Low-Tech Harnessing of the Awesome Powers of the Sun – Make Sun Tea!

Why heat up your kitchen boiling water for tea that you’re just going to ice anyway?  On any relatively warm day, even a cloudy one, the sun is more than willing to brew up that tea for you!

I generally use a wide mouth quart Mason jar (available at any hardware store) to make my sun teas.  When using a good quality tea, two teabags should be sufficient for this amount.  Don’t stick with just your green and black teas – all of your herbal teas will make fine sun teas as well.  Set the jar in a sunny place for a few hours, and the sun will do the rest.

Shown in this photo, I’ve used two bags of Organic Rooibos Red Bush tea and a big stem of lemon verbena.  I also put in just a pinch of green powdered stevia as a natural sweetener.  And even though it was a rainy day, it brewed up just fine.

A naturally brewed sun tea is a great alternative to highly processed soft
drinks.  Take advantage of the sun today!

Corn on the Cob for Grill or Campfire

There are lots of delicious ways to cook corn on the cob, but this method has always worked well for me.

-Peel back the husks without removing them.  Remove corn silk from cob.  Replace husks.
– Soak corn in cold water for an hour or so.
– Peel back husks again.  Smear cobs with butter (vegans can brush on olive oil).  Sprinkle with sea salt and Cajun seasoning blend.
– Replace husks.  Tear off one long husk leaf and use it to tie husks securely in place.
– Put cobs on top rack of grill for about a half hour, or bury in hot campfire coal and ashes (if a little dirt bothers you, you can always wrap them in foil before doing this part).

That’s it!  Take off the husks and chomp!

Lazy “Pasta” & Sauce

This truly is a dish for lazy, hot days.  It also uses up some of that garden overflow of tomatoes and zucchini.  There is no cooking required!  All you really need is a vegetable peeler and a blender.  This recipe will make enough for 2 – 3 servings – if you have more people, just double up.  The sauce will keep in the fridge for a couple of days, but the “pasta” should be peeled up fresh.

To Make the “Pasta”:

Take a medium zucchini.  Trim the ends.  With a vegetable peeler, peel off long zucchini strips.  Keep peeling strips until you hit the seedy core, which you can compost or juice.  This will be your “linguini”.

To Make the Sauce:

Toss the following into the blender:  (The recipe, done in these proportions, will also fit into the large cup of your Magic Bullet.)
– one large tomato, roughly chopped
– 4 sun-dried tomatoes (if you use the kind that aren’t soaked in oil, try soaking them in water for about 15 minutes first)
– a drizzle of olive oil (about a Tblsp.)
– a small handful of pine nuts or walnuts (about 2 Tblsp.)
– a large handful of fresh herbs (parsley, basil & oregano), roughly chopped (use a couple of tsp. of dried Italian seasoning if you don’t have fresh herbs)
– about 10 pitted kalamata olives, roughly chopped (note:  not a raw food.  Strict raw foodies can use sun-cured olives.)
– one small clove of garlic, roughly chopped (optional: raw garlic tastes great, but can make for some heady breath!)
– a pinch of sea salt

Pulse the blender until the ingredients are thoroughly mixed.  Don’t puree it –
you want the sauce to stay kind of chunky.  Toss the sauce over the zucchini linguini and garnish with fresh herbs.  What could be lazier?

Really Easy Facial Cleanser

This simple but effective facial cleanser and toner is easy to make and use.  Just this and a moisturizer is all the face care I need when I’m on the road.

Here’s how to make it:
– Find a 4 to 8 ounce plastic bottle that you’d like to reuse and clean it up.
– Fill it halfway with liquid vegetable glycerine (available at your health food store, or online from Jean’s Greens ).
– Fill it up the rest of the way with rosewater (available in the grocery store or from Jean’s Greens), leaving a little bit of head room.
– If you like (and this is optional), add one or two drops of lavender essential oil per ounce.
– Close it up and shake vigorously.
– To use, apply to face with cotton ball and rinse with cool water.

An Apple A Day…

Yeah, we’ve all heard that old saying, “An Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor Away”.  But how exactly do apples promote good health?

For one thing, they’re high in fiber.  Assuming that you leave the skin on, just one medium apple gives you about 4 grams of fiber.  That’s around 15% of your Daily Value!

And much of that fiber is in the form of pectin, which acts as a bulk-forming agent similar to psyllium, and helps to prevent both constipation and diarrhea.  Both the insoluble and soluble fibers in apples help to control LDL levels.

Apples are also high in Vitamin C, as well as a huge amount of flavonoids
and other antioxidants, including quercetin, catechin, phloridzin and chlorogenic acid.  Again, most of these antioxidants are in or near the skin, so it’s definitely worthwhile to seek out organic or low-spray apples.
Flavonoids have been shown to help lower the risk of heart disease.

There’s also a growing amount of evidence that apples reduce the risk of lung, colon and breast cancer.  They also seem to reduce the risk of asthma and promote lung health, probably due to the presence of the antioxidant phloridzin.

Even if you don’t eat an apple a day, you can gain many health benefits by eating at least three medium apples per week. So get to know and love the many ways of apples.

And by the way, the guy in the photo above is Steve French.  He just wants to let you know that cats think that apple trees make swell perches

So Many Apples!

A trip to the orchard is a great way to spend an autumn day, but now what to do with all those apples?
Here are a few ideas:
– Eat them out of hand of course!  Try Honeycrisp or Gingergold varieties.
– Make applesauce.  Fujis rock for this.
– Bake a pie.  Try Kendalls or Northern Spies.
– Apple Crisp – easier than pie!
– Make apple butter.
– Dice them up and put them in your
oatmeal.
– Spread apple slices with nut butter.
– Make a Waldorf Salad.
– Put slices in a peanut butter sandwich.
– Serve slices on a cheese plate.
– Use some in a Mulligatawny Soup.
– Baked apples: Core the apple without removing the bottom, stuff the hole with a mix of chopped raisins, cherries, dates, and nuts, and top it off with maple syrup.  Bake at 375 degrees until the apple is tender (about a half hour).
– When making stock, add an apple to the stock pot along with the veggies.
– You’ve got an awful lot of apples.  This is your big chance to try some weird cooking experiment.  Maybe you’ll come up with a masterpiece.
Here’s one I tried out today.

Cabbage and Apples

Saute in olive oil:

– half a bulb of garlic, minced
– two hot peppers, minced (you decide how hot a type you like – removing the seeds reduces the heat)
– one large onion, diced

Now add:

– two large apples, cut in chunks
– one whole head of cabbage (use red, green, savoy or napa), sliced thin

Continue to cook, covered, tossing occasionally, until apples and cabbage are soft. Salt and pepper to taste. Throw in about a pound of cooked sliced sausage (or Tofurky sausage if you’re a vegetarian) to make it a meal.

Apricot Orange Salad Dressing

Commercial salad dressings are often full of all kinds of questionable ingredients like high fructose corn syrup and MSG, so I like to make my own.  It only takes a few minutes, they taste fantastic, they’re better for you, and it’s frugal, too!

This one’s great for taking advantage of the fresh apricots available right now. It will make about 1 cup of dressing. Just throw the following into your blender or Magic Bullet and puree:

– the juice from one orange (about   1/4 to 1/3 cup of OJ)
– 2 Tblsp flax or olive oil
– 1 Tblsp tamari or Nama Shoyu (or soy sauce) (Strict raw foodies should stick to raw Nama Shoyu)
– 1 heaping Tblsp of tahini (in a pinch you can substitute peanut butter – just make sure it’s the all natural kind)
– 2 roughly chopped apricots

– a few sprigs of fresh chopped cilantro (optional)
– a small piece of fresh ginger, chopped (optional)

I really love this dressing, so once the apricots are no longer in season, I’ll probably try substituting dried apricots, soaked for about a half hour.

