The Post-Thanksgiving Stomach Sweep-Out

OR

A Long Weekend Cleanse For The Poor and Bloated

First and foremost, I must apologize for skipping out of posting these last three times. Between GF being in the hospital (she's okay) and cramming for a heavy-duty Anatomy and Physiology test in school, I was a little pressed for time. Also, last Monday was Canadian Thanksgiving (which we like to refer to as "Thanksgiving" in the same way one would refer to "gay marriage" as "marriage" when they're used to it), and although I watched no tediously long football games and had no turkey to put me to sleep, I knowingly neglected my blog to dedicate my time to the love of my life and her cooking. So basically, I'm lazy. The lucky thing about having a new blog is that no one really notices when you skip out.

Like every other Canuck from here to Alberta - because I'm convinced everybody in BC is athletic and shapely and would never gorge themselves on mashed potatoes and gravy the way Maritimers do - I suffered the after-effects of a delicious, uncombined, heavy-on-the-starch Thanksgiving dinner with rounds of hiccups, water retention, gas, and my personal favourite, bloating (Revenge of The Baloonha Belly!). While I can accept the consequences of my speed-eating gracefully, I can't help but want them to go away just as easily as they come on. It took twenty minutes of eating to make me uncomfortable for three days, and this is just the beginning of the holiday season, packed with identical meals. Ah, the North American lifestyle.

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Being as I'm in a classroom with a bunch of health freaks two days out of the week, a lot of conversation comes up about green - or for that matter, any colour - juices or smoothies. On any given day at least a third of my classmates have mason jars full of substances as green as cartoon toxic slime, slightly runnier than paste, and they slowly chug through it, somehow, without gagging. As appetizing as that sounds, fresh smoothies and juices are making an impact in the holistic world as widespread as the yoga movement. Movies like Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead have accentuated the reasoning behind consuming liquid leaves: plants are full of nutrients and it's hard to eat a lot of plants at once, but if you juice your plants you can eat a shit-ton in one go, thereby flooding your insides with nutrients without experiencing digestive stress. Bam, instant health! This is endearing and a great idea if you can afford tiny $5.00 bags of fruit thrice a week or more, but for those of us in the Magic Bullet boat, blending anything well is a far-off dream and affording a juicer - and the veggies to go in it - is a laughable goal. Certainly I can plan for the future, where GF's the family breadwinner and I can lounge around doing martial arts and drinking greens all day, but in the meantime I have to accept that these lovely alkalizing beverages are way out of my price range. There is a limit on how well I can take care of my body, and it's called rent.

This is a similar situation, I imagine, for many other folks fresh out of their parents' houses or struggling to make ends meet. Minimum wage is definitely the minimum one can live off of, and some folks are working with less than that. As much as vegan and locavorian books preach how affordable healthy food is, there are days when a loud, "Eff you," is the only appropriate response to the pages and their writers. This said, during my stint of über-hydration back in my first blog post, I discovered the only-slightly-splurgy poor man's way to clean and soothe one's digestive tract without living off lemon water and tea alone. I call it: The "Gerard, Is This A Grapefruit?" Weekend Cleanse*.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with all this fasting and juicing stuff, here's your 101 summery: A fast is when you go for a period of time, be it hours or days, without food. Many religions practice fasting. Persons on a fast can choose to eschew solid food and eat only liquids like soup and juice, or neglect anything beyond water for their fasting period. Fasts come in varying intensities and time periods, but the basic idea is that you don't eat food, so your digestive system gets a break. Cleansing, on the other hand, is less drastic and can still involve solid sustenance. It generally excludes anything hard to digest and focuses on simple foods to ease up on the tummy without starving the body of anything it might want. Anyone who's spent multiple lazy days in the summer eating nothing but fruit knows what a cleanse can feel like. If you're under a lot of stress day-to-day, or are working on upping a certain nutrient you're deficient in, doing either might be a bad idea. Talk to a nutritionist or naturopath. If you're pregnant, just don't.

