At Real Food Family® we are raising a family with intentional decisions and strong convictions in faith, food, health and home life.
Quick Facts About Me…
- Jesus Christ is my Messiah and my personal relationship with Him is the most important part of my life…I’d love to share my faith with you and why I am so passionate about it!
- After Jesus, I love my family more than anything.
- I used to be in the Broadway musical WICKED (Original Chicago Cast, 1st National Tour, Los Angeles/Pantages) and have been dancing, singing and teaching performing arts professionally for most of my life.
- I learned to cook from the amazing chefs in my family (like Aunt Pam) as well as from TV chefs- which is pretty much the only television I’ve watched since I was 15 years old (which is about half-of-my-life-ago…haha!).
- I have a meal planning website called Real Food Weekly with a library of real food meal plans you can purchase full access to. I donate 1/2 of all income from Real Food Weekly to Potter’s Field Ministries.
- I am a certified Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NTP), certified Birth Doula- CD(DONA) with a Bachelor’s Degree in Health Arts and Sciences.
- I love natural childbirth– having my first child drug-free with a midwife in a hospital and my last two children at home in a tub in my living room.
- I used to live on a 3-acre homestead with 40+ chickens, ducks, goats and a few turkeys. I now live back “home”, close to the beach in a small space with a small yard. Even though we don’t have a farm, we still are raising rabbits, chickens, bees and organic fruits, veggies and herbs in our little yard. Here are all our homesteading adventures.
- I’m really glad you’re here!
A Little More Detail…
Hi!
I’m Roz Mignogna and you’ve landed on my favorite website! Real Food Family really encompasses what our family is all about. We’re real people with real (busy) lives. We love REAL food. Our whole life revolves around God and family.
I was always really inspired by cool blogs that let you share a part of another person or family’s life. In fact, I first got hooked into blogging by reading a really cute fashion blog, with the hope that I might learn a little more to impress my designer husband. Real Food Family is about a lot of things, which is totally what my life is like. But it all centers around the idea of nourishing your body and soul. Sometimes that means really focusing on learning about real nutrition and cooking. Sometimes it means to sit back and enjoy God’s beautiful Creation in stillness and silence. That is, as much silence as you can get with a four-year-old and toddler! My goal here is that you’ll find something fun and useful and keep checking back. Okay..I’m also praying they’ll subscribe to my meal plans that I spend a lot of time and effort making every week (Real Food Weekly) or check out the fabulous services or items this site provides. Most importantly, I hope you’ll enjoy visiting and joining me in this crazy online age we are in. I’m just really glad you stopped by.
Now a little more about me and how Real Food Family got here…
In the fall of 2006 I was living in Chicago, performing as a singer and dancer in the hit Broadway musical, Wicked. I was newly married with an amazing job, but I longed to be busier (go figure), so I started The Reality Chef- a website offering weekly meal plans with organized shopping lists. I had always loved to cook and entertain, and I loved creating recipes and being super organized with meal plans and shopping lists. I even dreamed of being a Food Network TV star. I like to think it could still happen.
Soon life changed entirely. I had two beautiful daughters and became a certified Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NTP) with a Bachelor’s degree in health arts and sciences. I fell in love with childbirth and became a certified birth doula- CD(DONA), and I am now a passionate homesteader…raising chickens, bees, and organic vegetables close to the beach, but just outside of urban “OC” (California).
I soon realized that “The Reality Chef” didn’t fit anymore. I hate reality shows (except Duck Dynasty), which is what everyone thinks of when you say, “reality”. I’m also not a formally trained chef, and I know it really irritates actual chefs to say you are one when you’re not. I do know how to cook, though, and my mission is to help families realize that real food can be a reality in their lives with the help of quality information, instruction, and meal planning help. Thus, I decided to change my website to REAL FOOD FAMILY!
