From scratch: Reflection about Grandma J's Blueberry Muffins

Getting in touch with Grandma J

So far the baking/cooking New Year's Resolutions are in full swing. I think the cold weather has really allowed me to spend some time in the kitchen and be creative; it has been great to make some food and treat myself to homemade goodness. I don't think Jay minds it at all either :)

It's also been great to be doing something connected to my grandmother, the grandmother I'd say I had the least opportunity to get close to, because she was the first to go of my four grandparents (so I was younger when it happened).

When I cook/bake, now I often catch myself talking to Grandma aloud and in my head. When I am adapting her recipes, it has been good for me to engage with her in this way. I think it has helped with my baking skills, to be honest. I also feel after the Date Cookie Disaster of 2010, my dedication to keeping at it no matter the outcome, has made my Grandma proud of me. I think that's why last night, despite my absentmindedness, the blueberry muffins that I made "came out" alright.



Making mistakes

This time everything was written down correctly and with detail (thank you Grandma!), however, I forgot to mix the baking soda, baking powder and salt with the flour, and I forgot to add the vanilla when I should have...what was I thinking? I wasn't really. I was thinking that it was going to be a miracle if they would rise evenly, but I added all the stuff at the very end in its liquidy state, and while they are kinda puny looking muffins, they still taste quite amazing for a first attempt with lots of mistakes!

Because of its somewhat success, I wanted to come on here and give thanks to my Grandma for watching over me and for her wonderful recipes :) I learned I will need to pay more attention when I am cooking, and I reflected on why I am here attempting to go through her recipes.

Finding the inspiration to go on

I'm not quite sure where the deep inspiration came from for me to be so into the process of cooking/baking, but I think a lot of it stems from my recent nutrition course in my program and my want to get away entirely from processed foods. However, I have really wanted to put myself into "the process" of making the food and feel more connected to my food choices.

I attended a Meditation class last Saturday and was reminded about the importance of putting time and effort into the things we care about--from meditation to relationships to other practices like cooking.

The teacher was saying, you can't just take a meditation class and learn the principles and think that you are an expert. Just like you can't take a cooking class and expect to be a chef the next day. You need to put time into the practice in order to become proficient in it. You must meditate daily, before you find yourself acquiring the amazing achievements science has found meditation brings. You need to cook everyday to become a great cook.

So it is this principle of giving time to what's important that I am trying to make space for in my life, and I'm excited to see what outcomes lie ahead if I continue to pursue my interests in this way.

Check-in Question
What is it that you would like to develop in your life? Are you putting time into it? Are you building on your experiences? Are you working at it everyday?

Try making a list of things that are important to you be it people, places, skills, etc. and reflect on what you are doing to make these things a priority. What's stopping you from it? How can you make small steps to overcome these blockages?

Thanks for your thoughts, but just give us the recipe...
Grandma J's blueberry muffins (my twist on it is in parenthesis)



1 cup sugar
1/2 cup margerine (1 stick unsalted butter)
2 eggs
1 cup buttermilk (1/2 cup milk with 1/2 cup whole fat yogurt)
2 cups flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt (sea salt)
1 tsp vanilla
1-1/2 cup blueberries
(cinnamon)

1. Cream together sugar and butter. Add eggs over and beat well.
2. In a separate bowl mix flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt together.
3. Put vanilla in the buttermilk (yogurt/milk).
4. Add flour mixture alternately with buttermilk (milk/yogurt/vanilla mixture).
5. Fold in the berries.
6. Put in lined muffin tins (or lightly oil your muffin pan) 2/3 full. (For me it made 15 muffins).
7. Sprinkle a little cinnamon over the top if it suites you (my addition).
8. Bake at 375 degrees in the oven for 30 minutes (I only needed to do 28 minutes).
9. Enjoy!

Foods and activities that calm hormones and help PMS

This post is dedicated to my sisters in Korea and all the women out there who suffer from PMS symptoms. In order to live your best life, reducing PMS is a must.

The foods we put in our bodies affect the hormonal cycles in the body. One way to lessen the hormonal shift in the body is to avoid the foods or activities that cause them.

Foods/activites to consider avoiding or limiting around "that time of the month":
* Meats, cheese, eggs tend to drive hormone levels up.
* Fatty foods raise cholesterol and estrogen levels.
* Excess salt and sugar.
* Limit caffeine intake, and if possible, eliminate it.
* Tobacco use
* Certain Yoga poses should be avoided, inverted poses during menstruation can cause blood to leak out the fallopian tubes and lead to endometriosis. While not proven and highly unlikely, because it is not known, it may be best to do more restorative poses during this time. In general you know your body best, so if it feels okay to invert go ahead. Listen to your body. If you are feeling achy and tired don't push yourself too hard.

