You're a nut milk

So as it turns out high stress levels, international travel and eating out for two months can cause some problems in the ol' bag of bones.  Trever and I are trying to remedy those effects, which are played out by high acid causing painful stomach cramps.  Drama.   

Everyone is always talking about how we have these crazy high acid diets due to overly processed foods with added sodium, too much caffeine and alcohol, low nutrients in plant foods from modern farming practices and blah blah we’re giving ourselves cancer.  I cook really healthy but when you’re trying to heal from the damages of an unbalanced pH you gotta get crazy with the alkaline diet, as in not just green salads but green salads and no lemon or vinegar for the dressing.  yummmm.  Of course lemons and vinegars are ok in a normal balanced diet and over the long term assist in pH balance, but when trying to reverse some acid effects those things are out, aka flavor is out, aka a month of rabbit food.

So here’s what I’m learning:

First, our calcium/magnesium ratios are generally off (too much calcium) which plays into high acid levels.  You can take supplements but a great way to absorb magnesium is by taking Epsom salt baths. 

Stress adds to an acidic levels.  Do yoga.  Or say no to things.  Or don’t renovate a house.

Drink alkaline water and not coffee. Or maybe replace coffee with a turmeric latte if you’re a real bad ass.  Trever and I tried those and lordy are they somethin’ else.  It takes some serious commitment to develop a liking for that (1 tsp. Tumeric // 1 tsp. Honey // 3 parts Water // 1 part Almond Milk)  Although I haven’t tried it with fresh turmeric only dried, so maybe that will help.  Not likely. Another healing option is licorice tea - blerg. 

Peanuts are acidic, switch to almond butter.  Also avoid dairy, switch to almond milk. 

Almond milk is soooo easy by the way.  It’s a 1 to 4 ratio of raw almonds to water.  Soak the almonds overnight.  Drain, then add almonds to water and blend it up real nice.  Filter it through cheese cloth and there you have it.  To add sweetness, soak dates for an hour and blend them into your milk with a splash of vanilla.  This way you don’t have all those weird additives they have in store bought almond milk.

Avoid cereals and grains other than plant-based proteins like quinoa, which is obviously the grossest of all the grains.

Eat any raw fruits and vegetables. 

Avoid eggs.

Don’t eat sandwich meat.  Actually don’t ever eat sandwich meat, ugh, murderers.

Of course with balance things like lemons, berries, vinegars, eggs and wine (quality of life) can all be added back in.  But for now we’ll be having quinoa with avocado and a sprinkle of salt, apples with almond butter, broccoli salad with creamy almond dressing (recipe to come), and I’ll be giving a lot of my sourdough bread away. 

If we’re lucky Trever will drop another ten pounds, per his usual response to diets, and our fat cat Grey, Colette and I will keep putting them on. I hope you learned something utterly fascinating from my health related antics, if only that I'm a total nut.  Cheers. 

Reprocussions for the Things

Trever and I close escrow tomorrow.  I forgot how stressful it can be buying a house.  All the loan documents and paperwork is nightmarish for both Trever and my personalities.  Then of course the moving bit has its own unsettling effect.  I woke up in the middle of the night last night and did yoga in my kitchen, which is the only open space in my house, just to ease some tension of living in the aftermath of an explosion of things! We have too many things. I ended up waking up this morning and cleaning my house, which felt like wiping a bit of mud off a pig.  I pushed boxes into corners and made my kitchen and bedroom the safe zones.  I mopped the floors and cleaned the bathrooms, all of which had cycled out of control once the first frame came off the wall, and then I took a nap. 

I need naps recently.  I missed the tired portion of first trimester pregnancy and so I felt like I bypassed the fatigue and pregnancy wouldn’t get me down.  I know all the mothers are internally patronizing me for my adorable ignorance, because of course I now feel like I returned from another time zone only yesterday and just cannot beat this jet lag.  I’ll be in a meeting around 3:00 and could literally close my eyes mid sentence and likely fall quickly asleep.  I have to avoid people with calming and slow voices during that part of my day.

This fatigue however, could also be due to our current diet.  We went to Trader Joes this weekend and bought a bunch of frozen no cook meals for the week in anticipation of the chaos and a boxed up kitchen.  On Monday night I heard the beep of my microwave, peeled back the plastic cover from a plastic plate full of Veggie Korma and placed it in front of Trever.  My granola self looked upon what I had become that night and shamed me for my decisions.  Trever on the other hand was rather happy, like so happy that he told me I was going to have a hard time convincing him to go back to eating the way we normally do. He's noted that lucky for us these frozen sodium packets are low in calories which is an added benefit to death by preservatives.  You see, it might be important to know Trever is kind of ironic by nature.  I was talking to my friend Kayla about this, how right in the center of all his good taste, fashion industry work, fine art degree and general hipness, he’s still from Hemet and would honestly prefer Del Taco and PBR to a client meeting at Nobu. Truth is though, this is actually one of my favorite things about him, shitty towns make good people, sucks the life right out of any pretentiousness.

So, I ate my sodium rich indian food and was grateful in the middle of the craziest season of life we’ve had to date.  Houses are just houses and in the midst of chaos we kind of have to laugh at all that’s happening.  I clutch my round belly in gratitude for a tiny life that has already changed me in ways I could never have understood before.  I pray for her incessantly and can’t wait to make her a home that’s simply walls and a garden but really a place that she’ll feel loved.

