As Promised - Coconut Kefir a Different Way - Thoughts, Please!

I've obliquely mentioned my 'different coconut kefir' a number of times and promised to blog about it: I very much want to know what folks think about it. I also mentioned that there's one product with a tiny 1% of sodium casinate (a milk derivative) that I use - they're both the same deal: it's what I use for making coconut kefir! I'm highly ambivalent both because of that ingredient and because it is such a labor-intensive process, as you will see. It took me so long to do this because of the difficulty of photographing the process. And now that I have all the photos, Blogger refused to let me upload two of the best ones! What's up with that? (It said 'server rejected' and slapped my wrist about not having the right to upload those photos. Excuse me? I took them myself with my own camera!) So, apologies for the photography!

I use my kefir grains to culture a coconut cream made up from Wilderness Family Naturals' Coconut Milk Powder -

It is mostly low-temperature spray-dried coconut milk with 8% maltodextrin and 1% sodium casinate to help prevent clumping.

But even with those additives, it's pretty clumpy, as you can see! I use about three of these spatula-loads...

...blended up with a small amount of water, that I then top off to just over a pint.

Add in the kefir grains, cover, let sit for 24 hours or more...

...and the kefir cream rises to the top and the whey is at the bottom. The cream at the top has such an incredible texture that I didn't want to stir it back together, so I got myself a turkey-baster at a thrift store(!), cleaned it well, and use it to suck the whey up from the bottom -

Here is the whey - about a cup each time. It's not totally precise - I always end up sucking up some cream too.

And here is the cream with the kefir grains mixed in, sitting at the bottom of the jar.

The labor-intensive part is getting the cream out of the jar and separating the grains from it...

Blogger wouldn't let me upload the picture with the whey, cream and grains all separated, but the one above is on the way to that. I end up with half- to three-quarters of a cup of cream, that looks like this:

The tricky thing is that I almost always miss a couple of grains and have to pick them out later when I'm eating the cream. It really only works because I'm the only person eating this - I don't know how well it would work for a crowd. I guess I could just stir everything together, strain out the kefir grains and then strain out the whey - but the floated-to-the-top texture of the kefir is just so great...

I love getting both 'whey,' fizzy and delectable, and cream, out of the kefiring process. I use the whey in my green smoothies, to start sauerkraut, just drink it straight. The kefir cream I mostly eat straight, but here it is as a delectable no-sugar treat -

- mixed with a little stevia and lime zest, on a crust of pecan/flax/coconut/xylitol/lime zest. So yes, it has great potential as a dessert ingredient, if I save up several days' worth, or make bigger batches, or strain the grains out and then strain again. It really is delectable - it is sour, rich, creamy, with just a hint of coconut flavor remaining. Wonderfully satisfying texture and flavor. And all those beneficial bacteria too!

Kefir experts: is this ok for the kefir grains? I notice that they're always clogged with the cream (and when we were in Oregon and I was buying coconut water and kefiring it, the grains ended up looking very different, expanded). They've also scarcely grown since I bought them several months ago: I understand that naturally they reproduce. This is probably a pretty low-sugar product for them to work on. Occasionally I've added some sugar to the mix and they seem to have been invigorated by it.

So, I have ambivalence about the process, because it's so time-consuming, but I also have mixed feelings about the coconut milk powder itself, or more specifically, about that little 1% sodium casinate. I'm not a strict ethical vegan, but I generally feel better (in all respects) when avoiding animal products. And I have a really horrendous reaction to cow dairy, especially when processed. It has frightening effects on my mood and mental state (as I believe I mentioned wrt ghee in Oregon).  When I eat any quantity of this kefir cream, I notice a slight mucus-y feeling in the throat and sometimes nose. I wonder if it's my imagination, or if it's an allergic response to that trace of dairy. At least it doesn't make me psycho...

I'd love to hear everybody's thoughts on this, please!

Very Quick Post - Preview of Coming Posts and a Big Yellow Machine

A crazy-busy day here again, as our departure looms ever more imminent, so this must be a short post. A couple mentions of the next two posts coming up, some tidying up of loose ends, and a bit more story-of-our-life.

I am finally going to post about my special coconut kefir, as I've been promising to for ages now. I really want to know people's opinion/feedback about this one, so please stay tuned.

