Spring-Greens Detox Soup

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posted on

May 13, 2025

Few things these days seem more important than keeping healthy and building our immunity. Taking good care of ourselves so that we can take care of others and live life to the full.

As we move toward a new season where we'll spend more time outdoors, we'll naturally peel off our cozy comfort-zone-hibernation-mode layers, literally and figuratively, and move toward summertime fellowship and FUN! Preparing our bodies for this more vibrant energy mode feels exciting and timely to me.

As a newer member of the team here at the farm, I am I learning new ways to prepare healthy meals at home and for loved ones nearby.

So I was thrilled to meet longtime Polyface patron saint (as our customers are affectionately called) Eleonora Gafton at a recent neighborhood delivery drop!

Eleonora is a Doctor of Clinical Nutrition professor and Certified Chef in the Nutrition and Integrative Health program at the Maryland University of Integrative Health.

As Dr. Gafton was picking up her Polyface order, we chatted about her upcoming class where she would use our food to teach students about cooking nutrient dense meals. She promised to send me a couple of her favorite recipes.

Eleonora grew up on an organic farm and winery in Romania and has fond memories of shopping at farmers markets with her grandmother. Meeting the people who raised and grew their food ignited her passion for natural food and led her to become the first female executive chef in a communist country.

She moved to the US to follow a job opportunity in Washington DC and quickly fell into a fast-paced career culture and "convenience" grocery store food trap where she'd buy boxed or prepared food labeled as "healthy".

Ten years later, her body "broke down" and she was diagnosed with cervical cancer that she believes was due to those food choices and stress.

And so began a slow and steady healing process to rebuild her body. She stocked up her freezer with several batches of bone broth, which was all she "could handle" with very low energy, post surgery and treatment.

All the protein she bought came from Polyface.

There was a major shift for her where she began to really understand the power of whole foods. Just seeing her transformation, her oncologist and surgeon was "blown away" that she'd lost fifty pounds of inflammation in a relatively short period of time.

With her own health restored, Eleonora is committed to teaching others how to build their health with nutrient dense food as medicine.

She takes the mystery out of using "all the things" - unusual cuts of meat and organs to develop beautiful and satisfying meals.

One fun culinary term I've learned from her is the word "schmaltz" - which refers to rendered chicken fat. It is made by slowly rendering chicken skin and fat in a pot over low heat creating a savory, rich fat with a buttery texture. I now love schmaltz! Gaining the knowledge that it's is so good for me to eat and learning how to use to it for cooking has been such a fun endeavor.

So please enjoy and share these recipes which were so graciously shared with us. Because there is nothing more immunity building than being in community and sharing a delicious, wholesome meal around a table - al fresco!

Find our new recipes here:

Eleonora's Chicken Bone Broth

Dr. Gafton's Spring Greens Detox Soup

Blessings,

Kristi

Chicken

All Related

Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year--that's a lot of stuff going on kind of lumped together. Which brings me to my thought this month: it's all related. Perhaps the signature difference between Polyface and current mainline food thinking is integration versus segregation. I could use numerous words to describe this basic concept, like parts versus wholes, but I think these two are as good as any. Conventional industrial food systems break things apart. We see it on farms that grow only one or two things, without regard for the greater inter-relatedness of ecology, all the way up to packaged and processed food. Modern processed foods don't use whole ingredients; they use pieces of things. They strip out the germ of the wheat, for example. They refine things to the point that the food bears no resemblance to its natural state. Then they put all these pieces together and call it food. But these pieces came from widely divergent places, and the beautiful unprocessed original no longer exists. When Dad and I were brainstorming what to call this farm venture that would eventually become Polyface, Dad's assumption was that we'd call it Salatin Inc.--you know, like Ford Motor Company or Chrysler (named for Walter P. Chrysler, the founder). I was adamant that it NOT be our family name for two reasons. First, I suggested there may be a day when a Salatin isn't at the helm. Secondly, I wanted the name to recognize integrated thinking. I came up with the name "Interface Inc." to recognize the three great environments: water, land, and forest. For 20 years, during what I call our experimental homesteading days, we'd been planting trees, fencing out riparian zones, fencing out the forest to protect it from cows, and developing a landscape plan with these various zones in mind. The State Corporation Commission rejected the name because, unbeknownst to us, Virginia already had an "Interface Inc." It was a labor arbitration company to work out disagreements between labor and management. I was milking the cow when Dad told me the bad news, and I spontaneously blurted: "If we can't be Interface, let's be Polyface--the farm of many faces." Dad laughed, but we both liked the idea, and it stuck and was approved. The point here is that from the outset, all our thinking was about how to leverage the various assets of the diversified ecosystem and then harness the distinctives of the various animals. As a result, we looked at symbiotic natural patterns and have done our best to duplicate them. The Eggmobile follows the cows so the chickens can scratch through cow pies. We use pigs to aerate compost. Our small flock of sheep is like a glorified weed eater, cleaning up fence lines and around farm buildings to reduce mowing. The animals move through the pastures, paddock to paddock; they don't stay in the same place. Illustrative of "conventional-think", Virginia Tech veterinary professors who judged my son Daniel's 4-H talk titled "Symbiosis and Synergy in the Racken (Rabbit-Chicken) House" at the state contest nearly 30 years ago couldn't restrain their skepticism. "Aren't you concerned about diseases with two species that close to each other?" I was never so proud. He was about 15 and, without batting an eye, looked those professors in the eye and replied: "We've learned that most pathogens don't cross-speciate." Folks, I had not prepped him for that question. When he responded like that, those three professors slapped their legs and laughed at the audacious notion. They had no further comments and immediately tried to recruit him to enroll at Virginia Tech and major in Veterinary Science. Instead, he stayed with me on the farm and scaled up these simple integrated relationships to the thousands of animals we have now--with virtually no vet bills. Meanwhile, conventional experts wring their hands over bird flu, screw worm, African swine fever, blackleg, and a host of maladies that attack places where an integrated approach toward biology is severely lacking. Pediatrician Dr. Sharon Goldfield, director of population health for the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, wrote a fascinating op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week titled "Baby Food and Youth Obesity." She slammed "packaged baby and toddler foods" because they fail even rudimentary nutrition standards. Their surveys indicated that "80 percent of children are eating packaged toddler foods, many of which are ultra-processed, from an early age, with 43 percent of them eating these foods at least five days a week." Kids are eating out of boxes and slurping from concoctions created by a segregated mentality from field to stomach. This segregated thinking even permeates parental decision making, divorcing overall health from food and assuming whatever happens, pharmaceuticals can fix it. At Polyface, everything we do assumes that everything we do affects something else we do. It's that simple. Both land health and people health occur when we realize everything relates to everything. You can't just eat well and not exercise. You can't dismiss the value of sunlight on your skin; especially early morning sunlight. Hydration. Sleep. Stress. Forgiveness. Gratitude. It's all part of us. As we celebrate all these holiday times and imagine the relatedness of Thanksgiving with the Christmas story with the eagerness of a new year, imagine all the things going on in your life and how they work together. Or how if you pull them apart, things fray. Be assured that here at Polyface we're trying to integrate ecology, people, and economy in an overall symbiotic whole to deliver you the best food at a reasonable price. And we thank you for helping us build an integrated whole that respects earthworms all the way to our dinner plate and microbiome. We're not feeding you earthworms, but be assured they play an ongoing role in every bite you enjoy from Polyface. Thank you. Joel