What I Eat In A Day- April 24th 2024 | DrTomCowan
Summary
Transcript
Hey. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another Wednesday webinar. Today is April 24, 2024. And thanks for joining me. Thanks, everybody, also for participating in the sale. Things went pretty well this year, so that’s thanks to you and hope you got some things that you will enjoy and use. So today’s topic, I would say, is a little unusual. Maybe it even needs some explaining as to why I would devote a webinar to what do I eat in a day? And obviously, the first reason is because we had a number of requests for that.
So if that hadn’t happened, I don’t think I would have thought of doing this. So that’s probably the first and most important reason. And then I thought about whether this is just like an exercise in narcissism or an exercise in trying to shame people. Like, I do it better than you do, or look what I can do, sort of that sort of vibe. And I hope not. And I thought the second reason, and this is particularly for practitioners, if anybody’s a practitioner who’s watching this, listening to it, I talk a lot about getting people’s story and that we don’t believe in diagnoses anymore.
We believe in stories. So the question then is, how do you get people’s stories? So in a sense, I’m going to sort of play like I’m the patient, and this is the story of what I do in a day, which, because I’m one of those people who tends to do pretty much similar things most days. And I don’t, quote, work anymore, so I don’t go to work. So I don’t even have, like, quote, weekends.
So pretty much most days are the same, obviously. Some days I do webinars, and other days I do interviews, and some days I do neither. But most days are the same. And what I learned when I was practicing is, you know, I would ask people, well, what do they eat? And they’d say, oh, I eat good food. And I would think to myself, well, I’ll be the judge of that.
And so then I would get into the details because, as I say, the devil in this situation is in the details. And so I would ask them to walk me through a typical day. And so what I’m going to give you is a, you know, from memory, I didn’t, like, write anything down, a typical day’s food and even some activities that I do. And what I found was that if people can’t remember what they eat or they can’t walk you through, in a similar way that I’m going to walk you through what I eat.
That, in a way, by definition, means they have a, quote, bad diet because they don’t know what they’re eating. And in today’s world, unlike, I think, in former times, if you don’t know what you’re eating and where things came from and how it was cooked and what’s the whole story of this food, it’s likely to not be very good. And so, as you’ll see, you can get into a lot of details.
The other reason I I got into this was I would have people who maybe didn’t get better or things were confusing. And in the early days, I used to do home visits. And so they would tell me, oh, they eat a really good diet and everything’s fine with that. And then I would go to their house, and the first thing I would do is open their refrigerator in their pantry closet.
And my compass was my inner sense of I wouldn’t eat that. And so I would say sometimes half or two thirds of the things I saw in their cupboards and in their closets, I wouldn’t eat. And I never would have known that, except if I hadn’t actually gone and inspected their house and their kitchen. And so this is a sort of inspection of my kitchen. And then you can decide for yourself, there probably will be things that I say that I eat, that one or another person will say, I would never eat that, and that’s fine.
I mean, I’ve sort of evolved my diet for over the last, say, 45 years, because I really started working on my diet in 1978, I would say, and have been sort of added ever since. So, obviously, I’ve kind of figured out what works for me. And the other thing, you know, you might want to, when you think about this and how useful this is for you to incorporate some of the ideas that I’m talking about, it’s a fair question to wonder, well, how did this work for me? That’s a fair question.
So I can tell you a little bit. So I’m 67, and I don’t take any prescription medicines, or I don’t take any over the counter medicines. I’ve probably taken a total of five beta blockers for the heart thing that I described in my heart book and maybe ten aspirin since 1980, something like that. I don’t remember exactly. And I don’t remember ever taking any other pharmaceutical medicine during that time.
I don’t have any particular symptoms. I mostly feel more or less fine. They’re the same. You know, I get aches and pains if I work out work too much or do too much stuff or things like that. I’ve never been one to, like, try to get in shape, you know, by lifting weights. There’s been a few times in my life I’ve done that so nobody would look at me and say, wow, this guy’s really, like, buff or fit or anything.
I’m very active, as you’ll hear, and I don’t have any symptoms related to activity or any other symptoms that I know of. Everything seems to work fine. I’ve had a few things in my life, like hay fever and eczema, which have been gone for pretty much 40 years or so. Now, the other thing is, you could say, what about blood tests and examinations? And here I want to also be clear and to not be subject to criticisms of hypocrisy, which I am very sensitive about.
