty. So far, while I’ve had fleeting thoughts of non-milk food, I haven’t had any cravings at all.

I slept well last night, I had a fan going in the room. The fan is not aimed towards me, but rather is there to move the air around the room. I’m still tired today though and wonder if that is more of the detox happening.  I also woke up at my usual time of 4:30 to faint feelings of hunger. That is a first.

I’m still feeling fairly good (remarkably so).  The aches and pains I had yesterday have subsided. But I’m still planning on taking it easy this weekend (appointments and such not-withstanding). Any house chores I’m supposed to do can wait another week. The only thing that won’t wait is putting the new grill together on Sunday with GC. I’ll let him baptize the new grill on Sunday while I drink my milk.  But you can bet I’ll use it when I’m done with this.

Fatigue still finds me when I get home from work. I’m still at my best (as is usual) early in the day.

Yesterday evening, I took the milk I hadn’t drunk for the week over to a friend who had indicated that they wanted to try it. I didn’t want to waste it. My friend tried it and decided it did taste “different”, “better” than the milk they had from the supermarket, so I left it there. But the fact that I didn’t want to waste it begs the question of:

How Long Does Raw Milk Last?

An email from one of the groups I subscribe to talked about  the longevity of raw milk products this morning.  With the author’s permission, I am reposting it here:

“This topic was being discussed a few weeks ago. My two cents on milk freshness, yogurt, cheese, and the naturally long shelf life of cultured dairy products:

If you get the milk the day it is milked, it will stay fresh up to 2 weeks. If it sours, no worries, it will become yogurt with no help at all (with a little sour cream on top). Without a starter, the sour cream on top usually bitters, so you can just scrape it off and compost it if you don’t like the taste. As for the yogurt, when we have left over milk at the end of the week, we just throw it in a ball jar and leave it in the fridge for if we get low on milk (because it has an amazingly long shelf life after turning into yogurt). When we do run out of milk, we just throw some honey and fruit (usually berries) in and blend the yogurt into a tasty yogurt drink. I have some jars in there as old as two months and the yogurt tastes fine (well not like store-bought yogurt – to get that particular flavor you need to manipulate it with a bacteria starter like for cheese making – but with honey and fruit added it tastes wonderful!).

If you leave the yogurt out on the counter overnight, eventually it will separate into curds and whey (it eventually will in the fridge as well, just takes a lot longer). Use cheese cloth to drain the curds and you will get a soft cream cheese. The flavor is so/so, and of course, like with the yogurt, if you wanted to get a particular flavor, you would need to use a starter or bacterial culture (mesophillic/thermophillic, etc, or even a buttermilk culture). Or you can blend in sun-dried tomato, basil and herbs etc, and make a nice spreadable cheese. You can compost the whey or save some. I have whey in my cupboard that has been sitting there unrefrigerated for six months. After a while, it might get a little white mold on the top, but you can just scrape it off. It is a good fermenter. You can leave it in the fridge, but it will get more of a tangy bite to it if you leave it out. In Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions, she talks about using whey to help ferment the canned vegetables. You can also make a nice fermented mustard like in Aajonus Vonderplanitz’s (AV) We Want To Live (WWTL). With the whey in the mustard, it has a nice tangy bite that would be missing otherwise.

Milk is one of natures most amazing foods. It is almost as if it can not spoil. Milk turns to yogurt turns to cheese and leaves whey and of course cream makes sour cream, butter and buttermilk. Eventually the whey and cheese will grow mold, but you can scrape it off and keep eating. Amazing natural shelf life. In WWTL, AV mixes raw honey with butter to make a caramel like snack. We once unintentionally left honey butter mixture in jars out at room temperature for 3 months. It grew a thin layer of white mold on the top and the flavor aged, but after scraping the mold off it was still palatable. Now we always keep jars on hand in case of emergencies (no power). That goes for the yogurt as well. ”

 

Being My Own Human Guinea Pig

Weight is slightly up by about 1/2 a pound, but again, weight fluctuates and I’m weighing myself daily.

Blood Glucose stayed consistent during the day. My noon test probably would have been lower, but I was forced to drink 18.6 ounces (2 hours worth) of milk right after a 2 hour meeting to stay on track through the day. Drinking that much at the same time probably raised my blood sugar at noon. Bed time glucose was back in the 90’s.  At least at night, the numbers are now staying fairly low.

Day	Weight	Basal Temp	Glucose: Fasting	Glucose: Noon	Glucose: Bed
Baseline	201.4	97.9	114	104	110
Day 1	200.2	98.2	115	120	103
Day 2	198.2	100.2/99.1	124	115	129
Day 3	197.2	97.9	150	96	119
Day 4	198.0	98.1	151	116	107
Day 5	197.4	98.1	116	105	101
Day 6	198.0	97.8	134	113	106
Day 7	198.2	98.2	134	107	85
Day 8	197.8	97.9	99	102	107
Day 9	197.8	98.1	105	95	93
Day 10	196.6	98.3	94	112	105
Day 11	196.8	97.9	142	114	92
Day 12	196.8	97.9	98	103	103
Day 13	196.8	98.0	112	100	89
Day 14	197.2	98.1	107	107	95

Series

1. Milk Cure 2012: Trying Something Old
2. Milk Cure 2012: Preparations
3. Milk Cure 2012: The Day Before the Cure
4. Milk Cure 2012: Day 1 – And Here I Start
5. Milk Cure 2012: Day 2 – Why Am I Doing This?
6. Milk Cure 2012: Day 3 – Ups and Downs
7. Milk Cure 2012: Day 4 – Milk as a Health Food Part 1
8. Milk Cure: Day 5
9. Milk Cure 2012: Day 6 and Milk as a Health Food Part 2
10. Milk Cure 2012: Day 7
11. Milk Cure 2012: Day 8 and Milk as a Health Food Part 3
12. Milk Cure 2012: Day 9
13. Milk Cure 2012: Day 10
14. Milk Cure 2012: Day 11 – Halfway There
15. Milk Cure 2012: Day 12 – Milk as a Health Food Part 4
16. Milk Cure 2012: Day 13
17. Milk Cure 2012: Day 14 – Can Raw Milk Go Bad?
18. Milk Cure 2012: Day 15
19. Milk Cure 2012: Day 16
20. Milk Cure 2012: Day 17
21. Milk Cure 2012: Day 18 – Raw Milk is Safe
22. Milk Cure 2012: Day 19
23. Milk Cure 2012: Day 20
24. Milk Cure 2012: Day 21 – The Last Day
25. Milk Cure 2012: The Day After

Related articles

• A Clabbered Milk Adventure (morethanfourwalls.wordpress.com)
• Clabbered Milk Smoothie – An Update (morethanfourwalls.wordpress.com)
• Clabbered Milk (chismheritagefarm.wordpress.com)
• Sour Milk: Lessons from Scandinavia (nourishedkitchen.com)

Tags: milk cure, milk diet, Raw Milk