So removed are most folks from what food is that upon asking my cousin if I could dig around for breakfast in their kitchen while visiting a few months ago, she apologized  for the "lack of groceries" in their fridge, full to bursting with fresh fruit. To me, my godparents' kitchen stock was food nirvana. To them, it was embarrassingly empty of quick-to-make meals. There's a really interesting point-of-view analysis to make there, but it's not the point of my story. Excited by the abundance, I had starting making humongous salads with gusto, savoring the feeling and taste of fresh vegetables and fruit, lounging around and taking long walks at leisure (because that's what you do in tiny Cape Breton towns), and drinking, I'm sure, vat-loads of tea. I noticed, on my last day before returning home, that I felt amazing. Light, bloat-free, awake and hydrated. I felt like every movement was a drink of sunlight, if that makes any sense. I hadn't had a single juice or smoothie, and I'm happy to report that I ate cooked food too, so there, raw foodies.

As much as I'd like to duplicate exactly what I'd done those few months back, I don't have three free days of nothing to do, I live in a loud, non-relaxing city, and fruit is expensive. But I have leftover vegetables from my parents, discount mushrooms and melons from a shop down the street, and enough time in the morning to whip up some basic salads. That, my friends, is enough. To be honest, it's a lot easier than doing a juice fast, too; there's no loud machinery, no supremely different tastes or textures, more fibre, and overall, it's way less expensive and time-consuming. True, you probably aren't getting as much of a nutrient dump as a juice fast would provide, but for those of us who have never done a cleanse or have habits and cravings they're trying to break free of, this little cleanse can be a massive help without all the mental and digestive stress. If you're overweight or currently living on Mickey D's, an intense fast can actually make you really ill, as it kicks up all the toxins and fats stored in your body, and can give you crazy diarrhea, since your guts probably haven't seen carrot paste since you were an infant (or maybe not at all) . A basic vegetable cleanse gives your tummy a break from hard-to-digest food, and the huge influx of liquids and fibre will help you poop and clear out anything that's been stuck in your intestines or bothering your liver without the associated nausea. Simple, but effective.

To do The "Gerard, Is This A Grapefruit?" Weekend Cleanse, you'll need three not-too-busy days, as many green foods as you can get your hands on, a bunch of apples ('tis the season!), and, if you fancy it, tea. Herbal tea, please. A cup of green mid-day won't hurt, but try to keep the caffeine to a minimum and avoid it in the morning. To make things easier if you've got, say, kids to take care of or very little time to yourself, wash up everything the day before you start your cleanse so you don't have to worry about it later. When you hit day one, start your morning with a mug of hot leaf juice. If you want more, have more. The whole idea of this "fast" is to eat as much as you want, which sounds backwards, I know. But when you do it, you're going to be having water and herbal tea, very little heavy proteins or starches, vegetables up the yin-yang, a good dollop of sweet fruit, and very little salt and sugar. When you're eating good food, you can have as much as you feel like shoving in your face. To cover my bases for those of you worried about how safe a cleanse is, consider:

1) People have been doing fasts for thousands of years. While living off just water (or air, because there are people that crazy) for a week isn't great for you, short periods of easy-to-digest food give your poor overworked digestive system time to rest. You sleep to rest your mind; why not fast to rest your body?

2) All vegetables have protein. Per 100g, a leafy green like chard or a floret like broccoli has 10g or so of protein, where 100g of steak would have about 8g. Honestly, you'll be fine. Almost everybody in North America and the developed world are actually over-sufficient in protein. It's hard to digest and acidic to the body, and being as we want to be alkaline inside, it'd do you good to give yourself a break from meats and dairy and whatever else is pushed to get your daily dose of the macronutrient. The only way you'll ever become deficient is if you eat only fruit (and no avocado) for years. Chill.