I know she already is so loved.  My friends and family have been so kind and gracious and grieved and celebrated with us like she was their own. And to all of you who have been following along with me, I wanted to say thank you for your love.  The grace with which you have responded to me, my writing, and my family has overwhelmed me.  Your continual offerings of encouragement and prayer has been an honest source of support for Trever and I.  It’s been a difficult season and yet there has been comfort knowing the amount of people who have been crying over, praying for and celebrating Colette.  It’s humbling to be the recipient of your love.  So thank you, with all of my heart, thank you. 

And that's a wrap, off to the boxes again. 

Jam

So it looks like we're moving.  Not to Paris like some thought, maybe one day though. But just a few blocks away from where we live now. Radical. We really wanted a yard and although we love our place now it has bad juju.  The month we moved in my Dad got diagnosed with cancer and went through treatment which almost took his life, then Trever's Dad passed away, then we learned of our infertility, then we've had to endure the pain and joy of this pregnancy.  

Get me OUT! 

Some might say it's an interesting decision to be moving right now, it's not as if we have space for added stress, but it's also a nice distraction.  The place we are moving to is tiny, built in 1920 and full of character. It's got a ton of windows and loads of sunlight, there are tiny doors leading outside all over the house and the bedroom windows pull open like a disney movie.   We're going to re-do the kitchen so I've been losing untold hours to pinterest and kitchen stalking. I'm adding some of my finds to my CURATION page if you want to follow along with me in my distractions. Just as a side note, all of the images I use on my blog posts are Trever's suggestions.  So if the images are creating some sort of illusion that I'm more cultured than a goof from Victorville, we can all just let that go. 

Also I make jam now.  Remember in Friends when Monica makes all the jam after she breaks up with Richard? This is me, except less funny.  I was trying to find a natural Strawberry Jam recipe and I couldn't find one.  Everyone likes to add lots of sugar and pectin.  Pectin is like active yeast, it's a store bought products that makes a natural process happen a lot more quickly.  Jam gets its thick quality when the sugar, fruit, acid and heat work together for the good of those who love it. We speed this up with sugar and pectin, and really the sugar is just because it tastes good.  

So I experimented.  I made several batches of stawberry jam made with just the fruit, honey and lemon.  It takes longer to cook down but then when I lather it on my toast I don't have to feel bad. Also when it's hot off the stove before I bottle it I drizzle over vanilla ice cream.    

So...I chop up 5 cups of fresh ripe strawberries and place in a saucepan.  Then I add 1 cup honey and the juice of a lemon and let the jam simmer for close to two hours - until the jam sticks to the back of your spoon. That's it.  Then we consume it like ice cream. Yum

Blueberry Granola

I've been trying to figure out a healthy granola recipe.  Most recipes have some unhealthy oils and use a lot of sugar. Instead I used coconut oil and honey to make a really healthy and yum version.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees

Combine in a large mixing bowl:

10 c. oats // 1 1/2 c. unsweetened shave coconut // 1/2 c flax seed // 1 c. slivered almonds // 1 c. sunflower seeds // 3/4 c. chopped walnuts // 3/4 c. chopped macadamia nuts // 1/2 c. ground flax seed // 3/4 c. wheat germ // 3 tbsp. cinnamon // 1 tsp. nutmeg

Combine in a sauce pan and warm until blended:

1 c. coconut oil // 1 c. honey // 1/2 c. molasses // 2 tbsp. vanilla extract// 1 tsp. almond extract

Pour the ingredients from the saucepan into the mixing bowl with dry ingredients and mix together. 

Spread the granola across two baking sheets and bake for 30 minutes, stirring halfway through. 

Optional: Add 1 c. dried blueberries to cooled granola 

Ant Murderer

Well we have ants.  They like our cat's food and they enter our house through our front door in neatly organized single file lines until they access salty cat kibble.  We tried putting the food in a dish of water but we discovered that in fact, ants can walk on water...sort of.  Apparently what they're actually doing is taking tiny ferry's made of cat food particles across the mote to the mother load. Also, in case you're wondering, ants can support almost 100x times their own weight, they move an estimated 50 tons of soil per year in one square mile, they have two stomachs - one for themselves and one to hold food for others, and when an ant finds a food source they leave a trail of pheromones to inform their fellow soldiers to follow the lead.

So now that I've personalized them and discussed their strengths as any vegetarian might, I looked up ways to naturally deal with the ant catastrophe. Here's what worked:

A spray bottle with water and either fresh lemon juice or lemon essential oil, ground cinnamon or cinnamon oil, and peppermint oil.  As a bonus it smells fabulous so you can lift your spirits while murdering tiny four-legged families.  It's not going to be an Ant A-bomb like raid, it's more like a border than a killer, but at least it won't give you Parkinson's. Every day we spray the boundary of our door and it creates a blockade of lemony bliss. Try it. 

Internet is Life

I have all these idyllic ideas about agricultural life pre the industrial revolution.  It was a time when things were simpler, and everyone picked their own wheat and made their own bread and read books together at night like the Bennet's.  It all seems so much better than the industrialization of our modern Western world complete with the chemical fest that is commercial farming and Pokemon Go, which I have to say, is destroying my hope for humanity.  As I dodge the crowd of adolescent zombies walking through our downtown streets staring at their screens and running into me, I become worried that we are all that Ray Bradbury predicted and Pokemon Go is exposing this tragic truth.