I don’t want to be a hypocrite. And so when I tell people that I don’t put much stock or faith in blood tests or going to medical doctors for routine examinations or having screening tests for cancer or anything else, I can tell you that the last time I had a blood test and a physical exam was 1984. And I happen to know exactly that date because that’s when I started residency, and I wasn’t allowed to start residency unless I had an exam and a blood test.
So I did it for that reason. And I haven’t had an exam or a single blood test since then. My mother used to say to me before she died that, you know, Tom, you should get regular exams. And so I said, I do. I have an exam scheduled in 2034 and in 2084. The one with 2034 is with an old guy, so he probably will die before then.
So that’s regular every 50 years, although hopefully I won’t have to go to the one in 2034. And obviously, I’m kidding, but I don’t see the point. And so when I say that I don’t see the point for other people, I don’t see the point for myself. I haven’t had a colonoscopy or any sort of screening for cancer ever, and I don’t intend on it or have any other blood tests or anybody attempting to diagnose me of anything, which is pretty much what I say to other people, because I don’t believe that would help me out.
And I don’t think any of the information that I would glean from that would help determine what I do or what I eat. I basically go by how I feel and my energy, and that’s pretty much it. The only test that I occasionally do is I’ll take my blood pressure maybe once a month for no particular reason. The last time I did it, it was 117 over 74, I think, so I don’t seem to have any issues with that.
And so that’s kind of a synopsis of how I’m doing. And again, you could say, well, we don’t know his blood tests, and we don’t know whether I have diabetes or not. That’s true. I don’t have any symptoms that would suggest I do. I go by how I feel and how things look and whether I can do what I want to do. And I can say that pretty much every single day, I can do what I want to do.
Physical activity doesn’t mean that I’m the most active or strongest person there is, because I’m certainly not. But for what I like to do and what I want to do, I pretty much have had no restrictions for the last 40 years. So I think that covers that. So what does it my day look like in probably more detail than anybody really wants or needs to know? Now, I’ll get into it pretty specifically because I think some of these things are interesting.
And again, for practitioners, you may want to. These are all factors that may impact your health. Let me just say another thing. I’m in a little bit of an unusual position also doing podcasts, and people send me stuff to try, so I have stuff that I use that I don’t necessarily have to pay for. And so I don’t expect that anybody would have all these things that I do because they probably don’t need to.
And I probably don’t need to. And also, we tend not to go on very many vacations or spend our money on a lot of things that probably some people spend their money on. So we basically get food and take care of our needs here and take care of the needs of our animals, and we spend whatever money we need to on the best quality things we can have in our home and in our basic life.
And that’s where we put. That’s where we put our resources. The other thing, maybe I’ll say as a matter of principle, is I am not going to say the reason I eat oysters is because it has zinc. Uh, I I hear that oysters do have zinc, and zinc may have certain functions, but I’m, as you probably know, I’m suspicious of that way of thinking. I’m suspicious even of that we eat a mineral, and then that mineral becomes the same mineral or acts as the same mineral in us.
It’s possible that it does, but I’m not convinced. So that’s not why I eat anything. I eat food because a I like it and so I would not recommend to myself or anybody eating food they don’t like. That was one of the rays that I used to claim I had 100% cure rate of picky eating children because I was convinced, just like me, I don’t eat food that I don’t like.
I don’t expect for a child to eat food that they don’t like. And so basically the way that I did it was you just present them the food they can eat, either eat it or not. There’s no punishment or rewards. They either choose to eat it or choose to tell you what food they might like better. And if that’s an acceptable food, you would give it to them, and if it’s not, you wouldn’t.
And then they just eat or not. And literally 100% of the children just started eating. Just like all the children in Swaziland. None of the children in Swaziland didn’t eat because if they said they didn’t like this cornmeal and whatever slimy greens, somebody else would eat it and they wouldn’t get any food. And they learned never to do that again and they all ate their food. So I eat food because of the.
Because, because I like it and because of the quality of the food. And so if it sounds like, well, these things are too expensive that I eat, I tell people to think in terms of categories. Like there’s the fat category and the animal food category and the vegetable category and the berry category. And in that group, eat whatever food you like the best and you can afford. And if all you can afford in the animal food is, you know, eggs, then that’s what you eat.
If you can afford wild salmon and eggs and locally grown grass fed beef, then you can eat that. If you can afford and can have access. So it’s affordability what you like and access. Those are the reasons why I eat the food that I do. I like it. I think it’s the best quality in the category I’m looking for. And I personally almost don’t care what it costs because we’re willing to spend whatever it takes to get the best quality food.
