The Autumn Squash Challenge Round #3

OR

Butternut Squash Vegan Mac and Cheese - The First Success

It's ridiculous how quickly time goes by when you're older. Everyone and their grandmother remarks of this at least once in their lifetime - "Back in my day...!" - but it's true that as you grow up days fly by inexplicably faster than they used to. I'm of the belief that it's because we don't mindlessly play anymore; we're overaware of the hours of the day and days of the week and everything we have to do before certain dates. It doesn't help that a good chunk of North Americans have very few, but very commercialized holidays throughout the year. About once a month there's a date we have to plan and buy gifts and make food for, and the stores we buy the supplies from are always two months ahead of us. You want Easter decorations? Start looking on January 2nd. If you're trying to prepare for Thanksgiving, you'd better have that eighteen pound turkey ordered three months ahead of time. Christmas is its own special cup of tea, shoving grinning pumpkins out of the way well before it's reasonable and putting a disrespectful screen in front of November 11th. GF and I actually went to our first Christmas craft show, because we're old ladies like that, just this past Friday (with poppies pinned to our chests, thank you very much). While I understand the jumping of the gun in some respects - craft shows are fun any time of year - it makes us overall more paranoid of time going by.


It was almost a full month ago I decided to learn how to cook squash, and it was with a bit of a shock that I realized I've only made about five attempts since then. Any time now, our craft show reminded me, we'll start getting snow here on the east coast (Manitoba's already had some), and it's a slow decline of fresh gourd availability after then. I've got to get my shit together! Especially now that I've finally gotten a grasp on how to cook pumpkin seeds. That's right, folks, I've finally figured out the trick. Thanks to the tutorial on Oh She Glows, I now know I need to boil - yes, boil - the seeds for ten minutes, then toast them for twenty at 325F. Perfection. Even my mother liked them!

Pumpkin seeds, by the way, not only have magnesium (muscle relaxation), potassium (nerve health), protein (everything) and healthy plant fats (brain and joint strengtheners), but are rich in tryptophan, that amino acid in turkey everyone says puts you to sleep. It is, consequently, beneficial if you suffer insomnia or high levels of stress, and is a precursor of serotonin, the brain's mood-regulating chemical. Folks who have depression often don't make enough serotonin, which is why SSRIs (meds that convince your brain you have more than you do) are so popular for treating it. The added bonus of cooking your own pumpkin seeds is that their hard shell is built of an insoluble fibre, which helps build and move feces along your large intestine. Hear that, everyone? If you're stressed, depressed, or can't sleep or poop, start downing gourd seeds.

My other success, with the actual flesh of a squash, was a batch of vegan mac n' cheese. I've come to the quick realization that I'm not as talented an inventor in the kitchen as I'd like to be, so I've been latching onto recipes and following them to a T, with fantastic results. You'd be surprised at how actual measurements can help make a concoction taste good. This recipe was also from Oh She Glows, although the first time I whipped up a batch I actually used honey mustard instead of dijon, so it was rather sweet. Can't decide which taste I preferred, though. The roasted squash by itself was fantastic, too.

It's a shame I can't claim to have figured out both these recipes by myself, but such is life. Maybe I'll stick to promoting other blogs' food inventions. Appreciate what talents you have and accept those you don't.

In related news, do you realize how many pumpkin seeds you can get out of two cheap jack o' lanterns? Manna from the heavens, I tell you! The world really does provide for us - you just have to know where to look. Now is prime time to start stocking up on homemade pumpkin paste and toasted seeds. Before you know it, the Christmas snowmen will have taken over!

Shortly put,
- Leah

Breaking Bad (Habits, That Is)

OR

Making Promises To Yourself: A How-To Guide

There was a summer in my teenage days where I dedicated hours to playing video games. Certainly I'd spent a while trudging my way through Final Fantasy VII and Chrono Cross (finishing neither) in traditional gamer style, with my body half buried in a beanbag chair, getting up every few hours only for food or bathroom breaks, but in particular I'm thinking of the one summer I spent playing Dance Dance Revolution.

Source

Anyone aware of pop culture in the mid-2000's probably recognizes the misleading name of this game. As one of the first in "healthy" video games (AKA games that make you move more than your thumbs), DDR had a huge surge of popularity when I was entering high school and a reputation for making fat kids thin. Our now defunct local arcade showcased its DDR machine at its entrance, and the employees were quick to interest curious onlookers with stories of overweight teenagers who had played the game for months and shrunk down to fraction of their former sizes. It was mind boggling how fast those kids could move their feet. The arcade versions ran at about $2.00 for three songs, which you'd "dance" to by stomping on four directional pads at your feet. When the game became available on home consoles, my family quickly acquired the Xbox version, to which I spent an entire two months dedicating my time. Every day I would follow the same routine: get up, eat breakfast, "dance", eat lunch, relax.

