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| the sea ice on Turnagain Arm looks like a lava flow! |
One of the insights to come out of our rushed trip to Anchorage was that I'm overextended. We probably didn't need to be told that! There simply aren't enough hours in a day to do all that I consider essential. And there isn't a thing that I can cut out. At this point, I'm recognizing that preparing my online course is going to take a lot of work for the next month, and then teaching the course for the following five months will also be work. The more I can get done ahead of time, the less of a scramble it will be when the time comes, and the better a job I will do, which means less stress. I'm just trying to find ways to make sure that my levels of stress and busyness don't have a negative impact on Phil (as they sometimes do).
I am so grateful for the afternoons and evenings given up to writing groups here in town. Yes, it's not butt-in-chair, get-work-done prime time, but spending time with these people, giving and receiving feedback, is so validating. It assures that I'm not alone in my obsessions or my needs to honor my creative processes. My own ideas often spark against those of other people. And it reassures me that this is all so meaningful!
On other creative fronts, I'm bursting with ideas for one particular angle on nutrition, which I will share more of soon. When it comes to feeding myself, I'm finding myself wanting to be minimalist, fresh and water-rich. As is today's recipe.
When I wasn't refusing to eat brown guacamole, I had some pretty good food for our whirlwind Anchorage trip this week. Having all the veggies from Full Circle, I was conscious of not wanting to waste anything while being gone for a couple days.
So I made this gorgeous massaged chard salad with a horseradish dressing...
1 bunch red chard, destemmed and torn into pieces (save the stems for juicing or making veggie broth)
1 baby bok choy, torn into small pieces
1 cup purple cabbage
Sprinkle the leaves liberally with kelp powder (or you can just use salt), massage it in well, and set aside while you prepare everything else.
1 cup homemade kim chee
2 chopped tomatoes
4 chopped mushrooms
1/2 cup sprouted lentils
1/2 cup pomegranate seeds
Add these to the salad when you're ready to add the dressing.
This dressing is both simple and light, and was so easy and quick to make with the little hand-held blender. The horseradish and mustard give both pungency and a little sweetness, and the flax meal makes it thick without adding lots of extra oil. There are plenty of substitution options, so it should be easy to make with whatever's in your pantry and fridge!
Horseradish dressing
3 tablespoons lemon juice
1 tablespoon homemade macadamia nut butter (I'll talk about this soon)
1 tablespoon homemade coconut kefir (or just use 2 tbs nut milk)
1 tablespoon golden flax meal
1 tablespoon homemade horseradish (if you don't have horseradish, just use mustard--it'll be different, but still good)
1 teaspoon miso
pinch ground mustard
1/4 cup liquid (could be coconut kefir whey, nut milk, kim chee juice...)
Blend all together--a handheld blender works wonderfully, and probably even a manual whisk would do it.
Add the rest of the veggies to the greens and incorporate the dressing thoroughly. The chard will soften up the more you massage the dressing in--hands are good!
This salad included chard, bok choy and mushrooms from the Full Circle box.
I think the dressing would be wonderful on a 'slaw, and I have a beet from the Full Circle box and a cabbage ready to test it out on--pink beet cabbage slaw I see in the near future!
