Banana Energy Bars; (Pseudo)Grains--Good or Bad?

Happy Hump Day! I think I'm ready to share the banana energy bar recipe, as promised. I'm just kind of wrongfooted by this new blogger layout--they've changed everything, it seems: including listing all your 'blogger stats' in prominent places.

Confession: I've never looked at my stats before at all (I think I was afraid that it would confirm the 'voice crying in the wilderness' fear). But perhaps the weirdness of speaking out on a public platform but knowing that no one's paying any attention is liberating. Of course I do want people to read this! So, changes a-coming...

But change seems to be a constant in my current dietary life and I'm so tired of it. I wish that I could just figure out what works and stick with it, even allowing for some broad variation within that. One thing that I tried during the Residency--starting before that, actually, back with my "A" is for "Amaranth" post--was eating some grains (amaranth, quinoa, millet a little rice occasionally; you can see the gluten free oats in the energy bars above). I hadn't eaten grains for years and years--so many people make them out to be the devil's work and since gluten is such a no-no for me, for years I'd assumed "better without." Perhaps eating root veggie starch and feeling so much better was a gateway drug...

I love the convenience of the grains--soak overnight, cook, then dress up however you want. Porridge with a banana, a handful of dried fruit (gojis, raisins, mulberries), some frozen berries and some flax meal was a great breakfast during the residency and I've been continuing it since.

Continuing the convenience theme, I discovered these energy bars...

...considering that I thought they were really good, it's perplexing that I still have one left. They are too sweet, as were the glutino bars that I also tried but failed to photograph. The glutino bars didn't sit as well for me. Then, the university grocery store had 'Columbia Gorge' gluten free bars that I can't find a link for. Some of the flavors worked for me, others didn't (careful label reading is a must--the 'berry' flavor had buckwheat in it, which I didn't catch).

So, what's not to like? Well, it's not clear to me that the grains are responsible: it might just be withdrawal from being at residency, residual tiredness catching up, or my latest experiment with trying to eliminate snacking and only eat three times a day...but I haven't been feeling just right.

I'm dropping things (like I used to in the bad old days), having short term memory lapses (unheard of for me and very scary), the skin stuff is almost as bad as it was during that 'poisoning' episode, headaches, emotional rollercoaster... So--are the amaranth, quinoa, millet, oats turning me into this weird whackjob? Or is it something else? (We're suspecting that I might be allergic to another of my meds)

Let's just assume, for the sake of this post, that it's not the grains, that they're OK, as they are for so many other people, and share the recipe already!

It's sort of a riff on that banana bread. Various kinds of floury/powdery stuff, some dried fruit....

...some wet banana and sweetie stuff, some gluten free oats, a little shredded coconut.

OK, here it is:
Banana Energy Bars (raw, vegan, gluten free--dehydrated)
2 cups flour of choice (or flour and protein powder) (I did 1/2 cup protein powder, 1/4 cup mesquite, 1/4 cup lucuma, 3/4 cup coconut flour, 1/4 cup tapioca starch
1 cup gluten free oats (the last of mine and I don't know that they can be found in Homer...)
1/4 cup shredded coconut (more might have been better)

Mix together those dry ingredients. At this point, I also added a handful of gojis/raisins/mulberries, but you could do this at the end too.

Mash 3 bananas.
Melt 3 tablespoons coconut oil
Combine with 3 tablespoons coconut sugar
and 2 tablespoons lemon juice.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix all together.

Form into a square on a teflex-lined dehydrator sheet and cut into bar sizes.

Dehydrate for an hour at 145 and then turn down to 115. At that point, I was able to flip them, remove the teflex and divide the brick into bars. They dried much faster that way: I was impressed how fast. Maybe 4-5 hours.

I hope you try these and enjoy them. I still have a few left but they were my mainstay for our blueberry harvesting trip (actually, I should have brought more.)

Much love!

"The Written Gateway"

I was going to share an energy bar recipe tonight that sustained me for our harvesting trip but the 'energy' isn't right for that tonight. It's ready to go tomorrow or the next day, though--promise!