Perhaps it was because accomplishing a song on any other level than Easy was a challenge for me, and sparked some kind of competitive-against-myself spirit. Perhaps it was just something to do during my long, mostly solitary summer. Whatever the reason, I playing that game with almost religious fervor. I missed out on a full summer of sunshine. I lost the twenty extra pounds I'd been carrying from gorging myself on peanut butter sandwiches and cereal. I had wicked stamina, suddenly. I'd picked up a healthy habit and was sticking to it.

Often when folks are told to change their diets, they're given the one-choice-or-none approach. Either they're handed supplements by the wheelbarrow and continue to eat the same as always, relying on the magic silver bullet of herbs, or they're told, "You need to stop eating red meat and have it never again and be a vegan forever no exceptions." While this is responsible in some cases (namely allergies), generally most people can't do the all-or-nothing. They have to start slow and be reinforced often. There's a reason kids given stickers in school learn to spell quickly.

My very first blog post was about drinking water. I discovered the magic of hydration, and swore I'd be chugging that sweet nectar of life until every cell inside me was sick of wearing its bathing suit. But like every other human being out there who's promised to stick to something, I have very quickly found myself with cracked lips and a mouth like a desert (especially in the morning - hello Sahara). The fact is, winter is upon us, and as the cold weather moves in, my desire to do anything, including walk, eat, and drink, becomes extremely limited. To add insult to injury and enjoy a double idioms, it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks. I'm used to eating lots of simple carbs and drinking little water, and though I'd promised I'd rectify both habits, they're habits, and are severely ingrained into my life as stubbornly as a tick in the foot would be (Mom always warned us about going without shoes in the woods).

There will always be those persons who decide to do something and do it, cold turkey. Quitting smoking, abolishing fast food from their lives, or becoming immediately talented, like the boys my sister hung out with in school who just decided to learn to back-flip one day, and did (how?!). But for the rest of us, picking up a habit and adhering to it for the full twenty-one days they say it takes to make it automatic is often super stupid hard. For a few days we're golden, then we get lazy, or some event throws us off our schedule, and suddenly we're a week without following our own promises. Oops.

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If the old Berenstain Bears books taught me anything, it was that nail polish is the best prize for taking care of your nails. I'm one of those people (and believe it or not, this is entirely unrelated to me preferring chicks to dudes) who cannot stand having long nails. Talons that click on tables and keyboards, hinder my ability to pick things up, and grow all kinds of little pointy bits drive me up the wall. I cut my fingernails down as far as I can and habitually pick at the sides and skin around them. Gross, I know. As of lately, though, I've been suffering the clickity-click and nasty feeling of enamel out of pure love - and compliance. GF's taking an aesthetics college course, and had me swear on fear of her murdering me that I would not pick at my nails so that she could do a proper manicure on them during her upcoming first night in the clinic. I promised I would, but only if they were kept painted. I like pretty colours on my hands and am less likely to destroy my nails if I can't see the whites of them.

In this story lies two examples of ways to enforce a new habit:

1) Make yourself accountable to someone else

2) Reward yourself for sticking to it

My third suggestion is to make your habit something measurable. If you're taking up running, decide, for example, that you'll run at least to the stop sign at the bottom of your street before you turn back. If you go farther, great! But you must make it to that point. When you do, give yourself a reward. Food isn't always the best option, unless you're giving yourself one big night-out-for-nachos reward instead of a bunch of Cheetos-for-dinner treats, but something as simple as stickers on a chart or allowing yourself to buy a new pair of earrings (or nail polish!) can be awesome for enforcement. On that same vein, either convince someone to do the run to the stop sign together with you every day, or enlist someone in your house to force you to do it - if I told GF to not let me in the house until I'd gone for a walk, she would most adamantly stand in the doorway and threaten me in the way that only a hobbit-sized nerd girl can until I had finished my stroll. Positive-in-the-guise-of-negative enforcement can be wonderful for making you feel guilty and obligated, especially if the other person does the, "It doesn't matter to me, but you promised yourself," thing. Be mindful of whom you're asking to threaten you, however - they'll need to know when to back down. If I were sick or having a severe bout of depression or anxiety, I would trust GF to recognize this and let the nagging go, or at least take me seriously when I said, "Not today."


