travel journal | 01.

Sometimes all you need is to drive until the air turns salty, dive head first into fresh seafood and cocktails that smell like tanning lotion and forget for a little while.

That's exactly what Tyler and I did for the second half of last week, on what may have been our shortest and most-fulfilling beach trip yet.  We had been planning this trip since March, since about the time when the temperatures snapped back to freezing and we were getting fidgety.  For weeks I had been daydreaming about beach reading, Tyler about oysters and sandy naps.   Bright and early Wednesday morning we headed south, hoping to spend four days at the beach.

Destin was beautiful and May weather might just be my favorite for beach going.  In 48 hours, we consumed oysters, Landsharks, key lime pie slices, seafood steamer buckets and pina coladas to our hearts' desires.  We slept late and took naps, we stretched out on the beach and read books.  All the while, I was avoiding being submerged in any type of water due to an ear infection in both ears and Tyler was losing a battle with a sinus infection.  On top of of our physical ailments, we were both feeling emotionally drained from the passing of Tyler's grandmother last week.  So when a miscommunication left us having to change rooms on Friday morning, we decided we were ready to head home.  We talked about it for a while, wondering aloud if we were weird for wanting to leave our vacation.  But that's the convenient thing about being an adult, you can do what you want and what we wanted was to get back to some kind of normalcy (even if that meant trading room service for a mountain of laundry and gulf shrimp for a fridge full of leftovers.)  

And so, I'm learning, as much as you need to get away, sometimes all you need is to get back home.

the one about babies.

Approxmiately four minutes after I became Mrs. Nix, I was asked when we were going to have babies.  And it hasn't stopped.  (Actually, when I think about it, it was more like four minutes after I became engaged to be Mrs. Nix.)  We're bombarded with inquiries at every holiday and family gathering.  Each and every one of our family members (with the exception of my mother) will let you know in a heartbeat that they're ready for a baby Nix, regardless of if we are.

In short, we're not.  The reasons are far and wide, but that doesn't mean that a surprise won't catch us off guard.  So now that Ty and I have moved into this season where getting pregnant is actually a realistic, if even distant, possibility I decided I needed to know more.

Since about February, I've done my fair share of research and reading on fertility versus infertility and how to create a healthy and happy place for a entirely new human to grow.  And what I've learned is that what you eat for months before you conceive will determine the health of your baby and the happiness of your pregnancy.  We're talking about 100 days for a lady's egg and about 72 days for your man's sperm.  That means that what you're eating today will matter if you happen to get pregnant in August!  But that's the short end of the time frame -- in a lot of cultures, couples are put on fertility diets for up to a year before they get married/attempt to make a baby.  Maybe you do, but I don't know many people that go on fertility diets - or really even readily admit that they're trying to have a baby, better yet that they will be a year down the road.

I remember about four months before Tyler and I got married, I started taking prenatal vitamins.  Again, not because we knew we would be actively "trying", but rather that I want to be a good mom from the very beginning and take care of my end of the deal: being a healthy place for a baby.  But the vitamins made me sick and I eventually stopped taking them.  I'm still not exactly sure why the prenatal vitamins didn't mix well with me, but I'm not concerned with it now because through everything I've read I'm convinced that prenatal vitamins - even vitamins during pregnancy - are the Plan B.  Plan A is crazy-awesome, fertility-focused nutrition pre-conception and throughout pregnancy and breastfeeding.

Luckily, this so-called fertility-focused nutrition is one and the same as eating real food.  It's eating real, unprocessed food especially natural saturated fats with an extra focus on foods like seafood, organ meat and bone broths.  And inconveniently, many of the foods that our culture considers bad or off-limits are the exact ones that babies need to develop.  Did you know that your brain is 60% fat?  Which means that when a new brain is growing inside of you, you need to be eating fats.  Not skim milk or low-fat cream (I mean, what is that anyway?), but real, whole as you can get it fat.

It's not a temporary diet until I get pregnant or until there's a little one scooting around in my house -- it's simply implementing traditional, nourishing ways of eating until they become engrained in us.  And frankly, it doesn't hurt my feelings that I can eat bacon and homemade ice cream and July peaches and oysters on the half shell while still becoming a healthy future home for a baby.  

