Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

I loved reading this book. Basically a fundamental story of one families story of local living. Kingsolver's plucky humor and realism was wonderful. She and her family had a go-getter attitude that I believe fueled many of their well planned dreams come reality. Again, it took years worth of planning to create this dream of local living. But she says many times, it is the small things that count. The asking questions that no one else asks, doing tasks like making your own cheese, and selling your extra eggs to neighbors... the caring about things that others dare not care about. And in the end, she writes about a very satisfying life, with no level of deprivation, on a mostly local diet. And in the process, she becomes part of a tight knit community as well.

It was a wonderfully inspiring read, and, aside from the intimate interludes into turkey sex, it had wonderfully digestible and easily do-able information.

Reviews, recipes, and many more joyous pictures can be found at their website:

http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/

Books on families or individuals going local are popping up for all over the globe and I hope they continue. It is wonderful to be able to read all of these books and glean what I can pull into my own personal life. Setting goals for a more local existence and getting off 'the oil' is a huge part of the environmentalist movement now-a-days and being able to take a bit from Pollan, a bit from Kingsolver, a bit from Cockburn, and a bit from Fine... well, I have a working plan in my head that evolves each time I crack a page in one of these library borrowed legacies into local living.

Chocolate chip pumpkin bread

My whole family is in love with pumpkin bread. This is a great recipe, being a bit more dense, and a bit less sweet than most, so the mini simi sweet chips really stand out and give it an amazing flavor. The recipe came about when I had less of some ingredients than I needed for a pumpkin cupcake recipe and went ahead anyway. I am so very glad I did.

Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Bread

"wet"

1 cup pumpkin puree (or cooked pumpkin mashed with a fork)
1/2 c vegetable oil

2 eggs
1/4 c water
1 c sugar (raw works fine)

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp all spice

"dry"

1 c all-purpose flour

1 c spelt flour
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt

Mix 'wet' list together in a large mixing bowl. Beat together until well blended and smooth.

Mix dry together by sifting into another bowl, stir and then add to wet mixture. When well blended, mix in 1/2 c of mini simisweet chocolate chips.

Add batter to a well oiled baking dish (or 24 muffin tins with paper cups), and place in a 375* oven for 45 - 60 minutes.

As with all quick breads, these are done when tooth pick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Cool at least half way before you dig in.... I have gotten a couple burns that way.

I wish I had a picture of Logan tonight... covered in pumpkin bread and chocolate smudges here and there, standing next to the counter with his little hand reaching for the bread oh-so-cutely.

Sigh... the pictures that are only in my mind.

Sustainable Living For Dummies

Lots of good information, too much for me to finish actually, but I got some wonderful ideas about how to build cloches and a few other great gardening tips, and over and over again it had off articles and tables and stats about how the world is changing and what we can do to help.

It is based in Australia (at least the one I got was) and I would love to see an American version of this, as it would be a much bigger help to me with all the resources lists and graphic tables. But it was easy to see that this type of book is going to help a lot of people get on a more sustainable path. It would have been great to have when I started this journey. I am no where near the where I want to be on a sustainable living path, but I had found most of the information in this book somewhere else first.

HFCS

High fructose corn syrup is no longer a food. It has been reduced and refined to drug form. Quite literally. This is becoming common knowledge, and I am thrilled with that! But it still is very much a part of our every day diets as Americans.

From Wikipedia:

High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is any of a group of corn syrups which have undergone enzymatic processing in order to increase their fructose content and are then mixed with pure corn syrup (100% glucose) to reach their final form. The typical types of HFCS are: HFCS 90 (used almost exclusively in the production of HFCS 55) which is approximately 90% fructose and 10% glucose; HFCS 55 (most commonly used in soft drinks) which is approximately 55% fructose and 45% glucose; and HFCS 42 (used in other a variety of other foods, including baked goods) which is approximately 42% fructose and 58% glucose.[1]

The process by which HFCS is produced was first developed by Richard O. Marshall and Earl R. Kooi in 1957[2] and refined by Japanese researchers in the 1970s. HFCS was rapidly introduced in many processed foods and soft drinks in the US over the period of about 1975–1985.

Does this sound like a food? It isn't something that has been reduced to a concentrate... it is something that has been reduced beyond that. Well beyond that, and added with other highly processed corn sugar products to make something as potent as sugar, but at a 200th of the cost.

It wouldn't exsist in nature.

First post

I have thought and thought about this. I have researched nutrition for years. I minored in it when I was in college. Throughout the years I have used my knowledge for various people to help them gather new ideas and information. Now that I am rekindling my interest, I am finding that my research is becoming pigeonholed to the local movement. Which is fine for me and my family, but it makes my research bias, and not as easily shared.

So I am creating this blog for people to ask questions so I have more to research. Of course, there will be things I already know... but there will also be things that stump me, and spawn a new off shoot of interest in other nutrition venues so that I can broaden my knowledge base again.

You are all welcome to pose questions to me regarding nutritional ideas, fads, personal nutrition issues, cravings and anything else that fits in or around those categories. The more the merrier, as it will keep my research refreshed and new, and I will appreciate that. I look forward to chatting with you all. :)

Living The Good Life

Yet another book about the ethics of food, (and this one also goes into the ethics of energy, water, and even waste disposal).

