From "precious" to "previous," and triggers to epiphany

If you're local and would like something of mine, knowing my tastes, contact me! I'll bet there's something I'd love to give you that you'd love to have.
Ah, dear Homer--raining and snowing at the same time! 

We've been spared so much of that this winter, but I think being forced to drive in deep, wet, heavy snow on slick pavement with high winds and lots of airborne slush has been great trip preparation, as well as good memory-building of quintessential Homer.

On Sunday night, I realized the time had come whereat I could either let things slide along and have a very very dramatic last forty-eight hours in Homer next week, or I could make some lists and schedule time and plot slots, and make a calm, self-assured exit. I'm pleased to say I made the latter decision--I didn't get out of bed on Monday morning until I'd made a few pages of lists. Boxes are being taped, packages consolidated, emptied, passed on, used up. There have been some lovely serendipities as I've sought new homes for things that have been precious to me (and now, through an easy typo, are previous to me) :)
If you're local and would like something of mine, knowing my tastes, contact me! I'll bet there's something I'd love to give you that you'd love to have.

An unexpected abundance: two minutes after taking this photo, I'd found another half dozen paperclips and two more rubber bands. I never have enough clips and bands--until now!

This darling garden will have to come down soon. Since I'll be driving through Canada to get to the ferry I don't think I'll be able to carry dirt, but I'm thinking of sprouting clover in a mesh bag.

 Did I even talk about my birthday in my previous blog post? That post was maybe a bit too abstract, wasn't it? ;)
My birthday, plus the need to consolidate all kinds of ingredients, was my opportunity to play with this, which is danger zone for me...

 ...and to re-verify that this is a far far far superior alternative for me.

Five photos, five triggers. In the last couple days, I've been having some massive epiphanies around my relationship with food.
The need to drive in challenging conditions, the need to pack up and clean house, the practice of making treats for others, for myself, and seeing whether/what the differences between these are, have been tremendously instrumental in these realizations, and I'm feeling so grateful for the learning opportunity.

Do you want to hear more? It's an opening up I'm considering for my writing. Big changes are happening, and simply the fact that I can verbalize any of it is exciting to me.
Big love--local folks please hit me up soon if you'd like something of mine; anyone anywhere, if you'd like a postcard from the road please send me your address and I'll send you one!

Some Small Realizations

New Year 2013. Chinese New Year, the Year of the Snake. My birthday. Check, check and check. We're already into March, for crying out loud, with the nicely palindromic 3/1/13.
And I still don't know who I am or what all my choices, intentions, achievements of this year will be! You'd think it would be important to find that out, in a time so tessellated with transition. The question of where I should live runs alongside the question of how to structure my mixed genre creative thesis and which of the many themes I'm so excited to write on will really fit, and meanwhile my mental flywheel spins questions of what "diet" I should consider myself as being on; what foods I'm currently eating I should quit, as always..
But some things I have come to know, and I've come to know them through listening to myself.
Some people say they prefer the beach, some the mountains; some don't like the outdoors at all. I've generally felt my usual frozen inability to locate a preference or decision among all the outdoor places I love to be.
But trailing the dogs one time recently, I came with them into some woods atop a bluff above one of the beaches we hike (I had to lift them down from bluff to beach swinging from the sea wall later, but that's another story). I felt myself in that light and presence. And yes, there is truth to the "Ela-treela" and "tree fairy" appellations I've had over the years. 
I love direct sunlight, but I also love the dappled light of woods; of jungle, even, and I love just being amid trees, feeling all that expanding-upward energy, vertical earth, almost.
This photo from those woods looks exactly like a poem I had been working on shortly before. Its title? Simply "Ars Poetica."

For another thing: I spent most of yesterday, my birthday, driving home from Anchorage, grateful for good roads and a good, comfortable, reliable car. I spent yesterday--and most of today too--feeling very sick...because of some things I chose to ingest that I shouldn't have (and knew it), and consequently, that I failed to ingest and should have (was already feeling too sick).
OK, my bad, etc etc... But here's what I learned!
As I was acknowledging to myself at one point that I felt truly awful, a voice inside said I wished I didn't feel like that, wished I could feel more like I normally do.
If I wish not to feel awful, and to feel more like my norm, a fortiori that means I wish to be alive, to be here feeling at all!
Syllogism aside, that was a huge recognition. For most of my life off and on, I've felt apathetic resignation toward being alive, with an apathetic preference not to be. And that's not talking about when I'm in a depression. So, maybe this is moving into one of those spells where I feel an element of active electiveness toward being alive.
Good.