I find this so interesting and as an admitted research nerd I could spout off facts to you all the live long day.  But rather, there's a short resource list at the bottom of this post for more reading if you're into it.  And don't hesitate to email or comment with questions or shared interest.  

how we're starting a fertility diet //

+We're continuing to make our three food rules second nature.  We're cutting out processed foods, we're eating fruits, vegetables, meats and dairy to our hearts' content and we're limiting refined sugar.

+We're seeking out local, grass-fed and grass-finished meat so that we can have meat at our table and make stock with a good conscious.  We're even investing in a deep freezer to store 1/4 of a cow, a few whole chickens and hopefully 1/2 a pig.  (Have you written me off as crazy, now?)

+We're eating a lot more seafood.  We're getting into a routine of buying sardines and anchovies at the grocery store, and we're hoping to stock up on fresh gulf mollusks during our beach trip next week.

+We drink our milk whole and raw, with cream that rises to the top.  And we're experimenting with making everything from butter to yogurt to homemade ice cream with it.

+We're making efforts to consume more eggs, more bone broth, more fermented vegetables and dairy, more organ meat (okay, so any organ meat would be more)


some worth-while reading//
Beautiful Babies book and e-course, from Kristen Michaelis
40 fertility super foods, from Holistic Squid
Nutrition v. Vitamins, from Holistic Squid
Real Food for Mother and Baby, by Nina Planck
 

real food, and our journey to it.

I spend a lot of time thinking about food.  Stating the obvious here, I know, but bear with me.  Sure, I think about meal planning and what's coming up in the garden and recipes I'd like to recreate.  But I also spend a lot of time thinking about the nutrition of the food we buy and eat.  When I venture into a bookstore, I not only head straight for the cookbook section, but usually for the health and nutrition subsection.  I've read nearly every diet book and every eating plan guide that has stocked the shelves - most of them completely contradictory from the one I just put down.  But in the past few months or so, I became both completely overwhelmed and underwhelmed with the topics of health and nutrition.  I was exhausted, emotionally and physically, and decided that I'd had about all I could take.

I guess before you can understand where we are now, you need to understand how we got there.

Ty and I have both always felt generally healthy, with the exception of some minor hitches here and there.  We're both lucky to be allergy- and sensitivity-free when it comes to food and neither of us take any prescription medications on a consistent basis.  But I'm not convinced that we're in great health, either.  We both have serious sugar addictions, persistent headaches, low energy levels and more than occasional tummy troubles.  Ty's immune and digestive systems cause him frequent problems and I've been consistently gaining weight for the past...forever.  I mean, let's be real here -- for my entire teenage and adult life I've had a goal weight, and I've been steadily moving farther away from it rather than reaching it.  I've been vegetarian and vegan, I've given up gluten and grains, dairy and sugar.  I've been on juice fasts and broth fasts and count-every-calorie-you-smell diets until I'm sick and starving.  In fact, Ty has done a lot of these things with me.  I'm lucky to have a husband that not only puts up with me, but is willing to give up entire food groups for the sake of health, research or at the very least, five pounds.

But recently it seemed that all of the information about food and eating and nutrition that I have been cramming into my head over the years, all of the contradicting research and opinions and statistics from books and articles and documentaries started clicking.  Not that I bought into one particular way of thinking or that I somehow combined all that I had previously compartmentalized.  But rather that I started taking the nuggets of truth from all of my experiences -- the facts that I could really consider facts -- and using them to craft my own set of reasons for why we eat how we do.

My day job is in a nursing home and every single day I see elderly patients who are deteriorating mentally and physically, losing their basic functions, forgetting the details of their lives and the names of people who mean so much to them.  And what tears me apart is when I read in their medical history that their admitting diagnosis - the reason they're in the nursing home to begin with - is something preventable.  They're on more medications than they can count or even know about and to be honest, most of them have given up.  It's not fun to live that like that and many of them will be blunt with you about it.  Now, I'm in no way saying that everything is preventable.  I know that there are plenty of perfectly healthy people who receive medical diagnoses due to genetics, something unpreventable or something even unknown.  But I think we have to take responsibility for the state of our health and be critical of what we're putting into our bodies.  I know I want to be healthy.  I want Tyler to be healthy and I want our future babies to be healthy.