3) Doing a vegetable cleanse is the farthest thing from starving, if you're wondering. On a daily basis so many of us are eating tons and still suffering the munchies at the end of the day, because our bodies are going, "Hellooooooooooo, I didn't get my potassium! I need that! Go eat something!" When you chock yourself full of water (which cells love) and the vitamins and minerals vegetables are full of, your body gets its daily doses and keeps quiet, even if you're consuming fewer calories. You'll feel less hungry, suffer fewer or no hunger pains, and feel wicked good, because you're not weighed down with the task of digestion. Plant foods, especially when you're not including grains or beans, are pretty calorie-thin, though, which is why you can and will want to eat shit-tons of them. I'm serious about the "as much as you want" thing. There are no dainty salad-bowl-size salads in my house. There are mixing bowls for one. Pack enough food for an army everywhere you go. You will need it.

So, the basics of this cleanse are thus: Eat vegetables whenever you want, water in between, and an apple or two a day, and aim for as much raw as possible. The greener everything is the better. Salads are going to be your number one BFF, but feel free to have some cooked up veggies too; avoid white potatoes for the three days, because they're basically all starch and sugar, but carrots, squash, turnip, and anything like them are all fine.

Apples, cantaloupe, oranges, onion, shallots, garlic, broccoli, cauliflower, pomegranate seeds, rutabaga,
kale, enoki mushrooms, asparagus, carrots, tomatoes, radishes.

Water is your best friend. If you're bored, watching TV, or otherwise generally chilling out, try to make sure you've got a glass of either water (unflavoured, please, unless you're just dropping orange chunks in it) or a mug of tea in your hand. Think of your digestive tract as a blocked pipe; you're pumping Draino (fibre) into it like crazy, so you're going to need to flush everything out with a bunch of water, too. You won't feel half as good on this cleanse if you're not drinking. That said, and this should be common sense, but you shouldn't be having any pop, juice, or otherwise non-water drinks. Coffee is out, caffeinated tea is out (this includes decaf, because it's a chemical mess), and alcohol is absolutely a no-go.

As much as it can be super hard for folks who have sugar addictions, avoiding large amounts of fruit is kind of a part of this cleanse. Even though the fibre in whole fruit does generally stop it from spiking your blood sugar levels, fructose is still fructose, and you'll want to haul back on it a lot. Feel free to spice the crap out of your meals - if you're feelin' an autumn-y breakfast, throw some pumpkin together with cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves, but hold the maple syrup. Keep a weary eye out for pre-combined spice mixes à la "pumpkin pie spice" that could have included sugar - anything doesn't sound like food or ends in "-ose" should be avoided.

Pepper is totally free game. Go nuts. Spices are all great. They'll actually help things along. If you don't eat a whole lot of processed food day to day, and you don't have blood pressure issues, allow yourself a little bit of sea salt on the odd meal during your fast, if you must. But by little I mean, like, a pinch. Not a hefty dousing. Do the same as you would for the sugar and check mixed spice bottles for added salt or sodium anything.

As I said before, you're going to need to go easy on the fruit, but they're not under a total ban. If you want to throw some blueberries on your salad to make it taste better, you go, Glen Coco. Just keep in mind that you want the majority of your food to be from the vegetable side of the ring. On a related note, I know it's hard to make salads taste good without dressing if you're used to it. There are still some kinds of greens I can't eat without some sort of sauce on top. But in general, try to stick to spices, olive oil (just a spoonful!), and a sprinkle of salt. Lemon juice is tasty to some people. Maybe vinegar, if that's your thing. If you need more flavor, try blending up some berries into a sauce. If you really must use store-bought dressing, try to use little, and avoid anything "free". If it's fat/salt/sugar/whatever free, it's probably a chemical shitstorm of things you shouldn't ingest. Take responsibility for consuming "unhealthy" food and eat it in its natural state or not at all.

In closing, go easy on yourself. Too many people get hung up on what they're supposed to eat or not eat and in what portion sizes and lose the whole point of a cleanse - to clean. You're aiming to soothe your body by making everything easy to digest and wholesome. Don't worry if you want to throw chicken in your salad, or if you sneak a scoop of mac and cheese from your kid's plate. It's not all or nothing.