And I apologize that once again, I mentioned 'chia-sweet' in my previous post without linking back to earlier posts about it or explaining it. 'Chia-sweet' is my no-sugar ingredient intended to substitute for things like dates/honey/agave as a binder and sweetener. It is basically a stevia-sweetened chia gel, where the liquid can be a strongly-flavored herbal tea, or water with stevia and flavor extracts, or what you will. I introduced it a while ago, in this post, and have posted a number of recipes that use it.

The other upcoming post to look out for is another product review.

Remember I mentioned our 'Sea-bastion' - the dirt/rock/timber-work into which Phil has poured heart, soul and many hours (and I've poured a few myself) in trying to keep the Pacific ocean from battering down the bluff on which we live?

Well, since the ground will almost certainly be frozen when we get back from our trip, Phil deemed it essential to spend a couple days (yesterday and today) moving enormous rocks up to shore up the bastion so that it doesn't get ruined by the big storm tide coming up through the winter.

He spent some of his small discretionary cash on this great big dinosaur to help him do it -

They dropped it off at the beach, and he had to drive it two miles or so up the beach to the area beneath our cabin.

The monster showed up late - I had the laptop with me and did some translating work while we waited on it in the ice, but it was such a beautiful morning

He left the monster down below us overnight, and this morning, at 8am when it was still very dark and teeming with rain, I drove him out along the beach to get an early start. Driving on the beach is a skill-sport at any time of day - boulders everywhere that you mustn't run your truck into, four-wheel drive essential, quicksand in certain places, barely a semblance of a road formed from predecessors' tracks (folks drive beater trucks a way out to gather coal and logs from the beach). So driving in pouring, pelting rain when it was pitch-dark was a very serious challenge. I guess I should feel proud of myself for having managed it fine.

Are there any special or strange skills that you've had to acquire by virtue of where you live/whom you live with?
love to all!

Cold Here! And Snacks - Some Thoughts and Recipes (One Sweet, One Savory)

It froze hard here last night. Hard enough that ice persisted even on the salty beach, even in pouring rain, so that walking out without gloves on hands led to hands getting that constricted, bruised, blue feeling that aches even when the warmth returns.

But nonetheless, Phil couldn't resist taking this day to launch the little boat and go see what's to see. And if he'd given me more than a couple hours notice, I might have felt compelled to go too! (As it is, I'm happy to be home and relatively warm).

Another attempt at an eagle photo: this eagle cracked us up as we drove out to launch Phil's boat. It had picked up a dead fish in its talons and was trying to get away from its competition, the crows. It flapped and flew and flapped and flew, but the fish was too big for it to get any kind of liftoff, and it finally landed back on the beach, much closer to the ocean. The crows joined it pretty quickly, but it wasn't really letting them near the actual 'food.'  I wonder what happened when the tide came in...

With winter's approach, the young trees in town have been swaddled in burlap to keep the moose from eating them down.

Yes, snacks. I used to subscribe to the belief system that says that eating between meals is 'bad' and should never be done. And for some people, that's probably true. But for me, things work much better if I do eat regular snacks. Otherwise, either I eat three big meals, which always makes me feel awful, or I'm just hungry all the time between small meals.

I'm going to review 'product' snacks later this week, but as always in my life it seems, home-made is essential. This point was driven home when I tried out a few raw bars while traveling recently - gluten and dairy and soy free is a great start, but the low-to-zero sugar piece is crucial for me right now too.

So, back to 'chia sweet!'

This batch looks dark because it also has a tablespoon of cinnamon in it. Cinnamon thickens and becomes mucilaginous when mixed with water, so it's a great addition to chia-sweet. Of course, it's also good for blood sugar balance, is warming, lowers blood pressure (maybe not such a good thing in my case), tastes delicious, etc, etc!

My recent batches of no-sugar bars with chia-sweet were tending toward the minimal - chia-sweet and shredded coconut with some algae and mint oil, so that the chia sweet was the matrix of the cookie as well as the sweetener. I was spreading them very thin too, because of our lack of dehydrator and odd setup in that regard. But with the heater coming on more of the time now (I dehydrate things in front of it), I felt like I needed something more solidly textured and satisfying.