So that’s a little bit longer of an introduction than I expected. So what does it look like? First of all, we sleep in a. It’s actually a macroski mattress that we got. It was made in San Francisco. It’s basically a mattress that’s stuffed with cotton, and on that we have a peat moss mattress cover, and then a peat moss comforter, and the, the sheets are linen sheets. I here without any real evidence to back this up, so this is speculation on my part, but we like how it feels.
We like the quality of the material. And I hear there’s a somewhat of a protective factor against non native emfs, because of linen and because of peat moss, and that may turn out not to be true, but in any case, I don’t think it’s a problem. It’s either that it works or it doesn’t work. If it doesn’t work, it’s still great stuff to sleep on. And so that’s what we sleep on.
I tend to get up around 530 to six, sometimes a little different, but I get up around 530, and then I go into the kitchen after I put my clothes on. And the first thing that happens, usually, is pumpkin comes to greet me. Uh, he’s often sleeping on the bed or sleeping in the bathroom. And so he hears me get up and knows that I’m about to make food, so he comes and rubs against my leg, and then fluffy, his sister, soon comes, and then the first thing I do is open the refrigerator and take a cap full of our plasma seawater.
So that’s the first thing I eat in a day, a cap full of the plasma seawater. Then I start preparing the cat’s food. So we have two or sometimes three. Pumpkin and fluffy come inside at night, often their son, PJ, or pumpkin junior, he is sometimes in and out. Pumpkin and fluffy go out when they want to. And Lucy, PJ’s sister, she’s in the cat barn in the garden.
So I prepare their food, and just to say so that I don’t have to do this again, their food is typically, I get raw meat food from a company called viva raw, V I v a raw. And most of the base is ground up rabbit, which is rabbit meat, rabbit organs, and rabbit bones. It’s sort of ground up and frozen, and I defrost that sometimes. I also have elk or bison or beef, but they seem to like the rabbit best.
They also, all four of them, definitely catch their own food and eat mice, rabbits, and birds themselves. So that’s some of their food. So then I usually mix something like a locally sourced. I have a, we have a farmer friend who has a biodynamic farm that has been unsprayed and un messed with for at least 50 years and probably more. And they raise, they raise beef and chickens.
And so we get ground beef. So I’ll mix the rabbit with the ground beef with locally sourced chicken livers and heart mixture. So I cut that up, and then I heat it just so it’s not cold out of the refrigerator. So we’re talking 20 to 30 seconds, and I give them a portion about this big for each one of them. And then I give them a little bowl of locally sourced, biodynamic, pasture raised goat milk that’s raw with one of our own egg yolks cracked in and stirred around in the milk.
So they get that every morning, and then they get the same thing, more or less, sometimes different meat in the afternoon, meal around six. So that happens at around six to 630. And at that point, I start making our morning soup. And so I make this. When I say I eat this every day, of course, not every single, single day, solitary day, but it’s probably 80% to 90% of the days.
So the next thing I do is take is start making my morning soup. And the other thing I’ll say is I cook the soup in a donabi, which is a clay pot, and I happen to bring it here. So this is gininstore. com, and you can see this one has a steamer on it, and it’s made of clay. And so I take a big hunk of our grass fed a two.
A two ghee. I heat up the pan, and I put a big hunk of the grass fed ghee in the bottom of the pan. And then depending on what I have, so it’s. We grow probably 80% to 90% of our non grain plant food. So all the berries and fruit besides apples, which we get from a biodynamic farmer. But carrots and celeriac and rutabagas are either from our garden at the end of the year, like now, they’re sometimes from a local farm that grows them just up the road.
And we also freeze dry and dehydrate all those things. So I use a mixture of. But every soup is. Is a big hunk of ghee. And then I put, like, a teaspoon, a full teaspoon of our turmeric powder. And whenever there’s a spice that we don’t have, we don’t. We. Being Doctor Cowen’s garden, I almost always will get it from a company called burlap and barrel. They have really fabulous single source organic spices.
So it’s either our own turmeric, a teaspoon that I dissolve in the hot ghee, or from burlap and barrel. And then I add to that the hot ghee. I add first a carrot, and then usually a cut up, sorry, first an onion or a freeze dried onion, and then a carrot, and then a rutabaga cut up into small chunks, and then a celeriac. And that’s pretty much it.