A couple of tips that you don't need to follow but that will make your cleanse that much better:

1) Try to leave 20 minutes between each meal and drinks. Most of us are used to having a glass of something with food, but it actually messes up your saliva production and waters down your digestive juices. If you really need to, take a couple of sips of water while you're eating, but have as little as possible.

2) Chew your food! Seriously, pay stupid close attention to how much you chew each bite. Consider: there're no teeth below your mouth, so the less you chew the harder the rest of your digestive tract has to work. Food should be a paste before you swallow it.

3) When you reach the last day of your cleanse, try to ease yourself back into heavier foods. Suddenly dumping five cups of pasta into a freshly-cleaned digestive tract is just going to give you cramps and instantly take away the light, floaty feeling you get after three days of veggies. Instead, have a bit of chicken at lunch, or a cup of lentils with dinner.

4) Do yourself a favour and don't do this cleanse if your climate is now very chilly. There aren't enough fats and proteins in vegetables for the calorie boost you need in the winter to keep warm. Everyone's perception of cold is different, sure, but spring and early autumn are actually the best times to fast/cleanse. Trust your body - I've got too cold a temperament for cleansing in the colder months, so I don't.

So, because we all love point form and this is certainly long enough to give anyone attention deficiency problems, I'm going to summarize:

- Stock your house with vegetables and fruit. More of the latter than former. Discount racks are the best. Buy in bulk. Apples are like natural multivitamins, so have one or two a day. Try anything leafy and green. Eat like candy. Vary what you're eating - living off rutabaga is impressive, but not healthy.

- Drink water and herbal tea like it's going out of style. Try not to drink and eat at the same time. 

- Carry around enough food to feed six people and eat as much as you want whenever you want. Seriously, eat vegetables until you're going to burst. You can't have too many.

- Feel awesome!

With love,
- Leah

*The name of this game stems from my finding a grapefruit in my godparents' refrigerator with "Gerard, is this a grapefruit?" written on the rind with permanent market. My uncle can't eat this citrus fruit because it messes with his blood pressure meds, but had for some reason bought one. There, I'm not sounding crazy anymore - it's a phrase of association with my three days of awesome cleansing. This also brings up a point that anyone on prescription medication should remember: don't eat any weird spices or take any unfamiliar supplements until you're sure they're not going to react badly with your drugs. If you're on blood pressure meds, avoid citrus fruit like the plague.

DISCLAIMER TIME. I'm not a physician. If at any point you feel like shit or faint or are starving, nevermind what I've told you and go eat a sandwich or something. You know your body better than anyone; if it says something's wrong, SOMETHING'S WRONG. Please consider your state of health before you do any cleanse or fast - if you have blood sugar issues, are taking medications, have gaping nutrient deficiencies, don't know an orange from a grapefruit, or are feeling overwhelmed, USE YOUR BETTER JUDGEMENT. Talk to your doctor, a nutritionist, a friend who's done a million cleanses before, or consult Google. Take nothing at face value. Be inquisitive. Do what's best for you.

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 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

Why Hippies Rule My Bathroom

OR

Saving Water: A Guide For The Non-Squeamish

Ahh, that quote is so awkward it's almost cute. "If it's yellow, let it mellow." What does that mean, anyway? "Mellow" has long since left our vocabulary in urban North America. Am I meant to let the contents of my bowels chill out? Relax? Is it an implication that they're getting high? Do I grab a joint from one of the late-night teenagers in Victoria Park and chuck it in the toilet?

As scandalous as this might sound, I've been following the "yellow mellow" rule for four years now. When I was living in Labrador with a houseful of teenagers, it occurred to me how much water we were wasting on a daily basis. Nine people going to the bathroom up to six times a day went through a lot of eleven-litre (three gallon) flushes. I brought it up in one of our quaint Katimavik meetings and we all agreed to follow the slogan for the sake of the environment (and to prevent our old toilet from leaking due to overuse). 

