My brother-in-law’s college buddy, Greg Melville, converted his old mercedes to run on used vegetable oil. A book about his two cross-country voyages on vegetable oil, Greasy Rider: Two Dudes, One Fry-Oil-Powered Car, and a Cross-Country Search for a Greener Future
Sounds pretty good in these days of high gas prices, doesn’t it?
Check out this talk by one of my favorite authors, Michael Pollan, a natural historian whose book The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World
In this clip he discusses a topic from his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
[youtube TQPN1O03z8I nolink]
One of my goals with my garden this year is to use the gardening experience to get my kids excited about eating green leafy vegetables.
They helped me select the seedlings, prepare the soil, and set the plants. They’ve helped me with the watering and have been excited to check the progress of growth. So far so good, even if my son called gardening a “chore” this weekend, when I asked who wanted to help me plant a few latecomers in my herb garden.
Not a chore, I corrected him, a privilege. We get to help start new life and watch it grow. We are so lucky! And then we get to eat it!
I noticed my plot of rainbow chard was shining brilliantly so I decided we must harvest our first chard leaves for dinner that night.
I stripped the leaves from the stems and minced the stems separately. I rough chopped the leaves and set them aside.
I heated up some olive oil mixed with some macadamia nut oil (why not? I have it and it adds a little bit of a nutty flavor) in a deep skillet and sauteed the stems with 3 cloves of minced garlic. After a few minutes, I added some thickly sliced baby portobello mushrooms. Then, toward the end, I tossed in the chopped chard leaves and grated some fresh nutmeg and then some Parmesan cheese into it all.
I served it topped with more Parmesan alongside an easy entree of Ian’s Fish Sticks, which I like because they don’t have any fillers or other artificial stuff. I cooked them on the back patio in my large toaster oven.
The whole meal was a delicious end to a hot summer day. And the kids ate the chard, which thrilled me!
One of my favorite meals is what Elaine on Seinfeld called the “big salad”.
The foundation is lettuce, this time picked fresh from my lettuce garden, and then I add a bunch of yummy stuff to it to make it exciting.
Yesterday’s salad started with three kinds of lettuce from my garden (romaine, red leaf, and green leaf), chopped. My uncle in NYC is addicted to a chopped salad place, where they literally chop the salad and all the fixins’. Sometimes a simple change like chopping lettuce leaves instead of ripping them can change the eating experience. Funny how that happens.
Then I added half of an avocado, half of an heirloom tomato, and 3 sliced baby portabello mushrooms. I sprinkled it with shelled sunflower seeds, crumbled some feta on top, then tossed the whole
thing with Annie’s Naturals Goddess Dressing
Simply said: it was excellent. The soft creaminess of the avocados contrasted to the crunchy seeds, the earthiness of the mushrooms countered the salty feta, and heirloom tomatoes are a treat in and of themselves, particularly in this time of the great tomato scare.
Notice how the chopped lettuce integrates evenly with the rest of the ingredients? A chopped salad is really fun to eat.
My mother just came back from spending a month in Tuscany and the first thing she said to me was, “You’ve shrunk!”
She had a point. I recently bought a size two skirt and in my incredulity my reaction was to tell the sales lady that I’d have to start frequenting that store as their clothes must run really big.
Because I haven’t been dieting. Nor have I changed my eating habits or my exercise habits in about 2 years.
In fact, as I look back over the last 2 months or so, the only thing I’ve changed has been starting back up on plant-based digestive enzymes.
As we age our bodies ability to produce enzymes slowly diminishes, interfering with complete digestion and putting us at risk for degenerative diseases.
I’ve talked about how incomplete digestion is a major cause of weight gain, and how eating whole foods rather than processed foods encourages complete digestion and can help lose weight and nourish health. Digestive enzymes can help the body break foods down for better absorption of nutrients and more efficient elimination of extra material.
Years ago, my homeopath put me on digestive enzymes to help end the hives and facilitate my quest to get pregnant. At the time, I thought it was a great idea, knowing what I’ve put my gut through in my lifetime.
Beyond the typical alcohol/fast food/terrible eating habits abuse of my intestines, I’ve been infested with various parasites at various points for varying amounts of time, including giardia, cryptosporidium, listeria, cyclospora, blastocystis and others over a period of several decades. In my life, parasites have been a side effect both of traveling through the developing world and camping in the Rockies.
The commonly used anti-parasite medication is Flagyl, which, if you’ve ever done a course, brutally strips your insides as it annihilates both troublesome parasites and beneficial flora and fauna. Usually, by the time someone goes on Flagyl, the instigating parasites have been so brutal that the patient happily accepts the side effects as long as it works.
So I was thrilled to learn about digestive enzymes then to help rebuild my intestinal tract. I don’t remember losing weight that time, but I was a little distracted by other things.
The plant-based digestive enzymes, taken with every meal, are helping me to fully digest my food. Which is leading to weight loss as a bonus. This is the easiest diet I’ve ever done!
Looking for plant-based digestive enzymes for yourself? Here are general plant-based digestive enzymes; to find the right digestive enzymes to address the needs of your body, an Enzyme Urinalysis can determine what’s going on with your specific digestion.
