Everyday Bliss

@DesWalsh, Australian blogger of note has had a master stroke of genius. We were talking about #ThomasLeonard the other day and how he would have embraced social media. Probably been part-owner of something like Twitter only next gen. And Des says “What do you think about us coaches getting together and talking on Twitter like we did when Thomas was around?”

I said I thought it would be fantastic and why didn’t he go ahead and do that, and somehow @andymatic’s Andy Wibbels got involved and we both goaded Des into it.

So be there or be square, tune your TweetDeck to #coachchat on MONDAYS at 6pm Pacific (San Francisco) Time. If it catches on, it could become a regular thing. With your participation! So, what do you want to ask a bunch of seasoned coaches? What seasoning do you yourself have to put in the pot? Got a sticky client situation? Ethics issue? Cool new technique you love? Come talk about it!

You can read all about it on Des’s blog:

http://deswalsh.com/2010/07/29/launching-new-twitter-chat-stream-for-coaches-coachchat/

And I’ll be tuning in and throwing my saucy tuppenny into the ratatouille.

Speaking of Ratatouille, have you seen my recipe for my Parisian slimming masterpiece and darned good nosh, Rat-a-tat-touille? It’s on Facebook.

That’s Where I Have A Harvest Gift For You

Are we Facebook friends yet? If you friend me on Facebook, not only will we have the opportunity to chat (one great way is through photo comments), but you’ll get FREE TRAINING in how to make great tasting, Gourmet Gluten-Free Food in the Photo Essays just waiting for you in “The Arcane Foodie”. When you friend me, you can click these links and get total access to over 100 pages of recipes, like this “French Country Picnic” below:

In the FREE “Arcane Foodie” Eat-Right Gourmet Training: http://bit.ly/ArcaneFoodieFB

The infamous Rat-a-tat-touille Recipe & key to my
weightloss success, straight from my Paris kitchen:

http://bit.ly/Rat-a-tat-touille

You see here carrots, yellow onion, rocambole garlic, green onion, shallot, apple, green garlic, cabbage, tomato, mushroom, celery, cilantro…and whatever else is rattling around the veggie baskets. Rat-a-tat-touille means “clean the ‘fridge”.

Recipe instructions are below pictures on all the pages. You can follow a recipe’s progression as they are labelled “1, 2, 3″ in sequence.

WHY am I giving you this particular gift?

Because most people are having a funny relationship with food. And these are what are keeping me fit, trim, losing weight and truly enjoying what I prepare and eat. So it makes sense that it would be a really good thing to spread around. Tell your friends they can get their great healthy recipes here too! There’s room for everyone… 

Top Eating Right Tip: The less complicated food we put in our bodies, the more fiber and water content such as vegetables, the happier and healthier our bodies tend to be.

Another Harvest Gift for you
Snackin’ Right Gluten-Free Quito Road Guacamole

Put together with some gluten-free corn tortilla chips and snarf, muflnt, grmumfllle…..mmm… Your Aunt Lupita never
made it so good. You know I’m right. 

And finally, for the sweet-toothed, especially all
you women, we have the blissfully delicious

Gluten-Free Chocolat Pain de  Femme
Croissant pour mon chere amie Marie-Odile:

Pure Chocolate Lover’s PrOn: Midway through mixing, when the chocolate ganache (not Ganesh) is just starting to incorporate…

Chocolat Pain de Femme Croissant pour Marie-Odile #6

The ganache, mixed, will be slightly pebbly in texture but this tiny dusting of bits will melt into each other in the oven. Don’t stress about ‘em. Look at that surface sheen.

Great for spreading a soothing balm over those certain days of the month. Like Every Day.

Mmm, yes lord. Yes.

I hope you enjoy these heartfelt food reviews
and recipes to help you flow the Ease,
Grace, Joy & Eating Right Lifestyle!

Let me know what you’d like to see
and I’ll do my best to put it up at
The Arcane Foodie…

*** Update to the update 4/22: I’m going all the way home, to San Francisco on Saturday, 4/24, British Airways came thru with a last minute cancellation, called and booked me in. Wahoo! Leaving the rest as it was below though for posterity and export, to quote Bill Burroughs.   ***

Here it is folks, selected highlights of being stuck as a traveller behind “The Grey Curtain”:

If you’ve been following the Paris Adventure Online, following me on Twitter or reading my updates on Facebook (pretty much the main places I’m posting while travelling) you know that like thousands of others, I’ve been stranded in Europe by the volcanic ash cloud.

And wait for it…this just in on April 21st: Heathrow now back open. Thank the Lord! Whose name apparently, is Adonis. Nope, I’m not kidding. Lord Adonis is the British Secretary of Transport in charge of such things.

