One Year Anniversary to Graining!!

I have always been fascinated with living a healthier lifestyle and actually welcome the challenge with our growing family. 

For many years now I have been very interested in the benefits of graining my own flour, but two factors kept me at a distance cost and time.  Then last year for Mother's Day, my wonderful husband finally gave me the go ahead to purchase one of my dream kitchen upgrades, a WonderMill Grain Master and a Kitchen Aide Mixer.  Oh my goodness! For the latter, I feel like I just went from the Flintstones era to the Jetson's era!!  I can get so much more accomplished in the kitchen during meal prep now with my new mixer, but today I want to focus on my God sent grain mill!!

For years I've read the benefits of graining your own flour and baking with it fresh from the mill verses purchasing over counter bread or milling your grain at a store then bringing it home to bake. It is amazing how many nutrients we loose in just one hour after milling our grain, then three hours and then 72 hours!  Our society is so fixated on *fiber*, which is very important, but they never mention all the vitamins and minerals that are equally important and lost in the processing.

Since we started this very simple step towards better health, I can say that we have seen amazing improvements over the past year in the whole family's overall health. Let me start with Dave, my husband, since I have known him 20+ years. Like clockwork, every Spring and Fall, he comes down with terrible allergies that lead to nasty sinus infections. He gets very congested and for several weeks he is quite miserable. Well this is the first year, with the exception of the four years we lived in Florida, that he did not suffer with allergies and sinus infections!! It has been amazing.  Every year with the children we can expect to catch a variety of colds, ear infections or stomach viruses.  This year we had no stomach viruses come through our household. My oldest daughter, who also suffers severe allergies, only had to fight maybe two colds. My son who is susceptible to ear infections did not have one!!  As for myself, I had only one cold, which I caught after I got pregnant. Our total over the counter medication expenses have been cut by two thirds!! There was an occasion earlier this year when we got to go on a two week business trip with Dave and when we got back, everyone started to come down with either a sore throat or sniffles. The entire next week I made sure we had breakfast with a freshly grained food item, and within three days everyone was perfectly healthy!! It was truly amazing!! 

We truthfully have not changed any of our habits other than graining our own flour! Several friends have  made comments about not being big bread eaters so for what exactly would they use a grain mill? Well, I have yet to bake my own loaf of bread. That will hopefully be the next step towards better health when I get the go ahead for a bread maker that can handle the heavier dough. Currently we grain our flour for biscuits, muffins, pancakes, waffles, tortillas and occasional teatime snacks.  I try to have freshly grained foods a minimum of three days per week and when used in correlation with the Kitchen Aide Mixer the actual time and overall cost to prepare these food items is no different than when we previously used prepackaged mixes!!! 

Another thing I love about my WonderMill is if someone has certain grain in-tolerances you can mill other items like rice, corn, beans etc. It is just so simple. It really surprises me that more people don't do it!

I highly recommend these two tools on your journey to transforming your kitchen to a wholefoods kitchen!