In this book, well it is really a diary of a families choice (mama, papa, and one spunky 6 year old boy) to go "money free" for 6 months.

They live in Australia, and so much of the culture, and even some of the language was different than something I would normally run into. Esp being from the wettest part of North America myself, drought often has no reach here. But there, it is becoming an every year problem. In the book you follow this family through their 6 self sustainable months through everything, from eating pumpkin (which they call all squash, from what I gathered... I would hate to think they were eating actual pumpkin all that time) every day for a while to what to feed Possum, their noisy and demanding milk goat.

The book was well written, although some of the language was clearly Aussie, and terribly interesting.

One of my complaints about the book is that I wish that she had gone in more depth about how they did their daily self sustainable things. She talks often about the 5000 kilo tanks she has outside, but does not ever show a picture of them, or where they are on her property. She talks at length about the composting toilet, but again, no picture, or how they put it in, etc. Some of those things would be helpful if they ever were to print a second addition to the book... to help others get used to the idea of that path.

It was nice to read that it took her three years to get ready to do the 6 month project (and in some cases much much longer prep was employed. Trev, her husband, built his own log cabin in the bush and it took 15 years.) So they had some tools. And it was nice to know that not just "everybody" could do it, but that this goal, of getting off the world oil tit, was a long term one... one that even the most prepared had to work at for a while before they could really employ.

Living The Good Life Website

The Omnivore's Dilemma

http://www.michaelpollan.com/omnivore.php

I have just finished the Omnivore's Dilemma. It is an intense book. It is one of those that you really want to read with a highlighter and a pen to write in the margins. lol... I am interested in reading whatever else Micheal Pollan puts out.

Man, the book is SO interesting. Really good information, put out in a way that is matter of fact, and not alarming in the slightest (unless of course, the content is alarming... I think I meant not "alarmist" in the sense that he doesn't go "This is TERRIBLE, look what THEY do....." KWIM?) He goes through four different meals, from as industrial as you can get to as 'natural' as you can get. McDonald's of course, came first. Then Whole Foods industrial organics. Then PolyFace Farms (a sustainable grass/meat farm). Then a meal he hunts, kills, grows or gathers himself.

He follows each one back to the very start of the food chain on which they were formed.

For McDonald's it was industrial grown corn to feed the chickens and the beef (cows are not made to eat corn). It is pretty amazing how much of the fast food is made from corn. You'd never know from eating it, but really, it is all corn fed meat, fried in corn oil, battered in corn starch, corn fats, and salts from corn, with a side of High Fructose Corn Syrup soda. I had some idea, but I just didn't realize how true his most famous quote is: "So that's us; processed corn, walking."

He follows that up with a nice stint on an industrial organic farm. Then moves on to PolyFace, then on to his own hunting/mushroom hunting/gardening experiences.

Fascinating. Just really really interesting stuff.

He makes a point of staying very objective through out the entire book, and sharing his opinions in a language that it is clear he is owning each and every one of them. He doesn't expect you to think the way he does... he just says what HE thinks. It is a nice refresher for those of us who have read "fad" diet books where there is only ONE way to do things (and here is why - and here is the science behind it is on page 452 - and here is why everything else is wrong on page 597... lol.).

The other two books I have right now promise to be lighter, and I am ready. Don said to me the other day that I really need to find something that I can read for pleasure. Something that doesn't give me more to work on and worry about at the end of the day. I said that is what NetFlix is for. lol... he wasn't convinced.

Wise Traditions

by Sally Fallon author of Nourishing Traditions

http://www.westonaprice.org/modernfood/dirty-secrets.html

This article challanges the way we eat food today. Challanging that when 'they' say that half our diet should be made up of grains it doesn't mean processed grains, and that processed grains can actually be killing us and making our children more suseptable to disease.

I have never thought that cold cereal is good for you. But the main thing that has always held me back in buying it is price. Not nutrition. So when I read this, I was shocked to not only believe what she says, but understand that gut reaction that has told me that cereal isn't good for you. She doesn't use scare tactics... she uses plain facts. Some of which have been covered up by the billion dollar food market that keeps telling us these things are good for us.

Another thing that startled me was the way they put the fat back into milk. Now I am wondering if there is a way to get small farm milk from around here.

And orange juice... just make it yourself. Really.

A less scary article

Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation, and one of my favorite non-alarmist, just good information authors, wrote this article about the food we consume:

Cheap Food Nation

A very good read and some great food for thought, with out the alarmist view of the inevitable death of us all. lol...

MaryJane's Ideabook, Cookbook, Lifebook

OMG... this book is one I will need to own. It is stuffed FULL of great ideas for the Farmgirl In All of Us as MaryJane says on the front cover. Everything from how to hem stitch to how to cook a one pot meal on a campfire, this book has it all. It even has jump rope songs from her childhood that will bring back memories from the youngest and oldest of us. Beautiful pictures are littered through this volume of her life. Truly an inspirational book! And one to own as well... because you will want to go back and use the ideas and recipes again and again.