Why does Pizza make me so hungry??

So tonight was yet another night that I came home (from a grocery store, mind you) yet I hadn't thought of what I should eat for dinner. I started flipping through one of my cookbooks, and saw a recipe for a butternut squash pizza...yum. Then I realized I didn't have any yeast, or even any flour. But what I did have was an easy pizza dough mix that my mom had just sent me from her Wild Tree business (there's your plug mom). It was basically a mix of the flour yeast and sugar that you just have to add water to. Perfect! You didn't even really have to let it rise, it was super quick and easy, and kind of made me want to start making bread on a regular basis. I always forget how soothing the kneading part is. I think that's why I first loved making paper, there was such a lovely rhythm to it, that I could easily get lost in, alone, for hours.

I worked off of a couple of recipes, and put the butternut squash in some butter and oil with garlic and onion in the oven for 15 min while I prepared the pizza dough. I had thrown some quinoa in my rice cooker before I had decided what I was going to make, and it occurred to me at this point that a pizza is really just like a giant open faced sandwich. As long as you like the flavors together, anything goes. So I rolled out the dough, and layered quinoa first, then butternut squash mixture second, then bleu cheese last. Cooked it for about 12 min and it was great! Most of the flavor really came from the bleu cheese, but it felt like there was lots of nourishing goodness going on too.

Then comes the after attack. Part of the reason I usually avoid pizza as a dinner meal is that I get these intense sort of empty hunger pangs about an hour or so after eating it. This time, maybe an hour and a half later, I started having a sneezing fit. I sometimes get this when my blood sugar drops and I need to eat again, and I was starting to feel hungry. But it was a little more than that too, because I almost felt congestion forming in my throat too, like I was having an allergic irritation. (I don't want to say allergic reaction so much, because it wasn't as if my throat was closing up, it was more like mucous was forming...yum!) Then after the sneezing had calmed down, but I felt stuffed up, those kind of sharp hunger pangs came again. The kind that feel much more violent than just "hey you, I'm kind of getting hungry again down here"...more like "Why!!! Are we not EATing??? I will jab you til you fix this!!"

So I'm seeking advice on this one. Recently someone mentioned to me that wheat/gluten allergy can keep you from gaining weight, make you feel fatigued always, etc. I don't think I have celiac's, but it's one of those things I feel I should look into a little more. A sensitivity, or intolerance to some wheat perhaps? Kara, you are my expert on this one :)

Em, I'm calling on you as the expert on blood sugar here. Is there way that I could make this meal less empty feeling? Some better balance of protein to carb to fat? I'm wondering if I could just try out some gluten free pizza dough, which would take away the wheat and the empty carbiness of the flour and solve both problems.

The funny part is, I don't even like pizza that much, but this was so fun to make it would be a shame to have to avoid it always :)

Sesame Goodness

This recipe was given to me by a good friend, after she fed me some the last time I visited her in NYC...It's from Brendan Brazier's book "Thrive"...(he's a triathlete, and the book is on vegan nutrition)...It's great, it's sweet, it's crunchy and it is nutrient dense. Sesame seeds have lots of Calcium, Iron and Magnesium in them, just to name a few things. It's also an easy snack to have a few scoops of if you need a little pick me up.

I don't have a food processor, so I just mixed everything up in a bowl and it still tasted pretty good to me. Also I'm not actually sure that the seaweed I used was dulse. It's been awhile since I've seen it, and the Asian store I went to had no idea what I was asking for...but rest assured there is some kind of seaweed in there and it's not nori, or hijiki, or wakame :)

I made a batch and just ate it raw the first time, and then I doubled the batch and tried to cook some the second time. With mixed results. I really like the taste of the slightly toasted sesame seeds, but I had a heck of a time getting it off of the foil, as you can see. Any cooks out there know if it would work better if I used parchment paper? Actually I bought a cookie tray since then, so that might help.

Here's the recipe:
Lemon Crisps (Brendan Brazier, Thrive)
2/3 cup sesame seeds
1/3 cup agave nectar
1/4 cup lemon zest (yes go for organic)
2 Tablespoons dulse flakes
2 Tablespoons coconut oil
2Tablespoons fresh lemon juice

Mix it all together in a food processor (or just stir it :))

If you'd like to cook it, you can spread it out on a lightly greased (with coconut oil) tray, and cook 20 min. at 300 degrees F.

Yummy both ways.

On a personal note, I've been reading about herbal recipes for hormone balance, and one of the books recommended mixing your own herbal infusions to make a high calcium tea. That, combined with this recipe and one other sesame/high calcium recipe really seemed to make a difference in my hormone balance/imbalance symptoms, which is pretty exciting. I'll post the two others soon. A big part of what I love about healing with food/ herbs is that there are so many plant nutrients in each ingredient or herb. You actually nourish your body in a whole way...I'm sure it's not JUST the calcium in any of this that helped, but the calcium PLUS each and every nutrient working together. Again comes that feeling of everything being connected, keeping you aliving and thriving.