Here are some of the year's first potatoes from the garden... They're from two different plants, that butterball in the back isn't a freak...

In a briefer, more contemplative vein, I want to share the idea of writing as a gateway to spoken expression.

This came up in a facebook group discussion with some of my new cohorts. I spent much of today working on a poem that deals with issues I find hard to talk about: thought this would be both a brave and a responsible move toward being the best "best" I can be as a writer. One of my friends mentioned that she needs to write about difficult things before she can talk about them: that that's why she's a writer at all (and a pretty good reason it is)!

I realize that the same is true for me, in the confessional and yet relatively anonymous format of the blog at least: I definitely write about things on here that I wouldn't be comfortable talking about with most people. Moving this into my art and creativity feels scary but it also feels like being blown open--blowing myself open, merging my 'personal' discomforts and preoccupations, potentially, with a much more universal mind. Allowing them simply to be experience, shared as art, shared. Part of my 'pulling head out of the sand,' for sure. The connectedness is pleasing.

Some tricks: having tended to get all my paid work and chores done before focusing on my writing, I did the reverse today. And felt a huge pressure for my writing to be 'really good,' to justify the fact that I wasn't doing x y and z else. Fortunately, there was so much else to think about with the poem that this pressure got pushed into a corner. As well as engaging some 'hard stuff,' I was writing it as a sestina, wondering right up to the last minute whether this was even possible. Of course, getting all the words to fit together still only gets you a first draft, but a first draft is a kind of closure. At least I can set it aside tomorrow and then look to see if it sucks.

I'm excited for this process. It feels like surrender.

How do you handle making time for your creative work when there's chores and work to do? Do you feel guilty blowing them off?

Blueberry Harvesting Road Trip!

On Thursday, we drove up to Anchorage through the rain. Joining forces with our friend Terry, on Friday we then drove about as far from Anchorage northward as we'd covered from Homer the previous day. And back. And back to Homer today. Our quest?

Blueberries! Yes! You may remember my disappointment last year at our paltry harvest after a very strenuous hike, due to a new invasive moth whose caterpillar had stripped all the leaves from the blueberry plants in that area.

Given that, it was so sweet to see flourishing plants, autumning golden, with perfectly ripe berries.

As befits a long trip, there were sideshows and pit stops. We had to stop at the gas station in Willow for 'A Cultural Experience:' the longest candy aisle you ever saw.

On both sides!

No comment. OK, one comment. It reminds me of Scott Nadelson's self- and Oregon-deprecating line that most 'artwork' around where he lives is paintings of salmon or carved elk-horn. Here, too, Scott--and this we call a Cultural Experience?!

More wondrous were the views. The tundra and below are already in full fall colors--purple carpets splashed with yellowing birches, Denali in the background.

Spectacular like this for mile after mile...

It gives a whole different perspective on distances. You can see a day's walk off and yet the mountains look close enough to touch.

After many days of rain, it was also stunning weather. There were some neat-looking animation clouds to tell stories about from time to time, but mostly we had some late-season warmth and sunshine, just as I start to look for my long underwear and down coat.

Harvesting blueberries can tell much about personalities. In my post about blueberries last year, I showed the 'harvesting combs' that can be used to pick more rapidly, that some people deplore for the mechanization, claiming that it can also damage the plants.

Phil picks with one comb in each hand, roaring through a field as if he were back on a combine, the zingy noise the teeth make as they pass through springy branches even a positive sound-effect for him: "productivity!"

I used one comb, sometimes. Having driven such a long way, I sympathized with the drive to pick as much as possible in the time we had. On the other hand, it's so much more pleasing to use my fingers as combs, to touch and caress the plants, to milk the berries from the stems and greet each one. A couple times, the comb would pull a whole small plant out and that really put me off. There are techniques to make comb-picking friendly to the plant and I'm careful to use them, but they're not totally infallible. Terry's a finger-picker too, focused and speedy. Phil definitely picked the most of any of us: more impressive was how clean (as in relatively free of leaves and debris) his picking was: it's awfully easy to pick leaves with the berries that way.