When it comes to drinking water, I've decided to stick to one big blue bottle and drink two full loads of it daily. If I drink more, excellent! But two is my goal. That's 1.6 litres. Granted, I haven't yet found someone
to share the challenge with, which is probably the best way to hold myself accountable, but two days out of the week I'm in a classroom full of quasi-hippies who have water-drinking superiority complexes, and there is no stronger peer pressure to drink up than a judgmental eye (or twenty).

Finally, remember to give yourself some slack. Everybody forgets to take their vitamins, fill in their daily journal, and brush their teeth a particular way sometimes. Anyone telling you otherwise is lying. Habits take a long time to enforce, and nine out of ten people are going to fall off the bandwagon a couple times before new goals stick. Making yourself swear that you're going to do something is great, but the most important thing to promise - shut up, Yoda - is that you'll keep trying. I've been on and off promising myself I'll stick to vegetarianism for years, and sometimes I feel bad about having a nibble of Christmas turkey, but I've learned to listen to what my body wants, and sometimes it wants a piece of poultry. Some days you really don't want to run, because everything sucks and the outside world just seems too big. Sometimes you pick up a cigarette and puff halfway through it before you remember you were trying to quit. Some potlucks just have damn good food with crap-tons of fat in it. Remember that one time isn't every time, and you're strong enough to try again.

In the end:

1) Everybody makes goals and promises that they have trouble sticking to. Habits take forever to build. Make your new habit something you can measure, and practice it at the same times each day to make it really stick. Enforce it, reward yourself, and cut yourself some slack when you need to. At the risk of exasperated eye-rolling for using another idiom: Rome wasn't built in a day.

2) Drink your water.

Habitually,
- Leah

The Autumn Squash Challenge Round #2

OR

Pumpkin Pureé and Popped Amaranth

To be honest, I've never been a huge fan of Halloween, which is funny, because I make costumes as a hobby. But there's a stark difference between coming up with something clever and cheap (Glow stick stick-men! Static cling! Two peas in a pod!) for a one night dance and spending months weeping and freaking out over making a physical outfit to match the often unreasonable proportions and attributes of a cartoon. Anyone who's ever been in the situation of a cosplayer at work or watched one of those "Shit Cosplayers Say" videos is well aware of how out of hand this hobby can get. Budgets are blown, toxic chemicals are inhaled, too-tight wigs are suffered. It's a lot like the kind of stuff models go though, I imagine. There's pain, discomfort, and hunger suffered for beauty - I once went a week before a convention eating nothing but raisin bread with margarine because we were too busy sewing to buy food.

Maybe it's because I'm introverted, or because I've always been bad at making Halloween costumes that were anything other than stereotypical (cat! witch! another cat!), but this end of October holiday just didn't hold much for me after I wasn't allowed to go candy-collecting anymore. My mother, be it out of love or actual lack of money, made the Halloween costumes my sister and I wore every year when we were children, with the patience of a saint and mega creativity. We may not have been as fancy as the other kids in school with their store-bought princess dresses, but I had custom-made butterfly wings that could probably have concussed someone, and my nine-year-old sister was the best sheet of leopard-print roadkill anyone had ever seen. We were proud of our hard work. Halloween has its benefits, therefore: I've gained an obsession-level love for the construction of costumes thanks to Mom, a good bunch of ingenuity genes, and a fondness for stabbing pointy things into an unsuspecting vegetable and lighting it up for display (especially when it's designed to mimic my grotesque plastic surgery eye scar).

Let's just say I had the scariest costume ever,
and Spousal Abuse Barbie got extra candy that year.

Most anyone who's celebrated Halloween has at one point or another carved up a Jack o' Lantern. A dear friend of mine once did up about a hundred of them for around his parents' house, both traditional (triangle eyes, jagged mouth) and non (a light-up Pacman and monster pumpkin eating bleeding apples). The two of us rubbed our hands raw pushing knives through their tough skin, but it was a lot of fun, and I got from it seeds that sprouted like weeds in my garden at home and a couple years' worth of fulfillment for my carving quota. Once I'd moved out on my own and felt the desire to carve again, I'd picked up this particular guy in the above photo, but he only lasted a day after he'd been exposed to the heat of our apartment, and then promptly turned fuzzy and blue, so I now know that I can't cut up pumpkins in this building unless I'm cooking them.

Technically speaking, pumpkins are a type of squash, but for some reason get their own considerations by those people who hate zucchini but love pumpkin pie. Go figure. Maybe I'm a purist, spoiled by the first pumpkin pie I'd ever made and tasted in Orillia (directed by GF's recipe, sent via email), but I refuse to cook with canned pumpkin pureé unless I'm forced to. Making my own is stupid easy and ensures I'm getting a local food - if Nova Scotia's good at growing anything in particular, it's apples and winter veggies. Not only is it kind of soothing to roast a pumpkin, as they make your whole house smell autumn-y, but you also get the seeds from them, which you can roast, although you'll have to find instructions somewhere else, because, as my first Autumn Squash Challenged post indicated, I still haven't mastered how to do it yet.