Real Food Family is about real life, real food, real family, real health….real everything! I’m just here share to share important lessons about family and healthy living that I’ve learned with you. Hopefully you can discover information that will benefit your family’s health more than the typical (and often false) “healthy lifestyle” information out there. It seems that everything I do in life or am interested in is somehow either politically incorrect, borderline illegal, or just weird. Don’t worry, when I say illegal, I’m not talking about the typical type of crime you’re thinking of. I’m talking about buying and consuming raw milk from cows that have eaten green grass all of their life and gently milked by loving and caring farmers, instead of highly processed white stuff forcefully squeezed out of a sickly cow who is drugged up and living in her own feces. I’m talking about giving birth to a baby in my own clean, quiet home- surrounded by the peaceful support of my loved ones and a highly skilled midwife, instead of a disease-ridden hospital where I am treated like a time bomb with a parasite trying to kill me as it is born. I’m talking about passionately guiding the food and lifestyle practices my children are raised with to ensure strong immunity and health, instead of not caring about the crap they consume because the government has ensured their “immunity” with mandated, toxin-ridden vaccines that have been shot into their defenseless bodies since the day they were born. Sure, it doesn’t seem like this stuff should be “illegal”, but it basically is because some “important” people want to protect their money at the cost of real health in America. As a result of this, I’ve become an active participant in local and national food and health rights issues, as well as the effort to keep credible, unbiased information available to all people.
I believe our entire nation and culture has been advised to the point of brainwashing by big business and the government on how to birth, how to parent, how to school, how to eat, how to shop, how to live, how to breath, how to age, and how to die. Consumerism has infiltrated every aspect of our lives through commercials, magazines, music, healthcare, and more. I believe we, as a culture, have lost touch with reality- the simple and natural way God created us to live. Our culture of consumerism has created pretentiousness, apathy, wastefulness, sensationalism and unfulfillment.
I believe that when the family reclaims the vital role as the decision makers of our culture- instead of profit-minded corporations and government regulatory agencies- we will reclaim our health, our children, our intelligence, our success, our wealth, our freedom, our lives!
How do we reclaim it? Well, based on what I’ve stated here, that is YOUR decision to make. Don’t act on something just because you’ve been told it’s the right or “normal”, even if it was your mother, teacher, me, or, dare I say, your doctor. The Internet offers incredible accessibility to information, so there is no excuse for making uninformed decisions. For MY family, it means being educated about every decision we make, big or small, because we believe that all our decisions impact how our lives unfold. Food in its most natural state, untouched by industry and factory processing, is what we are committed to eating. We believe that the morning sugared cereal, weekly Sunday doughnut, and frequently raided stash of candy are, in fact, not “harmless.” We know that many modern diseases like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, are a direct result of the industrialized food industry, so we don’t see these diseases as needing a “cure” as much as families needing to change their ways and rely less on American healthcare systems. We’ve traded new-fangled, nutrient-less “food” with whole, traditionally prepared, nourishing food. It is a sad thing, but a vast majority of the food products families consume today are not what I would even consider actual food! Of course, we do know that we live in the “real world,” so we’ve figured out ways, and are constantly still figuring out ways, to make real food a reality in our home…and help you do the same!
We make informed and deliberate choices in all areas of life. We decide where we birth our children, which is in the home unless there is a true medical concern (which is unlikely for most women). We don’t use chemicals and toxic “cleaners” in the home because we believe our home should be the safest place in the world, not a place where most toxic exposure occurs or where most childhood allergies are developed. We don’t vaccinate, and will only consider a vaccine if we believe the necessity of protection outweighs the risks of the shot itself- which will probably never happen. We believe in the “Attachment Parenting” Method of child-rearing instead of modern standards like “Babywise.” (We believe in disciplining children, but not traumatizing babies!) I’m a dedicated breast-feeder and I try to lovingly educate moms about the dangers of feeding children highly processed formulas that are ferociously sold to them as “a healthy alternative” when, in fact, they have only been shown to suppress a child’s health and immune system.
We vote in the booths and we vote with our forks. We vote with our dollars and we vote with our actions. We are reclaiming our health, our family, our lives, and mostly importantly- our freedom to do so.
Above all, we feed ourselves with Real Spiritual Food. We believe in the God of the Bible, the Messiah Jesus Christ, and will undyingly defend our American right to freely and openly study His Word and Worship Him with a fellowship of believers. I am a high school teacher at a Christian school and the assistant director of music at my church, and I love nothing more than sharing my deeply founded faith with anyone who will listen!