This is that cup or so of chia-sweet pictured above, plus about half a cup of ground pecans, a pinch of salt and another of cayenne, a teaspoon of ginger and one of allspice and a half teaspoon each of cardamom and cloves. My favorite flavors!

I melted about 1/4 cup coconut oil and stirred that in.

And then it was still 'gloopy,' so I added two teaspoons of nutritional yeast and about a half cup of shredded coconut.

At that point, it became kneadable and spreadable. I spread it on the tray, scored it, gave it 30minutes in the toaster over at the lowest temp with the door open, and then flipped, cut and placed in front of the heater to get done gradually.

(haha, with the tide tables pictured under the tray - we live on the ocean!)

Since I can't just do one thing at a time, I made some raw onion crackers too.  I don't like raw onions at all - I can taste them for days afterwards and they hurt my tummy! But dehydrated or pickled seem to work better. And I recently read that onions are likely preventative of osteoporosis, due to a specific compound that they contain (in addition to being super-high in important antioxidants like quercitin, and sulfur compounds). Since I'm a super-high risk for osteoporosis on several different counts, that drew my attention.

This is super-simple. A quarter of a middle-sized onion, chopped (not fine enough: I should have diced it); a cup of soaked sunflower seeds, ground up, and a cup of flax meal. Mix all together, then add about two tablespoons of coconut aminos, about 3 tablespoons of olive oil. Mix those in very thoroughly, and then add a tiny amount of water and it all  holds together.

I gave this batch the same treatment as the cinnamon bars above, remembering after I'd cut them up to rotate them out so that the pieces that had been in the middle could be on the outside.

They're mostly dry now, in front of the heater, but since it's such a  sporadic drying, I'm giving them a little more. I tried an onion cracker with lunch and it's great! Onions are so incredibly sweet.

And of course the cinnamon ones are great too - no danger of them not being.

Do these bars/crackers sound and look appetizing? I know that not many people have to avoid sugar in this way. And personally, I'm not drawn to dehydrated goods but with months of experimenting, it seems that drying seems to be the best way to hold together and preserve bars that don't utilize dried fruit or syrups.

Have a beautiful day!

The View From Here; Water Drainage and Water Saving

Happy full-moontide! For me, as my jury-rigged hormones figure it out, it's that raspberry-leaf and licorice time of the month. (Seriously, it works great - try it!) I'm grateful that we still have viable raspberry leaves on the canes, but their colors are turning and the energy is clearly revortexing groundwards for the winter, so I'm also grateful that I dried so many earlier this year.

One rainy day recently, I climbed up on the roof of our 'bunker' (construction project, eventually to be storage shed and water-tank shed), braving the slick roof for the sweet view of our cabin. This is our dwelling-place:

- a rainy day, so you can't quite see the breathtaking view across the bay -

- and here is the 'bunker,' from the roof of which I took that photo:

Yes, we adore that robin-egg blue too!

Phil worked his tail off yesterday - trying to get all the dirtwork done before the ground freezes.

I took that photo standing on our counter - in that small place between the cabin and the bluff, he was trying to get a waterline to drain, so that we can actually run water down the sink! He dug pretty deep (and it was muddy, wet and rainy, so that was some perilous going yesterday, especially as the outhouse is on the other side of the trench!) and he's also putting down styrofoam as extra insulation, to lessen the risk that water in the pipe would freeze.

However, even though we now theoretically can run water down the sink (hurray!!), I'm only going to do so part of the time, and part of the time do what we've always done and pour the sink water out on the garden.

The reason for this? Our bluff is a major erosion zone - the Pacific Ocean, even mitigated by coming into the bay, is strong and mighty. Especially around equinoxes and solstices, we get enormous tides, and the edge of the bluff is a little closer to our cabin each year. Further up the bay, I've seen houses that have just slid down the cliff. So, the less water we have running down the face of the bluff, the less we'll be contributing to erosion.

Hiking the beach below: considering that rainfall is not high around here, it's astonishing how much water is cascading down the bluff in so many places. I promise pictures in the wintertime, when all these gushing streams have frozen: it's quite beautiful.

Phil has done a ton of work at the toe of the bluff, trying to shore it up, and is planning to do yet more this week...