Because I'm lazy and GF's much better at explaining this, I'm going to let her 2010 self do the explaining for how to roast a pie pumpkin (jack o' lanterns are bigger and need more sugar to taste good). While pumpkin smush is good for making pretty much anything involving the season of fall, you're going to want to not do what I did and mix your pumpkin with cinnamon and oatmeal. Sounds good, looks... not good. Tastes okay.

Erm.

WHAT YOU WILL NEED!:

A large serrated knife (a clean handsaw works too)

And ice cream scoop (or a big spoon; I find the scoop is easier, though)

A large pot

PREPARING THE PUMPKIN!

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Step 1: Determine if it's a Jack-o-Lantern pumpkin or a pie pumpkin. Pie pumpkins are the smaller, rounder type of pumpkin. Jack-o-lanterns are the big ones. This is important! Trust me!

Step 2: After determining the kind of pumpkin you've got, wash it under warm running water. DON'T USE SOAP.  Just make sure it's all nice and clean. Maybe hug it a few times too. You're about to get very intimate with this pumpkin, so it's okay. 

Step 3: Cut the pumpkin in half. Use your large knife (or handsaw) and use a sawing motion. A serrated knife is better than a smooth one! They both cut the same, but the smooth knife is more likely to slip and hurt you!

Step 4: SCOOP OUT THE GOOEY INSIDES! You wanna get rid of all that stringy, dangly, slimy stuff! BUT SAVE THE SEEDS! Place them in a bowl of water and rub them between your hands. Then pick out the orange bits (throw that away) and drain off the water. Spread them out on a clean towel or paper towel to dry and they're ready to roast. 

Step 5: After the pumpkin is all scooped out, put it into a oven-able container with a lid. Depending on the oven, baking the pumpkin can take 45 minutes to an hour and a half. After the 30 minute mark, check it every fifteen minutes or so and when it's nice and soft. 

 

Step 6: Once it's soft enough it is easy to scoop out the guts with a table spoon.  Use the spoon to gently lift and scoop the cooked pumpkin out of the skin. It should come off the skin pretty easy if it's cooked enough. Sometimes the skin will lift right off with your fingers! Put the pumpkin into a container or big bowl of some sort. If you find that there's a lot of water coming from the pumpkin, let it sit for like... 20-30 minutes and then drain the water out of the container. Otherwise your gloop will be really runny.

Step 7: IT'S TIME TO PUREE THE PUMPKIN! Hand mixer, blender, food processor... What you have there to do it with... PUREE THAT PUMPKIN!

Pureéd pumpkin, as any baker knows, is good for everything this time of year, from pie to muffins to probably spice lattés (but who knows what goes in those). I've got some leftover from the atrocious pumpkin oatmeal I'd made, and it'll probably be turned into some sort of sweet, as they're more reliable and satisfying. I made killer chocolate chip pumpkin muffins last year. Let's aim for that.

In related news, whilst reading Gluten-Free Girl and debating what to do with my pureé, I suddenly decided to make popped amaranth. Anyone up on their health craze reading will recognize amaranth as an ancient grain that comes from an ornamental flower, rich in lysene, an amino acid that's harder to find in plant than animal food. Amaranth seed basically looks like tiny yellow-y styrofoam balls - the ones that pepper your carpet when you break a big piece of foam from the box your microwave came in. It's got a kind of nutty taste, is rather cheap, and can be puffed up like popcorn. 

Let me try to explain how much fun popping amaranth is using a video (which I swear was HD before I uploaded it).

I'd been rather intimidated to try popping this little grain. I'd heard from multiple sources that it was super easy to do, but any recipe that entails "heating a skillet on high" usually has me balking and GF running from the room. But I was apparently having the sort of day where anything is possible if you don't think about it too much, and so before I'd realized what was going on I was throwing seeds in a pan with a spoon and listening to the sizzle of oil-less cooking. The sound popping amaranth makes is rather soothing, to be honest, like a gentle rain. It's also a lot of fun, and way less hard than I'd imagined. Basically, you put a little frying pan on high heat, toss in a couple spoonfuls of amaranth at a time, let them pop and stir until they're all turning a chocolate colour, then throw them in a bowl. You can use it to make homemade granola bars (like I did; just toss a bunch of grains and nuts into a pan with some sticky coating, like honey or molasses), as cereal, or probably to make cookies or something. In any case, it's an adorable food and I'll be finding more ways to include it in my diet.

