What Motivates You to Do Your Best? Raw Chocolates in London Review: Should We Sample Everything in Pursuit of Our Writing?

We're still in Anchorage, where it warmed up today from 10 degrees to around 32 (freezing): freezing it may be, but the 20 degree-increase in temperature makes it feel positively warm! You can't imagine this application of 'it's all relative' until you experience it in your flesh.

I'm more than ready to be getting home and have had a couple of embarrassing, shaming incidents where my behavior wasn't as I'd have liked because I hadn't eaten enough and my blood sugar was too low and I was cranky. What's the lesson here? Well, I need to fend for myself no matter what everyone else is doing, and I need to accept that my needs are different. More globally, I need to find some things that nurture me in Anchorage. I tag along with Phil and his friends, and they have been wonderful friends too, and very accepting of me. Some of them are even writers also, and afford me a tantalizing glimpse into Anchorage's thriving literary scene. But I don't know any raw-food enthusiasts in Anchorage and since there are raw products at the natural food store, there must be someone out there. And there must be other writerly types with whom I could connect also. So right now, a sense of frustration with myself at not having done my best is my motivation to do better. It's not pure and unmitigated shame: it's also a determination to do better.

What motivates you to do your best?

I have a couple more posts to make about our London trip and time is passing on and carrying in its current all kinds of other happenings to talk about as well. I'm looking forward to feeling less skewed and more caught-up.

I promised to share a review of the raw chocolate and other goodies that I broke the budget on at the Whole Foods in High St Kensington.

Pictured are 'conscious' 'Healthy Heart' chocolate bar and also their lucuma bar (with cacao butter, sort of a white chocolate) and 'pulsin's maple peanut protein bar and also their 'berry burst' with dried raspberries and goji berries and cacao. I also picked up this little ball

and a heinously expensive bar of Shazzie's Naked Chocolate that I seem to have failed to photograph. It wasn't an accident that the flavor of Naked Chocolate that I picked was the 'Siren,' with blue-green algae added, just like the 'Healthy Heart' flavor of 'conscious' chocolate that I picked out, shown above.

I have more intimate pictures of these goodies that I will add another time, since this internet connection is ridiculously slow and I want to post this blog before I have to leave! But it's kind of symbolic that I'm having such trouble posting photos, as I'm finding myself ambivalent about this whole reviewing process. I could tell you about how the conscious chocolate bar had more of a truffle texture, which was delicious and satisfying.

That the 'naked chocolate' bar, whose blocks are much thicker, was a little grainier, not a very good texture, but that both of them tasted great (the 'conscious' somewhat better) and the algae was a very unobtrusive note.

I could tell you that Phil, who loves chocolate but had never had raw chocolate before, thought that the raw cacao was a very 'harsh' note in the chocolate. I could tell you that 'conscious' lucuma bar was disappointing, especially since I'm on a quest to make chocolate without caffeine in it, and was thinking of exploring a white chocolate path. The cacao butter on the bottom was kind of waxy, the lucuma layer above was just too sweet.

I could tell you that the little 'berriball'

tasted a lot better to me than 'pulsin's berry-cacao offering,

which I would have categorized as somewhat 'harsh' too. But the 'berriball' had raisins and dates and much more sweet stuff in it whereas 'pulsin's was lower-glycemic.

I could tell you that my favorite thing was the 'pulsin' peanut maple protein bar.

Despite the fact that personally, I think that carob/peanuts/maple syrup is a very odd flavor combo, I liked the fact that they used carob and cacao butter, I loved that they used pea protein powder (my protein powder of choice, with hemp), and I especially loved that they were low-glycemic and low-fructose, with a minimal amount of maple syrup and 'brown rice malt' (a new ingredient for me) also with the sweetness of carob.

And thereby hangs a tale. What does it say that the bar I liked best may not have had the best flavor, but tasted good and was made from a set of ingredients that I was happy about? Furthermore, what does it say that sampling those raw chocolate bars just underscored for me that my naturopath is right and that I really shouldn't eat chocolate?

This all seems to say that maybe trying out all the chocolate bars isn't the best thing for me to do, and that as much as I love tastes and good foodiness, I (am compelled to) prefer what feels better in my body. The maple peanut protein bar tasted great (if a little offbeat) to me, and I ate half of it after lunch and half of it late afternoon and it didn't wig me out (the final ingredient was green tea extract, which I think is caffeine free) and it didn't spike my blood sugar. I would buy it again. All the others, not so much. I'd like to learn more about 'pulsin:' I noticed that although they are 'low temperature processed' and a small company, they did have whey protein in some of their flavors.