These are low-bush cranberries, aka lingonberries. They look so funny, just marooned in the bog there--all the foliage has died back and here are these little red jewels saying "Look at me! Eat me! Spread me!"

Speaking of marooned in the bog, it happened to me too.

I didn't think it was funny at the time, knee-deep and sinking. But I was sport enough to have a pic taken, even though I think that those bib overalls on top of my layers of clothing make me look even more unsightly than usual in photographs! Had I been alone, it would have been truly scary. I was so grateful that Phil helped me out.

Speaking of other growing things besides blueberries, Phil pulled out these king bolete mushrooms, and modeled them very fetchingly...

On the way back toward Anchorage, we stopped at Honolulu Creek (what is it about Hawaiian names in other states?)

It's a glacial outwash, which means rock-hunting heaven. Almost every stone you set foot upon is unique, beautiful, different from its fellows. We hauled down several backpack-loads of large rocks (well, Phil did): Terry's pretty sure she has enough now to finish a major landscaping project.

My taste runs to smaller rocks. The one on the left is a granite that has been compressed, shivered, compressed again and you can now pick it apart with a thumbnail--it's already significantly smaller in the picture than it was when I found it. The one on the right is the closest to triangular that I've seen in a long time, and it's blue with interesting green faceting that doesn't show up well in the picture.

So, successful harvesting of two kinds, plus great company and conversation for a long drive.

And now we're home again, with significantly more blueberries (even having given away a whole tub) than we picked with great effort last year.

And now we're home again, and I still miss the taste of being at Residency, and I'm still not fully rested from it, still have to figure out all kinds of scheduling and prioritization.

But the question remains: was it worth driving a thousand miles for those berries? Yes, that's closer than the frozen berries from Oregon and Washington we can get at CostCo, and these wild berries have far more antioxidants than those do. But the expense for the amount of berries pulled out is pretty huge in comparison to the CostCo berries. I feel very mixed about it and have to weigh in with the value of being there, seeing that wonderful scenery in a part of the country I haven't been for a year, the company...

Time to Pull My Head out of the Sand...

My new note to myself for the wall--

--I'm hoping that it will remind me to ask that all-important question, especially in those moments when the 'other side' is dragging me off the rails as if against any volition of my own. Perhaps I should have it tattooed on my retinas. Upside down.

One of the expanding blessings of commitment to writing, to making art of any kind, is the constant nudging impulsion to do my best--to see more, feel more, know more, share more--in the best, fullest way possible, in the most beautiful, poignant way I know how. I'm not speaking only for myself on that.

Speaking for myself, though, I've tended to have my head in the sand about the current events in the world around me. I've studied ancient languages and history in greater depth than the stuff of the here and now, I've lived in remote places, off the grid, far away from any obvious impacts from Washington or Kabul or anywhere further than the nearest volcano. Also, I've avoided taking radical stances on pretty much anything. I am caught in so many inconsistencies: even my marriage is a catalogue of them, straight down the line from age difference through spiritual perspectives to eating animal products (or not) and the use of chemicals (or not)--and more. There are so few things on which I've taken a stand, ever.

But the more I write, the more important it is for me to make what I care about relevant. If I have something to share, it needs to have passion, and it needs to be grounded in some commonly held objects, out on the table for people to roll around in their hands. Ok, I'll stop mixing metaphors right now! I've been talking about getting with it for a while now: it's time to stop talking and start acting. Yet one more piece of ammunition: Phil's daughter's bathroom reading tonight was an old issue of Ode Magazine (yes, it is very nice to visit a place that has a bathroom): on the back page was an explanation of why it's good for you to read 'bad news,' rather than trying to insulate and isolate from it. The basic message was that reading about bad news forces us to become problem solvers, to think about solutions. Each time we're exposed to a piece of bad news, we can learn from it by gauging our own reactions to it, understanding its etiology and asking what should be done differently if an analogous situation came up again.

I don't think it was an accident that I read that this evening. Part of 'being my best' is going to be pulling my head out of the sand! Watch this space...and send me links!

Meanwhile, here are the fruits of a quick foray to the kale patch...