The image at right was taken from BBC News on April 21 at 12:30pm Paris time. These travellers have been dossing down in the airport for almost a week, finally got boarding cards today, and are celebrating with champagne. I’m for a hot tub, massage and liberal application of chocolate, myself.

And then there were the inevitable gallows humor jokes that sprang up on Twitter and Facebook. One of the best I heard was “No, no Iceland…we said send us all your CASH. Regards, Europe”.  Here’s a random selection  of others from Britain’s Channel 4 News:

@hjortur: Sorry for the flight delays, Europe. We were aiming for London, but it’s hard to be accurate when firing a volcano .

@andylockran: ”Iceland goes bankrupt, then manages to set their island on fire. This has insurance scam written all over it”.

@pdacosta: “The last wish of the Icelandic economy was to have its ashes scattered over Europe”.

@islandpastor: “Waiter, there’s volcanic ash in my soup”… Waiter: “I know, it’s a no-fly zone”

The Personal-Ash End Of Things

Like many others, I’ve been rebooked – five times at this point. Like others, had cases packed & was literally in taxi ready to go when I fortunately got emergency call from British Airways not to come to airport.  This was the only time btw (and the third time I was rebooked) that BA notifications worked.

BA was helpful as possible but would absolutely not book me on a flight to San Francisco. I was offered any place else in Europe, when the cloud lifted, but no place in North America.

Like many others, I was reduced to begging. They’d heard it all before and while sympathetic, were not going to offer me a refund so I could book another airline that *was* flying.

“I’ll take anything to the American continent – Canada, Mexico, Peru – you go to Peru, I can see a British Airways flight to Lima from Madrid – how about that? I can get to Madrid on the train….bus…donkey cart. Anything!”

Finally, after I squeaked my wheel loud and hard enough, and made an absolute pest of myself by calling every fifteen minutes: “Ms Webster, I see this is the ninth time you’ve contacted us today, let’s see what we can do to get you home” – that’s the ticket folks! I was offered a flight out this Saturday the 24th to Phoenix, AZ. I took it and resumed praying the thing would go through.

We’re hearing that Katla, the second dormant Icelandic volcano and a bigger, nastier one (?!) is rumbling. My comment on the Facebook Ashcloud page was: “Now everybody, all together now: ‘Lullabye, and goodnight, and with roses bedight…’ Everyone keep singing ’til we all get home!”

Vagabond Coaches League & Rescue Tug

Molly (@shaboom) Gordon tweeted me that Michael Bungay (@boxofcrayons) Stanier was similarly stuck in Amsterdam. I joked with him over Twitter that we should call ourselves the “Vagabond Coaches League”, rent a tugboat and chug around European ports of call picking up stranded coaches and ferry the lot of us back home.

It would be just like Thomas Leonard’s Y2K RV trip across America to promote coaching.  We could party the night away, film the whole thing and sell book, DVDs and t-shirts as a product. It’d be a gas, gas, gas! (but no ash). Here’s our official t-shirt. Feel free to put this on your site if you’re a coach and were stranded by the ash. 

Although as to coaching, there were several opportunities for that. Group of British women tourists openly weeping in a cafe at hearing their flight was (yet-again) cancelled. When they said I could help I taught them EFT as in such situations people like to do anything to be proactive and EFT is one of the most active of the energy therapies.

We tapped and when that took the edge off, I taught them ETHOS to take them all the way into consciousness around the fact that they were safe, well fed and had a place to stay until they could get home. This is something I too am giving thanks for. They loved ETHOS and one said felt like stepping into her massage therapist’s office – it calmed her immediately. I left them with these two tools, the internet sites for more info and went off to see a museum I hadn’t gotten to see yet.

I’m good – I have a place to stay until Friday and then will do a hotel room for one night. Hopefully the shuttle I’d booked will take me to the airport rea-a-a-ally early as the flight is at gawdawful o’clock in the morning…

Short-Term Panic, Emotional Immunity & Other Biscuitry

While people were frantic to get back to their homes, we heard of fighting on trains and busses, bloodied noses on the Eurostar and a riot in Madrid. It was a relief to receive an email from ETHOS In Paris workshop participants, Anne & Jerome, saying they’d made it back to the UK with their children safely. On the whole however, I believe it’s been a time of great cameraderie, gallows humor and all.

Several older Brits I heard in cafes hearked back to the days of rationing during and after World War II.