Popped on the left, raw on the right.

So basically,

1) No recipe for anything especially different today, but now you know how to make your own pumpkin pureé. If I ever get around to making muffins I'll put up instructions.

2) Popped amaranth is super fun and meditative. Plus it's good for you.

Inconclusive and unhelpfully,

- Leah

The Salty Lesser of Two Evils

OR

Why Quality Salt Is Healthier Than Shitty Sugar

Source

Iodine is - brace yourselves, I consulted my textbook for this - a poisonous gas that we need to ingest. A halogen mineral, it sits comfortably in the 53rd spot of the Periodic Table, and is apparently purple, not that we ever get to see it. It's most commonly found in vegetables and mixed in with table salt, or salt in general, which is why folks who live in places like Halifax don't have problems with goiter; the sea breezes blow enough iodine into our systems that our thyroid gland doesn't have to expand to try to catch more. (For those of you wondering what goiter is, think of the guy in Disney's Tangled with the winged helmet.) While Iodine in its natural gaseous form is terrible for us, iodine in food is a natural substance that we need to function correctly. This is also true of the salt in which it's found. As much as it's not super great for your blood pressure, without it you would absolutely die. Salt is so necessary that in ancient civilizations it could be traded as currency and people would get arrested for boiling saltwater at home instead of buying it. It's a big deal.

My Daddy recently read and recommended a book called Wheat Belly by William Davis, and has been following the author's guidelines for getting rid of his persistent "beer belly", which I'm very proud of him for. Mr Davis believes that because wheat grown today is so far removed from the wheat that folks in the fifties and earlier had that our bodies have no idea what to do with it. Genetically engineered and cross-bred to be uniform heights, grow at specific times, and taste a specific way, as well as survive frost and pests, the wheat plants we eat in pretty much everything are not only a threat to those with gluten intolerance and Celiac Disease, but everyone else, too. I've been mostly following in my father's footsteps as of the last week or so after finishing a school project and realizing maybe wheat wasn't the best for me, either - albeit for a different reason.

This past Thursday I'd asked my teacher which was worse: salt or sugar. We'd been talking about atherosclerosis, the hardening and thickening of arteries in the body, and how the amount of salt someone eats can alter how bad their situation is. The class before, we'd talked about how sugar in high amounts, especially high fructose corn syrup, was causing ridiculous quantities of children in the United States to develop or be born with type two diabetes. Obviously neither salt nor sugar are great for you in large amounts, but it seemed, to me, that sugar was the baddest baddie of the two. It makes us fat, attention-deficit and hyper, lethargic, blocks absorption of vitamins we need to live (like vitamin C; those with compromised immune systems should really avoid it), inflames the body, is addictive, severely screws with our insulin levels, and tastes so damn good we can't stop eating it. Salt, on the other hand, keeps us balanced in more ways than one. It helps our bodies build hydrochloric acid in our stomachs to break down food, aids in blood sugar controls, and supports our thyroid gland. This being said, the thousands of grams of cheap, white, refined salt that live in prepackaged meals and your cute bottle of table salt aren't helping you at all. On the contrary, they're making you sick.

Anytime I've ever heard the term "food diary" I've gotten annoyed. Those two words ring out at me from every television show, healthily living book, and style magazine available, all aimed at women trying to lose weight - keep a food diary, they say, and you'll eat better! Or less! Or you'll just feel ridiculously guilty and
ashamed and stressed out, says I. Tedious and over-analyzed, the whole concept seemed pointless to me. But despite my loathing for the practice, I was assigned a project for school that told me to do just what I'd never wanted to: keep a food log. For five days I had to plug in exactly what I was eating and at what time (although thankfully without note of calories), how much water I drank, how I felt, and how many times the toilet and I made conversation. Afterwards, it was my responsibility to look over the information from an outsider's point of view and make recommendations to the "client" on how to eat healthier.

One of the most frustrating questions vegetarians of any kind get asked is, "Where do you get your protein?" Although this macro-nutrient comprises 20% of our body and is needed for everything from muscle building to brain power, it's considered the most important thing we ingest beyond calories by most people. Never mind that your body needs good carbohydrates and fats to function well too, no, the question is always, "How much protein are you eating? Are you pregnant? Are you trying to build muscle? Are you old? More protein! Eat your lean chicken!" Becoming a vegetarian at age fourteen opened me up to years of this question and insists that I eat more beans. Confirmations that yes, a person can get plenty of protein from plant foods were always met with hesitant, "Okay..."s and disbelieving looks. If you know a vegetarian or vegan, please refrain from asking this question, as well as the, "But if you were trapped on a desert island with only a cow to eat...?" one. Just stop.