I also have, every morning then I take dried mushrooms from a wild mushroom mix that I get from a company called northwest Wild. So they have this great wild mushroom mix. So right after I feed the cats, I put a handful of these wild mushrooms in a little bowl of hot water. So I let them rehydrate. So I saute the, all these different vegetables. Sometimes some greens or some beets or celery or whatever we have from the garden or whatever we have that’s freeze dried or dehydrated.
And I’ll saute that until they’re soft and sort of coated with the ghee and the turmeric. And I’m thinking, maybe this is too much detail, but this is, uh, this is what I do. Uh, when it’s soft, I add, uh, bone broth. Uh, my wife makes bone broth from locally sourced bones. And there’s almost always chicken feet. So the broth is very gelatinous, like when it’s in the refrigerator, you could stick a nut, a toothpick in, and it’ll stand up straight.
So I put enough of that to make two big bowls of soup. And then I put the mushrooms with the, in the hot water into the, into the pot. The water, as I’ve described, is primary spring water that I put through this myu filter, which is a magnetic filter, which stirs it for maybe ten minutes. And then I stir it with the wand for about a minute. And that’s the water that I use to do all the cooking and drinking, etcetera.
So, so we’ve got now a pot of different vegetables and mushrooms and broth and some, a little bit of water to that. If we have leftover chicken or meat, I’ll add that. If we have leftover rice, it’s the only other grain I eat besides what I’ll tell you in a minute. Uh, I’ll add some of that. Or if the very off, uh, rare occasion when we have leftover beans or peas, I’ll add that to the soup.
And then I pretty much always add sea vegetables, that, uh, powder that we get about a half a teaspoon, that’s from Doctor Cowan’s garden. And then I add a half a teaspoon of burdock root powder, that’s also from Doctor Cowen’s garden. I add that every single soup. Then I add about a half a teaspoon of ashitaba powder to that, and then I bring that up to a boil.
And then I, when it bring comes up to a boil, I put it on a very low burner and simmer it for anywhere from between a half an hour to an hour. After that, I take my morning, quote, medicines or supplements. It’s the only time of the day that I take any kind of supplement. I’m not a big supplement taker, and I sort of say I’m only going to do it once a day.
So that’s, that’s pretty much it. And that usually can. That pretty much always consists of one capsule or 20 drops of straphanthus. I’ve been doing that for about 20 years. I take a cell salt, appropriate to what I think. Whatever is happening for me right now, um, right now, I take calc fluoride, just because the only real issues I’ve had are tooth problems. And so I had a slight pain in one of my teeth, and that seems to take care of it.
So I’ll take three to five pellets of that. I take a chaga mixture, which is a vinegar, apple cider vinegar, uh, mixture of chaga. It’s like an extract of chaga, and that’s pretty much all I take. So we’re talking about the seawater straphanthus, and I’ve taken straphanthus for over 20 years because people said it would kill me. And so here I still am after 20 years and I’m not dead, so it didn’t.
And then I take the sell salt and chaga pretty much every morning. That’s. So, that’s. Now I’m ready. So the soup is boiling is, or simmering, and then it’s time to go outside. So we go outside. Usually we’re talking around 630 to seven, and we feed PJ and Lucy in the cat barn. And that’s the same mixture I said before. And then we go feed the goats and the chickens.
We let the chickens out of their coop and Linda throws them different scratch grains or leftover stuff. And the goats tend to get different flowers and different greens and different grasses and occasionally, or sometimes some sunflower seeds and something else that Linda puts in their mixture. And then we let them out into the other pasture where they have a sort of goat playground. And we feed them hay through the winter and some hay during the summer.
So that’s the next thing that happens that takes me till about 7715. And then we come back, and at that point, then I do my morning exercises, which is about 15 minutes. And I work with Pat, and so I meet with Pat, who works in our new biology clinic, about every two weeks. So I do things like, you know, raising my arm and the drop in and standing on 1ft for a minute on each side and bouncing on my toes for two minutes, and crawling with my knees up and with my knees down and the drop in holding an iron skillet.
So I strengthen my hands and just various movements that keep changing every two weeks. And it takes me about 15 minutes trying to work on essentially all the different parts of my body. And I let him guide me to that. And that’s the only formal exercise that I typically do in a day. It’s about 15 minutes, and then I would say about three mornings a week. Depends a little bit on how I’m feeling or the time and what I have to do.