The Great Lakes

For those of you who don't know, the ditty goes, "If it's yellow, let it mellow; if it's brown, flush it down," which means exactly what it sounds like. Bodily liquids stay in the toilet until someone does a #2 and flushes it all away. It was a saying apparently invented by a Californian politician in the 1970's to promote water conservation. There's a huge debate (which you can find through Google if you care enough to look) about whether or not being selective about your flushes is worth the effort or just weird and hippie-ish, but I prefer like to err on the side of caution in a world where huge quantities (2.5 billion litres) of the freshwater Great Lakes are disappearing every day.

Somehow, GF and I both continued to follow this "yellow mellow" slogan when we moved in together, even though we'd never conversed about it. It's become an unsaid rule. Granted, that rule is ignored when we have guests, because - despite urine being completely sterile - a bowlful of yellow water comes off as a little unsanitary. (Additionally, the con side of the "is it worth it?" argument says that urine sitting in the bowl can dirty your toilet faster, but if you're keeping hydrated, your piss should be both almost clear and less acidic, so it shouldn't be all that corrosive or smelly.) Being as we don't have a fancy low-flow or duel-flush toilet, we're probably saving something like 110 litres of freshwater per day. That's over 40,000 litres (10,500 gallons) of perfectly good drinking water a year.

We're in an apartment building, so we don't pay for our water. Most people with houses do, however. For those people, there is a very small incentive to flushing less when you're charged for it; lowering the amount of flushes can save you anywhere from $10 to $80 a year, depending on how many people you live with. So there's that. But mostly there's a responsibility we're all saddled with, in this world of climate change, to preserve energy. You might walk to work to save gas and turn of the lights in rooms you're not using, but if you're going to the bathroom often you're sending a hundred litres or more to sewage plants every day to be purified, which takes shit-tons of electricity. It's kind of a silly thing to do, when urine really doesn't need much to be turned back into water. 

If you can't deal with the idea of leaving your waste in the throne for everyone to see, consider putting bottles full of rocks or a couple bricks (wrapped in a plastic bag so they don't disintegrate and hurt the plumbing) in the back tank. This will take up space and prevent your toilet from using as much water. The older your toilet is, the more water you'll be saving.

Why should we bother?

1) There are droughts all over the world, and you have water. Be responsible about it. We're all in this together, like it or not.

2) You (should) turn off the water when you brush your teeth/wash your hands, don't you? Why not cut back on something that takes x10 the energy and resources?

Sloshingly, 

- Leah

Special GF Recipe: Carrot and Sweet Potato Soup

OR

The Three-Ingredient Autumn Dinner

(Being as GF now knows I've been writing about her - and she likes the alternate name, because it reminds her of Final Fantasy VIII - she's agreed to write recipes for my blog! This is good news for both you and I, because I can't cook well/don't measure with recipes and she's a cutie. This is one of my favourite soups she makes. It's super simple and is both light and filling. I've put it in a bottle and had it as a drink before for travel convenience. Adding the ginger in makes it to die for.)

(Sorry, I didn't have a photo of the soup from when it was last made.
This is it frozen.)

Hi everybody! GF here with on of my many delicious recipes! Today it's going to be a... drum-roll, please! Sweet Potato and Carrot Soup! Or SPACS! That sounded and looked better in my head. Don't care! Rolling with it!

So, to create your SPACS you'll need the following items:

- A big pot (or a small one. Depends how much soup you want.)

- 2 large bowls

- Large carrots (5-20, again depending how much soup you want.)

- 1-3 Large sweet potatoes (more soup = more potatoes)

- A small chunk of ginger root (optional - it's great for flus and colds and icky feels)

- Wooden spoon/plastic ladle

- Peeler and a knife

- 1L or 1-2 cans of stock (I usually use beef)

Now that you've assembled your stuff, we begin!

Step One: Peel your carrots and potatoes! If you're using it, peel a tiny chunk of ginger, too.

Step Two: Cut your vegetables into chunks! Small chunks are best. 

Step Three: Toss your vegetables (ginger too) into your pot and add water! You want the veggies to be totally covered with about a third more.