“Ay-up lass,” one said to me philosophically “we’re all in it together. There’s nowt any one of us can do ’til that buggerin’ ash-hole’s done spewin’ its filth. Best sit tight and have another cuppa.” Rational wisdom from the mouth of a wizened Yorkshireman* old enough to be my grandpa, yet spry as a spring chicken and loaded down with Parisian goodies for his “young’uns”.

When the times get tough, the tough apparently go shopping.

But on the other paw, like many in private moments, I was caught in the grip of short-term panic and negative emotions. “Oh no, what if I never get home! What if that damned mountain spews for a year like it did in the 1800’s!”. Cue tears, railing at the universe in general and feeling sorry for myself in specific.

The worst was the feeling of stark loneliness when I was on the phone for hours with British Airways in the re-re-re-re-re-booking of my flights time after time. The toll that the stress of “not knowing” took was tremendous and had me falling into bed early, too exhausted to go out.

I wailed on the phone to my ever-patient husband who was doing his best to cope and was upset in his own right. I cried on the shoulders of friends while simultaneously trying not to. I was evil to a neighbor who snorted “Merde, l’Americaine!” for the tenth time to my face. He subsided in shock and hasn’t squeaked a word to me since. In short, I had a “little kitty fit” as we call it, when one of the cats throws a tantrum.

Once it was over, I set about employing the energy tools I had in my arsenal to shore up my Emotional Immunity. This is something I’ll be writing about more in the future, but the basis is the AM Energizers & PM Harmonizer exercises from my Everyday Bliss For Busy Women book.

How’s YOUR Emotional Immunity?

You can greatly increase it by simply tapping a round of EFT – with or without any intention or setup phrase behind it, and then doing an ETHOS set, ending up by stepping aside into Unlimited Self. When I do that, problems disappear like magic and the way is opened for me to do more productive things.

More productive like packing (done=done) and looking forward to my flight. In addition to getting home, it’s one of the best sleeps I’ve had on an airplane. British Airways is one of the few to offer full lie-down seats in Business class. Most seats that say they lie down flat only recline to within 30 degrees of flat so you’re at a kind of odd angle. I can actually stretch out in the BA sleeping pod and snooze almost as good as in bed at home. There’s a tv with on-demand movies, a plug for your laptop and peripherals and lockable storage drawer for same. You get a real sense of privacy and they provide earplugs and an eyeshade so the world goes away.

Somebody on Twitter asked about the food. They actually use china and silver service, with all the booze those who imbibe can hold. The kitchen is open through the journey with all the snacks and drinks you like and the flight attendants were some of the sweetest, even though they were in the middle of an industrial action when I flew. My halibut on the journey out was done to a turn and the veggies were crisp and good. How on earth do they do that aboard a plane?

I’m giving great thanks for all the many blessings this experience has been. Extra time with good friends, the ability to see myself rise to the occasion and surpass what I thought were my limits, increased love and expansiveness and…other things.

Will I make it back home this Saturday? Time will tell. And I’ll keep you updated.

Tune in next week for Maryam’s continuing adventures in: “Ash The World Turns”….

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Picture credit:  The Yorkshire Man by Mick Cawston: http://www.corsini.co.uk/fineart/yorkshire-terrier-prints.shtml

I haven’t packed and repacked my bags for Paris. I haven’t, as yet, even singled out which nighties, socks and skirts to take. My girlfriend Margie is scandalized by this, as to her the packing, repacking and re-repacking are a sacred ritual to be engaged in as a hedge against The Unforseen. Margie likes her trips just so, with few surprises and zero possibility of anything weird happening. People marvel that we’re friends but they do say opposites attract.

I’ll take the weird.

Weird is often much more wonderful, interesting and informative than the seen and re-seen. I’ve decided I won’t be going up in the Eiffel Tower though I may take a picture from afar…as I pass by on my way to L’Orangerie perchance. It’s supposed to be beautiful.

More beauty, ease, grace and joy please.

(thank you very much)

I’m still in the air about escargots. I love garlic butter, but now don’t really want that much oily stuff in my daily intake. And well…they’re the texture of pencil erasers and about the same size. Nice. (not) So I may visit the Great Snail of Montorgueil, but I don’t think I will actually eat one.

Either Christiane or Virginie said for the best French gourmet experience, I should opt for frog’s legs, which my mother claimed to have loved, but I keep thinking of that old George Carlin joke: “Where did they do with the rest of the froggy? Do they give him a little dolly and send him out on the street to beg?”

No frog’s legs, I just couldn’t stand the thought of being responsible for indigency in the amphibian population.

More thoughts on the morrow. When I might think about what to pack, and pull out my now-dusty French language CDs and books to have a last minute bone-up on language, customs and…food.