Then I made my own bread. For weeks I woke up in the morning and scooped from my starter some globs of what looks like pancake batter and placed it in a new bowl with fresh flour and water, this is feeding my starter. Then I wash the bowl, which inevitably takes twenty minutes due to the concrete hold the starter has on the glass, but it’s the price I pay to be granola.  A quick note, it should be said that the term granola needs a positive connotation I am not ok with all the hate. Then the day came where I used a bit of my little starter I’ve been growing and added flour, water and salt to make my dough!

At this point the idea of bread making was still very romanticized, I was just a little 1950’s housewife swept off her feet by sourdough.  So every thirty minutes for four hours I went into the kitchen to turn my dough, which is sort of like kneading it.  After the four hours of rising I got to shape my dough into a round loaf. This is where things took a turn. I’m not going to try and explain the catastrophe that was the dough shaping, I would rather let you imagine pouring a bowl of thick pancake batter on your counter and trying to get it into a ball without it sticking to your hands. Trever happened to be munching on some chips standing dangerously close to the counter while I was in the middle of this process and asked innocent questions that almost made my head explode, so I held up my sticky batter hands and yelled, “no it’s not supposed to look like this.” Woah, I lost my 1950's housewife cool for a second.

Another four hours I waited until I got to transfer my globby sticky mess into my dutch oven where I was meant to cut small slices in the dough so it would rise properly. It was at this point I was fairly certain I had failed. Imagine again with me cutting slices into weak, wet, batter…it’s like, what’s the point? So I aggressively jammed the knife into the sorry lump and huffed at the calamity of it all. Then it baked and came out like a very heavy and dense ball that resembled, in some distant way, bread.  I think Trever felt a bit of panic over the failure of my day-long baking saga that went south.  I know this because when I squeezed the bread it’s supposed to make a crunching sound and when it kind of did he got ecstatically happy and congratulated me on my feat of accomplishment.  “Ooh yum, it tastes just like sourdough. No the texture is fine.  Ya it’s a little dense but I LIKE IT. Ironic how I just started a diet huh? No bread for me, but good job babe!”  What a dear.

I realize now, that if I were to somehow travel in time to the days prior to the fabulous and brilliant industrial revolution, I would have spent all my days surviving.  You just spend the whole day making bread, and then you eat it, and that’s it, because all you have time to do is make bread because it is so damn hard. 

But I do not give up quite so easily, so I made bread a second time and it was much better. I brought it to my sister’s house and we all ate it with cheese and celebrated the bread, something I will never again take for granted.  The irony is my dramatic improvement on round two was thanks to You Tube bakers who showed me what to do, thank God for the internet.  Ray Bradbury had no idea what he was missing. 

Bread is Life

A large part of my life consists of trying to be domestic and failing.  Due to said failure I have done deep seeded and irreparable damage to my self-confidence related to wife-ing. This is why it took me five years to start cooking. 

I once made Chili for a party we were hosting and charred the bottom of it. In a salvaging effort I thought it would be helpful to scrape the char from the bottom of the pan, not sure why that made sense at the time, but as you can assume the burn taste then permeated the whole pot of soup which we all ate anyways and called it, smokey. I also cooked in the oven smoked salmon, like it was fresh salmon, which is sort of like baking turkey sandwich meat and serving it for thanksgiving. I somehow missed the al dente lesson concerning pasta and boiled some spaghetti noodles until they were so overdone that they died and returned to their original state of wet formless flour. I cooked them into oblivion, as my mother would say. Because of these failures I quit, and for five years our fridge usually had an egg in it that was wildly passed its expiration date and probably some jar items that never really expire, like Dijon mustard.

Then one day I roasted some potatoes and they turned out good.  Trever gained a baby bit of confidence in me and thus, so did I. Slowly I started buying food and making salads, lots and lots of salads because they are very hard to mess up.  I made Vietnamese salad with napa cabbage, and Greek salad with feta cheese and crumbled pita chips, and a mixed grain salad with tomatoes and cucumbers. The first step into the wonderland of salads is making homemade dressing, which I did. Dressing by the way is much easier than one might think and far superior to the bottled super market version, which is just a cover for putting preserved sugar on salads. Blerg. Now at the ripe age of 29 I cook at home several nights a week and only fail miserably a couple of times a year. 

I do my best to cook healthy, which essentially means we eat a lot of vegetables. This works out well for me as I don’t eat meat and fortunately my skinny husband obliges my first-world eating preferences. I have however, inadvertently developed a reputation for myself that I am some sort of health nut. I know this because my friends moms always like to come up to me and tell me they were health nuts before it was cool and proceed to recite their health related fanaticism. I'm really not that extreme, I like to watch everyone get on and off bandwagons for what is and isn’t killing us all.  Starting with fat, then all carbohydrates, then sugar, now gluten, and on it goes. I just think we generally would do good to stop cutting out entire food groups and just eat fresh food (except vegetarians because we’re different, we cut out a food group in a stance against animal murder – virtual eye roll).