It was, therefore, the most grueling self-acceptance of mine that I realized, upon finishing my food diary report, that I was severely lacking in protein. In the span of a week I'd eaten nothing but sunflower seeds that were specifically, predominantly protein. Suddenly the suspicious muscle loss and slower cognitive function I'd been experiencing made perfect sense, especially when paired up with the realization that I live almost entirely off of sugar and simple carbohydrates, and had been following this pattern for years. No wonder I'm hungry all the time.

Most anybody can recognize plain white sugar. Hand someone a chocolate bar and they'll easily confirm that it's loaded with the stuff. Fruit, most people can tell, has its own natural sweeteners. But when handed a box of pasta, nobody looks beyond the nutrition facts on the side that say how many carbohydrates are inside and wonders what that pasta will become once they ingest it. When we eat the three main macro-nutrients, carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, our body takes them apart like Lego and then build them into things our
bodies need to function. Fats... well, they stay as fat, and lubricate our cells, move fat-soluble vitamins around, and pad up our internal organs so we don't die of cold or shock. Protein is deconstructed into amino acids when we eat it, little building blocks that construct everything from stretchy muscles to serotonin. Anything solid besides bones in these meat sacks we call bodies is made of protein. Carbs, on the other hand, are our main source of energy. Our bodies run on glucose, a form of sugar. Carbohydrates, both complex like buckwheat and simple like pasta, turn into glucose. Carbohydrates are sugar.

These are all sugar. Simple sugar.

The reason low-carb diets "work" is because our bodies, when they can't find sugars in our diet, will pull stored sugar, sitting in fatty deposits (your favourite love handles) out of our bodies to burn for fuel. Once those are gone, your brain instructs your digestive tract to start eating protein, our emergency rations. This is called ketosis, and although Mr Atkins thinks it's a great idea, it's dangerous and ensures that when you do reintroduce carbohydrates, your body's going to hold on to those sugars, in the form of fat, like a starving man would a banquet. The fact is, we all need carbohydrates to function right. It's the cheap firewood that keeps us running. Cutting out carbs is like throwing electronics in the fire to avoid burning up wood. Electronics don't burn well, aren't good to be breathing in, and cost a lot more than a chunk of dead tree. Plus the fire'll be pretty weak by the time you decide maybe it's okay to use firewood again. Let's just do ourselves all a big favour and not avoid carbs, alright?

Carbs come in a couple forms. Simple sugars are pasta, white rice, bread, basically anything that makes you feel good eating when you're stressed out. Complex carbs are buckwheat, quinoa, brown rice, beans, things that make it too hard for you to have dessert because you're so full. At the risk of getting too technical, simple sugars are little chains, and complex are long chains. If you had a couple jelly beans in one hand and a foot-long Fruit Roll-up in the other, which would take longer to eat? These long-chain "Fruit Roll-up" complex carbs are a slow form of sugar that your body can still use well but that don't cause blood sugar spikes or contain so many simple "jelly beans" that they get out of hand and your stomach has to time-out them in fatty deposit corners. Basically, if you've got problems - like me - with eating too much sugar, opting out of the Halloween candy isn't good enough. You've got to get rid of the simple carbohydrates and replace them - to avoid ketosis - with complex. The bonus of complex carbs, especially for those of you worried about their vegan family members, is that they contain protein. I've been opting out of eating wheat - which is generally a simple carbohydrate, unless you're eating wheat berries - and these "jelly beans" in general both to stabilize my blood sugar, increase my protein intake, and help satisfy my unending hunger.

Here we arrive at the point of this post. Salt. Once you cut that delicious sugar out of your diet, and being as everyone and their mom's telling you you need to stop eating salt, food's probably going to look pretty bland. I have bad news for you: you should probably cut down on the salt intake, and you have to stop buying regular old table salt. The good news is, you don't have to get rid of salt completely.

Dextrose is a chemical term for glucose. Sugar.

Consider where salt comes from. The sea, the earth, the human body. The table salt we're all used to eating comes from one of these sources (hopefully not the last one, haha), gets sent to a factory, and then is bleached, depleted, de-ionized, sprayed with chemicals, sprinkled with iodine, rolled in sugar, and packaged in pretty white bags. You read that right. Go grab the salt from your baking cupboard right now - there's sugar in it.