But here's the thing, we want to feel free to live life and eat good food.  When we go to Paris this summer, we're going to eat macaroons and beignets and loaves and loaves of bread with cheese and charcuterie.  When we go to someone's house for a holiday or celebration, we want to eat what they're serving.  And when we have children, we don't want to be paranoid because heaven forbid they might eat a slice of cake or drink a soda one day while our heads are turned.

All of these things - the sweets, the eating bread with reckless abandon - are exceptions.  We needed some rules.  Not temporary diet rules but guidelines for how we want to eat for the rest of our lives.  We took into consideration what we have learned over the years, what our common sense tells us and what our bodies crave and set our baseline.  It's the way of eating to which we'll always return.  "Rules" sounds strict, but really we're just creating new habits and until we've really done that, we need something concrete to come back to.

So far, our rules are working for us.  We have more energy, we wake up when it's time to wake up and have had less headaches throughout the day -- and I've already lost twelve pounds.  But the biggest lesson we've learned is that guilt doesn't work.  It just doesn't.  If we break one rule or all three in one night, we don't feel guilty.  Guilt. doesn't. work.

There are only three rules, but they cover a lot of ground.  And there are several other pieces and parts to the way we eat that I'll be sharing in the next few weeks.  


01.  We eat real food.  We try to significantly limit anything processed or "fake" (ridden with chemicals, additives or "natural" flavors.)  And the easiest way to determine if something fits into the real food category:  can you imagine it in it's natural state?  For example, we buy cheese at the grocery store, but I know that cheese comes from cow or goat milk and if I so chose to make my own cheese I could.  Same rule applies to the brown rice pasta we buy -- if I want to grind brown rice to make flour to make pasta, I could.  What it doesn't apply to?  Cinnamon toast crunch.  Another question that helps when deciding if food is real or not: will it eventually go bad?  Sure, Velveeta is "cheese" but its shelf life is a little too long for my liking.  

The basics of real food from Kristen at Food Renegade

Tips for real food newbies at Nourished Kitchen

Two of my favorite books on real food:
Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon
Real Food by Nina Planck

02.  We eat a lot of plants with a lot of animal meats and fats.  Mostly because of our love for the seasons, we buy most all of our vegetables from the farmer's market and we'll be eating from the garden when it's time.  Right now we're doing the dirty work of sourcing grass-fed (and grass-finished!) meat -- we're even looking into buying 1/4 of a cow (which would last us for an entire year!)  We cook with bacon fat and we're in the process of getting beef tallow plus lard from a local pig farm.  (We use extra virgin olive oil, too, but we're stopping using it over heat.)

Find yourself a farmer's market

The basics of real meat, by Kristen at Food Renegade

A list and descriptions of minimally processed fats and oils, by Jenny at Nourished Kitchen

03.  We limit sugar, significantly.  I believe with every fiber I have that sugar is the culprit of the obsesity epidemic.  And did you know that your body doesn't metabolize sugar like a food, but rather like a drug?  Tyler and I finished a sugar detox in April that made both of us realize how addicted we were, and it has motivated us to kick as much sugar from our lives as we can.  I truly believe that anyone can change their taste preferences -- we were both avid sweet tea drinkers before our detox, now we only drink unsweet.  And now when I take a drink of soda, I can practically feel it rotting my teeth.  We sweeten with maple syrup and honey, and I'm experimenting with different types of solid sugar for baking (share your favorites, if you have them!)

Meg Fee just wrote a post about avoiding sugar and included two great resources I had to share:
Regulating sugar, from NPR and a segment on sugar's toxicity from 60 minutes

Whew.  You're still here?  I'd love to hear your thoughts or questions.  As if you couldn't tell, I could talk about this for days and days.

bread + wine.

I'm sure you all know that I'm a Shauna Niequist fan.  I've read and dog-eared and highlighted in all of her books.  I follow her blog, facebook, twitter and instagram.  And every now and then I check her speaking schedule to see if she's traveling to the south, within a reasonable driving distance.

And I'm sure you all know that I like to read books about food.  So it was probably without question that I was going to read Bread & Wine as soon as I possibly could.  