And I know that you’re wondering to yourself, “Valerie, whatever is in that bee-yoo-tee-ful salad?”  Here’s what I threw in: local organic red leaf lettuce and bok choy; home-grown tomato, cucumber, green bell pepper, green onions, spicy globe basil, and nasturtium blossoms (note to urban dwellers: they were all grown in pots!); and a smattering each of roasted pumpkin seeds, pine nuts, and hemp seeds.  That’s chilled sun tea in the wine glass, and apricots accompanying the salad dressing that they’re starring in.

Environmental Working Group’s Dirty Dozen and Clean Fifteen

EWG Dirty Dozen
(with worst listed first)

1) Peach

2) Apple
3) Bell Pepper
4) Celery
5) Nectarine
6) Strawberries
7) Cherries
8) Kale
9) Lettuce
10) Grapes (Imported)
11) Carrot
12) Pear

EWG Clean Fifteen

(with best listed first)

1) Onion
2) Avocado
3) Sweet Corn
4) Pineapple
5) Mango
6) Asparagus
7) Sweet Peas
8) Kiwi
9) Cabbage
10) Eggplant
11) Papaya
12) Watermelon
13) Broccoli
14) Tomato
15) Sweet Potato

Reducing Your Pesticide Load

We all want to eat healthier, and that includes eating more produce.  But conventional produce is grown with pesticides,  which are pretty scary – after all, they were designed to kill living organisms and are linked to toxic nervous system, carcinogenic, and  hormonal effects, as well as skin, eye and lung irritation.  Organic produce is always a better choice because it’s grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers, but it can be expensive and isn’t always available.  So what to do?

First of all, always wash your produce.  You can buy products like Veggie Wash, but I think it’s just as easy to take a sink or bowl of water, add a capful of hydrogen peroxide (yes, just the 3% solution you find in the drugstore is fine) or a tablespoon of lemon juice, and wash your produce in that.  Even if I’m going to peel something like a conventionally grown apple, I’ll still wash it to minimize the possiblility of getting the pesticides onto the peeled product.

Second, become familiar with the lists above.  They were compiled by the Environmental Working Group using data from the USDA and FDA measuring the amount of pesticide residue found on conventionally grown produce.  Produce on the Dirty Dozen list had the highest pesticide loads, so buy organic versions of these fruits and veggies whenever possible.  Produce on
the Clean Fifteen list had the lowest
pesticide loads –  these are much safer to buy conventionally grown (but you should still wash them).

For more information, please visit www.foodnews.org. Here you can download a printable wallet-size version of these lists and view the rankings of 47 fruits and veggies.

Hidden Food Allergies

For some of us with food allergies, it’s pretty obvious – we eat that which we’re allergic to (for me it’s cheese), and we almost immediately suffer the consequences: hives, runny nose, wheezing, vomiting, or anaphylactic shock.  But sometimes food allergies and food sensitivities produce more subtle,  delayed symptoms, making it more difficult to pin down the culprit.  These symptoms may include fatigue, heartburn, joint pain, congestion, headaches, mood swings, immune dysfunctions and abdominal bloating.  So how can we tell if we have one of these allergies?  While there is medical testing that can be done, it’s easy to test for a suspected allergen by  doing  an elimination diet.

The seven foods that people are most commonly allergic or sensitve to are dairy products, wheat, corn, eggs, soy,  peanuts and sugar, but they’re certainly not the only ones.  Stephen Rachtschaffen, MD,  founder of Omega Institute, suggests looking at your diet and pinpointing the foods that you eat on an almost daily basis as the prime suspects.  Breakfast is a good place to look, as many of us eat the same breakfast every day.

Once you’ve identified your potential problem foods, you can begin the elimination diet.  Simply avoid these foods entirely for a period of seven days.  Some foods, like wheat or corn, are in a lot of different food products, so you need to really read the labels on everything you eat during this period. It’s possible that you may feel worse for the first couple of days, but after that note if your symptoms begin to lessen. If you’re not feeling better during days 5 – 7, you’re probably not sensitive to these foods.  But if your symptoms start to go away, you’re on to something.  Now reintroduce the foods and see if your symptoms return. If they do, BINGO!  You’ve discovered a food that you’re better off avoiding.