Power Balls!

Let's call these power balls because they are loaded with energy.  Their handy carrying and eating size make them great for on the go:  hiking, snacking or lunch at work - and as an appetizer or party food.

1. Mix 1 c. ea. of Dates (about 8-9 dates) - make sure to pit them!
                           Your choice of nuts (a single type or mixed, roasted or raw)
                           Your choice of dried fruit (again a single type or mixed)

2. Blend together in food processor until desired consistency is reached.  This will vary depending on your choice of ingredients.  Also, you can choose to leave it chunky or make it more smooth.  The dates are what help to hold it all together.  Just make sure it is a consistency that will hold together when rolled into a ball.  I have never needed to, but if you feel you need to, feel free to add nut butters or coconut oil to them to moisten them - though not too much else they won't hold together.

3. Roll into balls about 1" - 1 1/2" in diameter.  Makes about 15-25 balls depending on size.

4. Dip in your choice of coating: ground nuts, Cocoa, Cinnamon, Coconut, Cacao nibs, etc.  Just use something in small pieces or powdered.   Optional:  to this you can add powdered herbs such as Ashwaganda, Eleuthro, Cardamom, ...  Use about 2 tspn. of herbs per batch in about 2-3 Tbspn. of coating.  You will need less coating if it is all powder, more if it is a bit chunkier like Coconut.

***If you do add herbs you want to limit your daily consumption to half a batch.***

Rule #1 in Kitchen Alchemy:  Experiment!

Today I am making two types:  Cashew Cranberry Date rolled in Coconut and powdered Gardenia fruit
                                                Walnut Raisin Date rolled in Cocoa and powdered Astragalus root

I chose Gardenia because it is cooling and we will be taking these hiking on an 80 something degree day.
I chose Astragalus to boost our immune systems.  (You don't want to take Astragalus if you have an acute    infection as it can boost the pathogen).  There's more to these herbs than this; if you want to know more, click on the links.

Any leftover powder can be saved and used in oatmeal, or pancakes, or...

Rule #2 in Kitchen Alchemy:  Never waste food.  Always find a use for leftovers.

5. Keep refrigerated (or frozen for longer storage), but it's best for digestion to eat these at room temperature.  If you freeze them they will carry well on a hot day (in a back pack for instance).

As you can see some of those rolled in Coconut on the right are lighter than others; this is because I noticed part of the way through that I was going to run out of coating, so I added more Coconut to the Gardenia powder, making for a lighter coating.  Play with this recipe; there are not hard and fast rules here.  

Rule #3 in Kitchen Alchemy:  Be ready to improvise at all times.  Cooking and Baking are improvisational acts.

I saved the empty bags and containers the nuts and dried fruit came in to store the balls in - along with the wax paper used to lay them out and cool them.

Now!  Time to enjoy.  Share with us your favorite combinations... 

Rule #4 in Kitchen Alchemy:  Enjoy the fruits of your labor.  Sit quietly without distractions and BE with your food.

Holy Kale

While picking some Kale from the garden for dinner last night, thoughts came once again about the holes in the leaves and what they mean.  For one, it means we garden organically here at our house.  While there are organic means to control bugs, for this we didn't use any; we just let it be.  And here's the thing: Does having these holes in the leaves mean the leaves are more nutritious for you?  Many of the beneficial compounds in plants (phytochemicals) are there for the plant's defense.

Since a plant cannot get up and walk, or run, away, or talk, or scream, they have evolved other defenses: chemical defenses.  Many of these chemicals are beneficial to us, having antibiotic, anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, and other actions in the human body.  For instance, when a deer begins eating one plant out of a whole patch, that plant changes and begins to emit a chemical messenger, either through the air or via their interlinked root systems, alerting the other plants in that patch.  This leads to the entire patch of plants changing their chemical makeup to, for instance, become more bitter so that the deer will stop eating them.  This allows the deer to get some food without destroying the entire patch.  I am thinking this bitterness is often a beneficial phytochemical for us.  The same type of thing would happen with bugs/pests eating the leaves.

Though one thing to point out is that an unhealthy plant will often signal to and draw in pests.  Keeping our plants healthy goes a long way to preventing pests.  Growing a plant non-organically actually increases the likelihood of pests since non-organic growing methods only seek to supply the plants with 3 main nutrients:  Potassium, Nitrogen, and Phosphorus (the ones that affect how a plant looks, the size it gets, and other things good for selling), and hence the plant is not as healthy.  Organic gardening supplies a plant with much more, which is one reason why organic tastes so much better.  These principals would apply to herbs too.

"Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food." - Hippocrates

So!  I am thinking that Holy Kale is even better for you than perfect looking Kale.  This applies not just in the garden; but also when I am wild-harvesting food, I don't just go for the perfect looking parts, I also pick the bug-eaten parts thinking I am getting extra beneficial compounds.

Now if only this could translate to what is acceptable in the grocery stores so we didn't live under the falsehood that a perfect piece of fruit or vegetable is in fact perfect when it may very well be lacking.  Perfect is artificial.  If you go out into nature you will see that all living things have "blemishes."  It is these imperfections that do indeed make them perfect.  Same goes for people and photoshopping - but that's a whole 'nother blog...

Guess that means the freshest food is not even picked yet!

Many of these beneficial compounds are destroyed through processing or poor storage, so fresh is best.  Cooking is good as it breaks down or begins digesting many of these compounds making them more bioavailable.

How to perceive the natural world more directly. Click here. 

Yes, that is duct tape on my glasses.  I see no reason to put something in the landfill when it can be fixed.                               Duct tape is our friend.  :)

~ ~ ~

"If people let the government decide what foods they eat and
 what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as
 sorry a state as the souls who live under tyranny."
 - Thomas Jefferson

"He who does not know food, how can he understand the diseases of man?"
 - Hippocrates

"The Lord hath created medicines out of the earth;
 and he that is wise will not abhor them."
 - Ecclesiasticus 38:4

Rapture and Priorities

"A room without books is like a body without a soul." - Cicero

"Sit in a room and read - and read and read. 

And read the right books by the right people. 

Your mind is brought onto that level, 

and you have a nice, mild, 

slow-burning rapture all the time." 

      - Joseph Campbell from The Power of Myth

In these pictures are some of the books in my house, which has twice as many books as it does square footage.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. . .The People cannot be safe without information. When the press is free, and every man is able to read, all is safe."
 - Thomas Jefferson

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read." - Mark Twain

    "I think we ought to read 
      only the kind of books 
      that wound and stab us."
           - Franz Kafka

"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, 

we would find in each man's life sorrow and suffering 

enough to disarm all hostilities." - Longfellow

Kitchen books - books in every room of the house.

This is the only poem
I can read
I am the only one
can write it
I didn't kill myself
when things went wrong
I didn't turn
to drugs or teaching
I tried to sleep
but when I couldn't sleep
I learned to write
I learned to write
what might be read
on nights like this
by one like me
~ Leonard Cohen

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” 

- Thomas Jefferson

How-to Books

Art Books

"Proverbs often contradict one another, as any reader soon discovers. 

The sagacity that advises us to look before we leap promptly warns us that if we hesitate we are lost; 

that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind."  

                                                                   - Leo Rosten

                         What are YOU Reading?
 “Let us read and let us dance - two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.” - Voltaire



 “You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”  Ray Bradbury



"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need." - Cicero

Making Bone Stock

Lovely isn't it?  This is after cooking, during straining.

Why would you do this?  Because...

1.  It saves money; have you looked at the price of organic stock lately?  Mighty expensive when you can make it with just a little time on the stovetop.  Plus home-made stock tastes better and is more nutritious (less processed, less water).  Get nutrients in an assimilable form, cheaper than buying supplements!)

2. It'super nutritious:  Calcium, Magnesium, Phosphorus and other trace minerals; Glucosamine and Chondroitin and Gelatin- good for your bones, joints, hair, nails, skin, heart, and on and on...

3. It re-uses what would otherwise be a waste product.

This is what it looks like after cooking and straining.

How?
1. Collect bones as you get them in a ziploc bag in the freezer.  I mix all types of bones, literally from pork to chicken to fish (all humanely raised or sustainably wild-harvested, a prerequisite for me as factory farms are a true atrocity and serious ethical issue, on top of that, who wants to eat sick, tortured animals?  It matters.  We are what we eat.)

2.  Once you have a gallon bag full or so, use a hammer to break open any solid bones to expose the marrow and cover all the bones in a large stove pot (or crock pot) with water, add a couple tablespoons of Apple Cider Vinegar (this helps to leach out the minerals), and cook (bring to a boil, then simmer with lid) at least 24 hours, but as many as 72.  The longer you cook, the more nutrients you will get out of the bones.  72 hours makes the bones like mush.