Step Four: Boil them babies! (Don't cover the pot!)

Step Five: When your carrots and potatoes are super soft (super duper soft) remove the pot from the heat. Carefully scoop the veggies into a large bowl. If you used ginger, that can go in your compost bin now. Pour the (now orange) water you boiled your stuff in into another large bowl. (Got that? One bowl has boiled veggies, the other has orange broth.)

Step Six: Pureé/mash your vegetables! It's easier to do in smaller amounts and with the leftover liquid. Scoop some of the orange broth into whatever you're using to mash or blend you veggies (blender, bowl) and then toss the smushed up stuff back into your pot!

Step Seven: Once your veggies have been turned to glop and are in your pot you can, should you wish, add some more of your broth - but not too much, because you're going to pour in the entire carton/cans of your liquid stock! All of it!

Step Eight: Gently heat and stir your soup for about 20 minutes, then serve! 

Bonus: your leftover carrot broth can now be stored and used as a soup base or cooking broth! Try using it to cook your Rice and Lentils instead of just plain water. Yum!

(P.S:

1) There are such things as rainbow carrots. That was terrible English. Feel free to use purple, yellow, or white carrots (not parsnips, although I'm sure they'd be yummy) in place of orange ones for this recipe! Your soup might have more of a brown colour, bit it'll still taste the same - and it'll have the added benefits of different phytonutrients!

2) You don't have to have a big, powerful Vita-mix to make cream soups - we use a little Magic Bullet. A potato masher also works, although it'll be chunkier.)

Enjoy!

- GF (and 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

Please, Sir, May I Have Some More?

OR

How Putting Bones In The Freezer Helps Keep You Fed

I'm one of those people who knows the words to 90% of the songs that come on the radio.

Ask me who the song's performed by or what it's called and I'll stare at you like a deer in the headlights, but I can generally memorize at least the tune of a song the first time I hear it and know a good chunk of the lyrics by the third. I have no idea how I learn them, I just do. 

Like how double-jointed people don't know how they freakishly dis-form their limbs. Ugh.

In my tiny apartment freezer I have a bag of green bin-worthy vegetable scraps, and, until recently, a bag of leftover chicken bones and skin. They get tucked away on the freezer door or in the back by the compost*, ignored until I find potatoes that are going soft (always cut them open before you toss them! If they're still white they're still good!) or score free veggie tray leftovers from a party. Then I pull one out and make myself some soup.

Making stock from scratch is one of those things an alarming number of people don't know how or are too hesitant to try to do. It's not hard, but the convenient cartons or cans of broth at the grocery store are just so much easier, and make the task of making from scratch seem, especially to a busy student, worker, or parent, really daunting and unnecessary.

Not to knock the canned stuff - we do keep a couple cartons on hand when we need something quick, and for flavors we don't really have bones around for, like beef - but while homemade may not be necessary, it is worth it. Not only is homemade stock 100% less salty (figures are just pulled out of my arse) but it has no preservatives, hasn't been pasteurized, and often has more, or an actual amount of - in the case of meat-based stocks - gelatin, which is super good for those of us with achy joints. Plus it tastes better, and is made of things you already have lying around, instead of costing you an extra $2.29.

It's like Mr. Christie VS Grandma. Christie's stuff is pretty good, but there's nothing like a homemade chocolate chip cookie, Grandma-style. Not that my grandmothers really baked chocolate chip cookies, but they did make homemade bread, and that stuff is beautiful.

Making stock is stupidly easy, too. I was going to say that GF taught me how to do it, but actually, I think it was my mother. Mom's a very "throw stuff together and hope it works" sort of cook, but she's good at it. "Mix and match" suppers and "The Great Fry-up" are specialties of hers. She also makes a damn good turkey soup. She once showed me how to make that soup, but never told me how to make the broth. I must have gleaned the technique from watching her every Christmas day.

It's like the music thing. I don't know how I know it. I just do.

