Personal Reasons My Family Eats Cultured Foods

Everybody I know leads busy lives, but did you know there is always help for you? My family had a lot of big changes in 2017, but a constant through it all was the way each member of my family used and ate cultured foods. Maybe this could be the answer for you, too. But first, the journey . . . it was  March 18, 2017, and I was sitting in a truck with a convoy behind us with all our worldly goods, driving across the country to a new destiny. Both of our older kids had moved to southern California and wanted us to join them. Since we have our own businesses, we can live anywhere; and with one 16-year old kid still at home missing her two older siblings, we made the big decision to move. Not knowing all this would entail, we sold our home, packed up our stuff, and headed towards our new home hoping to be a family again. My side of the family all lives on the east coast and my husband’s family is in Colorado and Nebraska. We were in Kansas City and had nothing holding us there anymore with our kids gone. We left on my birthday and the stress of moving got to me.

I have lived far away from my family since the age of 18. I moved away to college and never came back except to visit. My mom and dad lived on the east coast and my sisters did, too, and it was hard for my family to visit since we all lived so far from each other. Ron’s mom had died many years ago and his dad didn’t really communicate with us but maybe once a year with a phone call. Watching my kids grow up without a lot of extended family was different from everybody else I knew, but I was determined to make my family something that would sustain us all. It would be something special and something we could build a strong foundation upon. Ron and I are a strong team. With over 35 years of marriage, both of us having our own business and not having a lot of outside support, these pressures and struggles have made us really strong and I'm so thankful for that!  We had to depend on each other, so Ron and I our three kids did everything together. When people talked about us they always talked about us as a unit. We were mostly alone, far from extended family, but we had each other and it was enough. Until our oldest daughter and husband moved to California. Then my son went to visit and was offered a job, and my son said he would only go if we would eventually come too. We sure did miss our kids and felt bad for our youngest who was missing her brother and sister. So we made the decision to sell our house and move closer to them.  As we got our house ready to put on the market we renovated the kitchen, painted, and redid all the rooms. And it was something else - all the while writing my book Cultured Food in a Jar. At this busy time, I was living out of jars with cultured foods in them as our kitchen was torn apart and in disarray. I never realized how much I would need my own recipes to sustain me and get me through this challenging time. I can remember sitting on the kitchen floor on a towel amidst the wreck in my kitchen eating miso soup out of a jar, drinking raspberry kombucha punch, and being so thankful that I had something easy to eat. My own foods from my book saved me again and again. We all reach for easy foods when we're busy and I created ones that not only nourished me but kept me calm too. Cultured foods do this with their powerful combo of microbes that work with me from the inside out.

Fast forward many months later . . . we sold our home and had all our trucks and trailers packed, ready to move and a tornado hit right down the road from us. And I heard my husband say, “If that tornado picks up my trailers and puts them in the neighbor's yard after I  spent all this time packing them I’m not going to be happy!" I closed my eyes and prayed and although the tornado did hit not too far from our home, we were left untouched and left the following morning on our journey which just happened to be my 57th birthday. I was sitting in the back of the truck because I felt horrible and was trying to sleep and discovered after missing several nights of sleep I had gotten a cold. This was my first cold in years and I felt like I was going to die. The body can only take so much stress and lack of sleep before it shuts down. I'm not used to being sick and I forgot how horrible this can be. I knew my body was reacting to all the stress I was feeling and it was trying to get my attention.  On that day, nobody remembered my birthday which at this point I didn’t care about anymore, but I was running a fever and couldn’t breathe out of my nose and thought I made a terrible mistake moving across the country. Tornados and sickness . . . well, it felt like all the forces were converging to stop me and that’s when I saw the cooler sitting next to me. I grabbed the new spicy kimchi jar out of the cooler. It was a recipe I had made from my book and then I grabbed a q tip from my makeup bag. I ate some of the kimchi and then dipped the q-tip in the kimchi and swapped the inside of my nose. I had a  reader tell me this got rid of a six-month sinus infection she had. A lot of sinus problems are yeast related so adding probiotics to your diet, and in this case up my nose, made my sinus clear and I was able to breathe, finally.

Three days later we arrived, and I saw my kids for the first time in almost a year and I couldn’t stop the tears. I couldn’t believe I had made it there, thousands of miles, to be a family again. Halfway there I thought I had made a terrible mistake but drinking three jars of kefir, gallons of kombucha, and kimchi got me there in one piece. My own recipes have sustained me through some of the hardest times of this last year and helped me back to my family. The Schwenks are a strong unit and if you come to my classes you will see everybody there helping and working as a team. We love each other and we also love helping you, too. I feel truly blessed, to live my life with my family by my side. FYI, moving to California allowed me to go to Disneyland (see picture above) for the very first time in my life. What a day that was and my kids have dubbed me "Disney Donna" but then that's another story for another time!