My First Blog Giveaway! And the Power of Perspective

If I can get blogger to co-operate - here goes with my first ever blog giveaway!

I am so grateful to Amazing Grass for their generosity in sending me so many samples to try out - hope you saw my series of reviews for them last week. Now, we're teaming up for a giveaway! 

More on that in a moment - first, today's reflection on self love - 'How do you witness the power of perspective in your life? Do you currently face something where your perspective could make a difference?

Awe and gratitude to Tina once again for a wonderfully-crafted series of reflections, that have been such a powerful tool in my own work on becoming my best - and we are just coming to the end of our first week.

Cauliflower leaves look so huge in the perspective of chives and carrots. And the thought of the frozen months makes all this fecundity so treasured…

Perspective… We all have our true north, but even true north has its declination. I love that Tina has brought in 'perspective' as a part of this invitation to find our true north. Self love is all about finding the best expression of our own gifts, but perspective invites us to acknowledge that this expression is flexible in different contexts.

I feel that my 'true north' is my poetry writing, and that everything else I do feeds into it somehow. But, as Alaska's Writer Laureate Nancy Lord advised us in the closing speech of the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference back in June, it's good to do 'other writerly things' as well as just writing. Perspective tells me that I can't realistically expect to have wonderful poems springing forth fully formed like Athena from Zeus' head every single day, nor that the process of revision will be as delightful in every case as I often find it to be. 'Other writerly things' include reading, even reading the occasional low-brow genre novel (amazing the kinds of poetic ideas that come from excursions of those kinds), walking in nature, blogging, gardening, interacting with other writers. 

A sense of perspective also dulls the aching edge of perfectionism. Since we are all coming from different perspectives, it's foolish for me to think that everyone who reads my work is going to love it - indeed, it encourages me to stop and think about whether I even want it to appeal to everyone!

The realization that it's OK to have preferences has come very late to me, and it's a precious freedom.

Raspberries are full-on here. I put a handful, that I'd just harvested, in my smoothie this morning, with chia-sweet, a ts of flax, pea protein powder, almond-brazil milk, herbal tea (reishi and fo-ti and chai rooibos), maca and wheatgrass juice. I love how the Vita-Mix can handle all those little seeds and the wonderful, thick, smooth texture of the smoothie!

Because that is how I love to make my smoothies, I chose Amazing Grass' superfood powders to give away (as opposed to the 'made up' meal replacements and energy bars) - I think the superfood powders are just a wonderful 'ingredient' that also stand alone just mixed with water. And so, I'm giving away an 8.5 oz bottle of the 'original' green superfood powder 

and another of the chocolate flavor. 

The chocolate flavor tastes out of this world to me; the original flavor is great too (but not quite chocolate!) but it doesn't have the oat fiber that I, for one, have to treat with caution, so I think it's an even more super product.

Please enter this giveaway and take your chance to enjoy Amazing Grass' great products and generosity!

To Enter:

1 - Mandatory - leave a comment below telling me why you want to win this.

2 - Visit Amazing Grass' website and leave a comment back here telling me which products interest you the most.

3 - Tweet this giveaway with a link and reference me @Ela_HG - and leave a comment here telling me you've done so.

4 - Follow Amazing Grass on twitter and leave a comment here telling me you've done so.

5 - Mention this giveaway on your blog - and leave five entries here saying you've done so.

I'm going to run this for a week and announce the winner next Tuesday. Good luck and thanks!

Reflection on Self-Love for Today

Hi everyone!

Another busy day in a busy week, so this is going to be brief indeed. I just wanted to pop in and give my response to today's 'reflections on self love.'

Today, 'take a few moments to think how you showcase intrinsic beauty. What positive qualities describe you? Search deep. Throughout the day, consider these qualities. How do they showcase in your life and make you beautiful? (Original post.)

My response: I love to help people. I love to see others' needs and points of view, and to support them as best I can, even when I don't relate to or understand them fully. I make food that I can't eat to share with a great variety of people, and when I prepare food, I always consider the person I'm preparing for when I decide what to serve and how.

As for my own fueling - here's my first Vita-mix use (lunch yesterday) - and see that blue sky and ocean in the background!

Coconut kefir whey (I promise, a post about that soon), half a carrot, top and bottom of a tomato I sliced for Phil's lunch, leftover massaged kale and chard, cilantro, chives, sage (from garden), dried oregano, chlorella, nutritional yeast, a little piece of avocado, spoonful of flax, some lime juice.

Green and good!

The brighter green on top is a blob of parsley-arugula pesto.
I'd still love to hear suggestions for what I should make, now that there are so many things open to me.

Love to all - we just got a netflix free trial and are going to be modern and watch a movie tonight (something we seldom do, but maybe more now).

Amazing Grass Energy Bar Review, Loosening Boundaries, Testing Tolerance and Always Reading the Labels!