Another one of theirs I was tempted to try was a maca-ashwagandha flavor, except that (as I've shared before), I know that ashwagandha wigs me out, much as I love maca! So, I didn't try the bar with the ashwagandha: why did I try so many cacao bars?

And why was this a bad idea?

When I eat raw cacao, I feel an instant hit of anxiety and stimulation. It often makes my stomach feel more capacious, like I could eat more than I'd otherwise be able to. It's addictive: I always want more of it. When I eat it more than a day or two in a row, it exacerbates yeast symptoms and prevents me from sleeping. And of course, the social element: everybody adores cacao, and I want to share in the conversation about it, not be the party-pooper who says 'oh, it's bad for me!' (or even worse, 'oh, it's bad for you!')

I love that having a blog has helped me to feel freer to buy sometimes expensive goodies to review them. I used to put myself off with sticker shock and deprive myself of the experience. But I'm now recognizing that taking the blogging as carte blanche to try all kinds of raw cacao when I know that I find it addictive, that it gives me instant and then cumulative symptoms, and that it is counterproductive to the adrenal healing that I'm working on, may not be wise, smart or even self-loving. As my very wise and kind bloggie-friend Bitt says, "We have to do what's best for our health first and foremost." 


And so, when we got to Anchorage and discovered raw chocolate bars at the natural food store...and then later found that they're even available in Homer, and at about half the price of raw chocolate in London...

 ...I didn't feel like I was compelled to buy them just to review.


Yes, I do still have a review of Vega's Whole Food Vibrance bars coming up. But this twist in the tail of a blog product review might actually be a more interesting direction for the blog itself! I'm mulling over all that and will talk more about it in due course.


What has you blog writing or other putting yourself out there inspired you to do? Have you ever had to back off from certain things that it allows that don't serve you well?

I'll be back as soon as I can, with photos and hopefully another post. Much love.

Back Home - To Winter! TSA Pet Peeve, And Finding My Voice on Blog World Controversies...

We are home! It's good to be back, after a stressful day of packing and then a long journey. Some beautiful mountains in the distance ushered us back toward Alaska-land

Just before we landed...

Sun on the ocean - Anchorage is another of those airports like San Francisco where it looks like you're going to land in the ocean before you finally hit the runway...

It was 27 degrees when we got there! There's something about it when things get below freezing - bracing, or involuting: I'm not quite sure which. Bracing for Phil, for sure, but I generally feel the need to make like the tortoise.

The overall impression when we arrived was of impassive, impressive mountains that care not a whit about our small humanity, and of brown. Green when we left, now brown with powderings of snow. I was struck once again by the sheer improbability that I should be living here.

It was actually snowing as we drove up into the Kenai mountains - lots of fresh, powdery, beautifully chasing and tracing snow on the hills.

And then some blue sky and even a little late sun when we got home. But it's definitely time for winter precautions - long underwear top and bottom, and don't leave the door open when you step out! The 'solar oven' effect meant that the cabin was pretty warm when we got in, but by the time we'd gone in and out ferrying stuff from the truck, leaving the door open, the inside temperature dropped by 10 degrees in the space of about as many minutes.

Many of the garden plants were looking sadly frost-nipped, but many others seemed to be quite resilient. It was fun to find some good carrots -

Oh, and the larch, or tamarack, trees look just glorious. They are the only conifer that turns color in the fall:

Raspberry canes underneath them, and we actually found a surprising number of delicious, ripe raspberries still hanging on!

That was a sweet welcome home. I found the whole packing and leaving portion especially stressful, because when I first left Hawaii with Phil, the plan was to move to Oregon with the in-laws, and it didn't work out. There were still several pieces of my life (like 5 boxes of books) at the farm, and I had to deal with them again. It'll be exciting to have them here, but we have nowhere to put anything else, and it made me feel like a homeless waif with no place for my books. Again.

Despite the cold, despite the lack of running water (I was so spoiled in Oregon with warm showers every day and being able to wash dishes easily), this is home - it is our place in which we can create our lives to our best. I love being reunited with my Vita-Mix! And having the internet at home is pretty awesome too.

I'm looking forward to re-combobulating here - more on that tomorrow, but I've been feeling out of my rhythm just lately...

After cruising the garden and fixing an impromptu dinner, having Phil's daughter over and catching up with her, we started to unpack. And the TSA had left us a nice little calling card...