I’ll do a saunaspace red light sauna until I’m sweating a lot. Takes maybe another 1520 minutes. Again, that’s from saunaspace. It’s the red lights. I like the way that feels, and I think it makes me have more energy and just overall feel better. And then I’ll quickly rinse off with a pretty cool shower after that. And if I need to wash, that’s when I do it then. So that’s my morning routine.
At that point. I’m ready to eat and the soup is ready, and then I have the soup, and I’ll talk. Get back to that in a minute. And pretty much every morning, along with the soup, I have two slices of bread that I bake, and I’ve been baking bread for 20 years or so, and the bread is completely sourdough, and it’s made from a variety. And I found that if you use different wheat berries or different grains as a mixture, you get a of better consistency and a better rise and a better feel of the bread than if you just use one type of wheat.
So I have different grains. I have maybe six different kinds of wheat berries, like poseidon and methue and spelt and Emmer and Einkorn. And there’s maybe a couple others. Those are the main, I think, five. And I also have rye berries, and I grind those in my grain grinder until they’re a flour, and then I have a sourdough starter. And I’ve been keeping that going for a really long time, and it takes about a day to make the bread.
And so I do that I make two loaves. I freeze one, I use the other. I cut two slices, put that in the toaster. Uh, and then I take. Then I make two eggs. Either our own chickens, which are, you know, soy free, and they’re running around all the time following the goats. Uh, and they eat kitchen scraps and worms and everything else. And I also like duck eggs from a local pasture raised duck farm or duck egg farm.
So there’s two eggs, and that’s cooked in usual butter. Not, they’re basically grass fed, but pasteurized butter. So I don’t use the ghee for that. And I don’t use the other butter that I use, which is raw butter from an amish farm in pence in Pennsylvania. So I use just a good, organic, grass fed butter, just because I put a little butter in the pan. And then I cook the eggs in it.
They’re like fried eggs. And then I take the toast and onto the eggs, I usually sprinkle charred eggplant powder, which I make myself grow eggplants, and I roast them or char them, and then I dry them in a dehydrator or a food or a freeze dryer, which we have. And then I mix them with pepper powder and pepper salt, and it makes a sort of spicy eggplant powder.
And I sprinkle that over the eggs. And then I take the two pieces of toast, and I put a huge amount of raw grass fed, a two. A two, you know, pastured butter that we get from an amish farmer. We buy, like, 60 tubs of that in the spring and just keep it in their freezer. So we thaw one. So the. The toast has two big slabs of butter on it, and then the eggs on top of that.
Uh, the. The soup then is now done. The vegetables and meat and whatever else is mushrooms are soft. And then I take miso and natto. And here’s the miso that I use from South river. And here’s the natto. It’s from a company called NY. Let me get this. Ny rture. com. It’s a New York company that makes organic turmeric. Sorry, natto. This one happens to have some turmeric in it.
And I order this by the case and keep it in the refrigerator. And so some people will quibble, why am I eating soy products? And these are the only two soy products I’ve eaten for probably, I don’t know, 30 years. I don’t eat tofu or soy milk or any other type of soy product. These are highly fermented and I can remember even 20 years ago, sitting next to japanese researcher telling me that he looked at longevity in people, and the main thing it correlated with was how much natto they ate.
And it’s definitely an acquired taste, but I’ve been eating it for 15 years, pretty much almost every day. So I take a big tablespoon of each of those. I put it in the bowl. I add some soup broth to the bowl, and so I soften it up and then add. Have a big bowl of soup. And on top of the soup, I may, I put our homemade sauerkraut or daikon pickles, or fermented okra or something else that we ferment.
And I do most of the fermenting from the stuff we grow. And I use these fermentation pots. These were made by Sarah Kirsten studio in California. And they’re clay pots, and they have a water seal, and they have weights. And so you put stuff, the sauerkraut and leeks and whatever else you want to put in there, and then the weights keep it down, and you put some salt in it, and I squeeze it with my hands, and I make all different kinds of vegetable ferments from whatever we have in the garden.
So they’re pretty much, I’d say 90% of them are homemade. And I put a big a tablespoon of that on top of the soup. So I’m not cooking with the natto or the miso or the sauerkraut. They’re just into warm soup. And that’s what I eat for breakfast. So there’s soup with natto, miso, sometimes meat and vegetables and mushrooms. There’s a piece of homemade, two pieces, two of homemade sourdough bread with a lot of raw butter, and two eggs, either from our own chickens that have some pepper, salt, or charred eggplant powder.