I was sent four flavors of Amazing Grass' 'organic green superfood' bars to try, as well as four flavors of their 'amazing meal.' The latter will be reviewed tomorrow or the day after, but today I'll talk about the bars.

First, a couple comments about both of these products. The way I see it, Amazing Grass' basic product is the green superfood powder, which has a wonderful mix of greens, antioxidants, fiber and superfoods. The bar and the meal are both vehicles for this basic product. Now, as I've repeatedly said before, it usually works best for me to create my own such 'vehicles,' since commercial products usually contain too much sugar and have other issues too.

However, I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to sample these, as because of that boundary and belief I have, I probably wouldn't have tried them otherwise. There's a boundary issue that's been going on for some time: I still have yeast issues. But the ND has been telling me that since we can't deal with those until the mercury chelation is done, I shouldn't be too uptight about avoiding every last bit of sugar. In particular, he wants me to eat my daily apple, berries are ok, etc. My preference is still to avoid sugar mostly, to control the yeast symptoms as much as possible, but Phil has been encouraging me to try some higher-glycemic foods to see if it'll help with my blood sugar. 

Here come these samples to review, and since the bars have dates and agave as their first and second ingredients, you'd be right to think that I'd never have gone near them if I didn't have this review to do! So, we got to try out Phil's sensible experiment suggestion. 

These bars fall into two pairs - the 'original' and 'berry' flavors, which are uncoated, and the 'chocolate' and 'chocolate-peanut butter' flavors, which have a chocolate coating. They also fall into a threesome and a singleton: the 'chocolate-peanut butter' version is different in a very important way - an illustration of why you should always, always read the label, which I'll get to in due course. They range from 210 calories (berry flavor) to 260 calories (choc-pb flavor) and all but the choc-pb flavor contain five grams of protein. The choc-pb flavor has twelve grams of protein. They all contain mid-30s grams of carbs including four or five grams of fiber, and eight or nine grams of fat.

Now for some comments about the individual bars.

The berry wholefood bar has a lovely texture, and well-nuanced flavor (it's nice that there are more 'savory' seeds like pumpkin and sunflower to cut the sweetness of the dates, agave and berries).  It's a little lower-calorie than the chocolate bar, probably because it doesn't have a coating. The berry flavor is intense and pleasant. I love that the recipe includes green foods, herbs, probiotics and enzymes. This makes the bar work better for me than anything else that high in sugar might. That said, the sugar content is too high and the protein too low for me to consume on a regular basis. It seems like everyone else knows how hard it is to make no-sugar raw energy bars! I keep working on it, but dates and syrups are such wonderful binders and preservers!

Most of the same comments go for the plain whole food bar - it's pretty neutral, without the intense berry flavor. The pumpkin and sunflower seeds dominate a little, which makes it seem less sweet than more nut-based bars.

The Chocolate energy bar: I actually tried this one first, shared it with Phil.  I haven't had dates in so long, so it was extremely sweet to me, but had a lovely gooey texture I haven't quite been able to achieve with 'chia sweet.' 

I liked that I could taste the different nuts and seeds in it, but also enjoyed the 'green' taste, which gave it a certain subtlety. This bar is fairly high in protein but is too high in sugar to be something I could eat regularly. Phil also thought it was very sweet, which surprised me. He liked it a lot but didn't love it.

I was excited to try the 'chocolate-peanut butter' flavor, especially since it has so much more protein. I had already accepted that I was going to eat more sugar than my usual comfort zone and that there was going to be some cacao consumption. But of course, I still read the label - and it turns out that the chocolate-pb bar is made with whey protein! It also contains rice crisps, so it's quite different from the other three. If you look at the photo, it clearly says 'whey protein' in large print - I like that it does that so that even if you're not an avid defensive label-reader, you shouldn't have to get an unpleasant shock.

I was really surprised by this, since so many of the other products are labeled 'vegan.' I know that whey protein is an excellent protein source for many people. It is thought to be one of the best sources of Branched-Chain Amino Acids, (in which I know I'm deficient). However, I also know that whey protein does awful things to my system. Aside from binding up my guts, which have been tending to be sluggish anyway, when I experimented with it in the past, it affected my mental and emotional functioning in a very adverse way. Interestingly, since I figured this out and quit all dairy again (it was a short-lived experiment) I have had an intense aversion to all things dairy. I can get Branched-Chain Amino Acids from Pea Protein Powder, which works much better for me. Fortunately, Phil was open to having it - he's not into smoothies or superfood powders at all, but he does like energy bars, and is a snickers fan. I had a tiny nibble just for the sake of the review - was afraid the whey taste would make it repugnant to me but actually it wasn't really detectable. The pb and the rice crisps definitely made it more attractive to a 'standard' palate, and Phil liked it a lot. It came with us on our beach hike on a warm day and got melted, though!