You can just begin to see what an awful mess they made... And I had a packet of sprouting seeds that they spilled all over everywhere, having made everything wet, so effectively ruining them...

This has to be a pet peeve of mine - if they have to go into your baggage and inspect it, they should at least leave it in the condition they found it. I have so many annoying stories of having things damaged because they generally manhandled them carelessly and didn't put things back as they were. The worst story being when I was taking some seal oil from Phil to give to someone, and they repacked everything carelessly, and the jar busted all over everyone's baggage, not just mine. That stuff smells so bad, everything that had been near it stunk irrevocably even after five washings! Grrr.

Do you have any TSA horror stories? Or advice (short of 'never pack anything unusual,' which is hard for people like us)? It just makes me feel so helpless, violated and disrespected. Thankfully, going through security was straightforward and missing the 'degrading' quality it sometimes exhibits.

A final comment, and I plan to post more on this soon: I've been catching up on some of the recent controversy surrounding raw vegans quitting the diet and going 'traditional'/'primal', etc. My head has been spinning with the information and I feel like I need to write about it, but don't even know if it's a worthwhile commitment. I feel that I have a fairly unusual perspective, having lived in Hawaii, where there were many raw-foodists, and an uncountable number of 'former vegans,' and now in Alaska, where subsistence hunting and fishing is still very common, and having been/being a raw vegan in both places. It's also unusual, maybe, that I took an excursion into experimenting with animal foods and found myself abandoning them again after about a year.  And then, the whole eating disorder challenge piece that has been so big in my life offers me some insight into and compassion for the obsessive traps that people get into when making diet into dogma. More disquieting is that some of the 'ex-vegans' cite thyroid and adrenal issues as reasons for their departure - as I've often discussed here, those are some of the issues that I'm working through too. (Phil thinks it's coincidental, but my impression is that my symptoms were at their worst when I was eating more animal products.) My current suspicion is that it's more about the sugar and cacao than about a lack of animal products, especially having dabbled in more sugar and cacao during my trip and feeling somewhat sicker again.

What would any of you like me to talk about in this?

love and kindness

Green Smoothie Learning Curve; Reflections on Self Love

Happy Friday, loves!

I want to talk about the sudden jump today in my green smoothie learning curve, and about today's reflection on self love.

First - thanks so much to all who are entering my Amazing Grass giveaway - please spread the word, and I'd love to connect with more likeminded folks through this blog.

I stumbled into making green smoothies back in California, and had started doing it shortly before Victoria Boutenko began recommending them: in fact, I spoke with her in person at an event just at that outset. I was selling produce and coming home with lots of squashed peaches and bunches of chard that I found hard to eat straight. At the time, I ate mostly fruit and no fat, so blending them together seemed a good way of making the chard etc palatable. And that was the major goal of my green smoothies until now - to make it palatable, no more (and sometimes, just barely)! I start to realize that a lot of my 'safe' food has been like that. 

Well, what with avoiding fruit now (except for my daily Naturopath-ordered apple and enjoying these raspberries growing outside), the green smoothies were very sludgy and bitter, with nothing but a carrot or beet to carry the green taste.

Isn't this the funniest little carrot I pulled out of the ground today?

 I'd also been adding very little liquid, and cramming in the greens, and often would feel stuffed without being satiated afterwards. I noticed that maybe I didn't most love that super-sludgy bitterness. Until the Vita-Mix arrived, I'd barely been making them - that little hand-blender not quite up to the task. Even with the Vita, thick, bitter, green sludge didn't taste great and I actually didn't feel that great from it either! Time to see what I could learn. (Self love, anyone?)

So today at lunch, my green smoothie had me humming and yumming - what a change! It was nut milk and herbal spicy tea, a little piece of avocado, some chia gel and flax seeds, a little pea protein powder, a teaspoon of carob, peppermint leaves and stinging nettles from the garden - just a few - and some peppermint oil, three drops of dark chocolate flavor extract and a touch of stevia! Oh my goodness, this was delightful! I'd been craving chocolate and thought I should probably not use cacao, as I'm chelating again and my adrenals have plenty to do already. This hit my chocolate spot really well.

And for dinner - a super-powerful smoothie: herbal spicy tea, stinging nettles and clover and some raspberries - all freshly picked, a few walnuts, some hemp protein/fiber powder, some chia gel, chlorella, spirulina  and a whole red jalapeno! Somehow the intensity of the nettles and hot pepper go so well together, and are toned down by the light raspberry and hemp tastes. This more liquid, drinkable texture is so much more to my liking - and it's easier to clean out the pitcher afterwards too! What rocket fuel! I love the dark, dark blue-green too. (And yes, those are kombucha scobys in the background!)

OK - Today's Reflection on self love is about exercise. Tina asks: "Has exercise ever controlled your life or defined you in a negative way? What ways can/do you pursue fitness for health and a stronger sense of self?"

It's great to be invited to consider exercise as a way to take good care of ourselves; and I love that Tina notes that running errands, walking from one place to another, etc, can all be included as exercise. 

I have to say, I have an inferiority complex around exercise! Always have. My experience of my body has been that it tires easily and does not build muscle easily. When I got quite strong a couple years ago, eating raw eggs in addition to raw plant foods, I wondered if this difficulty was nutritional and tried more animal products. But the end seemed to be that those foods just made me sick and my fitness levels crashed even before I quit eating them. It seems like I've gone through this cycle a few times, of building up to being fairly strong and then majorly crashing and being barely able to do anything. Chronic Fatigue, and adrenal and digestive problems, if we want to label. 

This time around, I'm so determined not to crash and burn again: to resist my natural tendency to push myself as hard as I can. So lately, I haven't always parked as far away from the store as possible - I've only done that if I've had the energy. I haven't always taken stairs instead of an elevator if I'm in that situation (I used to refuse to get in an elevator unless I was very heavily-laden!)

Yesterday, during my walk, I hiked out on this tongue of land surrounded by high tide water - it was a very high tide; much of the time, all of the surrounding land can be hiked on too.

I stopped to sit on this log for a little, and appreciated the treasure someone else had left - a small rock that's shaped just like a clam, with some clamshells beside it to make the point! 

That said, I was pretty sore and tired this morning, and today have kept my walks to errand-running and stretching.  

Speaking of exercise - I'll leave you with word of another great giveaway from Averie - for a $50 shopping spree at America's Nutrition, with all kinds of exercise equipment as well as nutritional products and foods. Go here to enter!

What If I Can't Have Cacao? Acceptance, Rule-Bending and Some Creative Alternatives

I mentioned recently that I'm avoiding cacao at the moment, on the advice of the ND and in recognition of my body's own response to it. I've been learning that it pays to do as the ND says - but - it seems awfully unfair that the one thing that really interests my taste buds also jolts my adrenals in a bad way and builds itself into an addiction whenever I eat it regularly. I've now gone through several cycles of eating it regularly, noticing addiction, starting to experience physical symptoms (like sleeplessness and skin irritation) and made myself quit it completely. There have also been times when I've been able to 'stay on top of it,' being very strict with myself about only eating it a few times a week, only eating it in the morning, etc. I'm hoping that eventually my adrenals will recover to the point that I can eat cacao with impunity, but the ND says not to hold my breath for that! (Even raw cacao? 'Fraid so. Although I do notice that the nibs (the whole bean, fat and all) have less impact than the powder (concentrated, minus the fat).

What to do, then? If you don't have a major adrenal issue, the very best advice is that given by Christian, to have your cacao with other superfoods that balance it out. Reishi powder, maca, algae - they all taste great together too. When I do have cacao, I always do that.

But if you have to avoid it completely, until you are recovered to the point that you can experiment to see how much bending of this rule your body can handle - ;) - here are some strategies and recipes!

One strategy is to remove chocolate from the picture altogether. The first three or four years I was into raw foods, there was no raw chocolate and everyone seemed to manage! There are so many other delicious flavors. For some, it's all about the berries and fruits. For others, like myself, the spices are where it's at (and isn't it interesting that both berries and spices are super-high in antioxidants?) I love making barks and cookies with lots of cinnamon, ginger and my favorite cardamom. Nutmeg is great too. And although mint chocolate is unbeatable, mint by itself is a wonderful flavor. Mint with lots of spirulina and chlorella pleases the eye with the minty green and pleases the body with all that wonderful chlorophyll and protein. Somehow, if you can find other things that are delicious to your taste buds and nourishing to your body, it doesn't seem as much of a hardship.

But what about when everyone is eating chocolate, when it seems like chocolate is coming out at you everywhere you look? What about when, no matter how much you remove your energy from it, it comes looking for you - whether through a habitual hankering at certain times of the month or the evocation of a social custom of sharing? Part of my playing in the kitchen yesterday was to find some answers to this.

Well, the first piece of good news is that cacao butter has none of the caffeine in it - that's all in the powder.