Also I think we should balance quality of life with our eating habits.  Friends of mine have become such health enthusiasts that they complain constantly about their weak stomach's inability to process pizza anymore and they wear it like a badge of honor.  Happiness is also very good for your body, pizza makes the world happy, in conclusion we should never stop eating pizza.  On that note, if our bodies can no longer process pizza we have done something terribly wrong and must retrace our steps to return ourselves to pizza, even if that means we eat it until it stops hurting.  Plus, if we just ate pizza with natural ingredients and cut out the chemicals and preservatives all the way from the farming of grain, to the raising of cows for milk, to the fermenting of bread, we would all be just fine!

Ok so we got to my point -fermenting bread.  You’ve seen cooked on Netflix right? Did you see the one about air? If you didn’t you should, but for now *spoiler alert* I will tell you that they interview a baker who goes through the history of bread and emphasizes the need for whole flour and natural yeast.  He convinced me of the need for fermenting our bread with natural yeast via our own starters.  BTW, my friend and farmer Bill Spencer at Windrose Farm makes his own starter and bread and it is the best bread, it is heaven in a crunchy little loaf. Because I will NEVER give up gluten, I am trying this whole homemade bread domestic wife thing.  This whole ramble was to convince you and me, that I can do it! I have begun my starter and it is sitting on top of my fridge stinking up my kitchen.  I have to feed it every day which essentially means throwing out half of what looks like pancake batter and adding more flour and water to allow it to keep growing.  Grow baby yeast grow! I might fail but I won’t tell you until I succeed because I prefer to parade my excellence to the world wide web as often as I can.  If I find the perfect recipe I might share, we’ll see. 

Cider Sour

My mom makes this drink that we're all crazy for, which we've dubbed the Cider Sour.  My one year old niece even gets all electrified when she sees my mom's cup, because just like us she's into the Apple Cider Vinegar. Yes! Apple Cider Vinegar made yum. So as you know due to our diets our bodies run acidic which causes a whole host of problems, and ACV is one of the ways to bring our bodies back to alchaline.  But of course it tastes like vinegar and so every time I drink it, it burns up my esophagus, just burns it all up. My mother is a goddess and makes this recipe that she tweaked from something she found online. It tricks the tastebuds into thinking they're happy with the tartness and sweetness and soda pop fizz. Hallelujah.

8 oz. Sparkling Water // 1/2 Lime // 1/2 Lemon // One dropper full of liquid stevia // 1/2 tsp. fresh grated Ginger // 1 shot Apple Cider Vinegar

Get into it! 

Peppermint and Dinosaurs

My blog has been such a drag recently.  It’s all so cheerless and contemplative, talking about souls and gods and cell babies. I want to encourage you dear reader(s), lots of things are good:

Trever has a sweater with a T-rex on it.  The bright colors reminiscent of the 80’s bring happy spirits and it reminds me that if nothing else there was once a giant lizard with tiny arms, and that’s rich.  It must have been an evolutionary flaw or maybe just a little Mesozoic humor, but either way they ended up dead and knit onto a Hedi Slimane sweater, poor guys. The sweater is made out of wool aka tiny needles, so I can’t touch him because I would rather not die of the heebies.

I got an essential oil diffuser, which is a hippie tool designed to do things to us through our nasal passage via smelly steam.  They can make us jolly, un-sick, free of anxiety, or in my case make my home smell like an enormous peppermint stick. It makes me feel clean and spritely.

We’re into Vietnamese food and I make vermicelli noodle salads and springs rolls and we drink sake to wash down the peanut sauce.  We bought rice paper to wrap lettuce, noodles, carrots, avocados, peanuts, cucumber, cilantro and mint into a translucent vegetable sausage.  Trever and I have roll offs like adolescents with an enormous duby. I always rip my rice paper, his are always flaccid, and we don’t make dirty jokes about them. The whole meal is like nine calories but the Mochi makes up for it. 

We have cat children.  They lay on our bed all day long like Victorian Aristocrats waiting for something interesting to happen. The thing about cats is they act like they’re stupid, you call their name and they behave like they’re gerbils with no brain, their face turned the greatest distance possible from you. DoiDoi. The ears give them away though, they dart back so they don’t miss a word. Genius brats, they never have to do anything they don’t want.  Sage…Sage…SageSage Sage, SAAAAGE, Sage the big fat cat, SAGE…ugh.

We ordered a record a month ago and it just came in.  I’m not sure when it was recorded but it sounds like the soundtrack on Splash Mountain, a little South American, with some French Horn.  Trever replicated that horn noise and I laughed like a 1950's house wife – ha ha what a hoot.

We have friends too. I just wanted to say that so you don’t think I sit at home with my cats, inhaling candy canes, drunk off Sake, and shimmying to the rhythms of the south. Not that I don’t do that, I do that.

So things are good.

Vermicelli Salad:

Cook Vermicelli noodles according to package (traders just got some good ones in their refrigerated section by the sushi) and let it cool. Add mixed greens, mint, bean sprouts, matchsticks carrots and cucumber, peanuts and cilantro.  For the dressing I used, fish sauce, soy sauce, sesame oil, honey, lime, sesame seeds, sweet chili sauce and rice vinegar. 

Spring Rolls:

Dip the rice paper in warm water (not boiling) for a couple second and spread on a cutting board.  Add one piece of lettuce and top with matchstick carrots and cucumber, avocado slice, bean sprouts, peanuts, cilantro and mint, then roll it up.  For peanut sauce I mixed peanut butter, soy sauce, sweet chili sauce, rice vinegar and lime. 

