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Okay, I kinda lied a bit.

Last week when I introduced Flourishing in Deutschland, I said that this week we would be back to your regularly scheduled programing. But I had such an amazing vacation and I want to share! So we’ll compromise: you read about my trip and look at pictures for a week, and I’ll share a recipe, a tutorial, and a reflection about the mental health effects of GAPS.

Today is recipe day. I’m making dark chocolate nut clusters. But first, my vacation (which I made the chocolate nut clusters for).

For the 4th of July weekend, my husband and I visited my mom and stepdad’s cabin in the north woods of Minnesota – about 5 hours north of where we live. The weather was perfect, the scenery was gorgeous, and I just overall had an amazing weekend. So when my mom offered us the cabin for a longer vacation, we quickly took her up on it. Two weeks after returning home, we were packing up the truck for a week long vacation:

Once again, the weather was gorgeous. A couple mornings it rained, and a few days it was pretty hot. But overall, the weather was perfect. Which is good, because we had no electricity or water at this cabin. We had propane, so we had a stove and a fridge, and a few lights we used every other day or so. We chose to go to bed at sunset, rather than turning on the lights, and then naturally got up at sun rise. We filled up 5 gallon jugs of water at a nearby campsite that we could then manually pump to the sink.

I cannot express how amazing it is to live without phone service, internet access, alarms, bright lights, or anything to worry about. Considering that every time I went into town and checked my messages/email it seemed like the world was falling apart and ceasing to function. Add in all the work I’ve had to catch up with since getting home, and I would not be upset about just living forever in that cabin (especially with July weather).

Now, the trip wasn’t perfect, and I’ll get more into that later in the week. But the time off was much needed. We walked around town (including a festival that was going on), swam, toured an underground mine, and went rock climbing. My husband tried to teach me to work his row boat. When that didn’t go well he went sailing, and I did a lot of reading and finally completed our wedding and honeymoon albums. One year after the fact….It was very satisfying to finally finish those. Will even baked a loaf of bread over a fire, which was super impressive.

Thanks for reading. 🙂 Here’s your recipe:

Dark Chocolate Nut Clusters

If you are curious, yes, we did bring up enough food for the whole week. We packed up two coolers full of frozen soup and meat, vegetables from the garden, concentrated broth, avocados and fruit, eggs, and all the little extras we expected we would need (fats, herbs, etc.). This is what our full fridge looked like on the first day:

This also included snacks for us to eat – it was vacation after all! I decided to do some stuff with black walnuts and chocolate. My mother-in-law’s parents have a black walnut grove, so the freezer is always filled with more black walnuts than anyone could ever eat. I thought, “Hey, free nuts! Great idea!” Black walnuts are pretty bitter, but this greatly improves once they have been soaked and dehydrated to improve digestibility, as detailed in Nourishing Traditions. And then I added chocolate into the mix because my homemade chocolate is GAPS-friendly, low sugar, and it’s chocolate!

I was surprised by how difficult it was to find ideas for this combination. I made these amazing chocolate black walnut cookies. I halved the sugar and used honey. I also used homemade coconut flour, which meant I could halve the eggs. They turned out sooooooo good. Will definitely be making again!

The other chocolate and black walnut treat I made was dark chocolate nut clusters. These chocolate nut clusters can be made with any type of nut or chocolate. I always go with 85% dark (approximately, since I make it myself) since I am sugar sensitive. This recipe is super simple to make. With just two ingredients, it is a fantastic and healthy treat. Whether you are Full GAPS, Paleo, following a real food diet, or none of the above, you will love these dark chocolate nut clusters.

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Shared on Wildcrafting Wednesday.

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