Getting Ready To Go! No-Sugar Halvah Bar; Reflections on Self-Love - Body Parts #4

We're leaving here after lunch tomorrow to start our journey! And I was on the road all day yesterday. Had company for breakfast, having company for dinner, I'm trying to get everything packed and figure out all the food I'm taking - it's going to be a hectic couple of days after this. I hope I'll get to blog, on self-love at least, tomorrow and Monday, but it may not be possible.

I went back and added the photos to yesterday's post - not spectacular but maybe they add a bit, at least.

Phil's daughter is coming to dinner, and she's avoiding sugar at the moment, so I whipped this up for her (I get to have a bit of dessert too when she's on her diet!)

It's a halvah bar (guess I connected with my Mediterranean roots). The base is: 

1/3 cup sesame seeds, 

1/3 cup shredded coconut

1/3 cup golden flax meal

4 tablespoons xylitol,

2 tablespoons coconut oil,

pinch salt

couple drops water

processed until crumbing up, then pressed into loaf pan.

Topping is:

1/2 cup soaked sesame seeds,

1/2 cup water

2 tablespoons lime juice

4 tablespoons xylitol

pinch of salt

piece of vanilla bean

good dash of ceylon cinnamon

blended in Vita-Mix until smooth; then add:

1 tablespoon cacao butter

3 tablespoons coconut oil.

This was completely  off the top of my head, made within minutes of hearing that she's coming to dinner.

I hope she'll like it. Does it sound good to you?

Reflections on self-love: it's come around again! Time to reflect with gratitude and love on four more body parts. Tina asks, "What are you thankful for from your body today? Try and think of something different." I'm embarrassed that this is so hard for me - feel like I'm being a little drama queen.

I actually asked Phil for some help with choosing some loved body parts.

One suggestion of his that I liked (and wasn't x-rated!) was the little notch between my two collarbones, above my sternum, where he can sometimes see my pulse. What a great spot to pick. It is like a keystone of an arch - so many things meet there. It's also right at my throat chakra, to do with vocalization and self-expression. It's close to my thyroid, which has had such a hard time and so much mistreatment, and which is just about hanging in there with all the help and supplementation that it's getting.

OK - where else? Well, I should give my adrenals a little shoutout - they are troopers. It's probably remarkable that they work at all! As we're about to go into the stress of a long journey and being away from home, I need to make sure that I'm especially nice to them and not get tempted to push myself too hard. A good moment to remember gratitude to them.

And finally...um.... well, actually, maybe this is corny, since I've featured my eyes in an earlier 'body parts' post, but I've always liked my eyebrows! They are dark, full and straight, and give good definition to my eyesockets. At their inner tips (nearer my nose), the hairs stand up straight, and then grow horizontally for the rest. I used to enjoy looking at those vertical hairs when I was a little kid, wondering how they did it! I've never plucked them in my life. I like how they are so long and straight, whereas many people have half-moon-shaped eyebrows (which looks just fine on them).

(It was so cold this morning but then the sun came out - Phil took this at lunchtime: the sun is in my eyes and you can see my slight green smoothie mustache!)

Blogging Locations #3, 30 Days, 80% Raw, Raw No-Sugar Key Lime Pie, Gelatin and Quirky Pragmatism, Developing a Thick Skin

This is going to have to be a really quick post - it's been a super-busy day and we're both exhausted!
But today is day one of Tina's 30 Days of Self Love and Reflection and I really am in, wanted to shake a leg! We're thinking of self confidence today, and one of my outings today was designed toward fostering that.

Latitude 59 is a cute little coffee shop in town which is another place in which I updated my blog in the past, in the days before we had internet at home (it's still been less than a month, but so easy to get used to!

I went there to meet up with someone to talk about poetry, my poetry writing and my possibly applying to schools to do a degree in poetry writing. As part of this process, I'm having people look at my work (and also my application essay drafts) and soliciting critical feedback. I really want criticism but I'm also really sensitive to it, and one of my self-confidence intentions is to learn to have the courage of my convictions so that I can learn to take criticism without emotional ache.

We got our first few potatoes out of the ground! Phil pulled these because the plant was sickly - we don't expect to harvest the rest for another month. I don't eat potatoes but Phil likes them.

We were having dinner with Phil's daughter tonight and she is trying out the candida diet (i.e. no sugar). She's more habituated to sugar than I am and I really wanted to make her a treat. So, I made a no-sugar raw key lime pie with xylitol as the main sweetener.

