Hi everyone:
I’m phasing out this blog and encourage you to follow me on my new blog: Whole Nina. See you there!
Nina
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All seed forms of plants (peas, beans, lentils, seeds, and nuts) are perfect storage units, able to stay in that form until mixed with water. Put seeds into a jar and cover with water (1 part seeds to 2 or 3 parts water) to unlock the life force of the seed and activate enzymes and pigments that will convert the stored starch into more bioavailable glucose for seed growth. If you add a few drops of apple cider vinegar to the water covering the seeds you come closer to approximating optimal growing conditions – soil is more acidic than tap or filtered water. Phytic acid is the storage form of phosphorus in seeds and, as it tends to chelate with essential minerals in the body if the seeds (read peas, beans, lentils, seeds, and nuts) are not well soaked, phytic acid is known as an anti-nutrient. The phytic acid will be converted to a less harmful form through the activation of the enzyme phytase, by adding the apple cider vinegar to the soak water. So, if a recipe calls for 1/2 a cup of almonds, put the almonds in a jar the night before you are going to prepare and cook the dish, and cover them with twice as much water. Then add 1/8 teaspoon or so of a good quality apple cider vinegar. Don’t rush the soaking step – nothing can replace it! When you’re ready to use them, you can easily pop the soaked almonds out of their skins, without having to blanche them, another advantage! Note – put the seeds in a container that is large enough to allow them to expand to twice or more than their original size. Best of health, naturally, Gracie Allen’s Classic Recipe for perfect Roast Beef 1 large Roast of beef Take the two roasts and put them in the oven. Best of Health, Naturally, I know who I am by the friends that I keep; I know who I am by the friends that I make; I know who I am by the thoughts that I have. I know. Every morning, I drink two large glasses of slightly warmed water with the juice of a whole lemon added. I started thinking about all the lemon skins and seeds that I’m throwing out. And I started to save them in a bag in the freezer. Yesterday, I boiled up the skins and seeds of the week’s lemons in several cups of water on the stove. I strained the resulting yellow lemon juice into a jug and put a jar of it in the fridge. Clearly, this isn’t cold-pressed lemon skin juice, so I’m no longer sure of its effectiveness, for anything. Yet, I have a lot of faith in the healing properties of lemons. So I mixed it in a 2:1 ratio with vegetable glycerin in a dropper bottle and took a teaspoon of that mixture in a small shot glass of warm water first thing this morning – twenty minutes before my regular 2 glasses of lemon water. I’m hoping it will deal with the constant catarrh that I have these days. I’ll let you know! Best of health, naturally, Rinse out an Avalon milk bottle in cold water; if you rinse a milk bottle with hot water, the milk proteins cook and stick to bottle walls. Yesterday, I started soaking a third of a jar of buckwheat in acidic water (water with a few drops of apple cider vinegar added) in preparation for cooking it. Buckwheat is usually grouped with the non-gluten grains.
Now that the buckwheat has expanded to twice its size, what shall I do with it? According to my sources, I need to rinse the buckwheat and add more filtered water and leave it overnight once more, so that tiny sprouts appear. Then it is called “kasha” and Sally Fallon has three recipes that use kasha: an egg dish, a casserole, and a nut loaf. And today, of course, I could always cook it as porridge. The Weston A. Price site has lots more entries about buckwheat, very worth while reading. I’m off to rinse my soaked buckwheat. Best of health, naturally, It’s easier to blog every day than to wonder how to get back at it after not blogging for a while! What would be worthy? It’s fascinating that in Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Last American Man, she exposes Eustace Conway with all his physical abilities and his social disabilities as clearly as a camera can capture clouds shape-shifting across the sky. Yet she barely helps us to connect the dots on Eustace’s Achilles’ heel, until she quotes Cuchullaine O’Reilly, “the foremost authority on the history of long-distance equestrian travel” (page 187) explaining that Eustace Conway, that long-distance horse rider, “needs to go on a spiritual journey” (page 189) to sort himself out. It reminds me of the words of that old song: ”
And who goes on a spiritual journey? Eustace Conway? No, Elizabeth Gilbert does, in Eat, Pray, Love, a book I loved reading, which is why I went looking for anything else she’d written. Elizabeth Gilbert is a thoroughly satisfying writer. In her epic story of Eustace Conway, she describes him minutely, gives us in-your-face stories, shocks us with her exposé of his poor family relationships and dissatisfactory love relationships and even work relationships. While Eustace is a brilliant frontier man, a man who has achieved every physical task he has ever set himself, he sucks at relationships. But somehow, that loses its significance when we step back and look through the lens that he holds up to the world, to see it more clearly for ourselves. Using Eustace’s words (page 18 & 19), Elizabeth compares the circularity of his lifestyle with the square box-like lifestyle that most North Americans call life.
His vision is to show the American people that it is possible to do what they want to do, to live off the land, to reconnect with the earth. Living at Turtle Island, one thousand acres of North Carolina that he acquired piece by piece, he would hold camps for American children to reconnect them with nature, for instance, by teaching them First Nation games that would involve rolling a hoop. And he found that the children couldn’t roll a hoop (page 211).
As a child, Eustace kept and fed a hundred or so turtles in his backyard, learned how to throw a knife and to hit his target with a bow and arrow. He moved into the mountains aged 17 and has lived by his own devices ever since. At Turtle Island, Eustace tried to train young Americans – apprentices – how to live as he does. They didn’t come anywhere near the standard that Eustace set for them and most of them left disillusioned, not with the goal or the vision, but with the lack of empathy that accompanied the teaching. Nevertheless, Eustace’s philosophy, as captured by Elizabeth Gilbert, is worth remembering.
Eustace’s message is so vital and so pertinent for waking up to really see the dross of life today. How did we drift so far away from living with nature? Why do we prefer to eat food from a package rather than food from a meadow? Why do we put aluminum in our clothes and leave chlorine in our water? Why did we forget that we create our bodies daily from the food we eat and the water we drink? Why do we not realise that we recreate our thoughts daily from whatever we notice,whether that comprises commercial and violent messages from the media or prayers of gratitude? Why do we recreate our emotional world from the anger of some movies and the lack of caring of the bottom line. As Eustace says on page 211,
I want to remember what I can, now. I am showing up for this life. I want to sew myself back into nature. Thank you, Eustace and Elizabeth, for showing us the seams that have torn. Best of health, naturally, Registered Holistic Nutritionist Catherine Meiklejohn is currently in the Venture Program at the British Columbia Institute of Technology with the hopes of launching a specialty baked goods business, focusing on unrefined, gluten free and some vegan goods. As part of her research she has created a survey to see what the market is looking for. It would help her greatly to know what people want in their baked goods. It only takes a minute or two to complete. Here’s the link to the survey. I just took the survey and it was fun. Best of health, naturally, |
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