Staples

These are items we always try to keep on hand.

• Coconut oil
• This versatile oil is delicious and rich in MCTs.  It makes a great addition to smoothing out a home-made nut butter as well as a good starting base for a Thai inspired shrimp dish. 
• Grassfed butter
• High in CLA, it also tastes heavenly.  
• Tallow
• Jesse renders this from pasture-raised cattle suet that we get from one of our local farms.  Once rendered, we keep it in pint sized glass jars in the freezer for long term storage.  It adds an incredible beefy flavor to anything cooked with it.
•  Lard
• Like our tallow, we render this from carefully sourced local pig hard leaf fat.  It fries things up crispy without imparting much in the way of flavor, which can be good for some lighter foods like shrimp.
•  Home Made Bone Stock
• We either save the carcasses from our oven roasted chicken dinners until we have enough for the stock pot, or roast marrow-rich beef bones before simmering them for days.  Shrimp stock is easy to make and only takes a few hours.  The stocks are the base of many of the healthy and delicious meals that we make, and we store them in the chest freezer in pint and quart sized portions for easier use later.
• Oats
• Whole, coarsely ground, or thick rolled...as long as they aren't instant, they are good in our book (actually, Christa doesn't care for the rolled variety as her tastes are a bit more discerning).  We eat them fermented for breakfast, serve coconut-chili-shrimp over them, add them to smoothies, mix them into pancakes, and even make our own granola.  This is something that is always, always in the pantry in a variety of forms.
• Frozen blueberries
• While fresh lowbush blueberries might be better, with our busy lifestyle, it's often frozen or not-at-all with these antioxidant rich little purple pearls.
•  Maple Syrup
• We like Grade B organic syrup for its rich and deep maple flavor.  It's a great sweetener that brings more than just straight sugar to the party.