Cooking with the Basics

I am so excited to be starting a new blog called Cooking with the Basics! www.cookingwiththebasics.com     I love to cook from scratch.  I love that I can choose what goes into my meals.  I love to cook healthy foods.  When Dallin was a few months old, he got eczema all over his sweet little body.  The worst of it was on his face.  It was so hard to keep him from scratching it.  I had to put little socks on his hands at night so he wouldn't lay there and scratch all night.  I took him to the doctor and they just prescribed creams to put on his skin.  I did that for a while and it didn't help.  With my medical background I knew I didn't want to just keep masking the symptoms I wanted to know what was causing the rash!  You just don't get eczema.  I knew there had to be something going on in his body.  So I read and researched about eczema and found out that most cases are caused from foods and how our bodies digest the food.   I knew I needed to clean up my diet (since I was nursing him) and my families as well.  I always thought that we ate pretty healthy.  But I learned so much about what is in processed food and what it does to our bodies.   My goal was to eat less processed foods and more fruits, vegetables and whole foods. Which meant that I needed to start cooking as much as I could from scratch so I could monitor what was going into our meals.  Growing up my mom always cooked everything from scratch, so I knew how I just needed to implement it!  I learn how to make bread with a natural sour dough yeast to replace instant yeast.  I made pancakes, pizza dough, rolls, crackers and cookies with the sour dough start.  Using a natural yeast breaks down the gluten in the wheat and lowers the glycemic effect.  There are so many great health benefits from using a natural yeast.  I started a little at a time and made more and more of our food with just the basic ingredients I had in my pantry.  As I did this I bought less and less of the processed foods we use to eat.  I learned that I really enjoy cooking and when I can make an entire meal from scratch I get so excited!!!  I not only learned that what we put into our body can effect our skin, but what we put on our bodies effect our skin as well.  I learned how to make homemade lotion and skin care products that we love!