3.  Strain and use.  You can fridge for up to a week, or freeze for longer storage.  Freeze in individual size portions, or use an ice cube tray.  You can use the stock for braising other meats, wilting vegetables, flavoring grains or legumes, making soup, reheating leftovers, etc.  I find a use for it almost daily.
Often I just make a huge pot of soup with it right after straining:

This is a soup to which I added right to the bone broth:  soaked and strained Aduki beans, Buckwheat Groats, Olive oil, Shitake, Kelp, Bay leaf, Thyme, Turmeric and Mizuna greens.

Mizuna, an Asian green from the coldframe

Greens Coldframe - with wild greens growing all around!

What?
Easy soup recipe guidelines (all measurements are approximate):
Add to gallon of bone stock:

- 1/4- 1/2 c. olive, coconut, sesame oil or saved oil from cooking fatty meats

- Kelp, small handful - I add this to all soups for it's salt, iodine, and other trace minerals.  Kelp helps to remove heavy metals from the body, so it's detoxing.

- 1 c. grains (cook in stock until done, different for each grain, can soak first overnight to initiate sprouting and improve nutrition)

- 2 c. dry legumes (**soak, strain, and cook them separately first.  There are so many beans and lentils
to choose from - lots of colors and flavors!  Soak  legumes 1-3 days before cooking with a rinse daily; this helps you to digest the beans, getting much more protein out of them, getting rid of the anti-nutrients that coat the beans so that you get more nutrition from the beans)

You can't go wrong with sauteed onions. 

- Greens of some sort:  bok choy, spinach, collards, etc.

- other vegetables and flavoring agents

- a dash of a couple spices (mix and match, experiment!)  I almost always add Turmeric for its anti-inflammatory effect.






Eat as soon as the ingredients are cooked, but simmer as long as you like.  Sometimes I leave this on the stove all day.  Then cool and put some in the fridge for sooner and some in the freezer for later.

These soups are so nourishing you can feel it; they make you feel good.

Another option is to mix vegetable scraps into the bone stock for making vegetable stock, or just use vegetables alone.  Vegetables only need an all-day or overnight (24 hour max) cooking time, so if I am mixing, I will usually cook the bone stock for a day or two first, then add the vegetable scraps.  By vegetable scraps I mean the peelings from carrots, the skin on the broccoli stem, the fibrous ends of the asparagus, onion skins, leaves off cauliflower, etc. - the parts that you usually compost, but are technically edible.  I save all this in a separate ziploc in the freezer.  I just keep re-using the bags, always keeping them in the freezer whether full or not.  Simple.  Keep in mind not to use tomato, pepper, or potato green parts as they are toxic.

Jujube dates

Another option is to mix herbs into your stock at the end of cooking time for their therapeutic effects.  Some possibilities include:
Astragalus, Jujube, Goji berries, Dong Quai, Codonopsis, Poria, Burdock root, Reishi, Dioscorea, He Shou Wu, Orange peel,
Lotus seed, and Lily bulb.
Go light at first so as to not overpower the flavor, and up the amount slowly. 

Soup-making:  a weekly ritual.  Warms the belly and the soul.

Redbud Flower Pancakes

“The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, 

and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.”- Wendell Berry

Celebrate Spring and her glorious colors with these delectable pancakes! 

Redbud flowers were eaten by the Native Americans; the Redbud, Cercis canadensis, is a native tree that grows wild (and is easy to cultivate if you don't already have them in your yard). It's heart-shaped leaves have graced this land for a long time. It's flowers are a welcome outburst of color when Spring arrives. Redbud flowers have the same antioxidants and flavonoids that red wine has - super nutritious!
You can eat them raw or cooked; try them in salads too.



These are the organic ingredients I used for the pancakes:
1 1/2 c. whole grain pancake mix
1 c. hemp milk
4 eggs (luckily had fresh, local, organic ones from friends :)
as many Redbud flowers as you want/can harvest. I went heavy because I recently trimmed a landscape client's tree and didn't want to waste all these wonderful flowers, but if you are harvesting from living branches, you may not get as many; you don't want to strip all of them from the tree(s).

If you want, you could throw some violet flowers in there too.

I like to use Coconut oil to cook my pancakes in.

For toppings I love to use ground flaxseed and maple syrup. Of course there are many other options like jams, fresh fruit, honey,...

 
The seed pods that the flowers form into are also edible; the Redbud is in the legume family and its seeds look like a pea pod. Pick them fresh (when they're tender) and use them like you would snow peas, or pickle them.

This book includes a recipe in it for Redbud Wine: