Voluntary Poison: A Brainwashed Love Story

OR

An Analytic Look At Drugstore Vitamins 

When I first moved away from my parents' house, my mother was constantly asking about how well I was eating. Although I've always downplayed the extent of my crappy food habits, I would admit that maybe I wasn't eating enough fruit or swallowing enough combined bean-and-rice protein for a vegetarian, and, with a frown, Mom would adamantly take me to the drugstore for a box of one-a-day vitamins. It was insurance, we figured, to make sure I was at least getting all my necessary vitamins and minerals. While there are only a few amino acids (proteins) that can be bottled, and science has yet to come up with a way to synthesize phytochemicals, vitamin supplements have been in circulation since the forties. They're a healthy way to buffer our standard American diets. If it were up to the opinion of mothers and dietitians everywhere, we'd all be popping a pill with our breakfasts every single morning.

As of the last few days, and much to the chagrin of the guy who usually does the shelf-stocking in the drugstore where I work, I've been going through the racks of supplements and checking expiry dates, stacking them neatly in rows, and trying to match the bottle with their haphazardly placed labels on the shelves. Being as the career I'm working towards can involve a lot of vitamin recommending, I took a moment or two when I came across something a little more vague than your basic "niacin" or "B complex" and read the labels on the bottles with fancy "Centrum Pronutrients Bone Health"-type names, wondering, okay, what's in this that makes it "great for bone health"? While certain supplements gave me obvious answers (calcium, vitamin D, etc.), others had me balking and wanting to hide the container behind one of its less dangerous brethren in hopes that nobody would ever buy and ingest the contents of its cheerfully sky-blue packaging. I'd had the same enlightened moment at home shortly before seeing a naturopath last week, and had trashed my tea cupboard in an inspection frenzy, wondering, "What on earth have I been ingesting?" 

We'd had a conversation early in the school year about multivitamins, and my classmates had been delighted to inform each other of the fancy brands they bought, rated five out of five stars and costing slightly less than their firstborn for thirty capsules. I kept quiet about my drugstore-brand pills, because as full as they were of good intentions, I knew they weren't the greatest, and could predict the judgmental, pitying looks and suggestions that would follow should I mention them. In their mostly-colourless bottle, my Compliments Century Complete tablets were a once-a-day dose of thirteen vitamins, six minerals, and one of the few capsule-able phytonutrients, lutein. As an overview, it sounds like a decent mix, but as my eyes traveled to the "non-medicinal ingredients" list, I became more and more horrified and promptly dumped what was left of the bottle in the compost. As a simple introduction, the "we're not food!" list included:

- Croscarmellose Sodium, an emulsifier that expands up to twenty times its size when exposed to water. It not only steals fluid from your body to do so, but can cause the vitamins contained within to be released in your stomach instead of your small intestine (which actually does 99% of the digesting in your body; elementary school lied to you), can create blockages in your digestive tract in large amounts, and can promote yeast overgrowth in your bowels.

- FD&C Yellow #6, a dye derived from coal tar that causes hyperactivity in children and can toxify the crap out of your liver and gastrointestinal tract. The EU has made it mandatory for this additive to have a warning label.

- Hypromellose, another emulsifier that's most commonly found in eye lubrication drops like Genteal. 

Source

- Microcrystalline Sucralose, which, if my dissection of words is up to par, is basically "really small crystals of Splenda", and anyone who's been keeping on top of the world of sugar alternatives is aware that this little chemical can basically freak up every part of your body, from your thyroid gland to ovaries to liver, kidneys, and eyes.

- Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, which involves not only GM soy (which I try to avoid, because it can act as a crazy estrogen in the body) but partial hydrogenation, the act of forcing hydrogen into fat to make it more stable (think margarine), thereby creating trans fats, which our bodies have no idea how to deal with. Leads to cancer and screwed up sex hormones, among other things.

- Polysorbate 80, another emulsifier that some folks have allergies to and people with Crohn's Disease can be really hurt by. Has been proven to eff up the reproduction of and cause cancer in rats, is a skin and eye irritant, and is in most shampoos and toothpastes, as well as ice cream. Yum yum.

- Silicon Dioxide, most commonly known as sand. Seriously. Silicon is wonderful for us in its natural form, but when bonded with those two oxygen molecules it becomes an eye, lung, and skin irritant and can cause inflammation in the body.

- Titanium Dioxide, my personal favourite, because it's the specific reason I switched to a natural deodorant. That's right, folks, my multivitamin contained the same heavy metal your antiperspirant uses to plug up your pores and stop you from sweating. There's a lot of debate on the safety of this one, because it is naturally occurring, but there're a lot of suggestions that maybe ultrafine particles of razor-sharp titanium could be a little hard on our squishy insides and it's probably a carcinogen. 

Unluckily for me, this was only the first level of unending horror I found in the friendly-looking bottle of Century Complete. Conveniently, somewhere between my naturopath visit and my stocking shelves, I picked up Pandora's Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over The American Meal by Melanie Warner and puked my way through the chapter entitled "Putting Humpty Dumpty Back Together Again", which explained how things like Froot Loops and Wonderbread are made completely devoid of anything healthy and then fortified with synthetic vitamins created in China out of things like petroleum. The likelihood of any of those lovely vitamin supplements you're taking being sucked out of an actual head of broccoli or an orange are nil to nothing, my duckies. The vitamin D in your milk comes from lanolin, the grease made in Australian sheep wool. The calcium quantity in milk is likewise half due to the calcium phosphate (gathered from rocks or synthesized by adding calcium hydroxide to phosphoric acid) dumped into it. Vitamin C is made of ten rounds or so of acids, sugars, and fermentation, finished off with a dousing of hydrochloric acid, the same chemical our stomachs use to dissolve food. Vitamin B1 comes from coal tar.

Understandably, the thought of avoiding the vitamins health culture pushes like crazy can sound a little backwards, because what's a malnutritioned old lady to do if her calcium pills are full of carcinogens? She still needs to keep her bones strong, and she just doesn't have the appetite for multiple meals of yogurt every day. If the aforementioned list of additives wasn't a good hint, many supplements are not only not well used by our bodies, but honestly can't be digested. There are many documented instances of seniors excreting "horse pills" completely in tact, because their systems couldn't break them down. This isn't exclusive to the older generation, either; in our first-world societies of obese persons and overindulgence, our digestive systems in general are all beat to crap, and have enough trouble trying to consume Kraft Dinner. We simply can't deal with food that isn't food.

I won't say that every human condition can be fixed by diet, but certainly a large percentage of vitamin or mineral deficiencies can. If you're lacking a nutrient, it's either because A) your body can't absorb it, in which case you should see a doctor to find out why, or B) you're not eating it. When I began losing weight, experiencing brain fog, starving for carbs, and being cold all the time, I realized I was lacking a very crucial macronutrient - protein - and specifically the eight different "essential" amino acids it's made of. Plant foods have varied kinds of amino acids, and animal sources have all eight. I was eating very little of either. Instead of doing the math on which amino acids I lacked and spending a fortune on individual shots of 5-HTP or a sketchy bottle of "branched chain amino acids" from a bodybuilding supplement store, I bought a carton of eggs and ate them like it was going out of style. Three days later I feel like a different person. Food trumps pills.

Checking the ingredient list of every single supplement you're taking can be exhausting and overwhelming, as I realized while stocking shelves. Nobody's diet is perfect, and sometime you have to take a synthetic whatever to live on in relative health (hence my taking Vitamin D pills knowing they come from somewhere weird). But in the interest of not ingesting the same chemicals as are in your antiperspirant, consider keeping an eye out for the following:

1) Avoid ingredients that sound like chemicals. You don't go to the grocery store to buy a cup of Polysorbate 80 for baking, after all. If you don't recognize it, do a quick Google search before you start ingesting it. Despite what we'd all like to think, vitamin companies don't necessarily care how good for us their product is, as long as we buy it.

2) Do not ingest heavy metals. Good for the ears, but not good for the gob. Be wary of anything that sits on the Periodic Table. Some minerals are totally harmless, but others can be extremely detrimental to your health. Eat nothing containing lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium, titanium, silver, gold, or arsenic, and be cautious of anything with iron, copper, zinc, aluminum, beryllium, manganese, and/or cobalt.

Source

3) The less ingredients it has, the better. In my mind, a supplement should have only three things: the vitamin/mineral/herb, a container (which may have multiple ingredients, but should be generally composed of either cellulose or gelatin), and maybe something to make it go down smoothly (usually magnesium stearate).

4) Avoid shopping at the drugstore. This isn't to say that organic food shoppes are automatically better; I've gotten excellent-quality omega 3 fish oils at the drugstore where I work. The thing is, drugstores stock cheaper brands of supplements because their clientele is unlikely to want to spend much money on pills that won't relieve their symptoms right away. Always check to see what's in your vitamin and let it play a factor in how much you spend on it. As in the case of the probiotics I bought for GF, I would prefer to spend a little more for fewer tablets that were just germs and capsules than more tablets chocked full of strangely-named and unnecessary milk powders.

5) If it looks or tastes like candy, it's not helping. Almost all of the Vitamin C and multivitamin capsules you'll see marketed to kids will be either gummies or chewables, usually formed into fun shapes (and in some cases include temporary tattoos and stickers). Take one look at the ingredients of these and you'll see a list that goes, "Sugar, sugar, Splenda, sugar, chemical colour, Vitamin A, sugar, weird gummy emulsifiers, preservatives." Not only are these full of things you shouldn't be feeding to an already hyperactive three-year-old, but they're a waste of money. You could spend $15 on a tub of Flintstone vitamins to make sure your child gets her Vitamin C, and unintentionally pump her full of chemicals and mood-altering artificial colours, or you could buy a box of nectarines for $5. There are cases in which a fun-tasting vitamin may be the only option - with a picky or unwell senior, for example - but try to find the best bang for your buck and remember #3.

6) Liquids > everything else. If you can find a liquid fish or flax oil, I guarantee it'll work ten times better than "horse pill"-sized tablets for getting your omega EFAs into you. This one I can attest to personally.

7) You should feel a difference! I take four specific supplements every morning, and I notice when forget to. Instead of feeling awake and well, I'm overly anxious, easily depressed, broody, and unfocused. While vitamins are not stimulants and shouldn't have you feeling wired, they are meant to help - if you don't feel like it's doing anything, it's probably not. Stop wasting your money.

8) Alligators Don't Eat Fat Kids. Vitamin A (alligators), Vitamin D (don't), Vitamin E (eat), Omega Essential Fatty Acids (fat), and Vitamin K (kids) are all fat-soluble substances that our bodies store and therefore need less often than water-soluble vitamins. Taking large quantities of these can actually make you sick. Remember this when shopping for any multivitamin, unless you've been specifically told by a naturopath or other licensed practitioner to take more. The less of these a multivitamin contains, the better.

9) You don't need multivitamins! I still struggle to understand why my class full of health nuts are so insistent on taking these supplements, because if you're eating well, you should have no need to plug yourself full of synthetic food bits. It's interesting to note that professional athletes aren't actually allowed to take multivitamins; they're so unregulated that it's considered doping. If you believe you need to take a supplement because your diet stinks or is lacking something, consider first changing what you eat. It may be a little harder to do, but there's a significantly lesser chance of you poisoning yourself with a rutabaga than there is with a synthetic, chemical-bound pill.

In the end, the most important thing is to listen to your body. You know you better than anyone else!

In health,
- Leah

The Human Lawnmower: A Grimm Fairytale For Baby Plants

OR

Growing Greens For The Lazy, Cheap, and Yardless

Alfalfa sprout salad

"It was a bright and sunny morning," said the Kalanchoe ominously (or would have if it had vocal chords), "just like this one." The African Violets nodded earnestly in agreement. (They could also have been swaying in the wind - it's hard to tell with Violets.) The Kalanchoe waved his branches as if warding off evil and loomed over the jar before him. Tiny sproutlings quivered in his vision, tightly packed as a yard of clover. 