Zinc is the New Tan

In the Californian eternal Summer we have to think about our sunscreen use often, lest we resemble a ninety year old at forty. Of course we always have the option to pay money to painfully inject numbing fluid into our face muscles so we can achieve that youthful glow of the expressionless, but that’s not for everyone.

So there are two main ways to block harmful rays, one is mineral filters and one is chemical filters.  If you read the ingredients of that sunscreen bottle you’ll see they will almost always contain the chemical filters. These chemical filters penetrate skin and their most common problem is that they can affect hormones and do things like bump up estrogen, which is connected to cancer. Here are a few of them listed from worst to least worst: Oxybenzone, Octinoxate, Homosalate, Octisalate, Octocrylene.  You gonna remember those? Maybe just generally avoid O words. 

Mineral sunscreen uses Zinc Oxide or Titanium Dioxide, which have much fewer risks and side effects. They are made from ground up minerals and they generally don’t penetrate the skin and yet are still equally as successful in blocking the harmful rays.

The trouble is that some mineral sunscreens are horrible.  I once used a natural sunscreen that would never rub in, it sat that the surface of my skin white as snow and ready to extend its UV blocking glory to any person I came in contact with, you could have trailed my activities that day by following the faint white residue I left behind. Also, some brands like Sun Bum give off that natural aura because they have no phalates which is good, but they still have the harmful chemical ingredients listed above (unless you buy their baby products) so always read the listed ingredients. 

My favorites are Alba,  Jason, Kiss My Face and The Honest Company, but there are tons more. 

Source: EWG

Grain, Sweet Potato and Kale

Here's another fab, well balanced and filling kale salad. If you're the Trader Joes type you can get their mixed grains and it's a good replacement for the regular Israeli cous cous. If you want to be a super health freak, cous cous is actually just above rice in grain health benefits, so if you want to move up the ladder you can sub farro or quinoa. 

Israeli Cous Cous // Sweet Potatoes // Goat Cheese // Dried Cranberries or Cherries (try to avoid the kind with gallons of sugar)  // Slivered Almonds // Kale

Cube the sweet potatoes and roast at 425 for 25ish minutes. Follow the package instructions for making the cous cous, I make 1 cup. Break down the Kale by massaging it (yes that's what they call it) or flash steaming it. It makes it blend better in the meal, and much easier to digest and absorb the nutrients. Allow all the ingredients to cool (or keep all of it warm if you prefer) and add dressing to taste. 

Dressing:

Olive Oil // Lemon // Lemon Zest // S&P // Minced Garlic // Honey

ChChChChia

Some people are healthy, and then some people just like pain. My husband is one such pain inflicting health nut.  He does things like take shots of apple cider vinegar – straight – with no chaser – grin and bear it.  He also drinks a glass of Chia Seeds every night.  He once tried to get me to drink a glass and I COULD NOT.  He sat across the kitchen counter from me and watched like a disapproving coach over my inability to toughen up and drink the goop. I kept gaging into the sink and he had no sympathy for me, just pure disapproval. The thing about chia seeds is the longer you wait the more they absorb the water and the more dense and glue-like they become.  It’s made to weed out the weak, survival of the fittest.  If you can’t gag it down fast enough you’re out of the game because nobody can get down pure concrete.  Most people soak them and throw them into a smoothie, not Trever, he wants to feel the pain of health.

The thing is, if you can get them down you should.  Their main benefits are protein, fiber, calcium and omega 3&6 fatty acids, plus a HUGE amount of antioxidants. First, the antioxidants are known to fight cancer and premature aging.  The fiber keeps your digestive system moving aiding in colon health, and balances insulin, a necessary component for our high sugar American diets. There are host of reasons why inflammation is hard on our bodies, and it’s a chronic problem due to the way we eat.  I’ve been doing a lot of research on anti-inflammatory diets so I’ll probably discuss later, but for now this is a really helpful way to balance things out.  The calcium is crucial for bone health and a necessary dietary element for vegans.  Remember the nice visual I gave you earlier of chia seeds soaking up so much water that you have to down it like a frat boy before it becomes a solid mass? Well this lovely water absorption quality is actually really helpful in your digestive system, because it prolongs hydration and promotes nutrient absorption, great for before a workout. It essentially does what a sports drink does without the sugar. Also a vain side effect– it helps reduce belly fat. 

So there are a lot of recipes online for chia seed pudding, which is a way of tricking yourself into thinking you're eating a weird dessert when it's just maj healthy.  Some recipes will put you in the casket, others are amazing...as puddings go.  I have made both.  Some recipes tell you that it only takes thirty minutes to become like pudding, but if you’re using milk then it takes around 4 hours, or overnight (dairy milk takes longer).  Honey is absolutely essential to this pudding’s survival, just get it in there, lots of honey.  I did several versions, some with dairy free milk, some with cow’s milk to get the benefits from the fat, and they both worked well.  Note: if you’re the type that gags looking at rice pudding, just walk away, this isn’t for you. 

