Sprouts & Tomatoes/41 Weeks of GAPS - Full Diet

We have been on GAPS for 41 weeks now and counting.  Wow! It has sure gone fast. My husband and I are still seeing improvement on the diet. My energy level, quality of sleep, and other symptoms continue to improve. I am now able to keep up with working part-time, being heavily involved with church, and keeping up with my "part-time job" of cooking at home. Considering I wasn't able to work at all when we started and was struggling to do much of anything else, this is really amazing! My husband has been keeping his ulcerative colitis under control as well. There have been a few flares here and there, but they seem to get less severe as time goes on, and it's nothing that interferes with his normal routine.

If you think the GAPS diet would be helpful to you, but are just feeling really overwhelmed at the prospect, I would encourage you to review one of my earlier posts: "I'm Getting Overwhelmed and I Haven't Even Started Yet."

Sprouting

Top to Bottom: Peas, Broccoli, Garlic

Sprouting has become a highlight for me in our GAPS kitchen. Many sprouts contain up to 30 times the amount of nutrition of organically grown vegetables, which is incredibly significant in and of itself for someone who is malnourished. Additionally, fresh sprouts contain enzymes that help you to digest and utilize your food properly - and, they're delicious! If you can't grow a garden, you can at least grow sprouts.

I like to use the Victorio (click to buy on Amazon) sprouting system because it is easy, affordable, and efficient. So far, I have enjoyed pea, garlic, broccoli, alfalfa, mustard, and radish sprouts. I keep two systems of them going almost continuously, and could really use a couple more sprouting systems than I have because it's easy to eat or juice a whole tray in a single meal.

I like to get my sprouting seeds from The Sprout House or Mountain Rose Herbs, and sometimes on Amazon if I find a good deal. Most seeds are very reasonable. It only takes one to two tablespoons of sprouting seeds per each tray, so one pound of sprouts usually lasts a number of months if you are sprouting moderately often.

Tomatoes

If you grew a garden and still had green tomatoes on the vine come fall, don't throw them away! I had probably at least 10 pounds of green cherry tomatoes at the end of the season. I stripped the vines in mid-October and put the tomatoes in a cardboard box in my kitchen under one of my shelves. I was skeptical whether they would all really ripen or not before going bad. But they did! We ate home-grown garden tomatoes on our salads until mid-December! Pretty impressive. You can see a few on the window sill in the sprouting picture above. I set them out in the sun to finish ripening once they began to get some color.