Bread & Wine follows a common food memoir format -- essay, recipe, repeat.   There's something about the recipes in this book -- maybe it's the fact that Shauna feels like a trusted friend who makes each one feel approachable -- but I bookmarked almost every single one and have made several already.  (The blueberry crisp, lentil soup and breakfast cookies are all winners.)  

But, like most of the time I read Shauna's work, it's her words that stick with me.  There's always something - something she gets exactly right, that keeps ringing in my ears for days, something that will make me get up at 11 p.m. to look for a highlighter.

That particular passage came for me in a chapter called "open the door", a chapter about inviting people into your home and to your table, whether it's perfect or far from it.

"What people are craving isn't perfection.  People aren't longing to be impressed; they're longing to feel like they're home.  If you create a space full of love and character and creativity and soul, they'll take off their shoes and curl up with gratitude and rest, no matter how small, no matter how undone, no matter how odd."  

This issue is one I've been struggling with more than usual lately.  I've been overwhelmed by life, comparison and apparent perfection that other people seem to have and I don't.  But like all good and much needed reminders, this one came at the time when I was willing to listen.  This spring, I'm making it my mission to heed Shauna's advice, stop waiting on perfection and open the door.  

Full disclosure:  I received a free, advanced copy of Bread and Wine in exchange for a blog post. All opinions are my own.  

introducing | nix homeshop + a season of meals

Tyler and I have a little project.

We're opening a shop!  Nix Homeshop, to be specific.  It's been a dream and a plan of ours and we've decided to just dive right in.  The shop will actually launch later this summer (around August), but we're softly opening on Etsy to debut something I've been working on.

It's called A SEASON OF MEALS and it's the meal planner I've always wanted and never been able to find.  

For a while now, I've been looking for the perfect meal planner.  And for a while now, I've come up short.  I've used notecards, I've used a dry-erase calendar on the fridge, I've used iCalendars and online planners and Evernote.  While all of them served their purpose, I never truly stuck with any of them.  I'm a pen and paper kind of girl.  And I like that paper to be pretty and to have a clean design with plenty of space to write.  I like something solid and well-crafted, something I can hold in my hands as I sit down on a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee and a stack of cookbooks.  

So I decided to create what I needed.  While I was at it, I wanted to incorporate one of my other biggest loves and fascinations: the seasons.  I wanted something pretty and functional enough to keep at it -- something I could use for more than a few weeks.  As I was working on my planners, with the phrase "a season of meals" stuck in my head, my dear husband suggested that if I wanted it, maybe other people did, too.  So once I finished my set of seasonal planners, I took a few photos and listed them on Etsy.

There are four planners, one for each season, and they each contain a list of what food is in season along with space for writing a seasonal bucket list, space for daily meal planning and plenty of room for notes, recipes and party planning.  Ideally, they're a set -- the dates flow between notebooks -- but they can also be purchased individually.

For more details, pictures of the inside or to purchase your own, please visit our shop.    

a week of meals | winter 01.

I think a lot about meal planning.  I go through extreme peaks and valleys of recipe inspiration and the desire to cook, but I'm always thinking about it (which makes me feel extremely guilty when I eat cereal for dinner or when Tyler has campus food for 2 of his 3 meals.)

I put a lot of stock into dinnertime.  Breakfast and lunch, too, actually.  I want to cook balanced meals that are nurturing and comforting and that make us look forward to meal time.  But I'm also a self-diagnosed perfectionist.  I'm easily discouraged when things don't go as planned, when a dish doesn't turn out quite right or when it wasn't as good as we hoped.  This discouragement leads to lethargy, which leads to more guilt.  It's exhausting.

It's not that we don't like cooking on a whim.  I can't wait for the summer when meals are all about what's ready in the garden or what looked best at the market, but in this season of life, meal planning needs to happen for us.      

So, I've decided to start a column of sorts dedicated to a week of meals.  I'm hoping it will be meal planning in retrospect.  Rather than posting about the meals I intend to cook for the upcoming week, I'm going to post the meals we cooked and ate last week.  (And if we stray from the plan for whatever reason, I'll mention that, too.)  This way, I'll have an ongoing list - for me and for you - of what worked, what didn't, what was worth it and what wasn't.  I'm going to include our breakfasts and lunches also, because they're meals after all but I'll warn you up front: we're creatures of habit and tend to stick to what we like in those areas.