 It's so beautiful... So luxuriant and happy. On the other hand, why oh why did I plant so much kale? Phil hates kale! He insists that it upsets his stomach, and mine too. And he may be right. Fortunately, I also planted a motherlode of chard, which does almost as well up here, and we've been enjoying that.

About half the kale ended up in the dehydrator...

...massaged in apple cider vinegar and a little olive oil, with a mesquite spice mix rubbed in--we'll see how it turns out.

Do you keep up with the goings-on of the world and take a stance on things? Or are you happy to compromise? (Is it ok to do both in different contexts?)

Wild Animals DO Get Cavities + "Food as Pleasure Challenge" #2--"B" is for "Banana Bread"

I hadn't intended to continue my "food as pleasure" challenge so soon after getting back. In fact, as I hinted before, I'm not even clear where I'm going with this blog. I also hadn't ever intended to do the 'food as pleasure' challenge in alphabetical order. But despite all that, I made some Ela-friendly banana bread yesterday--a recipe that doesn't involve any eggs or dairy in the first place and could so easily be made to fit but that I'd never tasted before in all the dozens of times I'd made it--so it seems right to share.

First, though, I wanted to show you what I found on the beach last night.

The rain finally abated yesterday evening, and Phil and I hiked the beach from 7.30pm until almost 10 and were home with just a vestige of daylight left. The crazy-long days are definitely on the wane, and as I look around at all the baroque green lushness, I have a wistful awareness around my extremities that it's only six weeks or so until we start to freeze here again. Probably not more than two months 'til the snow flies.

So, that above is a sea otter jaw. Not a very big sea otter, but quite an old one, judging by the state of its teeth! The back molar is missing entirely, and check out the holes in that second molar! Three big ones--wonder how that must have felt.

Now of course, sea otters have the habit of crunching down on clam and mussel shells their whole lives. It seems a bit surprising, considering that their paws appear so dexterous and delicate, that they haven't figured out a more tooth-friendly approach. But crunching on something that hard day in and day out must shiver their timbers pretty good. Those are some beautiful teeth, however--pearlescent and purplish.

It bugs me when raw food advocates spout that wild animals never get sick, never get tooth decay. Mostly, though, I feel grateful to live close enough to wild animals that I get to see how things really are with them. No global warming? Then how come so many sea otters around here are dying of canine distemper, which formerly only affected Atlantic seals, and only showed up in the subArctic when the Polar ice melted enough for infected Atlantic animals to pass through into the Pacific?

OK--off my soapboxes... Banana bread...

(gluten free, vegan, all that good stuff...)

This version of banana bread is super-easy, as the role usually played by milk and eggs is played by, well, bananas! Which also means that it's your recipe for when you have a lot of ripe bananas, not just the usual two.
Preheat oven to 350, prepare a 9x5 loaf pan.
Mix together:
2 cups flour (if using a gluten free mix, as I did, add a teaspoon of xanthan or guar gum)
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon (if you like)
Mix together separately:
6 mashed bananas
1/2 cup sugar (or xylitol, or a mixture of the two)
3 tablespoons oil (I used to always make this with butter just so there was a reason I couldn't eat it!)
3 tablespoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon vanilla
Mix wet and dry together and, if you like, stir in a half cup each of nuts and dried fruit. (I just added a half cup of raisins: I really don't like nuts in baked goods.)
Pour out into the loaf pan and bake for around 50 minutes.

Enjoy!
What lesson have you learned from an animal recently?

Back Home from MFA Residency, Safety Tracks, Changes A-Coming

I'm home from Tacoma: arrived to find Anchorage gray, teeming with rain, just as it was when I left. 

By the evening, when I got to Homer, it was dry and sunny, and had apparently been that way most of the time I was gone. By the next morning, though, the rain had followed me down from Anchorage and it's been just pouring ever since.

The deluge feels apt for my arrival back into this home life, after two weeks of intense, stimulating, exciting interactions with a whole cast of new friends, people whom I hope I'll know for the rest of my life. People among whom I felt safe to deliver a poem from memory, standing on my head, as part of the revelry on the last night before we dispersed.