Graham-style crust was 1/2 cup golden flax meal, 1/2 cup (soaked and dried) pecans, about 1/4 cup shredded coconut, 2 tablespoons coconut oil, a pinch of salt, 3 tablespoons of xylitol. Processed to crumbs and pressed into the 8x4 pan:

Filling - started out with 1/2 cup mac nuts, 1/4 cup lime juice with 3 tablespoons xylitol dissolved in it, blended and then added 3 teaspoons lime zest, 1/4 teaspoon stevia and 1/4 cup melted cacao butter - here's the cacao butter just being blended in (with a plate of lime zest on the side):

I then added 3/4c warm water with a packet of gelatin dissolved in it. I know this isn't vegan and apologize if it's offensive to any readers here. Phil's daughter is an omnivore and I really wanted to make a treat that she would enjoy. Irish moss and agar are not easily to be found out here. Here's my little piece of quirky pragmatism about gelatin also: gelatin contains some of the most nutritious compounds to be found in animal products. If the animals are being killed for meat anyway, I feel better about the fact that they are also being used to produce gelatin, rather than harvesting the meat and wasting the rest. Using animal products in a whole fashion earns far more of my respect than plucking the best steaks and dumping the rest.

What do you think about gelatin? Am I mistaken about it representing a more holistic use of animal products?

Here is the finished product:

Both Phil and his daughter loved it! And I got to have dessert with everyone else for the first time in forever. They both wanted to squeeze lime over it! I had been afraid it would be too sour, but apparently it could have taken more! I had a little piece and liked it. I thought the cacao butter was a strong taste, and it probably didn't taste a lot like 'standard key lime pie' (which I'd never eaten but they have, of course) - is it harder to fix alternatives when you're used to a 'standard flavor'? (Or is it just easier for me to like the taste of something 'at face value' because I've never tried the 'real' version?)

A new month, a new issue of Eighty Percent Raw Magazine! Check it out, and see my article about cruciferous veggies!

Stay tuned for the final installment of my Amazing Grass product review!

love to all.

Beached Whale, Wilderness Family Naturals, No-Sugar Superfood Cookies

I hope everyone's having a great Saturday! It was sheeting down rain yesterday and forecast likewise for today, but in the event it seems our guests have brought up the good weather from Oregon, which makes their plans to camp outside our cabin look much pleasanter than I'd feared.

Are you conscious of all the technology you use? Do you have ambivalence about how it eases your life, not wanting to be overly 'dependent?' I was very pleased with the new vacuum cleaner we just bought, for about $70, and the ease of getting the space cleaned up, including all the corners! How funny, some months ago here I mentioned that I was ready for a decent vacuum and a vita-mix - now both in the same week.

Major sight of the day was the decomposing beached whale down on the beach. It is a smallish gray whale that probably died out at sea and was washed in this last series of big tides. It's been there several days now and is in full breakdown mode - read stinky. You can see Phil in background for scale.

Someone has tied it off so it doesn't wash back out to sea: we suspect one of the local organizations who preserve things for museums. 

And actually, although the smell is off-putting, there is something really - well - wholesome, maybe - holistic, a little magical - about seeing this enormous life being given back to other lives. We are all food for something. Here are its baleen sockets (plates washed out or taken) - isn't that awesome, how they brushed krill from the ocean for decades?

I got my order from Wilderness Family Naturals today - very quick time, I only placed it a few days ago. Their customer service is excellent and their products are high-integrity. I got to know them as a coconut products company - and I'll post a review later of a coconut product of theirs I particularly appreciate - but it turns out that they have lots of herbs and superfoods - at very good prices too! Amongst others,  I restocked on maca, and also got fo-ti, which is a wonderful superherb that happens to taste great, rhodiola root powder, which is an adrenal tonic, just what I need, and some wheatgrass juice powder to try, see how I do with it. I like the foil pouches too, for maintaining freshness. Thanks to technology, I have more superfood powders to put in my barks, smoothies, etc, now!

So, I made some no-sugar cookies to try some of them out. I made a cup of chia-sweet (strong chai-spicy herbal tea with enough chia added to make a thick gel,) and a teaspoon of pure white stevia. 

I melted approx 1/4 c virgin coconut oil, and added about a tablespoon of orange zest (I was making an orange cake for everyone else). Then, before adding the chia sweet, I mixed the superfood powders into the coconut oil: 2 tablespoons of maca (goes great with orange flavor) 1 tb reishi powder, 1 tb fo-ti powder, 1 tb rhodiola powder, 1/2 tb wheatgrass powder. 

Then, I mixed in the chia-sweet,

and added a recipe's worth of nut-milk pulp (so the pulp from a half cup of mixed hazelnuts and brazil nuts), and coconut flour (1/3 cup?) until it all started to hold together. Finally, had to have my flax - added maybe 1/4 cup golden flax meal. (And yes, that goofy football in the background is our thriftstore crockpot with the clam chowder I fixed for everyone else's dinner.)

I then formed it into cookies and put it under the fan to dehydrate (with my dehydrating setup shown yesterday). 

It's great to eat just as it is, like cookie dough or conventional raw treats made with dried fruit. I'm just drying it a bit so that it will keep and pack well. To me, it's delicious and very complex. But it's definitely 'strong' tasting: the folks I live with run heavily to sweet and salt and don't appreciate 'herbal' flavors. If I wanted to proselytize with these (which I don't, really), I'd have to tone them down a lot. And that's a whole other discussion!