Blueberry Coconut Chia Seed Pudding

½ cup almond milk // ½ cup coconut milk // 1 tbsp. coconut shavings // 2 tbsp. chia seeds // blueberries // honey

Place milk, coconut, honey and chia seeds in a glass and stir until honey dissolves (you can sub this for agave if you prefer, it would mix in better) and cover, store in the fridge overnight.  Remove from fridge and drizzle more honey and add bluberry’s to top. 

Vanilla Cinnamon Chia Seed Pudding

½ cup full fat cow’s milk // ½ cup almond milk // 2 tbsp. chia seeds // ½ tsp. cinnamon // ¼ tsp. vanilla // honey

Place all ingredients in a glass, stir, cover and store in the fridge overnight. Add some extra cinnamon and honey for good measure and enjoy!

Do you want to get rich from home?

I super hate pyramid schemes, ahem, multi-level marketing.  It’s all over my world, buy me, buy me.

"All you have to do is purchase this product that burns up all your fat and simultaneously makes your muscles spasm so that you’re toning up your body right there in your office chair without ever moving, you’ll look like Jillian Micheals but be richer and have no friends left in just three months! What a deal, and bonus, it’s all plant based made out of bronacancerite and naturochemaline."

We already have to deal with a lot of people digitally screaming into our consciousness to choose them.  My personal favorite are the ads that pop up over the content of an article and pretty much shut down your computer and the internet trying to do some weird moving graphic and take so long to close out that 0% of readers survive the debacle and remain on the site (that ad better be paying your mortgage). I pride myself in my skills of averting my gaze away from the clutter of ads, for example if I google something I’ll always scroll below the ads links even if it’s the link I’m looking for, just out of principle (yes I’m the youngest sibling why does that matter?).  Now though, it’s worse because my friends are marketing at me on social media.  I have brands I follow on social media because I like their product, plexi drink away your fat is not one of them.  I do not care about it and I am highly uninterested in a photo of an ugly line-up of the products and a quote about, omg it’s finally the one product that cures cancer and clears acne all at ooooonce.

Suddenly is has turned my social media friends into car sales men. They have this weird tone in their voice as they find awkward ways of bringing up the benefits of crazy pill healer and asking really invasive questions to find ways to apply its benefit to my life.  Are you afraid of getting cancer, ya I bet you are, just swallow this brown powder made from natural cave rock particles fermented into globs,which cannot be replicated and is only found in obscure mountain -boom – you’ve got all the vegetables you’ll ever need in that one drink. Plus it could be free if you get forty of your friends to take it too. 

Or worse, you get weekly 800 word emails from someone who you met 5 years ago at the gym, and they’re trying to friend you up and do a super sly mention of, oh ya this product cures the average headache and will most likely end global warming, and if you thought you couldn't sell this yourself, you're wrong! Just sit around and annoy the hell out of your friends all day and your numbers start doubling, it's just twenty times math math plus this and youuu've GOT that new car.

Now I'm so mad that even if it is a great product, the marketing of it makes me never want to buy it.  I like essential oils (message me if you’re interested) but I don’t buy the pyramid brands because it’s annoying to me.

The absolute worst part of it all, is multi level marketing is GENIUS! I never pay attention to the chaos around the border of my screen, but I just cannot get away from Rodantheyou’ll look twenty for life.  

Ugh

…was that a little dramatic?

Cashews and Kale

This is my new favorite Kale salad.  Chop up everything really small like a slaw so it's easier to eat and easier to digest. Buy an asian dressing or just make your own, it's simple.  This salad has all the greens of course, protein in the nuts, digestive cleansing in the ginger, alkaline in the lime & healthy fats in the oil. Eat up.  

Salad::

2 bunches of Kale // 1 bunch of Cilantro // 5 Green onions // 1 cup Cashews // Half a head of Napa Cabbage

Dressing (a little of this a little of that) ::

Rice Vinegar // Soy Sauce // Lime // S&P // Olive Oil // Sesame Seed Oil // Fresh Grated Ginger // Honey // Peanut Butter (optional)

Sashimi on a Sailboat

If you follow me on Instagram you know I was at Windrose Farm this weekend. Hello nature photos (listen, if you’re hating it you’re only one click away from complete freedom).

On Saturday afternoon I had some wine, beer and cheese with the farmer Bill on their front porch.  He had to walk to the barn to grab his beer, he buys it in kegs – badass. We spent a couple hours hearing stories of his 22 day sailing trip from Hawaii back to California on an old wooden sailboat this summer.  I’m not sure if my imagination exaggerated his stories, but my images include Bill in the middle of the night hoisted near the top of the mast with the wind nearly tipping the boat over, while he fixes the problem that most surely would have sunk the boat.  It also includes fishing off the side of the boat and eating sashimi for dinner every night surrounded by Pacific Ocean blue and the perfect sunset, as well as long bumpy nights as the boat heaves with each wave and small amounts of water slosh around the floor. Oh, and also a captain that looks like the guy from titanic with the white beard and wears all blue and swears a lot.  I think this is a mostly true depiction.

We then moved into conversation about the farm itself.  It seems it is hard to turn a profit in biodynamic farming.  It’s essentially food for the rich because the amount it costs to grow food without chemicals, makes it so expensive that it no longer fits within the tightly squeezed American family’s food budget (on average 8% of one’s income is allocated to food, that thing that keeps us alive).  Of course we know that we end up paying a lot more in medical bills from health problems due to low nutrition and in our taxes to subsidize corporate farmers, but whatever.