Or sometimes I’ll put leek powder and a little bit of salt on it or some other powder just for flavor or whatever that’s called. I sometimes sprinkle that on top, and that’s what I eat, along with one cup of. Of olive oil tea that I make pretty much every morning as a long haul to get through breakfast. So that’s pretty much what my breakfast is. After that, I tend to have a small bowl of whatever fresh or thawed berries we have.
Most of the fruit that we grow is raspberries, strawberries, and I sometimes will buy flats of blueberries. We have gooseberries, currants, josta berries. So I freeze those, dehydrate those, and I’ll have a small bowl of that after breakfast. So that’s a lot of food, but that’s what I pretty much eat most mornings. And then I go about my day. And so that usually means, at least this time of year, an hour or two of garden work where I’m moving compost and preparing beds.
We don’t dig the beds, but we basically put compost on and kind of rake the compost in, flatten them out, get them ready to plant seeds or plant transplants. We have use a lot of straw and mulch or actually really rotted hay is what it is. So I’m doing a lot of moving of that, planting seeds, watering, some digging. So it’s not huge, intensely physical work, but it’s pretty much a constant or regular movement for an hour or two in the morning at that time.
We’re now at around 10:00 and I tend to have meetings, either of the business or interviews to do or subscribestar. That’s when I have the Thursday morning. I have a meeting on Friday that’s regular. I do the morning workouts with Pat in the morning on Tuesdays. And then I have other meetings that go till 02:00 or 03:00 like this webinar or other things of interviews. Either I’m doing a podcast interview or somebody’s interviewing me or meeting with somebody or something to do with the business, looking at issues there.
So usually around twelve to two I’m pretty much doing things, or ten to one or two in and out. And during that time I will occasionally have what I would call snacks. And typically there’ll be more fruit, either fresh fruit or we make a lot of freeze dried and dried fruit. And we have a neighbor who makes freeze dried apples, which I must say I love. And I eat carnivore, I think the company is called carnivora.
And they make this, these little pieces of dried meat and salt, and it’s all sort of regenerative, grass fed, a leg of lamb or ribeye steak that’s dehydrated. And I’ll have one of those. And sometimes I’ll have another piece of, of bread or toast and a big, like a little cup of our hundred or thousand polyphenol olive oil. And I’ll dip the bread into the olive oil so it’s just dripping.
And I’ll tend to eat that. And sometimes I’ll eat things like I have a, I love kumquats, so I’ll eat some of those. And that goes in this time from, say ten to two. As you’ll see, we finish eating around 430, and I don’t eat anything after 430, only water or ec tea at that point. So I pretty much let myself eat from the eight to 09:00 breakfast time until 430.
I wouldn’t, I’m not eating constantly, but I would say regularly during that time. So it’s either meat pieces. I’ll sometimes eat Brazil nuts or soaked pecans that Linda makes soaked or sprouted, other seeds or nuts that are basically organic and sprouted. That’s pretty much it. So that goes. Then around then I’ll usually do some more outside activity from, say, two to three, except today when I’m doing the webinar and that’s more garden work or cutting branches for the goats.
We feed them cedar branches and willow branches and honeysuckle branches and rose branches and pine branches. They love that. And even though one could say that, why don’t you just let the goats fend for themselves? The goats are like sort of friends, and so we love to interact with them. And I’ll stand there and feed the goats these branches and give them. June bug loves to be scratched and rubbed.
The other three are a little more leery because June Bug was born in our place and he’s like our surrogate child, so to speak. So that happens then it’s just more outside stuff. Sometimes that’s the time when I’ll go shopping, or that happens around ten or, you know, go to a food store to get something that I need. And that’s also the time in that ten to two time when I may, if I’m going to do some sort of quote, therapy.
And so I have a variety of the cymatic scope, the sound wave that you put your feet on, and I’ll sometimes do that for half an hour while I read, or I’ll use the iteracare wand and do a sort of treatment with that. I have these other sort of light treatment things, and if I’m going to do it, it’s usually during that time and again, I don’t expect other people would necessarily have these things or need to do them.
It’s kind of like just fun for me to just fiddle around with different stuff like this and see how I feel. So that brings us, I think, till dinner, and I probably am the cook four nights of the week, and Linda maybe two, sometimes three and three. And dinner is probably pretty much the same theme most of the time, which is we have some sort of meat dish, which is either chicken that we get from either polyface or local friend who raises meat, chickens or some grass fed meat, beef.