In case you missed all the clues I’ve been dropping on Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn and other places, I am going to be spending my birthday month of APRIL IN PARIS, baby! Paris! (pictoral tour of the ‘hood is down below) Yep, I’m leaving the hubby and kitties at home and going on an all-inclusive American Woman’s Dream Vacation of a Lifetime to celebrate that once in a lifetime marker for a woman:

TURNING 50 YEARS OLD
(made it…whew!)

And…stay tuned because I’m going to make it possible for YOU TO COME WITH ME. Yep, you read it right,

YOU CAN COME TO PARIS WITH ME!

While not everyone can jump a jet and get in on the live experience, you CAN check it out with me, and won’t have to leave the comfort of your armchair. Promise. I wouldn’t go without making it possible everyone interested in evolution, transformation, a LIVE ETHOS workshop, new friends, gourmet food, sexy accents and having a good time to get in on the fun!

Hold onto your hats: there’s more juice in this baby than a whole orchard full of fresh peaches!

You probably already know that 25 years ago I was hit by a drunk driver and paralyzed, gaining over 150lbs. And how it took me nine years to walk, even though the doctors said I would never walk again.

I’ll be teaching some super-secrets of how I taught myself how to do “the impossible” and reverse paralysis, PLUS how I’ve lost 70+ pounds in the last year and a bit. Add to that my own “energy facelift” exercises and how YOU too can learn to:

“ACHIEVE THE IMPOSSIBLE”

• Everybody’s been asking me why my pants are falling off! You’ll be able to model my success as I CONTINUE TO LOSE WEIGHT in Paris, scarfing down all that lovely gluten-free super-fresh French market food. I’ll teach you how to make some of my favorite yummy dishes too, so you get “Gourmet Paris” and “GlutenFree” too.
• Yes, I’m down four sizes and counting. You’ll learn some of my extra cool weightloss secrets and be able to climb inside my head to see my Body Communication & Shape Shifting program in the making. This is Practical Magic folks, for everyday comfort and best-living.
• Plus you’ll visit Parisian restaurants, get to meet neighbors and friends and get the scoop on famous landmarks and not-famous-but-cool Parisian places, people and things.
• You’ll even get to help PLAN MY DAY by telling me where YOU want to go in Paris. I’ll take you with me – it’ll be the next best thing to being there!
• And of course, you’ll also learn how to Achieve The Impossible in your own life through 4 WHOLE WEEKS OF LIFE-SHIFTING LESSONS, learning how to get your “can’t do it, it’s impossible” to “Done = Done”. (come learn the secret of what that means!) The Magic of Done is the Whole Point.
• You also really need to be here if you’ve always wanted to have a super jumbo deluxe vacation for yourself and you never got to take one.
• Oh yes, there will be massage and spa stuff. And coffee. And sidewalk cafe action. And girlfriends. And a live ETHOS Workshop. And lots and LOTS of energy.

I’ll be getting back to you a little later on the specifics, but if you’re interested in becoming an Early Adopter (we reward Early Adopters very heavily around here) you can join the “Achieve The Impossible” Experience in Paris by filling in this handy form. I’ll be holding some very special calls and giving you previews of what’s going to happen and also what isn’t. Only those on this list will get notification of these juicy free calls, so do sign up now – I’ll even send you a free gift of Parisian lore!

The Oh-So-Chic Neighborhood Tour

And now, just to wet your whistle, here are some of the sights and interesting places we’ll be surrounded by, courtesy of Google Maps:

Montorgueil is the old open market area of Paris and is close to my apartment. This is my new god, says the hubby “the Great Golden HypnoSnail”. Yes, the French really do eat snails, though my local contacts wonder if it’s become more of a touristy thing. There are seven smaller slimers if you can see ‘em – each about as big as two fists on top of L’Escargot Montorgueil. And of course The Great One. Trying to decide whether to go here for my birthday or not. What do you think? Do I have the guts to eat escargot? I wonder myself….

Here’s my front door, sandwiched as most Parisian front doors, between shop fronts. In this case “L’avion Rose” (a gay restaurant and play on the phrase “La vie en Rose” – “The Pink Life” which denotes gay culture) and Hanano sushi restaurant. I won’t lack for entertainment or food. Hope there’s a floor show…

But if I get bored, my neighbors on the right can provide me with Hip Hop & Soul records, a haircut or videos…

And next to the hip-hop shop the Librarie Scaramouche who provide theatre masks, marionettes and Commedia Dell’Arte errata. I am SO going to dive into this shop as well as the Maison de la Poésie (House of Poetry) and Theatre Moliere. Wow…and just next door to the Library Scare-a-mouse (to quote the hubby) is…

Passage Moliere! Theatrical aficionados will rejoice. As will the JBear, for right next door and not ten steps from my apartment is Jean-Bernard’s Wine Cave. Not cellar, *CAVE*. The Bear’s put in an order for a good Beaujolais.

Here’s my interesting across-the-street neighbor, what the web describes as the “Big Butch Lesbian” Unity Bar. Huzzah! Women to have drinks with! With my haircut, I’ll fit right in…

This is L’Horloge a Automate – a funky concrete plaza that goes through to the next street and contains antique clock displays. And I might get a tattoo….or not…

A store called Nag Champa! It’s GOT to have incense! Looks funky and just up the street. Woo!

And down the other way MASSAGE AND COFFEE? ARE YOU KIDDING? I am SO there! Wish they’d taken the photo when the place was open so we could get a glimpse thru the blinds…

And on the corner, a cute little breakfast-dinner cafe (morning coffee will be here, oh yeah) and wonder of wonders on the street where I live, a Fromager, or cheese shop! Whee!

And on the opposite corner, on busy, vibrant Rue Rambuteau just across from the Centre Georges Pompidou, a pharmacy for those necessary lost-my-toothbrush kind of purchases. I want to experience French toothpaste, deodorant and hair products. Having spiky hair, good product is important.

Marketing choices in flavor and fragrance have always been an interest. When I lived in England in the 1980’s, a popular fragrance for years was something I could only describe as “fuschia-pink gumdrop”. Another was “bamboo”. I’ve never smelt these fragrances in America. I also once had “Irn Bru” (a strong & dark Scottish soda) flavored toothpaste. Pass on that, if you’re ever offered. Trust me.

Finally, just across from Centre Georges Pompidou, is the Flunch cafe hooking up to L’Horloge a Automate and what we’ve christened the Fabulous (if dour) Flying Flunch-Mittie (for its resemblance to our Tosh-cat). I shall make a pilgrimage and leave a handful of catnip in homage. I may even lunch at Flunch. Maybe.

I just learned (all praise to Google) that Flunch is a self-serve cafeteria style chain and “If you need to use the toilet, take your receipt with you: It shows the lavatory entrance code, which you’ll need to unlock the door to the toilettes.” I’ll consider myself forewarned on that count.

That’s it from the French Front for now. Stay tuned for the next installment on my fantabulous apartment, ETHOS in Paris, and how YOU can join me on my travels, to Achieve The Impossible!

(scroll down for the apocryphal picture of me at close to max weight…and today’s version…)

I am fortunate enough to have a very good friend in social media expert Andy Wibbels (@andymatic on Twitter). We’ve masterminded and built our businesses side by side for years and he has been such a help and such a darling friend to me. Color me very grateful for this high class, high value friendship.

We met when Andy still lived in Chicago. When he and Ron and kitties Astroboy & Downy moved out here in 2008, Andy stayed with us while interviewing at SixApart, where he worked until recently on their TypePad, Vox and other products. Now he’s graduating to the bigtime and toddling off to North Carolina to work for sales shark Jeffrey Gitomer. I’m so proud of Andy I could bust. Love him like a sister. k

We’re getting in a lot of celebrating, dinners and theater, ballet and shows before they leave. Tonight we went to Swan Lake, which was great, though missing the iconic dying swan scene at the end. In Helgi Tomasson’s production of the San Francisco Ballet, Odette simply jumps off a cliff – offstage.

WHERE WAS MY DYING SWAN SCENE?! I waited the whole doggone ballet to see it. Ron was similarly taken aback. You just don’t cut the dying swan. It isn’t done.

At any rate, for afters we went back to the boys’ apartment and shot the breeze as long as eyes stayed open. Followed by a picture taking session (which followed the food pics at Santorini earlier in the evening). The below right picture is tonight’s. The one on the left is of me two years ago almost to the day. That chin is pretty much a straight line from under-lip to collarbone, and was a triple roll at my high weight.

BTW, I got that wrong in the caption below. (hey, it was late at night)  I went back to my records and found I weighed more like 265 in the lefthand picture, not 280. But once I got that large, I stopped counting as many do, so the lapse is understandable. 

All the cutting & sculpting done on this body happened pretty much in eight months. Close to 70 pounds, 5 dress sizes, 1 shoe size, 3 bra sizes and 2 chins down, plus over 6″ off my abdomen so far.

I didn’t effort, I just had fun.

I didn’t restrict my eating, I had what my body wanted. How I did it will be the stuff of a future workshop. Something to look forward to! For now though, photos unretouched, just captioned…

ILLUSTRATED RECIPES INCLUDED BELOW!

