Saturday, 20 April 2013

RAW GOAT'S MILK FOR KEFIR!!!

I have found a great supplier of RAW goat's milk for making kefir.  This company is a very small family farm and there may be a waiting list for their products.  In our opinion this only makes it all the more precious.  We owe it to small family farms like these to keep them in business and give them our support and appreciation.  This is where integrity meets quality and the outcome surely can only be health and happiness for all concerned.
see:  www.chucklinggoat.co.uk

Chuckling Goat
2012 Janey Lee Grace Platinum Award Winner
Rated 9 out of 10 by the Daily Mail
As featured in the Western Mail
www.chucklinggoat.co.uk
tel: 01239 654 672
mob: 07967 212 942

Thursday, 14 February 2013

Another gain for Kefir

Yesterday's (13th February 2013) Institute of Food Technology (IFT) Newsletter discusses how the previously clear lines between mainstream foods and "speciality" foods is becoming increasingly blurred.  It appears that the Yoghurt/Kefir group is the fastest growing food sector in the US.  As we all know, what the US does today the UK does tomorrow, so ride the wave and learn more about Kefir; Nature's Little Miracle from Doctor Enid.

See the whole article here:  http://www.ift.org/newsroom/news-releases/2013/february/13/foodie.aspx

Wednesday, 13 February 2013

Live, Fresh Kefir grains are now available on eBay:  

 eBay item=111012398434


...or from the clinic shop as before (undergoing a little renovation, so if you can't find them on the shop, go to the ebay item instead).

Quick Cheat's Green Smoothie Recipe

For those of you with busy lives and no time to juice fresh fruit in the morning, try this super-easy and super-healthy quick green smoothie recipe.

400 mls Innocent or Supermarkets' Own brand Mango Smoothie
250 mls fresh filtered cold water
couple of ice cubes
half a fresh mango (wrap the other half up for tomorrow) or half a banana
Great BIG handful of spinach leaf or baby spinach

Blend thoroughly with a high-speed blender until nice and smooth.  Water down again if necessary and add a little honey or Sweet Freedom or Agave to make it nice and mouth-watering to taste.

This might not be all raw and fresh (the smoothies in the shops are all pasteurised), but I have found this makes taking the green drink daily SO much easier and quicker;  a green smoothie made with commercial fruit smoothie as a base, teaming with live enzymes from the spinach and the mango is better than a bowl of cornflakes, a cereal bar .... or practically anything else you could buy.

Remember, it is not the Food in Your Life that matters, it is the Life in Your Food!
The spinach is the message, the smoothie is just the messenger!

Monday, 11 February 2013

Right!  We're back!! Couldn't believe how long since the last post but hey, we are trying to get modern, here!

Super Yogurt


Yogurt for Super Heroes?


Why buy silly little yogurty-pot things from the supermarkets when you could have SUPER-YOGURT...?

 THIS Super-Yogurt Mix is Billions of times more effective than anything you can buy:


Stage 1:  Each day, we strain off our lovely creamy and mild kefir (my particular favourite method is to not culture it for too long or too warm and it stays lovely and thick and mild;  we use organic whole milk at the moment because the unpasteurised milk farm is not producing), and we add it to the most incredible home-brewed yogurts (more below).  If you want to buy some kefir grains, just pop into the Taymount online shop:  Taymount Online Shop and place your order there.

Stage 2: We make a yogurt out of Mutaflor - which is a brand name of a strain of Escherichia Coli (E.Coli) sub-type Nissle 1917.  We have found that the tests for Gut Profile Analysis for many people suffering from IBD, IBS and other gut disturbances show alarming co-variances with low or undetectable levels of the beneficial members of the E.Coli family.  So we toss that into the mix as a great preventative.  

We buy our Mutaflor from Berlinde Apoteke in Germany (mail order) and we brew up our own yogurts using UHT organic whole milk, fruit sugar and pop it in the the dehydrator in 100 ml pots from ebay.  Works quite well after about 20 hours incubating.

Stage 3: We make another type of yogurt from the clinical-grade super-probiotic called VSL3.  One single-dose sachet contains 450 BILLION live organisms so we take one sachet and cultivate it with a whole litre of milk so it makes one packet go a very long way (good economy here) and activates the freeze-dried microbes right up front, so they get to work as soon as you swallow them, helping the mouth and oesophageal membranes (yes, we need helpful bacteria on all our mucus membranes) and hopefully enough survive the stomach conditions to spread their goodness into the lower regions of the digestive tract where they are so very needed.

Stage 4 - The MIX: So our daily yogurt super-blend is one or two 100 ml pot of home-brewed Mutaflor yogurt, 1 or 2 x 100 ml pot of home-brewed VSL3 yogurt, mixed into about 600 mls of creamy kefir.  Then the combination is enhanced (fed) with an extra spoonful or two of FOS - Fructo-oligo-saccharides, which feed the probiotic yeasts and bacteria further;  I like my yogurts nice and mild and sweet - and so we also add a little commercial drinking yogurt like Activia or Supermarkets' own drinking yogurt JUST TO MAKE IT TASTE NICE!  Being healthy doesn't have to mean being miserable and so we add a little bit of what we fancy just to make sure that we want to come back tomorrow and have some more.  You could also use a fruit smoothie to add a little flavour and sweetness if you didn't want to use commercial drinking yogurts. 

This is what I call SUPER-YOGURT.  It tastes superb, nice and cool and mild and creamy and I know it is so chock full of the biggest range of probiotics I can get into a single glassful.

 Be warned:  As soon as you mix this formula, you may get secondary fermentation from the fruit sugars in the commercial yogurt or the smoothie and the FOS, so mix and drink fairly promptly, or make sure the cap is strong, you will get a little exhale of CO2 if you leave it for any length of time after mixing.  They do sit for the best part of the day in the fridge without incident, but you might get that little sparkle on the tongue if it does a secondary fermentation (and personally, I don't like that sparkle in yogurts, but I love it in Kefir D'Uva which is kefir made in red grape juice, and it is like red champagne!). 

If you would like more information about kefir or anything mentioned on this page, you could buy the Kefir Book downloadable from the new Taymount website - coming soon.  Drop an email to Dr. Enid if you want to place an order for the book when it is ready - should be less than a month away.  Price is expected to be around £4.95.

I have tried culturing Symprove but it doesn't work in milk.  So sometimes I throw in a capful of Symprove into the MIX just for good measure, but it doesn't seem to add anything to the whole, so I would take Symprove separately on a completely empty stomach, as directed.

If there are any more strains or combinations of probiotics that anybody knows about, we are willing to try culturing them to add to the mix, so please add your comments.  Our kefir is a micro-community and we are also a community on a slightly bigger scale, our strength is increased when we work together in a symbiosis, just like the kefir microbes.  So the more we share our information, the better THE SUPER YOGURT can become.

NOTE:  Always sterilise any and all objects that come into contact with any culturing for yogurts - the exception to this is the wonderful Kefir, which is self-regulating and annihilates any foreign microbes that stray into the kefir colony, but the others are incubated in warm (38-40ÂșC) conditions so if you are not sterlising everything, you could be culturing some harmful microbes.  I use Milton steriliser tablets for baby feeding bottles and do EVERYTHING that might come into contact with the milk and yogurt starter solution.  Just to be sure.

Yours in Health

Dr. Enid