And that usually comes from this local biodynamic farmer who raises cows. And so we’ll have steak that’s cooked with lard. The fats that I use are lard that we either usually get locally. They make lard at this farm, or we have the raw milk, butter, or the, a two ghee from Doctor Cowan’s garden. I use that a lot for cooking, or the olive oil that’s also all from our company stores.
I used a 500 bottle for making sauces and salad dressings, and I use the thousand polyphenol one for just dipping in bread and have that as a sort of snack during the day. So the, the meat tends to be, so it’s usually either beef or wild salmon or chicken. Those are our main things. We don’t tend to eat much pork except Sunday morning. We have bacon. I don’t, I don’t like pork meat.
And we also have some lamb, lamb chops and lamb shoulder. And we also eat a fair amount of stews, which Linda also makes with vegetables and potatoes and the soup broth and usually frozen tomato sauce that we make during the summer. So those are the, that’s the main dish. And there’s always then one or two vegetables either. Right now there’s a lot of lettuce greens and salad and other types of small greens from the greenhouse.
And so we’ll make that, the dressing for that is with a little bit of mustard, which we buy organic mustard. And then I put some balsamic vinegar and stir that up. And then I put olive oil and then leek powder and then a little bit of salt and some other spices or seasoning. And I pour that over the lettuce and the greens. And it’s a whole mixture of different baby greens that we grow.
And then I add sometimes a hard boiled egg, one of our eggs, or ginger carrots that we make ferment during the spring and summer and fall, and sometimes other cheeses, particularly goat milk cheese. I’m a big fan of goat milk stuff. And so dinner is salad or greens or potatoes that we grew, that we eat those in season, or like butternut squash dish or butternut soup. We use Sally’s recipe and nourishing traditions for it’s onions and butternut squash and broth.
So there’s either soup with squash or baked squash or our potatoes. The potatoes are steamed and then roasted in the oven with lard. Or I eat a fair amount of, in the winter, roasted parsnips which we cut up and roast in the oven in lard and put a little bit of salt and some seasoning spices on top of that. So it’s meat and two different vegetables. One more of a starchy vegetable, which would be parsnips or squash or potatoes, and the other more like a green vegetable, like broccoli or frozen broccoli or peas or cauliflower.
Not green, but it’s sort of brassicas family or a raw salad, or sometimes both. And that’s dinner. And then after dinner, I take some of our granola, the soaked and sprouted granola. And I, sometime in the day, put that in with a big, like a half a cup or so of goat milk kefir that I make. There’s a local farm that raises goats and has raw milk, really great pastured goat milk.
And I take that and I make kefir out of it. And they also make chevre, which is sort of raw, soft goat cheese. And I put that on the salad and sometimes put that on bread. And after dinner, I have a this much or so granola with the raw milk goat kefir, and then whatever berries we have, either fresh or frozen. And sometimes I’ll put a little bit of the raw honey that we also get locally on top of that.
So I’m not watching carbohydrates. I’m not restricting fats or particularly trying to eat more or less. I’m not having a protein content number that I’m shooting for, or a carbohydrate intake number that I’m shooting for. I eat a fair amount of fruit, fresh and dried and frozen and thawed. I eat at least a tablespoon or so of honey in some form. During the day, I’ll eat potatoes and squash and some other starchy vegetables, and there’s a fair amount of protein and lots of fat.
Again, either this pastured local lard or ghee that we get from our company, or raw butter a little bit, a very little bit of just commercial, organic, so called grass fed pasteurized butter. And the two different kinds of olive oil from our company. One, the 500 for, for sauces and the thousand for just dipping. And that’s pretty much it, I would say. The, the two other things, or three other things, is my biggest, you might say, vice with food is Linda makes a different oxymoron, which are basically vinegar and honey and different herbs.
So right now, today I had this dandelion, green oximel. So she soaks the dandelion or does, makes some extract and mixes that with apple cider vinegar and honey, and it’s this sort of greeny, slightly sweet. Really amazing, actually. And so she makes different ones with all different kinds of herbs and berries and hawthorne berries and rose hips and different things. And I put a little bit of that in a glass, and then I add sparkling water on that, and I’m sure I’ll get some comments that sparkling water is not very good for you.