No-Sugar Maca Mojo Bark (aka White Chocolate Take 2) and New Finds

I mentioned on Monday that a good friend had nudged me to share a recipe that turned out really well. I'm really grateful for the prod (thanks, Terry!) because I threw this together in a blur in the midst of grading, and if I don't post it, I'll forget what I did. It's already been almost two weeks, so let's see how I do.

That "blur" of work seems to be a fairly consistent state at the moment. It's midterm week, and there have been various technical bugs all along--I've spent hours on the phone with the technical support folks, which has eaten into lecture-writing time. Today was one of those gorgeous bright-sun-in-the-eyes days that's why Phil got me this billed cap for my birthday, together with the happy green top and some long underwear under my jeans. I feel so lucky--and not just because I can keep working with the sun right in my eyes!

Yes, the little computer nook in the background of the next picture isn't so much sun-in-the-eyes, but most of my work for this course is on the "window workstation" computer.

So, about this second go at white chocolate/bark. You might remember my "not quite white" chocolate for the holidays. That used quite a bit of coconut cream powder, which some people find undesirable for various reasons, including the 1% casinate (dairy derivative) in it. I wanted to make another version that didn't use that--and this resultant attempt uses quite a few "unusual" or not-right-there-in-the-supermarket ingredients. But it also features the embedded fig and goji pieces that I so enjoyed last time. If you omit those, it's sugar free and candida friendly. Given the recherche ingredient list, let me share this "easy to find" tip: this stuff--creamed coconut--is basically the same stuff as coconut butter! It's incredibly cheaply available in Europe, and you can even find it in Anchorage. Just make sure to get the organic kind: some of the conventional brands have sulphates or other preservatives added. This package is 7oz, which is just under a cup. I used a whole block for this recipe.

No-Sugar Maca Mojo Bark (no dairy either!)
1 cup coconut butter, melted (or use one package of "creamed coconut")
1/2 cup cacao butter, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla powder

1 teaspoon white stevia powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

7/8 cup lucuma powder 

1 tablespoon maca
3/4 cup inulin (oligosaccharide, feeds good bacteria, naturally sweet-tasting)
1/4 cup yacon powder

3 dried figs, chopped
1 tablespoon goji berries, chopped

Mix together the coconut and cacao butters. Stir in the stevia, vanilla and salt.
Gradually add in the rest of the dry ingredients--lucuma, maca, inulin and yacon powder, and stir gently until everything is fully incorporated and there are no powdery pockets! Once everything is smooth, add in the finely chopped figs and berries.
You can pour it onto a tray, or into bar molds.
Refrigerate to set.

 This is not very sweet, very rich, but in a tummy-comforting, not a stomach-turning, way, and I was taken by surprise by how maca-ish it is! It really has a predominating malty flavor--which goes well with the figs and gojis. And actually, maca and coconut is an incredible flavor combination--it's like they're made for each other--so having the chocolate base contain more coconut than cacao butter worked well for this combination.

What do you think? Do you think you'll make this, or is the list of unusual ingredients offputting? Lucuma is getting easier and easier to find, as are inulin and maca.

Recent Discovery--Flax Milk!


I'm probably not a pioneer with this, as Homer, Alaska, is often the last place on the planet to see new health foods, it seems, but I found this "Flax milk" at the store today, and had to try it out. I was puzzled and curious, because flax is not a creamy seed at all--you wouldn't get a "milk" if you blended flax seeds and water like you would with hemp seeds.  It turns out that it's blended with flax oil, not seeds, and contains a fair amount of tapioca starch and gums as well (as do most store-bought nut milks--I'm ok with it).

Only 25 calories in a cup! Lots of calcium, and obviously lots of omega-3's, with fewer omega-6's than hemp milk.

 It's also unsweetened, which I really like, but it has the consistency and color of regular milk.