Foods/nutrients/activities to consider:
* Natural plant foods like whole grain bread, pasta, cereal
* A variety of vegetables, fruits and legumes
* Fiber. Eating foods with lots of fiber is good to help rid the body of excess hormones.
* Calcium (in the form of supplement or leafy greens). Improving calcium balance in the body has been shown to ease menstrual pain.
* Vitamin B6
* Light/moderate exercise
* Meditation

Information shared from Healthy Eating for Life for Women by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and my personal favorite, Yoga as Medicine: The Yogic Prescription for Health and Healing by Timothy McCall, MD.

Meet your veggie/fruit goals: Some more tips

This will be my final post on veggies and fruits for awhile, because honestly I'm getting a bit burnt out on the topic. Don't get me wrong, I have been incorporating this process into my life through ingestion, reading of materials, thinking about it all and then online discussion/writing (here), so needless to say I am ready to consider topics other than greens for a bit. I also have some big projects due this week and then will have at least one project due every week until the end of the semester so I am trying to relieve myself of my blogging duties. Although as I mentioned before I really think the blogging is for me more than anyone (as much as I love the .2 people who read this thing):) so who knows, maybe I will be on here a lot to just have some balance in my life.

Don't worry, I still love vegetables and will certainly continue to pay homage to them because they are a big part of my life, I mean heck they obviously are because I am sitting here writing about them again. So with that said I will leave you with five more considerations. Please if you have more hints or ideas related to making veggies and fruits a bigger part of your life, do share! We are all literally starving for this kind of wisdom!

1) Buy lots of fruits and veggies when you shop so that you have plenty of choices in the house. Seems like a no brainer, but actually try this, and don't let the food go to waste.

2)Separate your veggies into those that go bad quickly and those that do not so that you can be sure to use them. If you are having trouble finishing them quick enough, freeze them for later.

3) Keep a bowl of cut up veggies in your fridge for quick snacking. This is a good one. How many of you will eat veggies from a pre-cut tray, but won't put in the time to cut them up yourself. Take a step back in the processing, it will save you money and it will help your health tremendously!

4) If you need a snack for the day pack a piece of fruit or a veggie. People might have thought I was weird, but when cucumbers were good this summer from the farmer's market I would actually just bring a whole cucumber to work and eat it like a banana. Was very refreshing, gave me energy and made my skin clearer.

5) Add extra veggies to whatever dish you are making. For example if you are making spaghetti add some broccoli or zucchini to it. If you are eating a frozen dinner, add veggies to it.

That's all I have for now.

Produce: Sometimes organic is mandatory.

So maybe you're a health pro and you consume 5 fruits/veggies a day, well let's up your game. Do you always consider where these veggies came from? Knowing how they were produced is so important in understanding the nutritional value of your food. Unfortunately to save time and money the use of pesticides with our food has become prevalent. Annually, more than 1.2 billion pounds of pesticides is sprayed/added to U.S. crops (Murray, p. 47).

Pesticides kill pests. What do you think they do to humans? There is a huge consensus out there that pesticides can really damage your health, especially during fetal development (in womb) and in early childhood. So if you are a pregnant mother or a new parent, consider your child if anything (EWG Handout). Also, consider the health of the workers who use the pesticides, and the environmental damage that occurs because of pesticides. All the more reason for you to use your consumer dollar to deny support to this harmful practice, and to protect yourself, humanity and the earth as well.

Aside from the politics, the point of this post is to expose the fruits and veggies that have lots of pesticides. You gotta start somewhere. The Environmental Working Group explains that people who consume 5 fruits and veggies from the Dirty Dozen list on average ingest 10 pesticides a day. Yummy...hmm, not so much. Especially if your body is on overload mode and can't get rid of these toxins properly. People who eat from the 15 least contaminated list consume less than 2 pesticides on a daily basis. What's upsetting is that people think they are doing something good for their health but they are also putting themselves at risk.

Don't risk it and buy organic when you can (even if it's not on the list). Turns out broccoli (which is not on the list) has more than 50 pesticides used on it. I guess it wouldn't make the list when you compare it to the 110 pesticides that are used on apples(Murray, 49). Point is, just be mindful of what you are ingesting. To help get you started, here is the Environmental Working Group's list to consider.

