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ARE HOMEMADE BROTHS WORTH THE TIME & HASSLE?
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Many of you who have my book, The IBD Remission Diet will know that I strongly advocate that people drink meat and vegetable broths in between the Absorb Plus shakes on the Diet. This is largely due to the amazing health benefits of homemade bone broths. But it also serves to stimulate the appetite: If you just consume sweet tastes all the time, you’ll hit satiety quite quickly and just not be able to face the thought of yet another shake!

However, if you alternate sweet and salty tastes, this keeps the appetite stimulated and makes it much easier to consume the number of calories you need each day from the Absorb Plus elemental diet shakes.

For those of you who have purchased the new Listen To Your Gut program, one of your Complimentary Bonuses included a Healing Diets Recipe Book, and in that recipe book, I give you all the recipes for making homemade broths. You can then use these broths when you make soups, stews, or gravies/sauces. Again, I did this partly for the taste benefits, but primarily for the health benefits.

Traditional cultures all over the world – from Jewish to Asian – have always used homemade broths as an integral part of their diet. Sally Fallon and Mary Enig have written a fantastic cookbook based on traditional/primitive food preparation techniques, called Nourishing Traditions. If you’re to the point in your healing journey where you’re on the Minimize Gas & Bloating Diet or Maintenance Diet, then I highly recommend you pick up this cookbook and begin eating this way for optimum health. If your system has not yet healed to the point where you can move on from the Reduce Diarrhea Diet, then it’s too early for you to use the Nourishing Traditions cookbook. Until your system is healed more, you won’t be able to benefit from it. However, whatever stage of healing you’re at, you can most certainly benefit tremendously from homemade broths.

As Sally Fallon writes in her article Broth is Beautiful:

“Thus, broth is a vital element in Asian cuisines–from the soothing long-simmered beef broth in Korean soups to the foxy fish broth with which the Japanese begin their day. Genuine Chinese food cannot exist without the stockpot that bubbles perpetually. Bones and scraps are thrown in and mineral-rich stock is removed to moisten stir-frys. Broth-based soups are snack foods from Thailand to Manchuria.

Asian restaurants in the US are likely to take shortcuts and use a powdered base for sweet and sour soup or kung pau chicken but in Japan and China and Korea and Thailand, mom-and-pop businesses make broth in steamy back rooms and sell it as soup in store fronts and on street corners.”

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WHAT’S IN THE BONES?
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Now, to be honest, the recipes for broths in “Nourishing Traditions” are actually better than mine – because they call for more bones in the pot, and also get you to add vinegar to draw out the minerals from these bones. I like to use Bragg’s Apple Cider Vinegar (another health product) and you don’t have to worry about the acidity because the vinegar is boiled off in the cooking. As Sally Fallon points out in her “Broth is Beautiful” article:

“Peasant societies still make broth. It is a necessity in cultures that do not use milk because only stock made from bones and dairy products provides calcium in a form that the body can easily assimilate. It is also a necessity when meat is a luxury item, because gelatin in properly made broth helps the body use protein in an efficient way.

The French were the leaders in gelatin research, which continued up to the 1950s. Gelatin was found to be useful in the treatment of a long list of diseases including peptic ulcers, tuberculosis, diabetes, muscle diseases, infectious diseases, jaundice and cancer. Babies had fewer digestive problems when gelatin was added to their milk. The American researcher Francis Pottenger pointed out that as gelatin is a hydrophilic colloid, which means that it attracts and holds liquids, it facilitates digestion by attracting digestive juices to food in the gut.

Science validates what our grandmothers knew. Rich homemade chicken broths help cure colds. Stock contains minerals in a form the body can absorb easily-not just calcium but also magnesium, phosphorus, silicon, sulphur and trace minerals. It contains the broken down material from cartilage and tendons–stuff like chondroitin sulphates and glucosamine, now sold as expensive supplements for arthritis and joint pain.

Fish stock, according to traditional lore, helps boys grow up into strong men, makes childbirth easy and cures fatigue. “Fish broth will cure anything,” is another South American proverb. Broth and soup made with fishheads and carcasses provide iodine and thyroid-trengthening substances.

