Eating healthily...or trying to

If you're a fan of my blog on The Lady website, you may have read my latest blog for them, which details the difficulty of eating healthily out here - despite living in one of the major agricultural states (Kansas is the number one wheat producer in America). Not only is it difficult to find organic meat and un-messed about with milk (unless you go to Whole Foods) but I'm convinced that the alternative - artificially altered dead animal and 'vitamin enriched' milk - is actually making me fat.

So I was overjoyed when a friend emailed me about Bryant Family Farm, which strives to produce "Christ-centered service in all areas of our lives and business." The bit I was excited about was the organic, free range chickens, beef, milk and eggs that they sell - not to mention goats milk and local honey.

So I took a trip. And it was so fun.

We (I took a friend along) were greeted by the garrulous Dana, a rosy-cheeked, smiley woman who is the matriarch of the Bryant family and mother to Sarah (18), Nathan (14), Jonathan (12), Rachael (10), & Samuel (8), all of whom are home-schooled and carry out the chores, which including feeding the baby goat kids, making pens for the chickens and collecting the eggs. We saw the baby kids, their mothers, chickens in various stages of development and happily munching cows. Then I bought three chickens (dead, to eat), a gallon of goats milk, some honey and some eggs. And Dana, bless her, threw in some home-made goats milk feta (powerful stuff, good on baked sweet potatos) and an enormous jar of cream, half of which was whipped into a pavlova and the other half of which is sitting in the fridge, waiting for me to make butter with. Yes, butter. Apparently it's really easy and all you need to do is bung it in the food processor and blend it for a bit, and it turns into butter. Dana gave me a piece of muslin to rinse it out in afterwards. Then you salt it and shape it and presto, homemade butter.

I left feeling inspired and hopeful. My total shop at Bryant's cost me less than $50 - significantly cheaper than it would have been to buy the same amount of food in the local supermarket, and worth ten times more for knowing that what I was buying hadn't been messed about with in any way. There are people out there doing it, you just have to find them. And then you go home and make butter. Simples.