Can you see his daughter's little dog investigating what we call our 'Sea-bastion?' Buddy the dog turns out to be quite the climber!

My camera wasn't quite up to it, but I always love trying to get photos of the eagles perched on the rocks. They are as patient as the rocks themselves, perching, waiting...

Conserving water is very often a good idea. When I lived in HI, most folks were on catchment and sometimes there'd be a drought, so you really had to watch your consumption. I became adept at the 60-second shower and at showing newcomers how to wash dishes without pouring away gallons of water. Here, we catch water for our garden, and mostly haul our water from town. The less we use, the less we have to heft heavy jugs, but also the less erosion potential.

While I'm ecstatic about having a Vita-Mix now, the difficulty of washing the pitcher was one of the many arguments I used to deny myself getting one for the longest time. Especially with our sink setup...

Sometimes, I heat up water to wash dishes. Almost always, I have herbal tea on the go when I'm using my Vita-Mix. So what I tend to do now is to rinse out the pitcher with some warm herbal tea in it - run the motor (yes, uses a little more power, but definitely saves water) with warm tea. And then I have a much easier-to-clean pitcher, and a warm, watery version of my smoothie or pudding, which I could think of as a chaser, but probably better as an aperitif to be drunk first.

You can see the tea in the pitcher, all foamed up, withe the green smoothie in the pint mason jar and the herbal tea in the quart jar. Oh, and my best friend my pen just off to the right!

A couple more water-saving tips: although I love loose-leaf teas above all, I do use some tea bags. And I save those bags as pan-scrubbers and other cleaners. I use fruit peels in a similar way. In the morning, when I make Phil's sourdough banana pancakes, I save the banana peel and use it to wipe the fork I used to mix up the batter, and then he can use the fork to eat with.

I keep the same mug/mason jar going over and over for tea. I often don't wash the skillet in between cooking food for Phil (seasoning, you know!) Sometimes, especially when it's very cold or we're low on water, I just accept that not everything's going to look immaculate. And then I'll boil some water in the tea-kettle and do a more thorough wash later to make up for it.

Have you ever had to think about where your water's coming from and going to?

Our Next Trip, A Freudian Slip, Herb-Talk and Another Shout-out for Weeds!

Happy Friday! A sunny Friday here, and the sun is low in the southern sky now. We've been home just about a week now, and in just over a week, we're taking off again. We're going to England! We're going to see my parents and brothers (and Phil hasn't yet met my dad or one of my brothers), but most especially, we're going to meet this precious little lady.

Bad planning, maybe, to have two trips so close together, but that was just the way it turned out. We'll put on our stoutest traveling shoes...

And, whilst looking at things under magnification of detail,

make sure to stay with the bigger picture! It's been years since I've been to London and I'm excited to see some old friends and have some new experiences. Any recommendations?

Traveling is more stressful for me these days than it used to be, and today I'm going to talk about some of the herbs that help me to stay a little more balanced, as well as some that have an adverse effect. This is, in part, a story of why it's important to be so careful about broad-spectrum recommendations of superherbs to play with: to remember that plants are incredibly potent medicine, even when they come out of a bag or bottle, that we must always be very clear about our intentions in using them, and tune in very carefully to how they're affecting us.

Do you get everything right first time? I don't. Even though I often have blog posts, recipes, poems, etc, largely written up in my head, I'll often wake up in the night - or later that day - and remember that I left something out.  Or sometimes wrote something quite incorrect! In my post on Monday, I mentioned my morning herbal tea blend - rhodiola/fo-ti/reishi. Later in the day, I came back convinced that I'd left out the reishi, and discovered that I'd written 'ginseng' instead! Of course, I fixed it, but that was a Freudian slip, alerting me that it's time to talk about herbs and when they are not appropriate.

Rhodiola has been a wonderful helper to me recently. It is the ground up root of a golden-colored flower that grows in the far north (I am going to investigate growing it here), and it is, amongst other things, an adrenal tonic. Since I started drinking the tea, I've generally been less anxious and my energy has also improved. However, about six weeks ago I started adding ashwagandha and ginseng to the rhodiola. Come to find out, these two are usually considered 'male' tonics, but they are definitely supposed to help support (or perhaps, stimulate) energy. And they are two of the herbs that the superfoodists and others dedicated to doing our best often and strongly recommend.