When broth is cooled, it congeals due to the presence of gelatin. The use of gelatin as a therapeutic agent goes back to the ancient Chinese. Gelatin was probably the first functional food, dating from the invention of the “digestor” by the Frenchman Papin in 1682. Papin’s digestor consisted of an apparatus for cooking bones or meat with steam to extract the gelatin. Just as vitamins occupy the center of the stage in nutritional investigations today, so two hundred years ago gelatin held a position in the forefront of food research. Gelatin was universally acclaimed as a most nutritious foodstuff particularly by the French, who were seeking ways to feed their armies and vast numbers of homeless in Paris and other cities. Although gelatin is not a complete protein, containing only the amino acids arginine and glycine in large amounts, it acts as a protein sparer, helping the poor stretch a few morsels of meat into a complete meal. During the siege of Paris, when vegetables and meat were scarce, a doctor named Guerard put his patients on gelatin bouillon with some added fat and they survived in good health.”

When you go to make your own homemade broths, you can either use Sally’s recipes (provided in her article) or you can use mine, but add extra bones (and feet if possible) and 1 tbsp. Bragg’s Apple Cider Vinegar to each of my recipes.
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AN EASY WAY TO GET STARTED
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I know that cooking organic, unprocessed food from scratch takes a lot more time than the way all your friends and neighbors eat! So here’s one of my favorite procedures to get the “biggest bang from your buck”. The steps below show you how to get 2 meals, plus a gorgeous broth from one organic chicken:

1. Buy a whole, organic chicken (remove the gizzards, neck etc. from the chest cavity and set aside in the fridge). Place the chicken (breast down, spine up) in a roasting pan. Surround the chicken with quartered potatoes, peeled carrots, and peeled, quartered onions (you can also add peeled, cubed squash if you like). Drizzle olive oil over the top of the chicken and vegetables and then sprinkle the following spices on the chicken: powdered garlic, basil, oregano, hungarian (non-spicy) paprika, powdered ginger (use whichever of these spices you have on hand). Then put the lid on the roasting pan and put it into a preheated oven at 350 degrees Farenheit. An average size chicken should cook in about 1.5 hours.

2. When the chicken is cooked, remove the chicken and vegetables from the pan and set aside for supper or later. You can use the lovely roasted chicken meat and vegetables for that night’s dinner. You can make a gravy from the drippings left in the pan, if you wish.

3. Remove all the good, useable meat from the chicken. Eat some that day, package the rest up and freeze it for future meals. Cut into chunks ready for use in stews, casseroles and curries. Dice finely and freeze for Chicken Salad sandwiches (add equal parts yoghurt and cold-pressed mayonnaise to make the chicken salad – serve in sandwiches, or open-faced with raw cheddar melted on top). You see, from one easily cooked chicken (much easier than even pan-frying!) you get at least three meals!

4. Now take all the remaining skin, bones, gristle, and the gizzards and neck you removed initially, and throw them all back in the same roasting pan. Add filtered or spring water to within 2 inches of the top of the pan and 2 tablespoons of Bragg’s Apple Cider Vinegar (or regular vinegar is okay too), and 1 tablespoon of sea salt. Put the lid back on and put it back in the oven (still at 350 degrees Farenheit) for at least 2-3 hours (longer if you can leave it – up to six hours). Stir contents and break up softened bones halfway through.

5. Remove pan from oven and throw chicken parts away, or give them to your cat or dog (depending on how long you boiled it for, the bones can be as soft as cooked carrots). Strain the contents of the pan through a sieve into a large bowl underneath the sieve. Place this bowl into your fridge and allow to cool overnight.

6. The next day, use a spoon to scrape all the congealed fat off the top of the broth and throw the fat away. Then package up the broth into freezer bags for future use in stews, sauces, soups, etc.

Think of all the goodness and body-strengthening nutrients you can get from just one organic chicken! As with all things, the barrier is to just do it once, then it becomes a whole lot easier once you’re familiar with it.

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Jini Patel Thompson’s books on natural healing for digestive diseases have sold in over 40 different countries. Her health articles have been published in journals and magazines in the U.S., Australia and U.K. www.ListenToYourGut.com