It doesn't have a distinctive "flax" taste at all. It actually tastes very good to me. I go back and forth on the economics of buying something with so few calories per serving--if I buy something with 100 calories in a cup, I'll take a quarter or eighth of a cup and water it down, thus getting more bang for my buck. Sure, I can do that with this too, but it'll end up pretty watery real quick (which doesn't mean I don't do it anyway!) Nonetheless--definitely worth a try, and a great new addition to the growing array of non-dairy milks!

I hope you enjoy the maca bark/white choc! Have you tried flax milk? Would you?

"50 First Weeks:" Gratitude, Daylight, and a Whole New Year

Another Monday, and as I predicted, it's definitely a day to retarget some good intentions. Like getting out for a hike (which we did again) and giving of myself to my husband rather than being buried in work all the time--and, best of all, writing and reading poetry! I did! I feel a lot more like myself already.

We're getting some incredible sunsets--this is right outside our cabin at bluff's edge. It's a frightful pic of me (was super-windy--check out those whitecaps--and I had no hat on), but I'm including it because of the incredible lightplay.

 Aside from the fact that I was going off track so much with too much work and too little writing (and too little anything else) last week, tomorrow is my birthday. I'm sure I've mentioned here before that in some ways, I think a person's birthday is more important than New Year's day as an opportunity to evaluate, set intentions, and generally take stock. I'll be doing more of that tomorrow, but on my "50 first weeks" Monday, I'm feeling such a sense of gratitude and validation. Writer friends have contacted me with good wishes, poems, and spot-on writerly advice. Another friend nudged me for the recipe for something I made in a crazed between-grading dash that really is worth sharing--here too. And I feel flattered that Phil wants my company, too.

Since Phil was out for breakfast with a friend this morning, instead of fixing breakfast I did some pre-prep for "tomorrow" goodies. This little hand-crank wheatgrass juicer is all the juicer I have, which might explain why this is the first time I've used it in over two years.

Now, I eat a lot a lot of carrots, but the amount of carrots it took to produce that scant cup of carrot juice is about as many as I eat in three or four days--and they're a significant part of my intake. Scary. Also, not the most efficient juicer.

Last time I pulled the juicer out, two years ago, was for the carrot pulp, to make these:

I loved them so much, I thought I should never make them again. This time, I cut them really small! This time, I also need the juice for another creation I'm planning. More on both in my next post! Some nostalgia for Hawaii, too--I got the juicer from a dear friend in HI whom I miss, and I used it regularly to make coconut cream. Of course, I always made goodies (including carrot cake sometimes!) with the pulp from the coconut cream making. At that stage of my life, there was always coconut cream and ginger juice in the fridge, courtesy of that little juicer.

A few minutes after the picture at the top of the post... Thanks, everyone!

Happy Birthday Phil, and "Grover Pie"

Yesterday was Phil's birthday! He's sitting in front of a big chocolate cake...

 ...but I also made a white chocolate-blueberry cashew "cheesecake."

 We decided that it shouldn't be called a 'cheesecake'--it's misleading and doesn't do it justice. At the party, on the fly, we were trying to come up with an alternative name. The first suggestions all had my name in them, which I discouraged, because it's not just 'my' creation...But for this crowd it is, and they were persistent! Based on my nickname "Elamonster," they were coming up with "monster" something. And it finally settled as "Grover Pie." Because it's a "blue monster" pie! I didn't grow up with Sesame Street, so this was totally out of left field for me, but for now, it stuck! And it was delicious, as was the entire celebratory dinner.

Phil's had a funny 'jester hat' for a while, most fittingly, but when we were in Anchorage on Saturday, we went to our boutique--Value Village--and he found another jester hat, complete with bells on, that fit me, and insisted I had to have it. So here we both are.

 There was lots of laughter at his party.

I think Amy was the one responsible for the "Grover Pie" appellation...

 One of his gifts was wrapped in Scarlett Johansson. I don't know whether to be disturbed by this reaction...

I gave him new binoculars for his birthday--seeing, and seeing far, is so important to him, and with the eye surgery last winter he's been through some challenges with that this past year. I also got some bird-feeders, so that we can entice even more amazing bird-life into our yard for him to look at with the binoculars!
Here's my recap of his birthday last year!