Cooking, and tears.

As it turns colder this fall, I have turned to cooking. It's strange this year, maybe it's just that I'm getting older, but I never used to even want to cook like I do now. I get these ideas and I just want to cook all day while people come over and eat all my food, and be warm and full and happy. I think part of it is having a kitchen that I can just take over. And part of it is trying to save money by making food and having yummy leftovers for lunch. And this week, a lot of it was to turn the oven on, because the house is getting so cold! Truthfully though, most of the time it's just been me, cooking and thinking and packaging up leftovers for lunch. Which still makes me feel good because it means money saved, for future school, or future house, or future business, etc :)

I've heard that the way you know you have a fresh onion, is if your eyes water quite a bit as you slice it up. Today, while I was making dal, I was thinking about how my eyes didn't even water as I cut it, and I started to wonder if the onion was perhaps a little old. I'm thinking this as I put the oil in the bottom of the pot, and throw in the onion, then some spices, then the chopped up ginger, and then, realizing I hadn't cut up the garlic yet, my eyes aren't just welling up, they are dripping and streaming with salty goodness, and the cold and congestion that I've been fighting fills up my whole head, and I'm struggling to even see the garlic and finish chopping it and throw it in so that I can run for the hills and blow my nose. How strange to only feel the potent mixture reacting in me without actually smelling it.

It occurs to me after all of this, that I have that tightness on my upper cheeks that you get after a good cry, as the salty tears dry on you, and you have calmed down and released everything. Just this feeling on my cheeks makes me feel as though I've had some kind of satisfying release of emotion, though I haven't really cried at all. This got me to wondering...I've read that crying releases toxins, so presumably, letting out these tears even without crying, would also release toxins...So perhaps it wasn't just the physical feeling of my cheeks that made me feel some how lighter, but maybe somewhere in there there was an emotional release...all brought about by an onion.

Makes me think of how, an infusion of an herb in a tea is a potent way of ingesting herbal medicine, but so also is the act of sitting down and drinking a warm cup of tea. Heating the water, pouring it over the herbs, cupping your hands around a warm cup is also a calming, some might even say healing, ritual, of great use in addition to the medicinal action of the herbal constituents that you then drink.

It's a gentle reminder then, that each thing we do is so connected to the next. We may never really know which thing at which time brought about which healing reaction. It's part of why if we try to extract a single ingredient from a plant, and then test everyone with it, it doesn't always work. It's part of why the not knowing, or not always being able to explain everything, is becoming more and more okay with me. Today I can be satisfied with the beauty of the small connections. And the tears I cried (or didn't cry) for an onion.

Vanilla Extract update

Well, more than two weeks later, it's nice and dark, but man, the alcohol smell almost knocked me out when I took a whiff! I guess I should still try and take a taste.

If it still seems mostly alcohol, I think I'm going to strain, and add at least another four chopped up beans, and I might need to water it down a bit more. Another two weeks of shaking, and perhaps it will be ready for fall baking season! The funny part is I don't actually like vanilla flavoring in much, but I'd be willing to gift it to the right cause. Fun experimenting!

Vanilla Extract

I finally started my vanilla extract today...it is pretty simple, just like a tincture. After reading up on several recipes the consensus was 6 vanilla beans, to 1 cup of 70 proof alcohol. I had 4 vanilla beans, and 100 proof alcohol so I roughly adjusted accordingly and we'll see what happens.

Step one: Slice the beans lengthwise and scrape out the goo with the back of the knife.

Step two: Chop up the rest of the bean/s.

Step three: Put goo, and chopped bean/s in jar and add alcohol to extract those delicious flavors.

Step four: Set on a windowsill and shake vigorously at least once a day for two weeks.

Step five: Strain and bottle extract, discard (compost) vanilla bits. Use!

My Paper on the healing benefits of fats and oils!

So, as some of you know, I had to write a final paper for my correspondences courses and I chose to write it on the Healing Benefits of Fat. My disclaimer here is that I had never written a paper this long, so I chose a pretty broad topic...also, I was under a bit of mental duress during the week I finished it, so be gentle if you would like to read and critique it. I think my style is conversational enough to be readable by anyone, but I hope I touched on some ideas and research that would be new to some readers too. In many ways, I think the topic was much too broad, and I only scratched the surface in most sections, but I also hope it's a good introduction to the ways that fats can be healing in the diet. The link below will get you to a viewer that you can read from if you'd like, or you can download the entire thing. Be forewarned, it is 59 pages total (including footnotes and bibliography). I'm actually thinking of making it into a podcast because I think that a lot of my run-on sentences make more sense when said out loud. Ha. So if interested just click here. I'll be holding my breath as those book deals pour in :)

Shampoo, or not

In an effort to cut out some of the chemicals in my life, I decided to try going shampoo-less. Other ulterior motives include: wanting the natural oils in my hair to stay put, and being sick of paying people to strip my hair down to nothing and then add back in "moisturizers"(And by this I mean, buying shampoo and conditioner). This reminds me of how it was such a good idea to start processing whole wheat to get white flour by taking out all the good stuff, and then putting back a few vitamins and minerals to make up for it. But we don't have to take it!