DIRTY DOZEN Buy these ones organic.
From the worst:
1) Celery
2) Peaches
3) Strawberries
4) Apples
5) Blueberries
6) Nectarines
7) Bell Peppers
8) Spinach
9) Cherries
10) Kale/Collard Greens
11) Potatoes
12) Grapes (Imported)

CLEAN 15 Lowest in pesticides.
From the best:
1) Onions
2) Avocado
3) Sweet corn
4) Pineapple
5) Mangos
6) Sweet peas
7) Asparagus
8) Kiwi
9) Cabbage
10) Eggplant
11) Cantaloupe
12) Watermelon
13) Grapefruit
14) Sweet Potato
15) Honeydew melon

As a woman reminded me tonight, if you are going to buy a pair of good shoes do you go to Payless or do you go somewhere else known for more quality? If you will fork out the money for a good pair of shoes for your feet what about your body?

Same goes for food, it may be more expensive but there is a difference between price and value. The price might be lower, but what about the value?

Food topic for the week: Get veggies back into your life. Lots of them.

In my Alternative Approaches to Nutrition class I am learning a lot of little tips to help with eating a more balanced diet and living a healthier lifestyle. I'm also learning about food safety (you'll hear more on this later).

With that said I've decided to post some "food for thought" each week to help get our minds thinking about what exactly we put into our bodies for nourishment. If we want to wake up and live our lives, food choice is a big part of it. With the winter months creeping around the corner I think its a good time to establish some patterns and habits so it will be easier to stay healthy and active through the stillness of Winter.

Who needs more veggies in their life? Chances are, you do. As the Daily Beast reports yesterday, "the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a study this month that says only 26 percent of American adults eat vegetables three or more times a day. According to the 'Eating Patterns in America' report released this week by a market research company, only 23 percent of meals include a vegetable—and that’s including lettuce on a hamburger." If people are considering a leaf of lettuce on a hamburger one vegetable serving I would argue that the 26 percent figure may even be an overestimation.

So what does this mean? Yeah, we all know we should eat our vegetables, and we don't eat enough of them, so what? Well, for starters a diet rich in fruits and veggies is one of the best ways to prevent almost all chronic diseases. It's true. As Murray's Encyclopedia of Healing Foods says, "Fruits and vegetables are so important in the battle against cancer that some experts said--and we agree--that cancer is a result of a 'maladaptaton' over time to a reduced level of intake of fruits and vegetables" and similarly the medical journal, Cancer Causes & Control says, "Vegetables and fruit contain the anticarcinogenic cocktail to which we are adapted. We abandon it at our peril" (18).

Maybe in my younger years this would be a foreign matter, but as I get older and my bones begin to get creak when I get up I've started to pay more attention to "chronic disease" prevention and I'm all about it. Hell yes I enjoy life too much to discard all the evidence surrounding this topic, and I love food so I'm taking the veggie challenge. You should too. Try to eat more vegetables this week and you'll notice you'll have less room in the stomach for other things like, let's say chips, cookies, ice cream, etc.? And you'll feel better. I promise!

Tip of the day:
BUY LOTS OF FROZEN VEGGIES (PREFERABLY ORGANIC) FOR COOKING SO YOU CAN EASILY ADD A VEGGIE DISH TO A MEAL.
(SO EASY...NO WASHING OR CHOPPING INVOLVED. NO LETTING IT GO BAD IN THE FRIDGE, IT'S THERE AND READY FOR EATIN'!)

Frozen veggies retain their nutrients better than most canned and even fresh vegetables, which start losing their nutritional value the moment they are picked. Don't get me wrong though, eat lots of fresh veggies when you can!

You can be very creative with frozen veggies, they are good for stir-frying, side dishes to a meal, or even a snack. If you have any snack/meal ideas to share that incorporate frozen veggies please do share!

Here is my favorite breakfast meal lately, that incorporates frozen veggies:

1 clove of garlic chopped (from farmer's market...we'll discuss good places to buy food another week)
1 beaten egg (from the farmer's market)
1 cup of frozen organic veggies
Cheese (whatever's in the fridge)
Olive Oil

Directions
1) Chop up a clove of garlic. Beat one egg (or two if you need).
2) On medium heat, heat a little olive oil in a pan on the stove.
3) Add garlic, let cook for a minute.
4) Add the veggies (1 cup). Let cook for a couple minutes.
5) Add the beaten egg and mix it up/scramble with the veggies. Grate a little cheese over the mixture.
6) Add a little sea salt, pepper, dried herbs to suit your palate.
7) Eat a homecooked yummy breakfast with veggies and protein that took less than 10 minutes to prepare! If you're looking for some carbs to add to the mix, grab a piece of fruit like a banana and you'll really be set.