Obviously when your salt has sugar, your body's more than a little confused and you're eating something very unnatural. The general goal of someone who wants to be healthy should be to eat as close to a food's traditional form as possible, meaning they'd opt for a steak, which is just a hunk of muscle, instead of a hot dog made of mysterious beef parts mixed with chemicals and wrapped in plastic. Seasonings should be looked at the same way. If you went down to the beach, grabbed a cup of seawater, and waited for the liquid to evaporate, you'd be left with a cup of probably grey and black chunky salt. Believe it or not, this stuff is totally edible (although it's not a great idea, since our oceans have pollution problems). This is natural salt, the way it's been mined for centuries. It's infused, like a good tea, with minerals like magnesium, potassium, and calcium. A good natural salt can have as many as 85 different trace minerals in it. The chemical table salt we're all used to, by contrast, is bleached white, has all the minerals sucked out of it, has to have iodine put back in to protect midwesterners from goiter, and it's so over-purified that it bypasses every toll booth in our bodies and therefore screws us right up.

If you're going to eat salt - and we all should, in small doses - I highly, highly suggest you invest in a lovely sea or rock salt. Be mindful - if it's pure white, it's probably just a variation of the sodium chloride table salt we're all used to, labeled as "sea salt" to get in on the health craze because technically speaking, all salt came from the sea at some point. Aim to find yourself a nice off-colour salt, fine ground or chunky. My cupboard personally has some adorable fine pink Himalayan sea salt (said to be the richest in minerals), a rich grey Celtic sea salt, and oak-smoked rock salt from South Africa, which smells like a campfire in November. The added bonus of natural salts is that they've got stronger, deeper tastes, and you therefore need less, and this is coming from someone who salts the crap out of her food. It's important to point out that if you're eating a lot of sugar, whether with your sodium chloride, in candy, or as simple carbohydrates, you're probably going to crave salt like a boss to counteract all the sweetness. Cutting down on sugar means you'll need less salt, and if you're eating a healthy, un-stripped salt, you'll be getting essential minerals along with your meal instead of heart problems. Win-win-win.

In summery:

1) Simple carbohydrates are sugar. While our bodies do need sugars to function, they run best on complex carbohydrates that digest slower and give us a little boost of protein. If you're like me and eat bread and pasta all the time, consider switching up for more brown rice and buckwheat to balance yourself out. For the record, granola and oatmeal are simple carbs doused in sugar. Avoid them.

2) Your table salt has sugar in it. It's completely devoid of nutrients and you need shit-tons to make anything taste good. Spoil yourself with a colourful, mineral-rich sea or rock salt and experience both amazing new tastes and health benefits that will protect (in reasonable amounts) instead of harm your heart.

3) Although we all hate to hear it, vegetarians and vegans need to be mindful of their protein intake. It's very possible to be totally healthy on a plant-based diet, but us lazy meat-avoiders have to be careful. If you're like me and don't particularly care to eat beans every day, make sure you're eating lots of whole grains and nuts. If you're also like me and can't really afford/keep forgetting to buy nuts, or are getting really deficient in this important macro-nutrient, consider getting a hemp or plant-based protein powder.

4) Mr Atkins' program is dangerous and dumb. Your body needs fat, carbs, and protein. Give it good quality and reasonable amounts of all three, exercise a little, and stress less, and you won't have to worry about your weight.

5) Food journalism isn't a good long-term habit, I personally think, but it's not a bad idea to log your eating habits for a week or so and then critically look them over - do you eat a lot of sugar? Simple carbs? Salt? Are you stressed out? Do you poop? Are you eating late at night? Take responsibility for your own health. I'll be seeing a naturopath later this month who can help me out with the specifics of my protein deficiency and organize some better eating habits, but in the meantime, I know what I basically need to fix. It's no good waiting for someone else to take care of you; you're the best specialist you've got.

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

Who Invited The Herbivore?

OR

A U-Pick Adventure and The Vegetarian Who Doesn't Preach

Oxford, Nova Scotia, calls itself the Blueberry Capital of the World. It's got fields and fields of blueberry farms and a blueberry festival, and a giant, slightly horrifying metal blueberry statue at the first rest stop off the highway, complete with a Tim Hortons. 

"Oh heeeeeeeeey."

I was nowhere near Oxford, though. That was useless information for your next trivia competition at the pub. Now you know the answer, should anyone quiz you on the obscure and rather sad slogans of towns in my province.

Bedford: A Traditional Stopping Place

Stewiacke: Halfway Between The North Pole and The Equator

Truro: The Hub of Nova Scotia

Two weeks ago we went to my new favourite place in the Valley, Dempsey Corner Orchards. GF and I went last year, but too late in the season for anything really good. This time we brought friends and sunscreen and plaid shirts (lesbo chic) and completely forgot to pack a lunch. Oops.