Some background info on my hair specifically...when it's shorter, as it is now, I don't usually wash it everyday. This is part laziness, and partly because it's easier to style when it's not squeaky clean (or squeaky shampoo clean anyway). From what I've read, once you get off the shampoo routine (and you do replace it with a "wash and rinse" which I'll get to in a moment), then your natural oils come back and are there all the time. Reports include volume/texture/shine you never knew you had, without greasiness or feeling gross.

So basically you just use baking soda, as the wash, and vinegar as the rinse. I know, you're thinking, "Hey, that's how I made a miniature volcano in elementary school" ...or perhaps if your family was like mine, you used those two substances to clear a clogged drain...Don't worry as long as you use them separately there should be no bubbly volcano head that happens.

I looked at this blog a bunch to make sure I understood what to do (click here ) and then I was off! It's pretty simple, you just add 1Tbl of baking soda to a cup of warm water for the wash. And 1 Tbls of Apple Cider Vinegar to a cup of warm water for the rinse. I also added a few drops of essential oils to the vinegar mix because I was slightly concerned about the smell, which I definitely couldn't smell after I rinsed it off with water, and the added benefit of the essential oils was that any time my hair got wet, I could smell them again (it rained that day).

First day: I went swimming in a chlorinated pool, so my hair was feeling pretty icky, kind of dry and stringy. So I had my doubts about this actually working well the first day, but I was pleasantly surprised. I probably did less than a tablespoon of baking soda and vinegar in each of my jars, so they looked like water, but I could tell when I was pouring them on my hair that they each felt a little more slippery than water. As my hair dried it felt light and clean and had a bit of volume to it too.

Second day: I went to Kennywood, and went on the raging rapids, and got soaked. Again chlorinated water, but this stuff felt much dirtier than pool water. As it dried from the raging rapid water, my hair felt like a thick tangly mess. It mentioned on that blog that you probably don't have to use the vinegar rinse every time, so this time I just did the baking soda. This was NOT a good idea. Maybe it's just my hair, or maybe it's because I have leftover shampoo head, or maybe the raging rapid water was too gross, but my hair felt relatively clean, but not silky or soft at all. I went to bed with it wet and I woke up looking like I stuck my finger in a socket. I should have taken a picture, it was ridiculous. I was forced to hairpin it down and wrap some ribbons around its unrulyness so I could go to work without scaring little children. Another thing I noticed was that normally hair pins fall right out of my hair unless I put a ton in. Not this day, I could just twist a whole bunch of hair and stick one pin in, with no danger of it even moving, that's how texturous my hair had become...in a bad way.

Day three: After the no rinse debacle, I did both the "wash' and the "rinse" and my hair felt good again. Clean and kind of silky/soft feeling. I went to bed with it wet again, but woke up with it much more "ruly" (opposite of unruly?) and manageable.

So, I think I'm hooked. Price-wise it's a steal. Baking soda is cheap and even though I'm using the Eden Organic ACV (Apple cider vinegar) it's still much less than even a bottle of just shampoo. Chemical free is good for me, and I'm even happy with the actual hair results. I encourage everyone to try it out, I'd be interested in hearing what works for whom!

Thoughts on mornings

As I re-read that last post below, it surprises me now that I would just find some source somewhere that says I could be genetically predispositioned to hate mornings. It's very antithetical to what I think about how much genetics have to rule our lives, and in this instance for sure, it's a total cop out. The more I read and think about everything that effects our entire beings, the less I believe we are just the sum of our parts, and slaves to our genetics. Certainly there can be times when genes override other things, but we have the power to change so much and give our bodies what they really need, that our first thought should never be, "oh I was just born this way"...victim mentality never helps. Especially when you consider that you are what you believe you are. The mental component is so strong that if I keep telling myself that I'm not a morning person, no matter what I do, I will sub-consciously (or even consciously) make sure that I never am.

So while I'm not ready to embrace the term "morning person", I have experienced waking up more rested and less groggy because of feeling more balanced energy-wise(through some techniques and things I will hopefully discuss later), eating better, and going to bed earlier...and when I can keep that up(which is not always and sometimes not often) I just feel better all around, and can also maintain a more positive outlook.