I don’t know that I agree with that. I tell you, I love sparkling water drinks. If I had one food that I would be upset if I couldn’t eat it, I would say that would be near the top of my list. So I’ll have probably a half to a full liter of either that or apple cider, plain apple cider. Again, from our friend in the glass, I’ll put a little bit and add the sparkling water right now, on a suggestion from our friend Mark Bailey, he said one of the best waters in the world is from New Zealand.
It’s called antipodes. You can get it from salacious drinks, and it’s so, I think, naturally carbonated, but they probably add a little bit of carbonation to it, and it is just out of this world flavorful. And it seems to me like, it seems like a primary spring that gets carbonated as it comes up to the earth. And it’s just the best water, but I tell you, it’s hugely expensive, so I ration that a little bit.
And, uh, the other ones are nowhere near as good. But I’ll sometimes use, uh, different forms of sparkling water to add to the drinks. Uh, as far as other things I’ll eat in a day, it’s, again, uh, dried fruit. That’s probably a weakness of mine. I eat dried and fresh fruit and thawed berries fairly regularly throughout the day. Brazil nuts and sometimes pistachio nuts that are organic throughout the day.
Those are the main things after dinner. So at around dinner, after we eat, we go out and feed the cats and the goats. Again, that takes another half an hour. And again, it’s as much of a. I mean, we have to feed them, but it’s much of a social event for us. PJ and Lucy are out there, and we hold them and play with them and snuggle with them.
And June Bug, who’s the goat who was born here, he really loves our company. So we go out and talk to them and just, you know, secure the fences, make sure all the fences are clear, are, you know, latched and everything. And the chickens are back in their coop. For the evening, they also get some, if there’s leftover cat food, if the cats are don’t want to eat all their food, we’ll give it to the chickens and they love it.
And in the evening, we feed the goats. I basically, whatever the carrots and everything that I’m chopping up for the breakfast doing, I put the ends and the tops into a bowl and put those in a bag with some cabbage that I chop up. And whatever greens or celery or whatever from the garden is available. They love brussels sprout leaves and even the brussels sprouts, they love the cauliflower leaves.
So we chop those up and we put, uh, into their little four dishes, and that’s their evening snack and meal. Then they go out into the pasture around the barn a little bit before they go to bed. So that’s what we do in the evening. In the evening, then I don’t do much. So now it’s around 630 or so. I’d say four to five nights, maybe three to five nights of the week.
We have an ofora oxygenated hot tub, which we’ll go into for about 20 minutes. And then we’re pretty much in bed by 730, a little bit later in the summer, around when it goes to dark, in the winter, even by 637, which is why we wake up early and I’ll read in bed or something. And that’s pretty much a day in the life of Tom Cowan, trying to think if there’s anything else that’s relevant.
I do occasionally leave the homestead and go other places, but not so much. Oh, and on Friday night. Sorry, Friday night, we go out to dinner and we go to a local restaurant. One of them, our favorite, is a grass fed meat hamburger place, which we like. And there’s also various good restaurants. I tend to eat fish at restaurants that are sort of good restaurants just because they seem to cook fish better than I and I do.
And the fish is usually wild salmon or some wild caught fish. So there’s usually wild salmon and some different kinds of vegetables and sauces. As you’ll notice, there weren’t much grains in that, except for the different grains that we grind for the bread. So pretty much the only grain we eat is the bread grains. Maybe once or twice a month, we’ll make Anson mills rice, one of the types of rice.
And by the way, the grains all come from either Anson mills or bluebird grains. And I buy 25 pound bags of spelt and emmer berries and Einkorn. And I keep those either in the refrigerator or freezer. We actually have four freezers and two refrigerators. So we have a lot of food in storage. A lot of it’s garden stuff, a lot of it’s the grains and a lot. And a lot of it is meat and bones and sauce, you know, broth and sauces.
And we also made probably 50 frozen quarts of butternut squash soup in this in the fall. And that’s a pretty common thing. Will also include dinner will be squash soup and meat and veg, green vegetable and otherwise activity. For me, I’ll tend to take walks and things, things like that, but I don’t do any other hard labor or hard physical activity. It’s never been something that I was particularly enamored with.
I played a lot of sports and was pretty skilled, but the getting in shape part was not exactly my thing. So I hope people maybe learn something from that. Uh, that was pretty accurate, as best I can remember it, and be interested to hear your comments. I’m sure people will have things to say about they wouldn’t eat that or this. Uh, but that’s kind of what I’ve come to.
And again, I hope it, uh, helps give you some clarity and maybe inspire you to add some things to your diet. Okay, thanks, everybody, and I will see you next week. .
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