As the small amount of family farmers are beginning to die off, corporations are coming in and buying up land.  Bill popped my happy bubble I felt I was in, I thought by purchasing USDA organic produce I was out of the woods.  As it turns out they keep adding more and more chemicals and poisons to the list of approved organic pesticides and there is very little if any accountability to enforce organic farmers to abide by the regulations. Thanks Monsanto. 

Oh, and Bill went by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch on his way home from Hawaii, which is basically a giant dumpster in the middle of the ocean (it's estimated to be between the size of Texas and up to twice the size of the Continental United States).  I learned about its effects and that the garbage infiltrates itself into the food chain and we end up eating that shit, literally, on a micro level we are eating our own waste.

I just picture us like this disease spreading all over the earth and consuming and destroying without a thought to our future generations.  Or future aside, we act without thought to what’s sustainable now and better for us today.  We forget that we’re just organism in this huge breathing being and when we poison it we’re actually poisoning ourselves.  We're like the cancer to the whole being. 

Note: I’m aware that I understand food from a place of privilege.   I know that for some family’s their food budget allows only for fast food options and that’s literally survival for them. We can and should make peace with sometimes unsustainable farming to allow hungry families to at least eat, that's a priority. But for those of us who can sacrifice to support a more sustainable approach to farming, let's. 

Now that I have sufficiently bummed you out, here’s the advice I was given. Know your farmer.  You support sustainability by purchasing food from sustainable farms.  Go to the farmers market and get to know the farm, ask if you can visit, it should be local.  If they won’t let you come that’s not a great sign, if they do, go check it out.  See how they do things and support the farmers who do it right. It’s going to cost you more, but maybe less in the long run. 

Get Negative

I want a Himalayan Sea Salt Lamp.  Partially because they're pretty and they give off a vibey warm glow, but mostly because they make you happy. Shh, yes they do! 

You know how you feel happy and energetic after you've been at the beach, or out in nature? There's a scientific reason for such happiness (other than the fact that you're not at work). It's called negative ions, which are created from sunlight, radiation, air, and moving water.  There are tens of thousands of them in beach areas, near waterfalls, in the mountains etc. and there are very few, if any under the florescent lights in your cubicle.  These negative ions are believed to boost seratonin levels leading to positivity, studies show they increase the flow of oxygen in the brain helping bring mind clarity and energy, and they cleanse the air of germs and allergens.

So, himalayan salt lamps - the salt attracts water and cleanses it, the heat from the light causes it to evaporate quickly and in evaporation it releases bursts of happiness energy into your air (you can also get machines that do this probably more effectively, but they're ug). Like most eastern medicine the effects aren't proven (because why research nature when pharma is a multi billion dollar industry) but there is a lot of good research behind it - and anyways it's pretty. 

Everybody text Trever and tell him I need it, I find nagging to be a very effective (and mature) tactic - he's a lucky guy.  Side: The reason my lamp request is being denied is not due to any sexist domination on his part, but rather to my obsession with thousands of other related hippie health products…I've gone too far. I'm pretty sure if I were managing our money we would be living on the street, but damn would we be healthy. 

Sources: Web MD // Pub Med // Critical Cactus

Lemon Curd - sans sugar

I still have more lemons…so I looked up more recipes.  I found a lemon curd recipe and made it, but I felt so sinful for eating it because it's basically one part lemon, one part diabetic coma.  I decided to make a honey version and it's just as sweet and there's a lot less to feel guilty about.  

Ingredients: 

1 cup lemon juice

1/4 cup honey (I used raw honey)

4 tbsp. butter 

2 egg yolks

Place the egg yolks, honey and lemon juice in a saucepan over medium heat.  Continually stir it until it's thick and can coat the back of a wooden spoon (about five minutes).  Remove the mixture from the heat and slowly add the butter in chunks until each one has melted completely.  Pour into a small container and place a piece of parchment paper on the lemon curd to prevent a film from forming.  Allow it to cool and then put it on EVERYTHING. 

Limoncello

My mom gave me two huge bags of meyer lemons so I made bags of ice cubes out of them for later use and then I looked up recipes!

Limoncello is often times really really sweet and I can't handle it, so I figured I would go for a more tart recipe.  As it turns out there is no tart recipe.  Limoncello is basically 100 proof vodka infused with lemon peels and then mixed with simple syrup - and I wanted tangy.  So I made a non traditional version by adding real lemon juice to the mixture.  Most people store their limoncello in the freezer because the vodka keeps it from freezing, and if you add the lemon juice and freeze it will stay forever in a state of heavenly slush.

Ingredients:

1 bottle 100 proof vodka

10 lemons worth of lemon peels

1 cup sugar

1 cup water

1/2 cup lemon juice

Peel the ten lemons and get as much of the white pith off as you can.  Put the peels in a large sealable container and pour 100 proof vodka over.  Keep the container in a dark cool place for anywhere from 3 to 10 days (I did 5 and wish I did longer).  Once the vodka is infused pour over a coffee filter and into another container to remove the lemon rinds. In a saucepan warm the water and sugar over medium heat until the sugar is completely dissolved and add to vodka.  If it's too strong add more water, if you want it sweeter add more sugar, do what feels right.  Then if you wish to be non-traditional, add the lemon juice to taste.  Drink in slush version, pour over ice, or ice cream, or add it to a mixed drink. 