Could anyone living here make sense of that? 

And how amazing is it, coming from that context, that this is my home?

 Everything has grown up like crazy over the past two weeks. I'm particularly pleased to see such prolific raspberries, after the ravages of the snowshoe hares this past winter--

 --many canes have even set fruit.

The re-entry into "this" life from "that" is messy around the edges, of course. I return home with many more ties to people, many more books (and a renewed anxiety about where to keep them in this tiny space) and a whole program of study ready to unfold in collaboration with my new mentor. The 'mentor assignments' were one of the most talked-about elements of the program for my cohort: for many, there was a lot of excitement and speculation about who they would end up working with in such close concert for this year. I was a little different: I didn't have a strong feeling about any possible individual. Instead, I felt sure that anyone I ended up with would be fantastic and that there were no bad choices: a pretty great way to feel. So I was delighted when I was assigned Stephen Corey, best known as editor of the Georgia Review but a wonderful poet and essayist too, whom I'd experienced by then as a compelling teacher with a whip-keen, wry sense of humor.

I have work to do, and I have support and validation for doing that work. This is probably the most important thing that I bring home with me in terms of its impact on my home life. It feels sort of apt that I saw my therapist in Anchorage right off the plane and then my Naturopath in Homer as soon as I got back. With support, I can stay on the rails. It's alarming to me that conversely, when I wasn't seeing them so often earlier this summer, I started to go off those rails.

This writing commitment is getting big--and I want it to flourish like this horseradish I planted last year, turning into a perennial, luxuriant, pungent monster.

Two-gallon watering can is there for scale.

Fall is coming. The fireweed is just about bloomed out. Red berries everywhere. The nettles are purple with exhaustion and the watermelon berries are ripe.

I see some changes a-coming: for this blog, for this life. I'm still 'betwixt and between,' so I don't have full clarity on what those changes will be but it's not exaggerating to say that the very existence and character of this blog, among other things, are up in the air. More soon when I know it.
Much love.

Seeing Bats, Hearing Voices (in Tacoma, at the Rainier Writing Workshop)

During this wonderful time of getting to know people and being fantastically stimulated as a writer, I've been so cautious around all the shared meals. Night before last, finally, something got me. Mid-way through Dinty Moore's hilarious and yet depth-plumbing reading about death and family, I realized that I was in for a night of shakes, hot and cold sweats, frequent trips to the bathroom.

Despite this, I spent some of the evening at the North Pacific Coffee Club, as I have almost every night, talking, appreciating, getting to know people better. It took my mind off the sickness, the bathroom was close by, I wouldn't have missed the conversation. Still, I left early, hoping to sleep it off.

Harstad Hall's corridors are long and bare, with a "T" at each end. When I came in, a bat the size of a starling was flying back and forth down the hall...

...knocking around in one "T" or other for a few moments, then making another lap of the corridor. Anxious. Swooping low, frantic. I opened the end door wide and tried to usher it out, but I banged the door on the wall and it fled to the opposite end. I tried to herd it toward an open window. It ducked out under my outstretched arm. On my fourth lap of the corridor, I listened at doors for voices and found two people in the ladies' room, asked them for help. One of them was horrified at the very thought of a bat; the other was willing to help me try to trap it, but really thought that calling Campus Security would be the thing to do.

So, I went downstairs and called Campus Security. Five minutes later, three kids showed up with walkie talkies dangling from their belts and heavy flashlights in their hands. One also wielded a butterfly net. They came upstairs with me: no sign of the bat. They started opening doors and shining lights in, although I assured them that the bat wouldn't have gone through a closed door.

As soon as they left to check the next floor up, here came the bat again, making its frantic laps of the corridor. I called out to them and went up the next flight of stairs as fast as my nauseated state allowed. As I stepped onto the third floor landing, the bat shot past my right ear and continued up the stairwell. I couldn't find the "Campus Security" folks and I didn't know where the bat was anymore either, so I just gave up and went to bed.