"Little sprouts like you sat her not long ago... but that day they disappeared, and I never saw them again."

"What happened to them?!" shouted one of the taller seedlings, leaning forward. The Kalanchoe eyed him pitifully, noting the flush of chlorophyll in his newly formed leaves and knowing the same fate was to befall him soon. The table began to shake as monster footsteps drew near.

"The Sprout Eater."

Has anyone noticed how short lettuce season is? I mean, if you shop at a grocery store or eat other salad greens more resilient to cold then probably not, but the natural Canadian season for lettuce is only a few months long. We hardly start enjoying fruit salads before it's on to the cob salads and then pumpkin and whoops it's snowing you missed it. From the first of September this year our temperatures took a nosedive and parts of the country have already experienced frost and snow. Poor, gentle lettuce doesn't have a hope in Nunatsiavut of surviving very long up here (unless you're Niki Jabbour and make cold frames for the little guys).

When you're a stickler like me and picky about where your grocery store produce comes from, lettuce is basically a no-go in everything but peak season. I've made a rule of not buying anything from outside my country that can be grown in my country. So avocados and citrus fruit are an exotic treat, but berries or veggies from the States are forbidden. It's no 100-mile diet, but it's a small reduction in my carbon footprint that's not hard to maintain. Even GF's on board with it. The warm fuzzies of buying "local" turn into a pain in the butt, though, when I really crave something I can't get, like lettuce in the winter. It's all from California, and generally looks like hell (sorry).

Sprouted alfalfa seeds

Enter the horrific sprout-eater story. If that didn't make a crazy, "I only eat food that fell from the tree," fruititarian out of someone I'll be surprised. GF was actually alarmed when she realized what I'd become. I've been growing baby plants, letting them think their life's adventure was just beginning, then eating them by the bowlful just as they turned green. I've become an infant plant murderer.

Like my mother, many of you may have alarm bells ringing in your heads at the word "sprouts". Images of yellowy, bean-like plants in plastic containers with warning of E. coli may be flashing in front of your mind's eye. A boy in my elementary school, bless him, used to eat those pale plants by the handful, and my fellow students used to tease him endlessly about them (while eating their oh-so-healthy Lunchables). His mother was onto something, though, and obviously ahead of her time in the holistic world, if not quite on the right track. I urge anyone wasting money on these supermarket bean sprouts to hear me out, and anyone unfamiliar with all this baby plant consumption to relax about all the germs.

Sprouts are the beautiful little beginnings of edible plants, and they are both delicious and cheap. They're made by soaking raw seeds, nuts, or grains periodically in water over a few days and lettings the baby plants hidden inside those shells to start to grow before mercilessly snatching away their life once they're a few hours/days old. Sprouts are hailed for being full of enzymes, antioxidants, and amazing, life-saving chlorophyll (plant blood, rich with magnesium). They are by far one of the most raw, pure sources of sunlight we can pump into our bodies, and they make a lovely (if a bit different) replacement for lettuce in a salad.

This being said, a supermarket sprout is pale (although those kind of sprouts are anyway), dry, and probably a few weeks dead before you buy them, therefore those lovely perks that make sprout-eating worthwhile are completely null and void in those yellow bean sticks. Plus they've been sitting around in stagnant water for a while, so E. coli has time to multiply. Yum yum. Sprouting at home ensures you're getting the benefits of living, germ-free plants, while saving money and experiencing a bit of variety, should you so choose. It's ridiculously easy to grow sprouts - you need no special equipment, no particular heat, no parental supervision, and no yard or balcony. You don't even need a south-facing window. 

Sunflower seeds, pepitas, buckwheat, chia,
mung beans, adzuki beans, spelt, alfalfa,
teff, amaranth
(All bought for UNDER $10)

As a general rule, you can sprout all seeds, most nuts, lentils, chickpeas, adzuki and mung beans. You can find specifications of what sprouts best and how long they need to do so (like on Leanne Vogul's sprout FAQ) all over the internet, but I mostly just avoid large beans and eat'm when they're green.