Start by saving the crap everyone else tells you to throw out (unless it's fuzzy or blue or smells bad). Those almost-slimy lettuce pieces from a salad. Onion skins that aren't quite brown. Celery leaves or asparagus bottoms or the tiny roots on beet greens. If you roast a chicken or have another sort of meat product with bones, keep everything you don't eat, including the cartilage or leftover meat. You can mix the veggies and meat or keep them separate. I generally keep mine apart (in case of vegetarian guests), but I recently made a ham and pea soup with a bunch of veggies and half an apple-roasted ham as the base (plus ham I'd scavenged from the dinner table of a family get-together).

Before

Once you've got a medium-sized Ziploc bag full, dump the contents into a big pot (no need to defrost) and fill it with water. You can put as much water in as you'd like, but the more you have the more diluted your stock will be. A 2-to-1 ratio is usually good. Feel free to add bay leaves or any other spice you'd like. Turn on the stove to about medium heat and let the suckers boil!

After

(Maniacal laughter)

Depending on what you're boiling, this step could take one to five hours. Bigger animals = more time (a good analogy for digestion, by the way). Give beef bones four to five hours, pork three to four, poultry one to two, and vegetables one to two, depending on how potent you want your stock. Once your water's turned a rich colour (anywhere from gold to brown to red, if you used beets), strain your stock through a colander - or just tilt the pot while holding the lid at an angle - into another pot. TA DAA. The pretty leftover liquid is stock! You can use it right away or freeze it or... drink it, I guess.

On an ending note, for all you folks who fit the "I'm too busy" category, remember:

1) Homemade stock is free, especially if all your scraps are scavenged instead of bought.

2) Homemade stock isn't loaded with salt (unless you dump it in there) and contains lots of vitamins and minerals that the process of preserving canned stock kills off.

3) You don't have to make stock right away (although you can; Mom always started making turkey stock as soon as the bird had cooled and been picked over). Even freezer-burnt meats and vegetables make tasty stock, so you don't have to stuff soup prep into an already busy day. Wait for a lazy Sunday.

4) An excellent tip from Mom: If you're making an animal-based soup, don't put the meat in with the stock bones. Add the meat last (because it's pre-cooked anyway) during your soup construction to keep it flavorful! 

Sweet Simmering!
-Leah 

*We keep it there to avoid smells and fruit flies. The apartment is so warm in the summer that vegetables, fruit, and bread will go bad within a couple days if we keep them out of the fridge. There's such thing as silicone buckets specially made for folks with our problem, but a reused plastic bag is way cheaper than a $50 tub, thank you very much. 

I'm Gonna Drown You, Mister Fish!

OR
Keeping Your Body Hydrated To Fight A Bloated Belly

Something really cool happened.

Something amazing and astounding and really exciting happened.

I went a whole day without being bloated!

(Cue the cheers.)

Okay, so maybe my gastric achievements aren't that exciting to anyone else, but there's a good lesson included in the story. I'm a girl who habitually adds salt to my meals (to the point where they're completely unpalatable to anyone else) and I'll have maybe two glasses of water a day, which is way short of the generally recommended eight. Oops. Both of these are perfect habits to get into if you're fond of the ballon-meets-Happy-Buddha (let's call it Baloonha) body type, where everything below your belly button looks like its been violated by a tire pump. Your pants dig into your guts whenever you sit. You feel chubby, even if you're a really athletic person. Your insides gurgle in the decibel range of a lawn mower with sounds unheard of since the prehistoric era. It's just all bad. But as far back as I remember, my body's always been like this, so I figured it was just a result of where my fat stores sit (raise your hand if you're a pear! Genetics and stress hormones* for the win!)

Enter my tea cabinet. Well, don't actually, because it's not that big. Inside there's cute little antique cups and saucers from GF's grandma, supplements I should be taking, a stash of hot chocolate for our ten-month-long winters, and tea. Shit-tons of tea. Ye olde standard orange pekoe, herbal, black, white, green, and one that turns the water hot pink. Loose, bagged, in containers and not. We have a hoarder-level stockpile of tea. It's herbageddon. I don't even know why there's so much of it. GF doesn't drink it. I don't drink it. I think its single purpose in being there is for us to force on guests.