Ok! Celiacs and those with irritable bowel syndrome and those of us who are gluten-free by choice and like it, take heart.  There’s more value you can wring out of a pumpkin than just scaring the kids at Halloween. We’re using our Halloween Jack o’ Lantern for toothsome Christmas goodies now. Talk about your Frugal Gourmet!

If you were beaten into frugality by parents who went through the Depression and were determined “never to be hungry again, no not me nor any of my people”,  you probably know all this stuff already. But if not, listen up. It’s now cool again to be frugal. In our house, that means no vegetable end goes wasted but gets put into a container labeled “Future Soup” and used in weekly stock-making.

Even the Halloween jack ‘o lantern does not suffer the ignominy of the compost heap. We paint ours with its festive face, placing a tealight on top of the pumpkin (well glued-down with hot wax) for Halloween night, then remove the tealight, turn the pumpkin around and use it as a Thanksgiving centerpiece with other seasonal fruits and flowers. After Thanksgiving, the pumpkin is scraped of paint, baked, and both filets and chunks carved from it to use in cooking.

One of our favorite dishes is an Afghani entree of sauteed pumpkin filets covered with a delightfully savory sloppy-joe type ragu and finally a yogurt sauce gently scented with garlic and a touch of brown sugar. The dish is called Kadu Borani and is served over fluffy, long-grained jasmine rice. One gluten-free recipe for Kadu Borani is here and here is its graphical representation:

1.

Prepping pumpkin to be baked

2.

Slicing filets from the baked pumpkin

3.

Gluten-free dredge/breading for pumpkin cutlets: This time, tapioca & cornstarch with a little sorghum flour & spices. We used Cavender's Greek Seasoning (a favorite in our house) and mixed Italian herbs

4.

Brown both sides of filets in coconut or olive oil, after dredging in flour/herb mixture

5.

Plating the filets. Sweetened garlic-yogurt mix in background

6.

Simmering a one-person portion of ragu sauce. In this case we went veggie and used crumbled, soaked walnuts in place of hamburger meat. It was dee-licious and extra-nutritious!

7.

Ladle your meat or nut-based ragu over the pumpkin filets...

8.

Final plating with pumpkin filets, ragu & yogurt sauce, parsley garnish.

Awesome-sauce! Right?

Just a handful of ingredients you probably already have on hand and this dish is practically cost-free.

Other less intensive dishes can be made with pumpkin or other squashes, which are highly beneficial for those with celiac disease, irritable bowel syndrome and other conditions that require greater amounts of natural fiber added to the diet. One of my favorites is a recent innovation with this year’s jack o’ lantern cutlets:

5 Minute Breakfast Pumpkin Cheesecake

Now could you “diet” on your busy schedule if you had Pumpkin Cheesecake plus a mouthwateringly luscious cup (real, thanks to the Bear for an early Christmas present!) of Kona coffee for a quick out-the-door breakfast? You can prep all the ingredients the night before. Putting the Pumpkin Cheesecake in your serving bowl and making your tea or coffee is what takes the five minutes in the A.M.  Here’s how:

1. Assemble the ingredients (coffee optional and used as an accompaniment for this dish in the A.M.)

Ingredients: pre-baked pumpkin chunks, strained or regular plain yogurt, agave syrup or stevia, half-and-half, grated fresh ginger, pumpkin pie spice & cinnamon to taste.

2. For one serving, place a cup of pumpkin cubes in glass bowl and pour half-n-half to cover halfway. Microwave uncovered for 2 minutes on high, or simmer on stovetop until half-n-half is boiling.

3.  Remove pumpkin mix from heat, add yogurt, spices and sweetener to taste, mash with fork or puree with hand blender. I favor Blue Agave syrup or Truvia sweetener made from stevia, as both of these are low to no-gycemic and don’t metabolize in the body as sugar, which makes all the dishes I cook great for diabetics as well.

Additions: If you’re super-bulking your fiber, you can also add a tablespoon of ground flaxseed. If you’d like more high-quality protein, add the same amount of soaked crumbled walnuts or hempseed.

4. Though I have this “crustless”, you can line a bowl with gluten-free cracker crumbs – I use Glutino’s “wholemeal” crackers, with a teaspoon or two of agave syrup or honey and a drop or two of lemon juice just to hold the crumb together.  Press into bottom of bowl.

5. Spoon the rich pumpkin mixture over the crust, or place in bowl just as it is.

Jack o’ Lantern Pumpkin Cheesecake

This is a breakfast yogurt that you can amp up the nutritional complexity of as described above if you wish. It’s also something you might find at a swanky spa or gourmet restaurant. You can serve this for an after-dinner dessert. If so, spoon mix over crust in a glass pie plate and make enough to cover the crust. Freeze until 1o minutes before serving. Thaw very slightly on the countertop, slice and serve. This dish is better scooped out though, a la cobbler.