As I tossed between hot sweats and chills, flicking in and out of dreams like a mid-afternoon drunk surfing channels, voices started to intrude, loud, animated, back from the bar after closing time. The next time I had to get up for the bathroom, I determined I'd ask them to tone it down. I stepped out into the corridor. Silence. No one was there at all.

Back in bed, there were the voices again. And then I remembered Mary Blew's craft talk that morning, in which she quoted from "Crazy." The second-person protagonist, in the early stages of a psychotic break, is convinced that the downstairs neighbors, and eventually everyone else, are talking--about her--all the time. I realized that the voices were intensifying with my hot sweats and receding with my chills. I strained to distinguish words: yes, of course they were talking about me! Yes, of course they were all in my head. And what about the bat?

The morning brought some clarity. My guts were no longer in 'repel invaders' mode and the world looked more like itself again. There had indeed been a 'post-bar-closing' gathering in the first-floor lounge, directly beneath my room but not directly beneath the corridor.

And what about the bat? This morning, someone came down saying there was a bat in the third-floor bathroom. And the front desk folks were on the phone to Campus Security once again.

Greetings from Tacoma!

Greetings from Tacoma, WA! Here is my home for the next ten days or so.

 It's hard to imagine that two people have to share a room this size during the school year. Between my food stash and my book stash, I'm definitely spread over both desks, and my clothes are spread out on the bed I'm not occupying.

Yesterday and today have been mostly 'meet and greet,' but we've been treated to two amazing readings already also. And workshops and classes start in earnest tomorrow, bright and early. I've been running the last two days, getting to know the surrounding area a little, and recognize that there may not even be time to do that so much. My cohort is filled with interesting people who are as excited about this as I am. The 'returning students' are friendly and welcoming.

This is all going to be happening so 'immediately' that I don't know how much I'll be able to write about it. We have a breather on Thursday, so I'll aim to update then.

I'm aiming to be well-prepared but relaxed with the food thing, but found the opening catered dinner very stressful tonight--the combination of hordes of  unfamiliar people and cheese-covered salads at every place setting tripped one of my switches for a moment there...

On a more positive note, I had bought some gluten free granola bars made with gf oats, a little apprehensively as I wasn't sure that even gf oats would work for me, and it seems to be fine!

Back home, I packed pretty light. I found that computer case at the thrift store and used it as a carry-on for my clothes--slightly awkward and not perfect, I may shop at the thrift store again for a better space arrangement!

 Of course, now I'm here, I'm not sure that I brought enough clothes. I've been handwashing with "bronners" already.

I should introduce "The Warthog!" This little sweetheart is the new addition to our family--'our new car!' We got her when Phil's nephew and his girlfriend came up so that they could have transportation, and our next set of guests, and maybe winter driving for us. She gets great gas mileage, and check out those udders behind the back wheel! (They're just drips of expandable foam but I'm calling them udders.)

Yes, she's a rusty tub, but we have some sandy ideas for clearing her up. It's funny how now that we have her, I'm noticing cars just like her all over Homer. Subaru is a ubiquity up in AK: they work very well there, but most people have the newer and bigger models. Proud, we are!

Thanks for reading!

"Food as Pleasure" Challenge #1--"A" is for "Amaranth"

Often, I take on a new challenge or institute a new practice, only to have life circumstances move in ways that make follow-through complicated at best. Maybe I'm not alone in this?! This time, however, I knew from the get-go that when I set that 'food as pleasure' recipe-following challenge, I would be on the road within a few short days, heading off on my big adventure, my MFA residency, almost two weeks of everything 'writing and literature,' probably just the bare minimum of food-prepping, and otherwise just making the food thing work as seamlessly and graciously as possible. And so, on the eve of my departure, I have the first recipes (yes, I did make two) to tell you about.

First off, not a recipe but a wonderful fruit salad that is also a celebration of my renewed embracing of all macronutrients.