A good starting bean for sprouting are lentils. To be honest, I've never actually sprouted lentils, but where most other sprout seeds can be hard to find outside of a health or specialty store, lentils (or chickpeas) can be bought dry in bags at the local supermarket. Grab a small handful of beans (they're going to expand to about 8x their size) and dump them in a glass jar. Most people use mason jars, but I've got washed out salsa containers, and a glass cup would be okay, too. A clear plastic cup might work, but I haven't tried. You want something that will allow the seeds light and create a little greenhouse effect. Over the lip of the jar you'll need some sort of mesh to hold the beans in but filter water out. I use some muslin cloth I found in the sewing scraps. Many people use a plastic or metal wire screen. Again, your call. Stretch your barrier over the top of the jar and grab something to hold it in place - I use rubber bands or hair elastics. Fill your jar with water and let your beans soak for a while. Like with the ingredients in a stock, the bigger your seeds, the longer you should soak them. Alfalfa seeds take four or so hours, lentils maybe five or six. I usually just let them go until the water looks cloudy. Sometimes overnight.

Soaking alfalfa seeds

Once your seeds have had a good bath, drain all the water, rinse them, then find a place where you can sit them to dip-dry. The water needs to seep out and the sprouts need to breathe, so don't put them face down on a plate or anything. I put mine on the lip of a soup cup at an angle, but you can flip yours fully upside down as long as they're on a dish drainer or something equally elevated and holey. They don't need to be in the sun right away - for mung beans, some folks suggest they should never be in light. You can let them grow on your kitchen counter, if you want. Just poke them in the sun during their last day so they start making that beautiful chlorophyll and turn green.

Now comes the easy part. Let the sprouts do their thing. Rinse them at least once a day (twice, once in the morning and once at night, is usually recommended, but ain't nobody got time for that) and eat them when they've got decently long tails on them or are turning green (again, the amount of time you let them grow for depends on the type of plant; consult the Google). Lentils should be eaten before they grow leaves. You can eat the seed husks or rinse them off. It's totally personal preference. Use them on/as salad, top a burger, dehydrate them and use them in bread, throw some in a casserole, whatever. Generally you should avoid cooking sprouts, though, because putting any sort of baby in an oven is guaranteed to kill off anything you like about them.

Spelt and adzuki beans sprouting
(Kalanchoe in the background)

Important things to note!

1) As a VERY IMPORTANT NOTE, you can sprout kidney beans (and it's cousins, like navy, pinto, and black beans), but you HAVE TO COOK THEM. This does kill off enzymes, but eating big beans raw, especially kidney beans, will make you violently ill. They're poisonous. Sprouting and then cooking beans of any sort, though, makes them much easier for our bodies to digest by turning their complex carbohydrates into simpler ones and making their nutrients more bio-available. If you're prone to gas when you eat beans, sprouting them beforehand will more than likely prevent that. 

2) Always get your sprout seeds from a food store, NOT a gardening store, where they may be cheaper but coated in pesticides/herbicides. Even if they're organic, it's a much safer bet to find some at food-grade. 

3) As anyone who clicked on Leanne Vogul's sprout FAQ link may have noticed, some people drain their sprout jars and then leave them right side up to grow. You can do this too, but I suggest the face-down method because it ensures there's no water pooling at the bottom of your container for mold to grow in.

Jar-sprouted teff. Bad idea.

4) Some very small or gelatinous seeds, like teff or chia, can't really be grown in jars. For those you need to use the toss-them-on-a-plate-and-attack-them-with-a-spray-bottle method, which I haven't tried. I did try doing the teff-in-a-jar method, though, and it just got moldy and attracted fruit flies. Alfalfa seeds are probably the smallest you should go with jar sprouting.

5) I use the green-tinted water the sprouts drip off to water my other plants, and they seem to love it. Good (cannibalistic?) sprout food for all!