Let's talk technicals.  I'm still deciding how this will work in the long term -- will it get redundant?  will it be boring?  do other people care about their weekly meals as much as I do?  I don't know.  We'll figure it out as we go, I suppose.  I may hide the specifics behind a jump if I'm rambling too much.  But I will be posting links to the recipes, or giving page numbers for cookbooks if I can't find it online, to make these posts a resource for those that feel like they're drowning a little bit or just lacking inspiration.  I'm hoping to post each week on Saturday, because I personally prefer to meal plan on the weekend and I'm assuming others do too.

And you might have noticed that the subtitle of this post is "winter | 01."  We try to eat as seasonal as possible so I intend to label these posts by season because I feel like it best reflects our lifestyle.  But keep in mind as you read that we are far from perfect and give in to our in-season or out-of-season cravings more often than not.  (Yes, it's March, but it's still technically winter, so I'll keep with that until the 20th.)

lessons I've learned regarding meal planning //
+plan your dine-out nights the same as you plan the rest of the week.  It makes you look forward to it, appreciate it while it's happening and keep from eating out too much.

+it's very time consuming at first, but you'll get better.  You'll have more recipes committed to memory, a better idea of what you need in your pantry at all times and a better grasp of how to balance.  It will still take time, but not as much.

+have a system for what you liked and what you didn't.  I make notes in my cookbooks with the date I made the recipe, what we liked about it, what we would change or do differently next time.  When a recipe is darn near perfect, it gets written on a recipe card and stored in a wooden recipe box that Tyler made me a few years ago.  (This way, the box only holds our favorite recipes and will slowly grow over time.)

+have a schedule.  Within a given week, we have 2 vegetarian nights, 1 chicken night, 1 other meat (not chicken) night, 1 soup/stew night, 1 pasta night and 1 pizza/other craving night.  This helps me when I'm paralyzed by the infinite possibilities out there but it also helps me to balance.  If we're being honest, I would be perfectly happy eating pasta every night of the week but I know I don't need to (we're working on getting it down to 3 of the 7.)

+don't just write down your general plan, write down make-ahead tasks.  Many of our dinners have gone down in flames because I forgot to thaw the chicken that morning or forgot that the pizza dough has to rise for 18+ hours.

+take you weekly schedule (and your husband's schedule or kid's or whoever you're feeding) into account before you make the plan.  This semester, Tyler is in class or working until late 4 out of 5 weeknights.  For me this means that on the nights that he's actually home, I don't want to spend it all in the kitchen -- I want something quick and easy.  But the nights that he's not getting home until 9:30, I don't mind spending an hour and a half to prep.

our week of meals, after the jump.

on finding voice + books of march.

Voice, in writerly terms, is such as complex topic.  There's finding it, writing in it, staying true to it.  There's imitating what you love without becoming that which someone else already is.

Jenny Rosenstrach of Dinner: A Love Story describes it pretty perfectly on her blog:

"...the medicine I crave is reading writers with strong voices.  You know when you travel to another country then after a few days start thinking in that country's language?  That's what happens to me when I'm immersed in good fiction.  The trick is not to steal the other writer's voices, but to let them loosen your own."

I experience that thinking-in-another-language feeling almost every time I finish a good book, fiction or non.  When I finished Gone Girl, I frequently found myself narrating my life the way that Gillian Flynn writes. (Creepy.)  I did the same with Joan Didion's voice when I finished The Year of Magical Thinking.  When I'm in the kitchen, I find myself thinking about food the way that Shauna Niequist or Jenny Rosenstrach or Nigel Slater or Molly Wizenberg writes about food.  Each is unique, but they're all real, witty, a combination of practical and poetic.    

I'm not sure where imitation stops and inspiration starts.  I'm not sure when or how or if I'll find my voice.  I'm actually hoping it turns out to be some tangible thing I can chase down and tuck into my bag and bring home to keep and use forever.  But in the meantime, I like to employ this mantra: you're only as good as what you consume.  To be a good writer you have to read good writing, to make good music you have to listen to good music.    

On that note, here's what I'm reading this March.  Follow along with me at Goodreads.
01. bread and wine by shauna niequist
02. bossypants by tina fey | march's book club pick
03. vampires in the lemon grove by karen russell
04. the meaning of marriage by thomas keller