That is a bowl of blueberries, half a mango, thawed cherries and grapes, two chopped dates, spirulina and coconut kefir! It's like what you might make a smoothie from, but it's a very different experience from drinking a smoothie, let me tell you. A bouquet of varying textures and flavors: the intense almond note of the dense cherries, the juicy smack of the blueberries, the occasional sticky sweetness of the dates--and when you stir it all together, the spirulina and kefir just melt into the mix. So, I was pleased with that, and you'd enjoy it too (although replicating it just that way to eat while driving up to Anchorage might have been less smart--should have gone with the good ol' smoothie)!

As for the recipes I chose to feature for purposely delicious food, a little voice in my head had been nagging me for weeks that I should try amaranth. I've never had it before, and I haven't really explored the world of the 'pseudograins' (quinoa, millet, amaranth) yet. I'd been impressed by its nutrient profile and since I love the greens, I was curious to try the seeds.

I googled around to find a recipe to try it in, and was immediately drawn to this 'Amaranth Polenta with Wild Mushrooms' recipe: I'd been having a hankering to make a mushroom risotto-type dish for ages too, so this fit both the amaranth and the 'mushroom risotto' hankerings!

For the challenge, I wasn't supposed to 'healthify' the recipe, and in this case it was pretty easy for me not to: it's a simple and healthy recipe as it stands. My one exception to the 'no healthifying' rule is that I'm allowed to substitute coconut oil for other cooking oils if high heat is going to be involved. So, the recipe calls for butter or olive oil, and I used a bit of coconut oil instead.

Garnished with fresh thyme...They recommended serving it with 'wild game,' so I fixed up something of that ilk, together with freshly harvested chard (steamed with lemon) and lettuces (in a salad), and freshly baked bread--and it was quite a spread!

We had one friend over for dinner, and then another one unexpectedly stopped in, and everyone enjoyed all of it. I knew that Phil would like the amaranth, because it still has a crunch even in a porridgy-textured context like polenta. Here's the funny thing: both Phil and our friend who was there from the start commented that the texture and appearance of the amaranth reminded them of fish roe at Japanese restaurants (although it tasted completely different). And then, when the unexpected guest started eating it a little later, he said, "What's this? Fish eggs?"

But I wasn't done! That same website linked a recipe for gluten free Amaranth-Ginger Muffins--a blend of gluten free flours including amaranth, with crystallized ginger pieces and nuts scattered through them. I decided I should make those too. Now, this was a gluten free recipe, but it called for eggs and milk. I used ener-g egg replacer and almond milk instead, but this was veganizing, not 'healthifying!' In other words, I used real sugar, not stevia and xylitol, and although I did use coconut oil instead of the recommended canola (not on your life!), I didn't reduce the quantity. (Actually, with the quantity recommended, there's only a quarter-tablespoon of oil per muffin anyway, less than a teaspoon...) I _did_ leave out the nuts, but not for 'healthifying' reasons: simply because I don't like nuts in baked goods. Oh, and I used arrowroot instead of potato starch because I didn't have the latter.

Crystallized ginger is definitely one of those things that I _would_ normally leave out: honestly, though, I was fully intending to include it. I chopped it all up hours ahead of time. But I was multitasking, and only remembered that I'd forgotten to add it when the muffins were almost done. Since I'd decided not to make the sugar crumb topping (just didn't think it was necessary--you can call me on it if you think that's 'healthifying' :) ), I added the crystallized ginger pieces as a belated topping a few minutes before they were done.

I'd been quite nervous about how these would be received, being as they were gluten free and vegan and all. But they were delicious on all palates! Phil ate three of them right away, and one of our guests also went for seconds. Very moist but almost a 'stretchy' texture, from the combination of xanthan gum and egg replacer: I imagine that the texture would have been more like classic gingerbread had I used real eggs.

Since I made the amaranth flour by grinding whole amaranth in the Vitamix, there were a few whole grains still in there--you can see them in the picture above (maybe I need to grind for longer next time). These little seeds popped like fig seeds as we chewed--I'm glad that people were put in mind of figs and not fish roe in this context!

Oh, and I liked them too. I love gingery, spicy stuff. I didn't adore them but it definitely felt like a treat.

So. I'm flying south to Tacoma tomorrow. For the next two weeks I don't know what my schedule will be vis-a-vis blog-writing and reading but I'd love to stay checked in as and when I can. 