Sun-filled and growing,

- Leah

Recipe: Herbed Croutons

OR

Salad Toppings From Bread Heels: A Story of Seagull Deprivation

Have you ever been to one of those really ritzy home decor stores? You know, the kind that're usually privately-owned and tucked into some secluded corner of a city? They sell dishware and tablecloths, as well as beautiful, unique pieces like bronze chandeliers, abstract art, and tablecloths made of the Golden Fleece. The few times I've been in one of these places (wondering what it's like to drop a couple hundred dollars on an ugly horse sculpture without being intoxicated beyond intelligent thought), GF has pointed out objects so ridiculously silly and expensive that neither of us can wrap our heads around them. For example, one Christmastime we saw a silver bonsai tree in a store window downtown I would call "the minimalist style of today's high-class urbanite" in that it was all branches and sparkled something fierce. We were struck both by how pretty and how audacious it was to be asking $200 for something we could make with a walk in the woods and a can of glitter paint. A few months later GF saw spindly silver (it's the "in" colour) decorations that were equally pretty and equally expensive, and was so enraptured with them that she went to the Dollar Store, bought foam and paint, and made duplicates for a fraction of the price. We now have six sparkling silver carbon atoms hanging from our living room ceiling.

I love grocery shopping. I take to it like some girls do to shopping for clothes or makeup. Be it at the local supermarket, farm market, or convenience store, I get a huge thrill out of picking out food. I love trying to figure out what my most cost-efficient option is. I love filling up carts and baskets. I even love paying for it (gives me that accomplished feeling). I get the warm fuzzies from shopping for necessities. I am totally for hire if somebody wants me to grocery shop for them. Dream job, I'm telling you.

What I don't especially love when I'm shopping is finding pre-fab food I could make myself. I get that convenience is king for most people, but who doesn't have time to make mashed potatoes? It's just silly and a little bit frustrating, in a way. Why would I pay three dollars more for something that would take three minutes to do myself? (That would be an excellent job, too. A dollar a minute? Talk about rolling in the dough - pun intended.) There are some things I absolutely refuse to buy just because the Average Joe could make it in under ten minutes. Ready-for-baking tinfoil-wrapped potatoes, pre-layered salsa chip dips, pre-cut vegetables of any kind, salad kits, and pre-seasoned meats top the list.

Also, croutons.

Like with her ingenious crafting, GF has become a pro at mimicking recipes on cookbook pages, meal boxes, and sample tables. I'd like to say she's the art girl and I'm the inventive chef, but this is real life and I've long since accepted that the only things I'm especially good at cooking are pasta (which is bad for me in large quantities) and quiche (which I should really make more of, but responsible eggs are expensive). Still, I'm quick to learn, so when GF showed me how to make real croutons from scratch, well... I actually promptly forgot, and will probably get the finer details wrong the next eight or so times I make them. But I promise I got her to double-check this recipe before I posted it.

Croutons (and for that matter, stuffing, but I'll pick on Stove Top another day) are stupid easy to make. In the same way I can't fathom spending $400 on carbon atoms for my ceiling, I likewise can't reason why anyone would spend $3 on a salad topping. Croutons are entirely made of stale bread. Birds don't pay to eat your hot dog bun ends - why are you paying to eat overcooked bread heels? Croutons sit in the same boat soup stock does; they're made of scraps.

To make croutons, stop feeding birds. It's bad for them anyway. Hoard your bread heels, broken toast pieces, freezer-burnt slider buns, and the cheesebread logs your cousin brought for tea. Pop them in the freezer in a Ziploc bag next to your stock chunks. When you need them, yank'm out of the cold, preheat your over to 325F (so they can witness their impending doom), cube/rip them up, dump them in a bowl, add enough vegetable oil to coat them, douse them in spices (we usually use garlic powder and Italian seasoning), then sprawl the oily nibs on a cookie sheet ("Draw me like one of your French breads!") and cook them for about fifteen minutes, until they're toasty and brown.

Or, if you're me, put them in the oven, forget about them, cook them for too long, eat the black ones, and save the nice bits for your girlfriend.

Oops.