Enjoy!

Answered a post at Alltop and thought I’d put my leftover veggie heaven tips here….

Try striped red & cream chiogga beets that look like peppermint sticks, and the mellow chocolatey flavoring of golden beets if you dislike the darker, semisweet chocolate of traditional red beets. Whiz them up with any juice you like for a cocoa-goodness backbeat and infusion of vitamins. It’s literally like getting an infusion of red blood cells but instead of a needle, you use a straw.  <grin>

I just included the leftover Brussels sprouts from Thanksgiving dinner in an adventure in High Cheesery I call “Potato Rarebit” that is to die for. To leftover mashers add sauteed garlic, worcestershire sauce, greek seasoning (or black pepper, oregano, parsley, chives, thyme + dried onion), curry powder, shredded cheddar, milk and chopped tarragon, cilantro and arugula (or your combination of favorite herbs).

How:
Cook the garlic to light brown and add milk, cheese and spices to taste. Simmmer together into a thin sauce stirring frequently and add the mash and herbs. Keep stirring until everything incorporates and begins to look glossy.

It literally spins into a richly decadent dip that looks and feels like spinach sour cream type tip (but is so way better), and is delicious picked up on any kind of bready substance. Being gluten-free, I used my mom and grandma’s no-sugar cornbread which was also left over from Thanksgiving.

Throw in the brussels sprouts as I did for dinner, and it’s reminiscent of broccoli in cheese sauce.

What’s not to like?

From my favorite Good News Site, www.gimundo.com:

…the premium Swiss chocolate company Callebaut claims to have solved both of these chocolate conundrums with the invention of a brand new confection known as the Voulcano.

Read the inventor’s article on this here.

What’s so special about the product? According to founder Barry Callebaut, the new bar is completely melt-resistant to hot weather: it’s able to withstand temperatures up to 131 degrees Fahrenheit without getting sloppy. Even better, the new chocolate, which will be available in both bar and cookie form, will contain up to 90 percent less calories than a typical piece of chocolate.

It sounds revolutionary, but the question, of course, is the taste. Is there any possibility that a Vulcano chocolate could compare to the luscious flavor of your favorite Lindt bar? Callebaut claims that it can—and, if the company’s right, they may have struck (black) gold.

“It’s nice and chocolatey, with a strong aroma, and crispy rather than creamy,” a Callebaut spokesperson, Gaby Tschofen, told The Guardian. “It does melt in the mouth, but it is the enzymes in saliva rather than the heat of the tongue that causes it to dissolve.”

Read the rest of this article here.

My mother, God rest her, used to save up pickle juice to baste fish in  – a particularly horrible tip she got from her Weight Watchers sponsor in the 1970’s. Now I’m not talking about the kind of pickled fish you find in a jar like that on the right. I’m talking about regular old Vlasic or Heinz cucumber pickle juice. The stuff that’s left over with all the floaty bits, when you’ve eaten all the pickles.

Throw it away? Mom would rather have bitten off her own hand than to throw “good food” away, so even old, clapped-out pickle juice got used up – to Dad’s and my chagrin. For Mom, that was being a good steward of the environment, being frugal (which was next to Godliness in her book), allowing her to be creative and seasoning a hated food item “interestingly”.

Interesting was one word for it. Once she actually put the whole sodden mess up in lime jello. That was one of the worst nights of my life. Dad rescued me with a McCheeseburger (hey, I was seven, ok?) and knowing Dad, probably fries and a rootbeer. We were great drinkers of Frosty Rootbeer in my household. Can’t get more white bread vanilla than that. 

Because Mom was the only one doing the cooking, PickleFish unaccountably became a Friday night standard with the cheery quip: (you know you’ve heard this before folks)

“You don’t have to LIKE it, you just have to EAT it!”

Just as unaccountably, Dad instituted the “alternate Friday pizza night” tradition.

We can all thank God that Mom didn’t meet Picklepop Bob before she passed into the great mystery. Or we’d have had the horrors of PickleSickles to deal with as well.

This is apparently…for real. Pucker now or forever after hold your peace. Click to check it out:

Now say: “Pickle pop packing plant prime pickle puree!” eighteen times real fast. The most worrying aspect of this is that they’re pushing it as an alternative to soda in elementary schools. Is there enough psychotherapy in the world to undo the damage this item will inflict? Worried experts are unsure…

Yes, as Mom used to say, “there’s all kinds of people in this world honey, and half of ‘em are as crazy as loons.” This, from the woman who innovated on PickleFish, which never should have been invented in the first place.