Sending love to everyone and hoping that if it's raining as hard where you are as it has been here in AK, your garden is growing beautifully as a result--and otherwise, that you're enjoying sunshine and summer with no breath of fall!

Have you tried amaranth? Liked it? 

...And Then I Got Hungry! Coping With Increased Exercise and Some Dehydrator Goodies

Ordinarily, I have a pretty small appetite. And although my digestion is much-improved now, thanks to all the work I've been doing with the ND over the past year, I tend not to feel good if I eat a large amount at once. I'm also identified with these beliefs about myself.

And so, when I start to exercise a whole lot more and find myself HUNGRY when I think I 'shouldn't' be, or think that I've had enough already, I freak myself out. Dry, dense things that are not usually very appealing to me suddenly go down by the handful. Like kale chips. (More on those in a moment.)

Worse yet, remember that chocolate chip hummus transmogrified into cookies I mentioned earlier? Even though it didn't taste particularly good, I found myself eating one, then two at a time, then picking the chocolate chips out of the third and discarding the rest. After which, I didn't feel so good at all. So unusual for me, not the me I want to be, icky and repulsive to me: I must remind myself, so human--whom am I calling names? (Can I believe I'm confessing to this?)

Freaking out over increased hunger due to increased exercise has been the downfall of many previous fitness endeavors in my life: this time, I intend to do better. Both yesterday and today, I rode my bike hard to town and back, rowed on the rowing machine twenty minutes, and went for a twenty-minute run, plus crunches, planks, pushups, etc. I'd been mixed about running: it has harsh connotations for me, but it may be the only form of cardio available to me at my residency that starts so soon, so I need to get in the groove.

So, to do better with all this, I powered up my remaining hummus-dressed potato salad to make a hearty lunch today. I culled a gorgeous mix of lettuces from our garden, chopped in some remarkably sweet cherry tomatoes and a quarter of an avocado (I hadn't been eating them, and had forgotten how delicious they are!), poured in some homemade kim chee, sprinkled on some spirulina, nutritional yeast, kelp powder...

 It was hearty and good, and I didn't mind eating an orange and some blueberries too.

Speaking of kale chips, I've made some more (pictured above) and discovered that I may even prefer them with a simple lemon juice or vinegar and olive oil massage, rather than a creamy dressing. I did straight apple-cider vinegar and olive oil with a dash of salt, and I also did lime-ginger chips--the juice of half a lime and about an inch of ginger, freshly grated. For that batch, I used just the minimum of olive oil (still being fat-phobic, apparently) and discovered that it really works best if all the kale is massaged with some oil: without that coating, it gets dry without the real crispiness.

Also in the dehydrator:

They're not very pretty, but they're very yummy! It's my first attempt at a banana cookie.
3 tablespoons coconut butter
2 tablespoons coconut sugar
1 mashed banana
3 tablespoons flaxseed meal
4 tablespoons lucuma powder
2 tablespoons mesquite powder
~1/2 cup water
mixed all together, then add a handful of raisins.
Even when pretty well-dried, they have a lovely, moist texture and a lingering, but not overpowering, sweetness.

This last trip to Anchorage also afforded me my first opportunity (i.e. leftover rice from a Thai restaurant) to make Phil's rice crackers in the dehydrator rather than our toaster oven!

When the sun shines in through the kitchen window, it can be almost impossible to take a photo in there!

I was able to get them super-thin and crunchy, just how Phil enjoys them most.

And they're so much lighter in color than the oven-baked version--lower temperatures, I guess.

Well, I'm getting ready to go on my first MFA residency and have my world shaken, or possibly turned upside down! I'm just starting to realize how 'different' things are going to be for this brief two-week period fast-approaching. Obviously, the "living-breathing-speaking writing and literature" part will be awesome and I can't wait for it. The social dynamics and also the food part cause me some trepidation. I'll talk about that more as I prepare to leave, and will also endeavor to post my first "make someone else's pleasurable recipe challenge before I head out.

How do you handle increased appetite, for exercise or other reasons?
What are you looking forward to in August?