“Did you want anything? Tea? Water?”
“I'm good, thanks.”
“Tea it is.”

But here I stood, six-o'-stupid-o'-clock in the morning, eyeing the teas with a lust usually reserved for GF's curry casserole. I brewed myself a cup and sat on the couch reading hippie magazines and probably contemplated life or something equally overwhelming enough to make drinking said tea automatic. I finished my mug of tea within an hour. Then I brewed another cup (I must've been sleepwalking), and sometime later had more. I drank tea like it was going out of style. I think I went through about five cups that day. The next day I had more. We went to visit relatives and I stuffed my face with freeloaded veggies and fruit. Downed more tea. Sipped water. Et cetera. I'm not sure what compelled me to keep doing it – maybe I was thinking of all those “green tea is good for you” articles the hippie mags had shoved into my memory – but it was starting to feel really good. I've got a cold constitution (anything under 24C is uncomfortable to me), and downing a couple of hot leaf juices before brekkie was warming me up and making my tummy happy. My body was getting much more than two cups a day of liquid. The tea stocks were starting to diminish. It was win-win for everybody but the kettle (he worked so hard!).

Maybe this is just happens to me, but do you ever notice how trim you look in the morning? As soon as I dump fuel in the tank (cue prehistoric noises), all the taut tummy muscles I'd been admiring in the mirror just give up and surrender to the Gravity Demons I'm convinced live in my intestines, but before I drink or eat anything I am the (less athletic-looking) prime example of firm form. I am a goddess with bedhead. I am rocking the pear hips like no D'anjou ever could. I am getting way too personal. Sorry.

Flash-forward (or -back, at this point) to the fourth day of my incessant tea-chugging. I eat breakfast. I have lunch. I lounge around all day. I perfect bad posture.

The Baloonha belly doesn't appear.

Bless GF for putting up with my raving about it at every quiet moment. I was ecstatic. As it turns out, ingesting piles of salt and not hydrating yourself are a perfect combo for chronic dehydration, which produces a bloated belly. My cells were starving for water, and the Dead Sea treatment I was sticking to was only making what liquids my guts could get all that more precious. We do get a good portion of water from our food (and I eat a lot), but two cups of pure H2O is hardly enough to feed everything in a 5'7” body, especially in the summer. Once I started pumping liquid into my body, my guts realized that there'd be more coming than what they had right now, and they didn't have to hang on to the water I put there a week ago.

It's like Finding Nemo, only your cells are Marlin, and Dory is the tea, and the water you drink is a wave of Nemos that--

Y'know what, let's forget that analogy. The point is, your body needs water, because it's 98% made of the stuff, and you keep crying and breathing and pissing it out. How rude of you. The polite thing to do would be at least to put back what you take out.

So, in review:

1) Your body is a hoarder and it needs reassurance. Feeding it water is feeling it love.

2) Cut back on the salt (I recommend piling on the garlic and onion) and double the liquids you consume if you get Baloonha Belly. You're probably dehydrated or constipated. Water helps both!

3) If you're like me and can't handle the cold, opt for tea instead of ice water for your daily drink. Just make sure you're sticking to herbal teas, because black and green contain caffeine, which is a diuretic (makes you pee) and don't technically hydrate you at all. Feel free to have a cup or two daily for the perk-up or antioxidants, however.

4) Tea > flavoured water/water flavouring. There's no added sugar or weird sugar substitutes and no chemicals in the former. Just rehydrated plant guts. Mmm. Plant guts.

'Til later,
- Leah

*The hormone cortisol, which is produced when you're really stressed out, lowers your sensitivity to pain and helps give you a burst of energy, which are good things if you're being chased by a bear. If you're chronically stressed, cortisol can screw with your blood sugar and pressure and a host of other things. If you've got a persistent spare tire of fat at the top of your hips, cortisol is probably involved.