Dad rolls his eyes and makes the index-finger-twirling universal glyph for “fruitloop”.

Don’t even start telling me about your Grandma Yetta’s lutefisk or hakarl.

Picklefish was worse.

I just created my first couple of HubPages. The second one I did was on Practical Sustainable Living which means, Sustainability without Stress. Simple stuff we can all do. It’s here:

http://hubpages.com/hub/Practical-Sustainable-Living

The first post I made to this hub was so good I wanted to share it with you, because sustainability is dear to my heart and one of the shifts we need to make as a culture. In answer to someone else’s question about whether or not to go organic to avoid hormones in meat and milk, I answered:

Real simple: ORGANIC = YES.

Anything that is an animal product, always, always go organic. This means there are no pesticides, hormones or additives to the animal’s life, and that they were kept in a humane manner, allowed sufficient pasturage to roam in the case of cows, goats, sheep etc., and in the case of chickens, turkeys and other fowl, that they were not cooped, were allowed to scratch freely and have room to stretch their wings. Also, that they were killed humanely and treated with dignity throughout their life and in their final hours. It makes a difference in the taste and nutritional value of meat, milk and eggs of domestic food animals, plus which it’s just the right thing to do for all the reasons above.

Put it this way: Would you eat a piece of chicken pumped not only full of artificial hormones and antibiotics, but the extreme stress hormones from being cooped beak to beak with other birds all its life, who suffered before dying and was killed inhumanely while terrified? I know I wouldn’t. My conscience won’t let me, my tongue detests the taste of non-organic meat, and my body, fed for over a decade now on organics, knows the difference and begs me never again to feed it chemical-laced protiens. Organics are also one of the best ways, animal or vegetable, to cleanse your body of all the poisons you’ve ingested over the years. The benefits of going organic and taking a full body cleanse with time to integrate into new eating patterns, are manyfold and thoroughly blissful.

Some speak of organic farms not producing what pesticided farms do. That may be true or it may not be true…or we may have yet to find out what new organic-friendly technologies can produce. But simply put, would you rather eat poison or quality nutrition? It’s also over 100 years of using pesticides and other chemicals in North America at least, that have leached the core nutrients from our soils such that we have to supplement them by taking vitamins – even with organics. Those farms that have been organic 20 or more years have put back the nutrients into the soil by adding their organic livestock manure or vegetable matter compost and even seaweed top dressings to the tilth.

Food from organic farms is vastly more nutritious, and if you feed on it, your body needs less food to live better. Part of the overeating we’re seeing as pandemic right now is caused by the very poor nutrition available even in plain meat and vegetables that are produced on chemically saturated lands. The body is just trying to get its RDA of nutrition, so the person eats and eats. It’s a shame the available calories in such food haven’t gone down too, or we might be able to break even. But that’s not the case… *wry smile* Also, our bodies have become miniature pharmacies of hormones, antibiotics and a host of other chemicals we have picked up from the chemically treated foods we eat. That makes us more susceptible to influenza and other diseases, and is one of the suspected major causes of some cancers.

Organic food makes us healthier and more able to cope with illness or physical injury.

Also, in turning our lifestyles around from the endless consumption that factory farming is part of, we can leverage other options for food production. Rooftop and back yard gardens – in the 1940’s during WWII, everyone had them and everyone fed their families nearly 100% with them. Farming the seas as well is technology we are only starting to leverage, like seafaring nations such as Sweden, Norway and other Scandinavian countries have done for centuries to create their hearty and disease-resistant populace. We can also learn from Asian teachings and use meats sparingly as flavoring like they do in Japan, another nation whose bulk of protein comes from the sea. Hydroponics, terraced city agriculture and community farms are also extremely viable options, even for city dwellers. There are vast tracts of land in America that is currently being used to house feeder cattle that if turned over to organic farming would feed hundreds more people. And across the pond in England, each family without back yard space for a garden may request an allotment of land from the city for the purpose of growing their own vegetables and keeping small livestock. There are many options to boost farm production other than sticking with chemicals that will continue to damage the earth, even if we stop using them tomorrow, well into the 22nd century.

We might well take advantage of these options no matter what city, state, nation or principality we live in. It’s no longer an east /west issue, or a north / south divide. Food and water are becoming scarcer, but that doesn’t mean the trend has to continue. If we all pitch in towards sustainable longterm solutions, we can still turn back the tide of damage a century of chemicalized living has done.

Go Green! It’s not just for posters anymore…