We got our hands filthy and fed screaming kids and pulled a really heavy wagon back and forth in the blazing summer sun for hours - for fun. 

Dempsey is a gorgeous U-Pick farm in Aylesford, Nova Scotia. As the name implies, they grow the food, and you pick it off the trees/bushes or dig it out of the ground. Not only are the workers super nice and the farm full of variety and the animals adorable, but the owner is a riot. She appeared during our U-Pick 101 session, draped herself all over our teacher, wailed about how she'd been missing her since a whole day ago, then offered us a pregnant cat. She also tried to sell us a book by asking, "Do you like to read? Do you poop? If you keep it in the bathroom this book is perfect for extended stays." My kind of woman.

I mentioned before that I generally don't get to eat fruit because I can't afford to. Despite Oxford being only about an hour away, blueberries can cost anywhere from $4-$7 per two handfuls. Just about a cup of berries hardly feeds one person, let alone two for two weeks. For a poor almost-student, fruit is just out of the question. U-Pick fruit is the exception to this rule. Not only did I score enough blueberries to satisfy me for probably a good chunk of the winter (six boxes), but I got them organic and for $2.50 each.

GF also got a huge kick out of digging white potatoes, and we came home with probably three or four pounds for less than $3. There's absolute benefit to buying in bulk and doing the harvesting work yourself. Provided we can keep them at an optimal temperature (Warm Apartment Hates Potatoes: A Memoir), we'll have three months worth of food for $18.

On a related note, we also picked up 8 kilos (16 pounds) of rice for $15 from the grocery store. Rice and Lentils are a very cheap, base staple for really tough times that everyone should be aware of - it's much healthier and less expensive than, say, Hamburger Helper (and requires less attention to cook).

"Little Dog" begging me with his beautiful
two-coloured eyes to feed him more cookie.

Dempsey has a beautiful big yard besides the gardens that kids can play in. Around it are pens full of farm animals, enjoying their day-to-day life and so used to attention that the goats, pigs, and baby cow (named "Daisy" - can you believe that?) will come running when someone approaches, screaming for affection (and probably food). There were rabbits, ducklings, two hilarious piggies, two breeds of hen and a rooster, sheep, goats, and the cow, plus four absolutely precious old dogs, whom I referred to as "Fluffy Dog", "Fluffy Puppy", "Dead Dog" (he laid around so still), and "Little Dog" and fed under a picnic table. I had my hands all over any animal that would stay still long enough (pig noses feel so weird!) and had to help get Daisy the calf into the goat pen without the goats escaping, during which time I had my fingers licked and became a cow whisperer.

For the last year or so I've gone from a relaxed vegetarian to more of a flexitarian (someone who generally avoids meat but won't disregard it completely), but it struck me when I was feeding Daisy how like the dogs she was. She had such gorgeous big brown eyes and was so dainty and polite as she took grass from my hand. I think I fell in love with her and her shyness and little hooves, and it kind of hit me while I was petting her neck that I've eaten bigger versions of her. That thought upset me the whole drive back to the big city.

Everyone knows how food animals are treated in developed countries. I don't have to quote any hippie books or activist websites on the horrors of feedlots and slaughterhouses. It's sick. But we don't make the connection of hamburger = tortured cow because we're not seeing it daily, and because we much prefer the delusion of the happy Dempsey-esque farm life for Bessie or Daisy the Former. I've let myself slip into that delusion, going, "I'll buy humane, grass-fed, local beef when I have the money, but I can only afford regular stuff right now." Really, I should be taking responsibility for the practice I'm promoting with my appetite, and just avoid eating those animals who have as much personality (if not as much brainpower) as my childhood dog. I wouldn't want my boy or Fluffy Puppy in a slaughterhouse.

(I will, however, continue making broth from animal bones, because GF does eat meat, and I will not waste food.)

So the herbivore has returned. Admittedly, I've gotten used to eating meat now, so stopping is a bit of a challenge. But I'm determined, for both the sake of the baby cows in the world and for my own health. Next stop: hummus.

Things to pick from this:

1) Buying in bulk is almost always cheaper than pre-packaged. Picking your own food lowers the cost even more. If you can get to a U-Pick before winter, do so, and stock up!

2) Go to Dempsey Corner Orchards, or, if you're too far away, check out their quirky Facebook page.

3) What you eat is your business. Take a second to reflect on your business expenses. Could you eat less of something and splurge on the more humane/antibiotic-free/local version? Would it save you money? Could you consider limiting what meats you eat? Could you be passionate about your food choices without criticizing others for theirs? Let's all be open-minded!

4) Dogs love carrots.

With love,

- Leah