My bottom line on the bars: they're quite similar to 'organic food' bars, which I liked a lot before I had to avoid sugar. They're probably similar quality, although as far as I know, 'organic food bar' doesn't have a corresponding superfood powder sold as is that I could check against. I would love to be able to give these bars to my family as healthier snacks than they might otherwise go for. For myself, I love the idea of incorporating superfood powders into my own bar creations - and have blogged about doing so before - but these bars are too high in sugar for me to eat. The most I've eaten at once is a half a bar, and I found that that wasn't enough to fill me as a snack, but was right on the edge of feeling like too much sugar. I know that not everyone is like this, and both in terms of taste and of quality of ingredients, I would recommend these bars to people who can handle sugar (especially people looking for something better than trans-fat laden candy bars!)

Speaking of 'too much sugar,' how did the experiment go with trying these higher-glycemic foods? Well, sometimes it's hard to interpret,  when you are both the principal investigator and the guinea pig! Here's the current state of play, though: today, I took a day off from sampling the added-sugar items. On Sunday, I felt fantastic - I think I mentioned: the best physical and emotional-feeling day I can remember during a chelation spell. But yesterday I felt terrible. In terms of stomach upset, bound up guts, general yucky-bloated feeling and other chelation-associated malaise, I was in the dumps and even the steam sauna didn't help! On Sunday, I wondered whether more sugar had helped me to feel so good: yesterday, I wondered whether it had helped me to feel so awful. I can't quite believe that one minuscule nibble of the whey-protein-containing bar could have been responsible for binding my guts so badly, but wonder whether eating less flax because of eating these other things was a contributing factor.

I hope this doesn't sound like needless obsessing: it's really a complicated equation and it feels good to be gathering some data. 

Sweetness from the garden -

- raspberries, peas, cilantro, mint, parsley, arugula - and a poor cauliflower that got nibbled all over by slugs! We harvested hundreds of slugs the last few days and are hoping to get the population down. I'll probably kraut that cauliflower, since it's so much bitterer than all the others we've had, probably as a defense against predacious slugs! I made the herbs into pesto - parsley-arugula and cilatro-mint. Delicious!

'Theme and Variations' 3: Energy Bars/Bliss Balls

I guess I'm picking an easy one this week, because I'm still so behind on everything having been gone camping and then up to my elbows in processing afterwards. I'm still not caught up energetically either, and Phil is feeling a little sick too, so catching up on chores is taking longer than we'd expected.

'Energy bars/bliss balls' is an 'easy' 'theme and variations' for me because I've already done a whole series of posts about energy bars here! I might as well link them all in here so that we're consolidated up to this point. But another good reason for picking up on these again is that I have a good modification to the basic recipe technique that I figured out this past week. So then, here's the first recipe and conceptual background, and here's the post where I explain 'chia sweet,' and here's where I explain about 'pressing.'

For me at the moment, 'no sugar'/'low glycemic' is taken as read (although I am open to seeing how goji berries can be worked in and perhaps yacon slices too, as in Shannonmarie's suggestion).

This means that whereas the standard energy bar 'theme' is nuts/seeds blended with dried fruit plus whatever superfoods and spices, for me, 'chia-sweet,' or chia gel, or flax meal whipped with water or tea, are going to replace the dried fruit, and stevia (or occasionally xylitol) is going to replace dried fruit and any honey or agave as the sweetener. Cinnamon, vanilla and other spices that have a sweetening effect are also used a lot.

I wrote before about my technique of mixing all the nuts and dry ingredients together, and adding the coconut oil and chia-sweet last. But this week I discovered that mixing the coconut oil and chia-sweet together first and then stirring in the dry ingredients works much better overall. I'll give the full recipe that I winged up in a moment in the 'variations' section.

Variations

Obvious variations are the whole slew of 'lara bar' flavors (or: 'bitt bars?!'. Just by varying which nuts are used, the flavor can be changed a lot. I've posted before about how much I enjoy super-spicy mixes, with everything from cinnamon and ginger to lemon peel and cayenne pepper all together, but variations involving just cinnamon and ginger, or just cardamom and cinnamon, or just lemon and poppy seed, or just vanilla, are wonderful also. 

And I seem to have lots of good company on this one: my all-time favorite combination, mint and chocolate! 

My new recipe was for mint-chocolate balls. 

I started by mixing together 1/2c coconut oil (melted) and about a cup of 'chia sweet,' which was chia gel made in strong stevia-sweetened peppermint tea with some peppermint oil added. Added a little shake of salt.

Next, I stirred in about a cup of shredded coconut. Then, about 3/4c cacao nibs. And then, I simply added coconut flour until it all held together. To make it last better, I left it out on a tray in a warm spot with lots of airflow (the air is dry up here and as I've said before, on sunny days our cabin is an oven).

These 'balls' (it made 20-some) are almost too yummy to me! It scares me when I like something that much. 

What's your favorite energy bar flavor? What's the weirdest one you've ever tried? Mine would have to be my own spirulina/cayenne/lemon zest/cinnamon/sesame bars! Can we say 'Ela-bar-ate?!'