Beached Whale, Wilderness Family Naturals, No-Sugar Superfood Cookies

I hope everyone's having a great Saturday! It was sheeting down rain yesterday and forecast likewise for today, but in the event it seems our guests have brought up the good weather from Oregon, which makes their plans to camp outside our cabin look much pleasanter than I'd feared.

Are you conscious of all the technology you use? Do you have ambivalence about how it eases your life, not wanting to be overly 'dependent?' I was very pleased with the new vacuum cleaner we just bought, for about $70, and the ease of getting the space cleaned up, including all the corners! How funny, some months ago here I mentioned that I was ready for a decent vacuum and a vita-mix - now both in the same week.

Major sight of the day was the decomposing beached whale down on the beach. It is a smallish gray whale that probably died out at sea and was washed in this last series of big tides. It's been there several days now and is in full breakdown mode - read stinky. You can see Phil in background for scale.

Someone has tied it off so it doesn't wash back out to sea: we suspect one of the local organizations who preserve things for museums. 

And actually, although the smell is off-putting, there is something really - well - wholesome, maybe - holistic, a little magical - about seeing this enormous life being given back to other lives. We are all food for something. Here are its baleen sockets (plates washed out or taken) - isn't that awesome, how they brushed krill from the ocean for decades?

I got my order from Wilderness Family Naturals today - very quick time, I only placed it a few days ago. Their customer service is excellent and their products are high-integrity. I got to know them as a coconut products company - and I'll post a review later of a coconut product of theirs I particularly appreciate - but it turns out that they have lots of herbs and superfoods - at very good prices too! Amongst others,  I restocked on maca, and also got fo-ti, which is a wonderful superherb that happens to taste great, rhodiola root powder, which is an adrenal tonic, just what I need, and some wheatgrass juice powder to try, see how I do with it. I like the foil pouches too, for maintaining freshness. Thanks to technology, I have more superfood powders to put in my barks, smoothies, etc, now!

So, I made some no-sugar cookies to try some of them out. I made a cup of chia-sweet (strong chai-spicy herbal tea with enough chia added to make a thick gel,) and a teaspoon of pure white stevia. 

I melted approx 1/4 c virgin coconut oil, and added about a tablespoon of orange zest (I was making an orange cake for everyone else). Then, before adding the chia sweet, I mixed the superfood powders into the coconut oil: 2 tablespoons of maca (goes great with orange flavor) 1 tb reishi powder, 1 tb fo-ti powder, 1 tb rhodiola powder, 1/2 tb wheatgrass powder. 

Then, I mixed in the chia-sweet,

and added a recipe's worth of nut-milk pulp (so the pulp from a half cup of mixed hazelnuts and brazil nuts), and coconut flour (1/3 cup?) until it all started to hold together. Finally, had to have my flax - added maybe 1/4 cup golden flax meal. (And yes, that goofy football in the background is our thriftstore crockpot with the clam chowder I fixed for everyone else's dinner.)

I then formed it into cookies and put it under the fan to dehydrate (with my dehydrating setup shown yesterday). 

It's great to eat just as it is, like cookie dough or conventional raw treats made with dried fruit. I'm just drying it a bit so that it will keep and pack well. To me, it's delicious and very complex. But it's definitely 'strong' tasting: the folks I live with run heavily to sweet and salt and don't appreciate 'herbal' flavors. If I wanted to proselytize with these (which I don't, really), I'd have to tone them down a lot. And that's a whole other discussion!