I was excited about the idea of having more energy without having to eat more, so perhaps my motivations were suspect. I mentioned that I was using these to the Naturopath, and he said fine to the Rhodiola but said be careful with the other two: he said that if I felt like I'd had caffeine, or just generally anxious or overstimulated, I should stop them. I'm so grateful we'd had that conversation, as not long afterwards, just before our Oregon trip, I was crawling out of my skin, just crazed with anxiety, and thought that I was just over-reacting to the upcoming trip.

But then, I quit the ashwagandha and ginseng, and guess what? By the end of that day, I'd scraped myself off the ceiling and was able to feel more objective. To me, that's a real magic with the herbs, though, that they evidently hadn't built up in my system - that it just took a day of not using them to have the overstimulating effect removed. So, ashwagandha and ginseng may be great, but if you're a woman with thyroid/adrenal/other hormonal issues, like myself, it might not make you feel so good. (Note: I wasn't using a large amount by any means: just a little in my morning tea/smoothie).

On the other side, when we went down to Oregon, I packed some rhodiola powder, but didn't manage to put it in my tea for the first three or four days. I started feeling very off-balance and panicky, added the rhodiola back in and felt better almost straight away. I don't like the idea of being 'dependent' on herbs, any more than on pharmaceuticals, but when I see the difference in effect on me of rhodiola versus the other two, I'm able to consider it as a friend and helper to me, a supportive being.

Herbs are strong medicine: this isn't just 'making a cup of tea,' folks! (Although real tea, camellia sinensis, would have me sleepless and climbing walls too, for that matter...)

With that in mind, here is another of my recently arrived goodies from the Raw Food World:

Gynostemma leaves. Another prized and much-touted 'longevity tonic' tea. A small bag is not at all cheap, but it turns out a little goes a long way.

Those leaves unfurl in the cup and become quite large.

A perfect application for the tea-straw!

It is a slightly sweet tea, but quite tannic, with a smoky note also. Reminds me just a little bit of oolong tea, without the palpitations. I've been enjoying it with nettles that I gathered and dried this spring. I know that this is a 'female tonic' tea because of the 'gyno' in its name. However, I am still using caution with it, and will re-evaluate whether it is a good medicine for me after about a week. I only added the nettles after three steepings of the same gynostemma leaves, so I'm not going crazy making combinations just yet, until I know how we work together!


What are superherbs? A lot of them are weeds, really - plants that are adept at sucking the minerals out of the most spare, barren soils, in the most adverse climates, and flourishing where few others can. As our garden, and green things in general, dwindle all around here with the onset of winter, I am savoring every meal that I can make of freshly picked greens. And what's interesting is that I find myself picking just as much from outside the raised beds, if not more, as I do from inside!

Chickweed flourished early and late; nettles did the same. Those little baby plants that we nursed so tenderly indoors and then put out in raised beds were outstripped by orders of magnitude of growth by the nettles, dandelions, chickweed, and other, bigger weeds that had had no such mollycoddling. I really loved my garden this year, as has probably been clear from all my writing about it, but when I'm making a meal just for me, I go so often to the weeds - fresh herbs!

I have to confess that the Vita-Mix has greatly facilitated this.

Here she is, churning away my concoction of cooled gynostemma/nettle tea, chickweed, fresh mint, avocado, chlorella, flax, chia and a drop of stevia.

Do you have a special relationship to herbs and weeds, or any adverse stories?

Have a beautiful weekend.

How Do We Do It Without Running Water? And One More Teaphernalia Piece, Final Forbidden Foods (One Bar); Joy of Being Less Rigid

Happy Wednesday/Hump Day/whatever you call it! Thanks for all the kind comments about my previous post. Today, I'm going to share one more 'teaphernalia' item and also attempt to answer the question of how we manage without the running water. And I keep talking about how I'm not going to have the foods I'm not supposed to have, now that we're back home, and there keep seeming to be 'one last thing!' I'm going to share the last (honest!) of those.

Teaphernalia: we call this one 'the rhino condom' - that's what I thought it looked like when I first got hold of it!