Ciao

Fox Fur

My mother gave me her fur coat from the 90’s and I love it.  I just looove it.  It makes me so happy and feeds my little materialistic soul. It carries with it the spirit of Carrie Bradshaw and I swear I’d move to New York just so I could wear it more often. 

I’m also a vegetarian.  I don’t believe in eating meat for a lot of reasons, but one of them is the inhumane raising and slaughtering of the animals.  I was just giving a hate speech to a friend the other day about Halal meat and the absolute cruelty involved in the way the animals are killed. I used all these terrible and vivid details about blood and pain and slow deaths so I could successfully ruin his favorite lunch spot…it worked :) 

I feel like Phoebe in friends when she gets the fur coat and she ends up giving it to a squirrel because she can’t handle all the animal judgment.  

Now let’s talk about it.  Should I really feel bad? No, my mother should.  She purchased the beautiful, beautiful thing, so the blood is really on her hands. But I don't judge her, I mean, it’s just one coat and besides she eats meat anyways so she's not breaking her own moral code, plus she’s just so generous.  They don’t actually kill it just for the coats right? It probably lived a fulfilled life in the wild and died by natural causes. 

It’s a fox fur - that makes it worse doesn’t it? It makes it worse because foxes are so in vogue right now, they’re littering my pinterest page, and I love it because of their tiny cute faces.  Also Fantastic Mr. Fox is one of my all time favorite movies. How can I wear a fox fur?

You should see it in real life. I would let you try it on and you would feel like a queen (man or woman, you would). Maybe I should just accept that I’m not a consistent person. I’m a hypocrite. Maybe we should all accept it about me and then we can just move on and we can celebrate with a nice dinner on a really cold patio with no heaters!  

Mammoth

I got a call from my friend Kathleen last week who has a close friendship with nature and she asked if I wanted to join her on a trip up to mammoth, get out of the offices and fluorescents into the great outdoors.  I happily obliged as Trever was out of town anyways, and I convinced another friend Shannen to join.  

As all southern californians know, fall is one of our greatest flaws.  We're usually in some outrageous heat wave while the rest of the country is pulling out winter sweaters and boots. We grieve deeply over this great misfortune every year as if all the previous years of sunshine in October was no prediction of what was to come.  So we find weekends in autumn to runaway to colder temps and changing colors and gobble up as much fall as we can before returning with only our memories of the chill in the air and an instagram account that has been thrown up on by a pumpkin spice latte. 

Mammoth was all this and more.  We arrived to a cold cabin and I quickly lit a fire.  If I could make you re-read that sentence I would.  I started a fire because I know how, and it had big orange flames billowing out of the log tower I made and I deserve a gold star for that.  Kathleen made soup and roasted vegetables, healthy comfort food, and she cut the carrots long ways which was pretty so Shannen took a picture.  Whenever I eat her food I eat a ton, get full and somehow lose weight. I asked her to move in to cook all my food, she said no, but she taught me how to do basic things like make salad dressings by knowing the elements needed so I wasn't glued to a recipe like a robot. 

We hiked to rainbow falls.  Kathleen the friend of nature had on real deal hiking boots and waterproof pants and a coat.  Shannen and I were wearing cotton, fleece and nike frees like newbs.  We hiked a few miles in and took deep clean breathes while marveling at the sites, huge trees, fields of sage cream and grey shrubs dotted by black pines, dramatic rocks, snow capped peaks and finally the waterfall that is supposed to have a rainbow but didn't due to the grey cloud sky.  

Grey cloud sky is a point to be noted because it follows that there might be rain and thunder and buckets of more rain on our two mile hike back to the car. First my hooded cotton sweatshirt blocked the rain, until it just soaked it all up, just soaked up all the rain.  I would have been better off naked because then the water droplets could just fall of my skin, but instead my sweatshirt grabbed hold of every bit of water it could and then laid on my skin gaining weight with water as it clutched tightly to my body like it was saran wrap. What's worse is Shannen, because she didn't even have a hood.  She took a bag we were carrying and balanced it on her head because the rain water was pooling in her eyebrows and dripping into her eyes, when a purse hat is an upgrade you're not in a good place. I laughed inappropriately hard at her misfortune because I felt solidarity in our adventurous misery, we both said it was worth it. 

We got back to the house and thawed out with a big beautiful fire and more soup.  Round two was a hike around lake george, crystal clear and beautiful.  Of course halfway around the lake the hail started, which was an upgrade from the rain because it took longer to soak into our clothes.  At that point we were growing gills and virtually unaffected by our wet hair glued to our faces, we didn't even move it or wipe the mascara from our cheeks, we were one with nature. 

We ended by a hike around Convict Lake on our way out of town and it wasn't even real, but it was real.  The mountains were snow capped from the night before, the clouds were drifting above and settling halfway down the mountain and the trees at the back of the lake had turned bright yellow and painted the path with fall.  Someone needs to get married there, they need to walk down the elevated wood path and have thirty people standing on either side, and not tell the resort or have any chairs or flowers,  just stand there in the yellow and get married.  

The point is, it was cold, clean, quiet and autumn.  It was perfect and I give God an air fist-pump for making October and for making Mammoth.