Cacao butter tastes wonderfully chocolatey and provides that special mouth-feel, because it is mostly a (good) saturated fat and its melting point is right around the human body temperature! For myself, I'll probably use cacao butter in combination with coconut oil for the most part, because coconut oil is what my body 'needs.' But just a little cacao butter will give that flavor and texture, and increase the melting point a bit too.

Next up - Carob! Wait! Don't dismiss this out of hand! 

Yes, I know, I hate it when people say that carob is a substitute for chocolate - because I don't think it's fair on carob! I love carob - even feel an affinity for it as a fellow-transplant from the Mediterranean. But I'm the first to say it tastes nothing like chocolate. It's also much lower in fat, which means higher in carbs, which is less optimal for me. However, it's super-high in calcium (so could be said to balance magnesium-rich cacao).

Even though carob is not chocolate and does not taste like chocolate, in combination with cacao butter and the next ingredient I'm going to talk about, it does offer the color and texture of chocolate without the caffeine, and (if you like carob on its own merits) adds a special, sharply-sweet flavor of its own. (Note: I've been using toasted carob because I haven't been able to get hold of raw carob, and toasted carob has a much finer texture and flavor. I'm ok with this in small quantities.)

Imagine taking chocolate and distilling it to an essence, and then being able to take a drop of that and evoke the whole thrill of chocolate. Well, that's what the folks at Medicine Flower claim to have done with their dark chocolate flavor extract

. 

It's a bit expensive and I was skeptical, especially having tried chocolate flavored stevia and liked it, but not as a 'real chocolate' flavor. But I'd seen good reviews of this flavor essence, and got some to try.

Yes, it's very concentrated indeed! On the side of the bottle, it recommends using one part essence to 10,000 parts finished product! That's a lot of zeroes. Trying a drop on the tongue is just overwhelming. Unfortunately, the dropper 'drops' by itself, without you even squeezing the bulb, so it's good to ensure that the dropper is almost empty before removing it from the bottle, if you don't want waste/overwhelm.

In water, it definitely imparts a chocolate flavor - but not a full-bodied, full-on chocolate. That's what you need the fat for! 

So, my theory was that using cacao butter, a few drops of this flavor essence, and carob for color and binding would make a decent chocolate replacement. I tried it out to make a no-sugar version of Larabar's 'German Chocolate Cake' - a bar I've only tried once but have had a hankering for ever since. 

My challenge was to use only the ingredients listed in the bar plus my substitutions. The ingredients are: dates (I subbed chia-sweet), pecans, almonds, shredded coconut, virgin coconut oil (I used vco plus a little cacao butter), cocoa powder (I used a little carob).

I know that for the larabar, the dates predominate: it's about two parts dates to one part nuts. So I made two cups of chia-sweet from water, two teaspoons white stevia and about three drops of dark chocolate essence. 

Whoops - I ran out of chia seeds! This gel has only 5 tablespoons of chia - seven or eight would have been optimal to make it really thick…

Here's the chia-sweet mixed with the melted coconut oil and cacao butter, with the ground-up (soaked and dehydrated) pecans, almonds and shredded coconut going in.

And here it is with the addition of the carob. With the slightly gloopy chia-sweet, it looked like a big chocolate pudding - and tasted like one too!

Here it is going onto trays to be dried out. I gave it a couple hours in the oven on lowest setting with the door open, because it was so wet, and then went back to my fan contraption. By this morning, I had delicious no-sugar cookies! I made them flatter than I'd prefer, because I was worried about drying, but this was the first time! Next time, I'll have more chia seeds (I ordered them already) and will probably add some flax meal too. 

So, delicious, no sugar, no chocolate, full of good things!

And while I was at it, and since I've been feeling inspired by other bloggers, I also made the beautiful Twins' tahini bars! How's this for serendipity - they mentioned those bars in their blog yesterday too!

Yes, I own no mixing bowls, I mix and serve in our baking pans...

Again, I subbed chia-sweet (I had some in the fridge) for their date paste, omitted the cacao nibs and used extra shredded coconut (with the chocolate essence, the chia almost feels like chocolate chips), and made the topping with coconut oil, cacao butter, carob and vanilla. I didn't make it look nearly as pretty as they do, but the taste is just to die for! I adore carob and tahini together - they are both squarely in the middle of that nostalgic Mediterranean spot that I hit with Lisa's dal yesterday too! I also love that the omega 3-rich chia-sweet balances out the tahini, which is heavily omega-6.

Enjoy - I hope you have a beautiful day.