Put leaves/powder in, and set in the jar/mug. It hangs down lower than the copco one that I mentioned last time, and works pretty well, apart from its propensity to fall in the jar and spill out the contents! It also doesn't arrive this teastained color: it earns that through many loving brews...

Before I start sharing the 'forbidden foods,' I have to acknowledge how good it feels to be out of the grips of rigidity. For my first several years as a rawfoodist, I wouldn't have eaten steamed broccoli, as I sometimes do now, let alone steamed carrots. I wouldn't have eaten a larabar or other raw food bar in case the nuts weren't 'really raw.' My friends and I worried about what temperature things like cinnamon and ginger were ground at. It feels so good to embrace less of a black-and-white outlook. I used to prowl the aisles of natural food stores picking up raw or gluten/dairy free bars, reading the ingredients, putting them back down... Actually, I still do that to some degree. A lot of them have things that I can't eat, and for the foreseeable future at least, I should probably accept that I can't have cacao or 'sugar' (dates, agave, etc).

I would certainly never have bought this to try in my old ideology. But it was marked down to 96 cents and I wanted to encourage that grocery store to carry things like that (it's a new item and I'm afraid it wasn't selling well), so I picked up two, one for me and one for Phil's daughter.

It does have sugar added, and it's a creamer: the listed 'serving size' is a tablespoon. I mentioned before having the experience of sugar-added foods tasting alcoholic: I kid you not: to me, this stuff tastes eerily like Baileys Irish Cream! Seriously! You should try it and let me know if I'm deluded (obviously it's been years since I've had the real Baileys).

The other 'indulgence' arrived with my recent order from The Raw Food World, the rest of which is much more 'virtuous' and I'll talk about soon.

This is 'the one' chocolate bar. It contains cacao - butter and powder, mesquite, maca, agave, sea salt.

So, it does contain agave, but fairly far down the ingredients list, and it also contains some of my favorite superfoods. I think that maca in particular helps to balance the cacao. I've eaten about half of it over the past two days (it's a small bar - just 28.5 grams, so 1oz).

It is delicious, and quite satisfying in that small quantity. With the added powders, the texture is slightly more 'munchy' than 'melt in your mouth,' but I like that sometimes. Calls itself 'the only chocolate bar you'll need,' and (allowing for the fact that (a) I'm not supposed to have chocolate at all and (b) I always prefer to make my own), I'm actually inclined to agree.

I should also mention that the price was good enough to make me decide to try it, since so many raw cacao bars are exorbitantly priced. And, it's made by Gabrielle Brick, another rawfood superhero whose path I've crossed before - when I was cheffing at Raw Spirit 1997, I think. Gosh, I miss that world!

So, how do we do without running water?
These two big 6-gallon jugs on our porch (took this photo at 8am, still dark up here) are part of how - the two trashier jugs off of the porch are the rest.

We take them down to the Safeway, where there is a public spigot (lots of homes around here have no running water, but most such folks don't spend winters here), and fill them up. I remember one time last winter when the spigot was frozen and we were out of water - wasn't much fun. Soon, we'll have to bring those jugs indoors - they're right on the verge of freezing outside now.

We have another jug, with a little faucet on it, that we heave up to our little sink area (usually I let Phil do this: it's heavy and high)! As you can see, it's a tiny sink (which also doesn't drain - we carry out the dishwater) - hard for washing a Vita-Mix pitcher!

Next to that is our cooking area - toaster oven, two-burner propane stove, little fridge (too little)

And, as dawn breaks, there is the tea kettle and Vita-Mix station at the other end of the counter! That spot in front of the Vita is also where I often sit to work. So lots of mess potential there! You can see our full-spectrum 'Sad' light there too: we're using it in the mornings to help protect against SAD.

For 'other end' plumbing needs... This is an old and weird picture (I was sick at the time and it's super-unflattering) from snow-bound March, but if you look out of the window and ignore me, you can see our outhouse.

When you need to go 'real bad' and it's snowing outside, you still have to make the time to put on a heavy coat, etc. And that is one mighty cold toilet seat! Honestly, we have old gallon jugs with lids on inside for '#1' needs (hope that's not tmi).

To finish - we found a beautiful sculpture on the beach, hiking the other day. We hauled it home! Phil might equalize the length of the 'legs,' which will make it rather more x-rated, but we might just leave it as is.