 Summing it up:

 1)
- Save up bread scraps and freeze until needed
- Preheat oven to 325F
- Rip or cut bread chunks into bite-sized pieces
- Place breadcrumbs in a bowl and coat with vegetable oil
- Add seasoning (garlic powder/Italian spices/whatever)
- Spread on cookie sheet
- Bake for 15 minutes, give or take, until they're golden brown
- Eat

 2) We have sparkley silver carbon atoms on our ceiling and GF is very proud.

 Cheaply crunching,
 - Leah

Recipe: Rice and Lentils

OR

The Poor Man's Staple Food

Today I'm going to introduce you to the bare bones of frugal cooking. 

Did you know there's more than 600 different kinds of legumes in the world? Legumes are beans, basically - you know, that "alternatives" part of the "meat and alternatives" on Canada's Food Guide/Pyramid. You can buy them in cans and dried up in bags (the less expensive and less salty version). Not only are legumes dirt cheap, but they're healthy and versatile and are an excellent source of iron and protein and a bunch of other vitamins that if you care enough about you'll Google. Point is, everyone should have a bag or two of beans in their cupboard. 

Personally, GF and I like lentils. They're cute, small, colourful, and don't take as long as their bigger brethren to cook. Some big beans like, say, kidney beans, can take three hours to cook; lentils take twenty minutes. They can be sprouted, stir-fried, boiled, whatever. They're filling. Even organic ones cost less than $2 for a 500g (1lb) bag. You can't lose.

A couple years back I enrolled in Katimavik, a youth volunteer program. For six months I lived with twelve other kids from different places in Canada whom I'd never met and helped nonprofit organizations while learning how to work as a team, run a household, and eat healthily. That was the cereal box promo version, anyway. I'll spare you the story for now, but suffice to say it was the best of times and it was the worst of times. Three months I spent in a little town in Ontario, and for a week during that I got to escape the crowded frat house and live with a host family of four in the suburbs.

It's only now that I can really appreciate the amazing people I spent that week with, and I kick myself every time I think back, because those folks were a gold mine of holistic living information, and I didn't put the effort into connecting with them. They grew and ate sprouts. They had a garden. They bought from a co-op. They'd traveled the world. They had solar panels in their sunroom. They didn't watch television. They only ate organic, and were all vegetarian. While I was there, the dad was doing something to the laptop wires to avoid electromagnetic pollution in their house. I spent a week in hippie nirvana and I hardly took a bite out of it.

On the bright side, though, I was introduced to both guacamole and rice and lentils while I was there. Today's recipe was stumbled upon by accident. Host Dad was making up a quick supper for everyone, and completely floored me when he put both white rice and green lentils into the same pot. This is the ultimate in basic food, and can be seasoned however you want it. You can add veggies or leave it as is. A rice cooker is the easiest way to go, but it can be done in a pot on the stove, too.

You need rice - any kind, but white rice has about the same cooking time as lentils, so we usually use jasmine - and lentils. Red, green, brown, French, whatever. Measure out the amounts of each and add in any flavourings you'll want. I put cumin, turmeric, and paprika on this batch. Generally, if I'm not too hungry and want to feed both of us, I'll go with a 1/3 cup of lentils, a 1/2 cup of rice, and 2 cups of water.

My rice cooker was a re-gift from my adorable 93-year-old grandmother. As she handed it to me, she said, "Now, don't tell your mother about this. She gave me this for Christmas two years ago, but I've never used it, and I don't want to hurt her feelings." Oh, Nanny. As if Mom would care.

Rice cookers are a blessing, though, if you're busy and poor. Rice and lentils cook beautifully in these contraptions, and all you have to do is dump the uncooked food and water in and flick a switch. They shut off automatically when cooked. Which is really great if you're as attention-deficit as I, and forget about things almost instantly.

If you're making this in a pot, cook for twenty minutes (or whatever the bags say) and stir every once in a while.

P.S:

1) Red lentils fall apart when you cook them and turn into a tasty mess. Green lentils stay crunchier.

2) Adding a powdered animal stock while cooking makes for a subtle but super-tasty mix!

Presto! Dinner!

Forgetfully,
- Leah